This is an excellent movie-length discussion of how inefficient it is to continue to subsidize fossil fuels, which are disposable fuels. He discusses “opex” (operational expenditures) vs. “capex” (capital expenditures). Over the medium- to long-run, an energy infrastructure with lower “opex” will win out.

“We should stop growing corn to feed to cars.”

You are being misled about renewable energy technology. by Technology Connections (YouTube)

The author discusses how modern solar panels no longer use hazardous materials, being composed primarily of materials derived from quartz.

Even the batteries can benefit from the existing nearly closed loop already established for recycling car batteries. Modern batteries can be used for 15 years, day-in, day-out, before they start to degrade. Fossil fuels can be used once. Even degraded batteries still contain all of their original materials—they’ve just been moved around within the battery to suboptimal positions. These can be recycled and made into new batteries. This means that, once we have a certain number of batteries, we no longer need to dig up the materials to build them.

From the last half-hour, which goes into other topics,

“Launching satellites into space to make rural broadband happen is an admission of laziness and defeat from both Big Telecom and the government. It’s a solution a billionaire could provide and happily monetize, but it’s not necessarily the best solution, is it?”

00:00 Intro
07:35 Some opening notes
10:14 Cars and all the oil they use
15:38 Photovoltaics and electric cars
18:59 A cost and opportunity comparison
22:33 Solar farms
30:35 A discussion of land use
38:29 A diversion on wind power
41:17 The materials in solar panels
50:52 What about the batteries?
1:02:41 The reasons I made this video
1:10:16 The reason I am who I am
1:16:35 Who the liars are and what we need to do about them.

The article NASA launches new mission to get the most out of the James Webb Space Telescope by Stephen Clark (Ars Technica) describes something really neat [1] but the thing that drew my attention was a more politically oriented comment at the end of the article.

““It’s been very, very challenging to try and squeeze this big amount of science into this small cost box, but that’s kind of what makes it fun, right?” Barclay told Ars. “We have to be pretty ruthless in making sure that we only fund the things we need to fund. We accept risk where we need to accept the risk, and at times we need to accept that we may need to give up performance in order to make sure that we hit the schedule and we hit the launch [schedule].””

Imagine this statement coming from the mouth of a military contractor. The incentives are completely different for scientists and military. See the article about the over $1T that has flowed into the F-35 program and the returns on it.

These vastly unequal incentives and rewards are perfectly encapsulated by one of my favorite stickers of all time. 25 years after I first bought it—and 46 years after it was printed—it still describes all you need to know about the U.S., or any authoritarian, militaristic country.

The Air Force should have to hold bake sales to raise money

“it will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the air force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber”

The article ‘Indigenous Knowledge’ Is Inferior To Science by Thomas R. Wells (3QuarksDaily) has two main thrusts: the primacy of scientific thinking and the degeneracy of preferring something for nonscientific reasons. On second that, those are two sides of the same coin.

Science is knowledge that deserves to be believed

The following citations illustrate the point as Wells put it,

“[…] knowledge is knowledge. Where it comes from doesn’t matter to its epistemic status. What matters is whether it deserves to be believed. The scientific revolution has provided a general approach – systematic inquiry – together with specialist methodologies appropriate to different domains (such as mathematical modeling, taxonomy, statistical analysis, and experimental manipulation and measurement). It is irrelevant that this approach first appeared in North-Western Europe and that many of the domain specific techniques were first developed and refined by white men from the ‘west’. What is relevant is that modern science allows a degree of confidence in factual and theoretical claims that has never been warranted before, and made this capability equally available to everyone around the world as the new standard for objective knowledge, i.e. knowledge that is reliably true no matter from what perspective you look at it.

“If indigenous peoples have observational data and successful technologies to contribute to this kind of systematic inquiry into what makes an ecosystem resilient, or what plants might contain molecules with pain-relieving properties, or the history of climactic events, then that should be welcomed. But the test of whether these are an actual contribution must come from whether they survive scientific scrutiny, not the authenticity of their indigenous origins.”

“Even when we suppose that indigenous knowledge claims might well be worth believing, we first subject them to systematic scrutiny – i.e. science – to evaluate their epistemic status. If they pass the test then they will be refined into a form that could be incorporated within the body of scientific knowledge, to become available to anyone who might find it interesting or useful.”

Believing indigenous medicine has value without proof is denigrating to those cultures, suggesting that they are incapable of achieving the level of proof that western society has set for itself.

Science absorbs all knowledge

This immediately reminded me of Timothy Minchin’s 10-minute beat poem Storm, which includes the lyrics,

“And try as I like
A small crack appears in my diplomacy-dike
“By definition”, I begin
“Alternative Medicine”, I continue
“Has either not been proved to work, or been proved not to work
Do you know what they call ‘alternative medicine’ that’s been proved to work?
Medicine.”

““So you don’t believe in any natural remedies?”

““On the contrary Storm, actually
Before we came to tea, I took a natural remedy derived from the bark of a willow tree
A painkiller, virtually side-effect free
It’s got a weird name, darling, what was it again?
M-masprin? Basprin? Oh yeah! Asprin!”

Storm by Timothy Minchin (YouTube)

The West’s track record

The west used to believe in a whole bunch of things that it now “knows” is mumbo-jumbo, like “bodily humours” or the “four elements.” None of those ideas had any predictive capacity better than luck. So they fell by the wayside because they just as often caused more harm than good.

For a long time, we had no metric for “cures”, so we remained fooled by their proponents’ claims of efficacy but, once we figured it out, we realized that removing most of the blood from the body wasn’t helping you get better.

Viruses

Nowadays we believe in invisible—to the human eye—creatures that attack our bodies until more invisible creatures can be rallied to fight them off, like a microscopic Helm’s Deep taking place all over you. This sounds f&@king batshit, of course! But we also made microscopes so that we can see them and we made medicines that help our Ents win against those damned Orcs and it works. We proved that thinking about the world with this model—unverifiable though it may be with unaided human senses—is largely beneficial.

Homepathy

The west also still largely believes that eating tiny balls made of sugar that have been infused with an essence whose power is inversely proportional to the amount of the essence remaining after preparation is also super-good and beneficial. So nobody’s perfect.

Science describes value and cost

Wells is writing about how to come up with efficacious and valuable knowledge. We’re trying to come up with materials and practices that do more good than harm. We are interested in estimating their value to society, usually with respect to other proposed solutions. How else would you determine how much of your energy and effort to invest in something?

Like, if someone says that you should go for a ten-mile walk to heal your pulled muscle and someone else says to put heat on it and someone else says to put ice on it, who do you believe? Do you figure out how to make heat that you can apply to it when walking ten miles would be even better? Do you waste time trying to make ice? Do you waste time walking ten miles, when it might make it even worse?

That is what science is for. Science is not woke. Science is not culturally specific. It can be practiced that way, but then it’s not science. Anyone who’s not following the rules is automatically not playing that game—they are playing a different game. Usually that game is scamming, i.e., they are trying to get you to listen to them in order to extract more value from their idea than it intrinsically has, usually for personal gain.

The title is clickbait but the content is nonetheless interesting. It discusses how to move processing from “system 2” (logical reasoning) to “system 1” (intuition). It’s how you get to a point where you understand a language without thinking about it. Or how you can just read music, or code, or vast swaths of text on economics or philosophy. Or how your body has learned to move in any sport or activity.

There is no way around using familiarity and repetition to get to highly accurate and seemingly effortless intuitive responses. It’s not effortless. The effort is front-loaded.

Veritasium: What Everyone Gets Wrong About AI and Learning – Derek Muller Explains by Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (YouTube)

At 33:00, there’s a good example of a technique for moving people from system 2 to system 1.

“[…] this is kind of a problem we have in complex domains like physics where, to the physics professor, everything’s perfectly clear because their system one is so fully developed. But, to a student, it’s not. So, this is the expert/novice divide. The professor can’t see with the student eyes what that problem looks like.”

At 40:00,

“[…] the thing that I’m really worried about is how AI has this opportunity to reduce effortful practice.

“I have four kids who are 8, 6, 4 and 0. And I worry about them that, you know, if they’re going to be…will they write an essay, will they write 100 essays?

“If there is a generative AI that can write for them, what forces them to practice crafting those sentences? And if they don’t craft those sentences, what happens to their brains?

“The argument here is that you get good at your command of the English language. You get good at being able to speak in front of people, at being able to express your thoughts in writing by doing it again and again and again and again.

“And you should suck at the beginning, and you shouldn’t let that stop you. And you should keep going and going and making slight tweaks and improving and getting feedback and getting going. If they never do that, I really worry what gets into system one, you know, what is that? Do they have an amazing network of connected knowledge that they can draw on? Do they have things that are automated? I fear that they won’t.

“How do we force people to have to do that painful, effortful work when there’s a magic machine that will do it for you? That’s a big concern.

“What about drawing? You know, if you can just ask it to make a picture of whatever you like. The bat and the ball was AI, by the way. I can’t draw, so…. But again, like, what will happen to people’s artistic abilities?

“So this is, I think my biggest concern, is if it prevents us from going through this painful, effortful process which is the core process of learning. Using your limited system two resources to engage with things and practice again and again and again, even when it’s hard, even when it doesn’t feel good, even when you’re not great at it. That is my big concern.”

This was already a problem with people who thought that knowing something in a web of other knowledge in your own head could be replaced with “just Google it.” You can’t develop intuition about things that you don’t know. You can’t draw connections between things that you don’t know.

At 59:30, a question came in,

“I feel like everybody here might understand [it’s a roomful of scientists] when you don’t understand something, it’s exciting. A lot of people, when they don’t understand something, it’s not exciting. So how do you think we change that?”

🎤 💧

That’s a very important thing to remember: intelligence is more like seeing and hearing. Different people have different levels of ability. I always tell people that I can spend so much time on reading and writing because it’s actually rewarding and, if I’m honest, it kind of always has been. When I put time into something, I’m rewarded by getting better at it within a noticeable amount of time.

This morning, my partner reported that Utica’s air quality was really. I checked the Real-time Air Quality Index (World Air Quality Index) and could verify that the station in Utica was signaling “very unhealthy” conditions.

You can see that Utica stands out alone as very unhealthy.

Utica Air Quality is 243 (very unhealthy)

Whereas our initial idea was “wow the fires in California have already drifted that far? Over 5000km? Is that even possible?”, you can see that no-one else between California and Utica is similarly affected. It’s not smoke. If you look at LA, you can see that there isn’t even anywhere nearly as bad as Utica was showing this morning. You’d have to look in the work spots of India to find similarly bad readings, where I found readings in the 800s in some places.

The details shows that it started happening very suddenly at about 18:00 the previous evening. Either something happened—industrial accident?—or this is when the sensor stopped working properly.

Details of Utica Air Quality is 243 (very unhealthy)

Later in the day, it’s being reported that its an iPhone Weather App Glitch: No Hazardous Air Quality Over CNY (WKTV News). Whereas they do well to point out that the winds in LA are actually blowing in the other direction, It’s a bit odd that they write that “Official air quality reports from around Utica and CNY show air quality at a healthy and normal level.” That’s simply not true, as the source I’ve cited above was showing very unhealthy levels and is now shows levels twice as high as that that are hazardous.

Utica Air Quality is now 395 (hazardous)

It’s been quite consistent for about seven hours now. And you can see that the rest of the US is more or less normal.

Whole USA shows it's just Utica

Again, even LA is showing much better air quality than Utica right now. You’d have to look at the most highly industrial zones in China and India to find anything as bad or exceeding Utica’s reported level right now.

There is an unalterable dynamic in which the establishment rejects all heresy if it is a challenge to its power. It continues to repeat itself. In Midnight Mass, one of the characters told a story about Ignaz Semmelweis (Wikipedia).

“[…] was a Hungarian physician and scientist of German descent, who was an early pioneer of antiseptic procedures […] Semmelweis discovered that the incidence of infection could be drastically reduced by requiring healthcare workers in obstetrical clinics to disinfect their hands.

“Despite his research, Semmelweis’s observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. He could offer no theoretical explanation for his findings of reduced mortality due to hand-washing, and some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and mocked him for it. In 1865, the increasingly outspoken Semmelweis allegedly suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to an asylum by his colleagues. In the asylum, [Semmelweiss] was beaten by the guards. He died 14 days later from a gangrenous wound on his right hand that may have been caused by the beating.”

What’s the lesson here? 🤷‍♂️ The wheel crushes all.

Stop what you’re doing and learn about how clever corvids are. There is a lot of footage of them creating grub-digging sticks to quite exacting specifications. It’s quite incredible, but there you are.

True Facts: Crows That Hunt With Sticks by Ze Frank (YouTube)

“Anyway, science hippies put a camera on the crow’s tail feathers…”

The crows are capable of solving multi-step problems. There are several tubes arrayed around the crow. One of the tubes has food in it, but cannot be reached with the small stick that the crow is given. There is a slightly longer stick in one tube, but it’s also not long enough to reach the food. It is, however, long enough to reach an even-longer stick that is able to reach the food. There is no way to solve the puzzle without using the short stick to get the medium stick and then using the medium stick to get the long stick and then to finally reach the food.

“When she’s trying to figure out how she got into this escape room/restaurant.”

The crow “Pierre” cheats, but he’s “got some pluck.” He tries with the short stick, then flies away to find a longer stick somewhere else, digging out the food with that instead of messing with all of the tubes.

First, let’s take the less-hopeful, but more-sober article COP28 climate summit exposes the dead end of fighting climate change under capitalism by Brian Dyne (WSWS). It writes,

“The end of COP28 was also applauded by John Kerry, the US special presidential envoy for climate. Kerry said of the draft resolution, “While nobody here will see their views completely reflected, the fact is that this document sends a very strong signal to the world.”

“That signal is that capitalist governments can and will do nothing to fight climate change. Any genuine mobilization would cut across their national interests and corporate profits. It is significant that while most other heads of state attended at least part of the conference, US President Joe Biden did not, ostensibly too busy prosecuting war in Ukraine and genocide in Gaza.”

“Current greenhouse gas emissions are putting Earth on track for a 3-degree Celsius warming, twice as much as the current benchmark presented as a “point of no return.” In such a scenario, an estimated one billion people would be forced from their homes a result of sea level rise, on top of the billion now who are currently under threat from dying as a result of starvation, disease and thirst.”

Yes, but none of those billions of people are us. We have arrogated all of the things unto us. Maybe our climate will be less-good than it was, but we don’t really care—because rich people stay indoors, in their apartments in big cities, or in air-conditioned palaces in the nicest parts of the countryside and world. Those places will take decades before they degrade. At that point, we can begin to tackle the climate crisis in earnest because then, you see, it will be important humans who will be affected.

Until then? It’s somebody else’s problem. COP28 might as well have sold T-Shirts that say, “We can’t stop it now, so why bother?” It would only mean that we have to restrict ourselves and it probably wouldn’t even work. So why risk it? Why reduce my personal perceived comfort for an uncertain benefit that doesn’t even accrue only to me? What do I look like, an idiot?

So that’s the exceedingly sarcastic picture I’ve got of attendees of COP28.

Let’s see what else we have.

Oh, here’s something…

The article This Year’s Climate Summit Ended on a Hopeful Note by Bill McKibben (Jacobin) is here to set me straight. The author, made sure to title his piece in a way that lets liberals smugly keep doing what they’re doing, safe in the knowledge that their elected leaders have got a handle on everything. He seems to have made that his job in the last decade or so. [1]

“The world’s nations have now publicly agreed that they need to transition off fossil fuels, and that sentence will hang over every discussion from now on — especially the discussions about any further expansion of fossil fuel energy. There may be barriers to shutting down operations (what the text of the agreement obliquely refers to as “national circumstances, pathways, and approaches.”) But surely, if the language means anything at all, it means no opening more new oil fields, no more new pipelines, and no more new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals.”

Hans Guck in die LuftJFC Bill. Talk about setting yourself up for disappointment. “Surely”, it means all of that. No, it surely doesn’t. There are going to be five times as many LNG terminals in Europe in ten years. The “green wave” is horseshit. And you know where that LNG is going to come from? The U.S., Bill.

Joe Biden has merrily opened up more territory for fossil-fuel exploration than any president before him. Do you know why? Because it’s still wildly profitable. And because he gives less of a fuck what the world thinks than Netanyahu. YOLO.

McKibben goes on to note that there were two other hopeful moments in climate-change history. In 1995, the world finally acknowledged that it existed. Progress! In 2015—20 years later!—came a pledge to do something about it. Eight years later, the third hopeful moment was calling for “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems in a just, orderly, and equitable manner.” Fifty years after having learned about climate change, with the last two years having seen the highest CO2 emissions of all time, and also being the two greatest increases of all time. But, sure, Bill; go ahead and be “hopeful”.

McKibben ends with,

“[…] today’s agreement is literally meaningless — and potentially meaningful. The diplomats are done now, so the rest of us are going to have to supply that meaning.”

They’re not going to do anything, Bill. There’s not a chance in hell of sticking a landing under 1.5ºC. How can you even suggest that that’s realistic? The system will not allow it. Their greed will not allow it. Their devotion to piracy will not allow it.

They cannot stand to see anyone have something that they do not have. They squabble like chimps. There is no possibility for a way forward with these people in charge, from cultures like this.

The OECD—led by the U.S.—will bury the world. I used to think the planet would be just fine without us, but we’re seemingly determined to take down most other higher-order life on Earth with us.

The article We can’t afford to be climate doomers by Rebecca Solnit (Guardian) takes “doomers” to task for failing to maintain optimism in the face of overwhelming resistance.

“Stanford engineering professor and renewable energy expert Mark Z Jacobson tweeted the other day, “Given that scientists who study 100% renewable energy systems are unanimous that it can be done why do we hear daily on twitter and everywhere else by those who don’t study such systems that it can’t be done?””

This means nothing. First of all, all you people spend way too much time arguing with idiots online. Second of all, the fact that it is technically possible has been true for decades.

We only have to reduce. We don’t even need to invent anything. We won’t do it.

We do not have the systems in place to enact anything approaching climate protection in the most wasteful societies. And it is those societies that will determine what will happen.

Instead, an opposing religion has taken such strong hold that even the smartest, most enlightened of the people living in those societies simply can’t conceive of a society mediated by anything other than money, can’t conceive of living with limited resources, believe that “out of sight” is “out of mind”, they drive everywhere in the most wasteful of vehicles, consume, consume, consume, and can’t see anything wrong with it.

They will drag this fucking boat under the water, completely oblivious to their role in this debacle. We cannot stop them. Everything is working against us. You would have to eliminate most of western culture—but, honestly, especially American culture—to save the planet.

Try and Stop UsThere is no way to reconcile America as she is with saving the planet. One of them has to go. And, the way things look, it will be the planet that goes—because no-one can stop America. It eats everything. It corrodes otherwise intelligent people into espousing the most warped opinions.

You can be an Earth-science teacher in a town without drinking water and still talk about luxuriating in 30-minute showers and washing your hair every day. People cannot. Fucking. Get. It. Nothing connects on a personal level. One’s own behavior and benefit will always be paramount. They start off thinking differently, but they all end up the same: defeated by America’s poisonous form of capitalism and dog-eat-dog philosophy (if you can even call it that).

“One day this week, someone told me that she was “angry at people’s refusal to acknowledge what’s happening to the planet” and when I waved a couple of surveys at them showing that in 2023 “Nearly seven-in-ten Americans (69%) favor the U.S. taking steps to become carbon neutral by 2050””

What a fucking joke. Who did you ask? I haven’t met a single person who would say that unless they thought they would be entered in a contest to win a 13MPG truck by saying it. If they did say it, they meant “carbon neutral” as long as it could happen “without sacrificing a single, tiny thing that I have been brainwashed into thinking is important for my life”.

“I don’t know why so many people seem to think it’s their job to spread discouragement, but it seems to be a muddle about the relationship between facts and feelings. I keep saying I respect despair as an emotion, but not as an analysis.”

JFC, please talk to actual people in your own country. Get out of your hippie bubble of planet-saving folks. No-one else in your country cares. They do not grasp the problem. They all want to travel the world, visit places, buy new cars, buy giant houses.

They. Do. Not. Understand.

And those that do? They. Do. Not. Care.

They are laser-focused on personal promotion and do not see any reason to restrict their lifestyles to ones that use less energy.

They don’t even understand the question.

They can’t follow the discussion. Believe me, I’ve tried. People can’t understand what I’m saying. They seem to agree with me, but then cite examples that indicate that they completely missed the point. It’s not a matter of will or determination—they are not even prepared to understand the situation. We are so far away from where we need to be at this point.

Go ahead and “fight defeatism”, Rebecca. You’ll still only be talking to people who basically already agree with you, people who are capable of understanding what needs to be done.

But defeatists and deniers aren’t the reason we will fail to maintain a livable climate. It’s not even apathy. It’s blank incomprehension. It’s the Idiocracy. We are living on Ark B, Rebecca. Most people aren’t even as clever about the climate as the Golgafrinchan captain of Ark B.

Look—really look; watch TV here; look at what people are ingesting—and you too will despair. No-one is even prepared to take a shorter shower or turn the AC above 70ºF for even a minute. Personal comfort is paramount and it isn’t even seen as related to either climate change or the effort required to combat it. Changing attitudes and lifestyles is not even seen as a component of the solution—to say nothing of being the absolute crux of it.

The article Revealed: more than 90% of rainforest carbon offsets by biggest provider are worthless, analysis shows by Patrick Greenfield (The Guardian) reveals what it says in the title. It’s an excellent article proving to us what many of us already suspected strongly or already “knew”: the carbon-offset system looks like a scam and it is a scam. The company Verra, responsible for providing about ¾ of carbon offsets globally, is being accused of having sold 20x more credits than it can actually verify. That is, it is being accused of having lied about 95% of the carbon credits it sold.

This is the deal we’ve had for decades now. They pretend to do things and we pretend to believe them.

Obviously in a market where it’s difficult to prove whether the product being sold actually does what it says on the tin—and those that purchase it don’t really care whether it does because it doesn’t affect them in the short- or medium-term.

Reduction is the only way

A colleague of mine commented,

“Better to avoid carbon-dioxide emission in the first place than to compensate or offset them later.”

Agree 100%. We don’t have to clean up or compensate the carbon that we never emit. We don’t have to produce energy that we don’t require. Reduction is not only the most powerful, but also seemingly the only viable way forward because our globalized system has shown itself again and again to be incapable of focusing on the climate crisis—it is largely concerned with matters more … remunerative in nature.

I mean, look at the graphic to the left! You spew carbon, but you make it better by paying someone else not to. But who determines how much they’re allowed to sell? Who audits this system? Who ensures that the same credits aren’t sold multiple times?

How could anyone imagine that this type of system would actually provide the purported benefit—controlled and reduced CO² output—within the confines of the economic and political system we have. It was never anything but a bad joke that provided the masters of the universe with a cheap way to tell themselves that they not only have all of the money, but also the moral high ground.

Handling Verra

If we had a functioning system in place, then the solution would be to take Verra to court, and quickly decide what the truth of the matter is. If they truly were “leveraging” carbon offsets (i.e., lying about how much they had to sell), then they should be forced to pay back all of the customers to whom they sold fraudulent goods. If there isn’t enough left to go around (the money might very well be gone), then their customers will have to take a loss.

Verra’s customers, in turn, would then be required to purchase replacement carbon offsets from elsewhere or, failing that, to inform their customers that the product they sold them (e.g., a carbon-offset flight) did not actually include a carbon offset, for which their customers would be entitled to a rebate.

It sounds relatively straightforward, and it will also never happen. Unless this report from the Guardian, Die Zeit, and SourceMaterial gets real legs, it will be forgotten soon enough, much as the Panama Papers had no real repercussions. We looked, we saw, we nodded, we acknowledged that we weren’t really surprised, we shrugged, and resigned ourselves to living in a world over which we have very little power to effect large-scale changes.

Verra will almost certainly continue to be a going concern and might even become more successful—they did after all come up with a savvy business model that generated a lot of profit. If the punishment isn’t too high, then their EBITA probably stays quite rosy.

The whole system is broken

The masters of our universe are not primarily interested in solving the climate crisis. They are interested primarily in profit and are willing to tell a few stories about how they’re doing something about slowing climate change, if that will keep us quiet. If the climate is actually saved as a side-effect of profit, then that’s nice to have, but it’s not a requirement.

And we—the royal we, the hoi polloi, not the individuals on this forum, who are all enlightened souls 😉—for our part, are willing to stay quiet, even though we are 100% aware that we really shouldn’t believe a word they say.

This is the deal we’ve had for decades now. They pretend to do things and we pretend to believe them.

Of course, we are still left with a planet that has suffered extra years, if not decades, under accelerating carbon usage, perhaps partially because so many were convinced that carbon offsets were a real thing—or as noted above, allowed ourselves to be convinced or convinced ourselves—so that we could continue to do what we were going to do anyway, but with less of a guilty conscience.

And this isn’t just be me being a Cassandra. The article cites Barbara Haya in the final paragraph,

“One strategy to improve the market is to show what the problems are and really force the registries to tighten up their rules so that the market could be trusted. But I’m starting to give up on that. I started studying carbon offsets 20 years ago studying problems with protocols and programs. Here I am, 20 years later having the same conversation. We need an alternative process. The offset market is broken.”

As I was reading the article Polio declared a disaster emergency in New York after more poliovirus found by Beth Mole (Ars Technica), the following citation caught my eye,

“Rockland County—which is notorious for generally low vaccination rates after battling a tenacious measles outbreak in 2019—has a polio vaccination rate of just 60 percent among children under the age of 2, who are recommended to have three polio vaccine doses.”

People are not vaccinating their children because they see the injections as dangerous. They do not see them as helpful. They do not remember. They are incapable of remembering. They decide for themselves whether to vaccinate their children. They decide not to. They become infected, sooner or later. These are solved problems. There are vaccines. It could work. But it won’t. Not without a lot better education/indoctrination or at least a little bit of authoritarianism.

Humanity seems to be incapable of addressing these kinds of problems, in general. Most people understand and continue to understand that vaccinations are the much lesser of two evils. Why are vaccinations evil? Injecting a serum into your body isn’t a very comforting thing, really, is it? You really, really have to trust that it will do more good than harm—and you’re very hopeful that it does not harm at all. But you don’t know. So, at the very least, it’s a psychological strain that we’d rather not have. Still, the upside far outweighs the downside.

So, we can’t keep people’s belief in viruses alive over more than one or two generations. As soon as we’ve conquered an enemy, people forget that that enemy ever existed and pretend that it can never come back. Two generations.

And then I hear about the think tanks that consider how to communicate with people 10,000 years in the future—e.g., to tell them where we buried our nuclear waste. This is literally impossible. Just give up. We can’t even communicate ideas about communicable diseases between adjacent generations. What hope do we have of communicating across hundreds of them?

What’s the biggest source of CO₂ in the world? I was with a friend who argued that it was personal passenger vehicles. I was pretty sure that industry and agriculture produced the lion’s share of CO₂, but she was adamant. I thought it sounded like her source was conveniently placing the blame for a warming planet on individuals’ inability to conserve when I thought that our individual contributions, while not inconsequential, were not the place that we needed to start, necessarily.

When I had a moment, I looked it up and found, lo and behold, she seemed to be right. The article Cars, planes, trains: where do CO2 emissions from transport come from? (Our World in Data) shows the biggest bar for “Road (passenger)”. However, the first sentence of this article states that “Transport accounts for around one-fifth of global CO₂ emissions.”, which makes 45% of 20% = 11% of global emissions. So passenger traffic, while a very high percentage, is not anywhere close to the major contributor.

The article Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions Data (EPA) has a sub-head named “Global Emissions by Economic Sector”, where we see that industry, agriculture, and Energy Production account for about 70% of CO₂ emissions. Transportation, according to this diagram, is only 14%, of which the aforementioned 45% would be only about about 6% of global emissions.

Global Emissions by sector 2015

The figures are from 2015, but I fairly sure that they’ve not changed significantly in proportion since then.

We can debate about the relative utility of “energy production” vs. “personal transport” but personal vehicles do not seem to be the major culprit. Improving efficiencies in agriculture and industry would seem to be a more efficient use of our time.

We can also discuss the amount of other pollution—not just CO₂—produced by these sources, as particulate pollution impacts and destroys many, many lives as well.

I was listening to this video,

COVID decreased life expectancy by 2 years. What does that mean? by Sabine Hossfelder (YouTube)

Sabine said that the standard measure of life expectancy “is easy to misunderstand”. So, instead of expecting that people should make an effort to understand it, we dumb it down instead, making it easier to understand, but much less accurate. That is, people will get a less-accurate impression, but be just as confident in it. It will become the new reality, as usual.

Hossfelder talks about the Period life expectancy, which is a measure that assumes that every year going forward will be like the one being measured (2020 in this case). She says that “no-one believes that this will happen”, so that the measure—though official and standard—also doesn’t impart useful information, necessarily. However, 2021 was worse than 2020 in the U.S., despite vaccines. And 2022 is shaping up to be an absolutely horrible year in the U.S., as far a COVID-deaths-per-year goes. Maybe the number is more accurate than she thinks?

Why do we use the number anyway? Because “it’s the best number we can come up with from the existing data”. There are other numbers—e.g. the cohort life expectancy—would be more accurate, but would only be useful after people are already dead. It’s a useful number as an input to other formulae, but it’s not predictive.

She also says that “[t]he life expectancy at a given age increases with age.” A rule of thumb for right now is to take your life expectancy at birth and add about eight years. Using the U.S. actuarial tables, my life expectancy is 68.3 + 8 years, which takes me to 76.3 years, which seems … low?

That’s for the U.S., though, a country in which I’ve not lived for almost 20 years. That’s why she suggests to look at a Life Period Table instead. That table tells me how many years I have left to live, which, added to my current age, would give me a life expectancy of 79.75 years instead. I can’t find the “Life Period Table” for Switzerland, but I’m sure it would predict slightly higher.

The article So entwickeln sich die Corona-Zahlen in der Schweiz (SRF) is updated constantly. In the update from Monday, 24.01.2022, the matrix that shows the infection rate by age group was a particularly brilliant crimson.

Matrix of Infections by Age Group

If I’m reading this chart correctly, 4.5% of 10 to 19-year-olds were infected with COVID in the week from 10.01 to 17.01. That seems like quite a lot. Switzerland has a 7-day rolling average of about 32,300 cases per day. That makes about 226,000 per week. The latest population estimate from 2019 (Wikipedia) is about 8,570,000. That’s about 2.64% of the population infected per week at this pace. So, wow.

And the positivity rate is a stratospheric, completely out-of-control 41%.

Positivity Rate Is Over 41%

I’ve heard news that contact tracing is “starting to fall apart a bit”. No wonder.

On the very positive side, the ICUs are below 80% occupied and holding. The daily average number of deaths is at 12.7. These numbers are much more reassuring than other countries, like the U.S. They indicate that, while a lot of people are being infected at once in Switzerland, the system seems to be able to handle it.

Long Covid is still a question mark, but this wave, enormous as it is, is hitting Switzerland fundamentally differently than the others before it.

In a recent article Links and Notes for December 17th, 2021, I noted that Doctor Mark Hanefeld seems to be underselling vaccine efficacy (predicted) and effectiveness (measured).

The podcast is linked below,

Coronavirus-Update Sonderfolge: Gerüchte und Fake-News zur Impfung einordnen | NDR Podcast by NDR Ratgeber (YouTube)

At 17:30, Herr Doktor Marc Hanefeld says,

“Nehmen wir mal einfach die Zulassungsstudien zu Biontech. Da haben wir eine 95% Effektivität. Und die Effektivität ist immer im Hinblick auf symptomatische Ansteckung. Das heisst, man wird angesteckt mit dem Virus und merkt was—hat Symptome. Diese hat 95% Effektivität am Anfang. Das heisst 5%—sprich jeder zwanzigste—konnte sich trotzdem anstecken. Würde nicht schwer krank werden aber kann das Virus weiter geben.”

A lot of what he had to say was very, very good. But my ears perked up at this explanation, because it’s wrong—it drastically undersells the efficacy of the vaccines (or any vaccine). [1] The 95% protection is relative to people without the vaccine. It means that of the number of unvaccinated people who became ill with COVID (in the control group), only 5% as many vaccinated people got it.

The 5% is not applied to the entire vaccinated group, but to the percentage of unvaccinated people in the control group who became ill. If each group had 10,000 people and about 100 people in the control group became ill, that means that only 5 vaccinated people of the 1000 because ill. That means that, while you had a 1% of getting sick without the vaccine, you had a .05% chance of getting sick if vaccinated.

It was never perfect, but it was incredibly good. Hanefeld’s formulation makes it sound like you have a 5% chance of getting infected when it’s actually much better than that—even with the waning effectivity of the vaccines against new variants and over time, the protection number you hear is still calculated in the same way—as a percentage of the likelihood that you’ll be infected without it. So a 50% protection means that you still only have a 0.5% chance of catching it if an unvaccinated person has a 1% of doing so.

On another topic, I was extremely hesitant to say that Hanefeld had formulated efficacy incorrectly (or sub-optimally) because I don’t want to be the kind of person who, without any formal training but a lot of “reading” starts disagreeing with experts, thinking that I can run with the big dogs. That’s why I found the Lancet reference in the footnotes, to corroborate my gut reaction.

The problem we have today is that there are far more people who think that they’re smarter than everyone else—with the corollary being that experts are kind of dumb, blinkered by their experience, set in their ways, and/or bought off by corporate interests. They think that they are the only ideologically pure and incisively clever person on the planet, doing humanity a favor by jumping in everywhere and fixing things.

This is an attractive plot for a movie, but it’s not how reality usually works. Sure, you’re going to get so-called experts who are bought off, who are hamstrung by pet theories, but those are generally also the experts who are considered to be damaged goods by other experts. The winnowing process of science and rationality generally works pretty well, if you can control for ego and corporate interest. One way to control for those things is to make sure that the incentives are lined up to guarantee correctness rather than fame. If the incentives allow for people to get famous or rich while pushing something they know is incorrect, then you are doomed to fail.

I wrapped that up one day and read, just the next morning, in CDC surrenders US population to the spread of Omicron by Patrick Martin (WSWS),

“Even those fully boosted have only 75 percent protection against Omicron. That means that if 60 million people who have received booster shots come into contact with a COVID-19 case and are sent back to work without even a day off, 15 million of them would be carrying the infection with them to spread.”

That sounds wrong, in the same way that Herr Doktor Martin’s formulation sounded wrong. And the WSWS would ordinarily be doing everything they can to emphasize the effectiveness of vaccines.

I recently saw an argument that says that people like Greta Thunberg—let’s use her as a placeholder for any semi-affluent first-worlder—can argue all she wants for a massive reduction of fossil-fuel usage, but that she’s privileged to be able to do so, as there is zero chance that her life will be impacted negatively by it. The argument is that stopping fossil fuels now will leave the developing world even farther behind because they won’t be able to benefit from the economic growth they need in order to improve their lives.

This is the type of hot take that will be repeated endlessly and that impresses those who like to be led by the nose, but it’s not true. A drastic reduction in fossil-fuel usage will affect everyone, both initially negatively and eventually positively. People in the developing world will be impacted more severely in either case. People in the first world will, but more through an increase in climate refugees, which will drastically change those societies as well.

Arguing that we should ignore climate change because no-one has an alternative plan is intellectually lazy. There is an alternative plan, but nobody wants to do it: stop mindless growth built with fossil fuels everywhere. Just stop building stuff we don’t need. Stop driving an economy based on fabricated desire.

Everyone who benefitted massively from the reckless usage so far is obligated to help everyone else who is severely impacted by either,

• the climate change that usage engendered or
• the potential drop in quality of life engendered by stopping the use of fossil fuels (“potential” because there is no reason why people should suffer other than the greed of the wealthy).

Obviously, it’s a giant long shot to think that any of the “winner” countries will step up and take responsibility, but it’s really the only way forward. Keeping on keeping on while telling Greta to go fuck her bratty, white, privileged self is a super-bad plan.

The whole plan isn’t just to stop using fossil fuels and then sit back and see what happens. The whole plan—laid out in countless well-written articles and books—is to change how we do things from the ground up. There is no other way. There is no shortcut. Just because there’s almost no way that it’s going to happen doesn’t mean it’s not the only way out. There is no techno-miracle lurking around the corner. We are well and truly fucked if we continue on this path. Even just slowing down a bit won’t help. Our system isn’t really capable of doing something like that, anyway.

Pissing on first-world climate-change activists for being more privileged under the current system is just being spiteful and unproductive. They are mostly right and they have a plan for everyone. Go piss on the people who are standing in the way of bringing that plan to fruition.

A not insignificant part of the community doesn’t want the COVID vaccine. So, they’re coming up with their own versions. I heard from one friend that he’s taking dandelion extract. He’s convinced it will help fend off COVID, so that means he thinks he’s developed a partial vaccine, at least. The picture below comes from an anti-vaxx blogger I follow, [1]

Nyquil: just as good as the vaccine

The guy posted it without comment, other than to title it “A safe alternative to the “vaccine”“, so I have no idea whether he’s just kidding around or not. If I were to guess, based on the rest of his content, I would say…no. No, he’s probably serious that when words match, that’s SCIENCE.

In combatting the pandemic efficiently and successfully, Switzerland is in a pretty bad place right now. It’s not nearly as bad as Austria or Germany (or a bunch of Eastern Europe, for that matter), but it’s not too far behind.

There aren’t too many reasons to believe that things will go any better in Switzerland than it’s gone in those countries—with their overflowing hospitals and people dying due to emergency-triage policies.

That’s the thing about playing musical chairs for real: when you don’t get a chair, you don’t just go back to the circle with the other losers and start clapping to the music. No, in real life, when you don’t get a metaphorical chair, you die.

A lot of us think that that isn’t something that should be allowed to happen in a country that’s well-known as one of the most civilized and technologically, medically, and philosophically advanced in the world.

Switzerland isn’t alone in wasting the opportunity it has—opportunity that a lot of other countries can’t even dream of having, to say nothing of wasting. So this story and proposal should be applicable elsewhere.

Solidaritätsmangel (a failure of solidarity)

We have a problem with people who don’t believe that this is the story of what’s happening. There are a lot of people who are either unwilling—or incapable—of seeing the connection between their actions and the scenario described above. They see only their own personal sphere, make decisions based only on their own personal well-being—and perhaps the well-being of a few close relatives and acquaintances.

They don’t acknowledge that, simply because they feel that they are unlikely to be strongly affected by COVID—whether because they feel they’re strong enough, or young enough, or taking the right witch’s brew of self-prescribed chemicals—that they still pose a not inconsequential danger to society. If they get sick, they think only of their own personal survival and recovery, not of the people to whom they might spread the disease—people who might be weaker, or older, or perhaps who don’t know about the miraculous cures you can find online.

Nor do people “believe in” the predictable scaling effects. A single person getting ill isn’t going to be a problem, not when only 1% go to the hospital—even fewer if they’re young. This illness tends to keep people in the hospital for a while—tying up a lot of resources and personnel in the process. If enough people get sick at once—and they are doing so because even .1% of millions is a lot of people—the hospitals fill up.

Now, it’s not just the people in the hospital who are in trouble, but a country full of people who no longer have a working healthcare system at their disposal. At that point, people without COVID will die because of COVID.

That explanation is already too complex, though. People like a simple, predictable process, like: go out into the sun without sunscreen? You get sunburned. Not “you might be sunburned” or “other people might get skin cancer”. A direct, observable, and painful effect that cannot be misunderstood. [1]

There is a not insignificant portion of the Swiss population that is not availing themselves of a safe, effective, and free medication that would dramatically decrease both the human and economic cost of the pandemic if enough people were to take it. These people probably watch a lot more team sports than I do, but they don’t know what it means to play on a team—to take one for the team, as the saying goes.

A failure of vision

Society is fundamentally broken, but it’s all we have right now. The world is now fully marketized. Margaret Thatcher has won. As she once decreed, a large minority of the population now believes that “there is no such thing as society”. There are only transactions between unaffiliated individuals, with no pre-existing trust relationship. People don’t matter. Society has given you nothing and you owe it nothing in return, is their philosophy.

Now, don’t get me wrong: in moments of darkness, I, too, wonder whether we really need to save everyone. There are, after all, more than enough people to go around. The Gubrist tunnel is still full no matter when you drive through the damned thing. Maybe fewer people would be better. Maybe these people are onto something! But who gets to choose who lives and who dies? That’s always the problem. I don’t want to make that choice, so I approve of trying to save as many people as seems feasible. [2]

I don’t think that that’s their calculus, though. I think that they don’t like being told what to do unless they’re also told that it will directly benefit them. Doing something for the good of society is passé and unlikely to find a sympathetic ear in a world where everyone is hustling for themselves in an increasingly gigged/rigged economy. The only way to get ahead is to step on others. If you’re not stepping on anyone, then you’re the one being stepped on.

The task at hand

Society has something that it wants: it wants to exert its significant scientific, economic, and medical muscle to beat back the pandemic, to stop expending so much energy on constantly fighting the same battle over and over again. It wants to win the war on this crisis so that it can move on to the far more significant crisis waiting for it: climate change. [3]

That’s what a sane and just society wants. It wants to expend its resources efficiently. It wants to survive. That’s the long-term goal.

We’re not talking about preserving every feature of existing society, warts and all, but about getting to a point where we’re no longer spending so much time, resources, energy, and attention on combatting a stupid virus.

How do we get there? Well, society started out by asking people to do the right thing. That actually worked surprisingly well, at first! The solidarity expressed in the first couple of months of the pandemic was heartwarming and hopeful.

A lot of people did a reasonable job of conforming to the bare minimum of living in a society. They stayed home, they stayed in home office, they wore masks, they got vaccinated. It wasn’t that it didn’t involve any effort or suffering—there was still a lot of that—but wearing a mask and getting a shot helps a tremendous amount relative to the personal investment.

As with anything else, though, we got bored with it. It was fun for a while to pretend that we were more interested in a higher purpose than in our prosaic concerns. But the way our world is built wouldn’t allow that to continue for very long. The thrust of society pushes toward consumption, toward growth, toward bigger, better, faster, more. It uses greed and envy to generate needless economic activity. Over the long term, staying home, reducing consumption, etc. to protect others was a no-go.

Settled science

It’s not a question of who’s right. At this point, there is very clear and overwhelming data showing us what the most efficient and efficacious approach to winning the war against COVID is.

The arguments about the efficacy or safety of the vaccine were legitimate at the very beginning, but they are very much dead in the water today. It’s been a year. Half the planet is vaccinated. People are not getting ill or dying in significant numbers from the vaccine. They are doing so as a result of catching COVID. The scientific community is in agreement.

We should not care what a vocal, untrained, and self-nominated minority has to say about the facts of the matter. We must, unfortunately, concern ourselves with them because of the undue influence they have on people.

What must be done is not without effort, but it’s also not particularly difficult. It involves work—and working together—but it’s not complicated. We have to be careful to do it without accidentally—or deliberately—extending the surveillance or authoritarian state, but I believe we in Switzerland are capable of enacting measures that will be reduced when they are no longer necessary.

Any ideas?

So: society has a big problem called the COVID pandemic that’s costing a lot of time, energy, resources, and money. It’s a sinkhole. There is a solution, but pretty much everyone has to play along in order for it to work. It’s in our best interests to get better at dealing with pandemics because there are, in all likelihood, more of these coming.

A lot of people played along without much effort on society’s part—whether because they respond well to authority or because they trust society or because they thought about the argument outlined above—and they came to the obvious conclusion.

There are still millions of Swiss to be vaccinated. What do we do, as a society? What are our options?

We could kill them all. If they’re dead, they can’t spread the virus. Or we could lock them up, prevent them from partaking in society. If they’re not around others, they can’t spread the virus.

Neither of these is really practicable.

Austria is sending people vaccination appointments and fining them heavily if they fail to comply. I think Germany is doing something similar now. That’s the punishment solution. We all recognize it from child-rearing: clean up your room or I’ll put you through the wall. Or, in an age of reduced corporal punishment: clean up your room or I’ll ground you: no TV, no iPad, no … whatever.

That will probably work, in that it’s more likely to lead to a society that beats the pandemic than if such a large proportion remains highly susceptible to the virus. But it might backfire in that it leads to a society at war with a significant portion of itself. You are leading, but through fear rather than admiration. It is the world of 1984 envisioned by Orwell, rather than the Brave New World of Huxley.

Getting closer…

As with any other issue, there is a very, very vocal minority among those who have not been vaccinated. They are hardcore, unlikely to be moved.

There are many, many more who have not vaccinated because they couldn’t be bothered or because they’ve read some disturbing bit of propaganda that they immediately believed and that governs their decisions now (e.g. vaccines affect fertility). But they’re not hardcore. They just need to be slipped out of one valence level and into another. They just need a bit of invested energy to achieve the transition.

Energy…or money.

Society wants something from these people. Why don’t we pay them to do what we want?

An immodest proposal [4]

Because that wouldn’t be fair to everyone else, you will immediately say.

That is, of course, a very good point. If you start paying people who didn’t volunteer to help society, you only encourage others to hold out for more money later. Not only have you established a pattern where you reward the most recalcitrant, but you also annoy the overwhelming majority who volunteered without any reward. A bad idea, all around.

But…what if we just paid everyone? That is:

1. We make a “reward” available to everyone who’s already been vaccinated. [5]
2. Anyone who cannot be vaccinated for valid medical reasons qualifies for the reward as well.
3. Then we make the reward available to everyone who schedules a vaccination appointment right now.
4. Finally, we reduce the reward by 5% each week.

The sooner you’re vaccinated, the more reward you get. If you’re already vaccinated, you get the maximum reward. That’s it. [6]

There’s one more question to answer, though.

How much?

Society has a giant problem. It has a solution. It has quite a bit of money. But it also has other problems and other needs as well. It has other priorities. They must all be balanced and it must determine how much value it places on solving this problem efficiently and expeditiously.

There are 8M people in Switzerland, give or take. About 5M have been vaccinated by now (again, give or take).

If the reward were CHF1,000, then that’s 5B Swiss francs to dole out so far, with a cap at 8B when everyone is vaccinated.

That’s just a number I plucked out of thin air because I can multiply 5M by 1,000. When I first thought of this, I said CHF200.- to the friend I always annoy with these ideas. On consideration, I thought it might be a bit low in Switzerland. Regardless of the actual number, there are two questions that are likely to arise:

Is it too little?

This is a country where people have been regularly paying CHF25.- to be tested every 3 days rather than getting a free vaccination. A lot of this can probably be explained by sunken-cost theory, where they’ve committed to their anti-vaccination stance and every CH25.- they spend on it solidifies their position. If they were to change their minds now, then that money will have been wasted. The reward has to be high enough to convince them. It doesn’t have to be crazy-high because a high-enough sum right now has been shown to be quite convincing. I’m not an expert. Consult some marketing professionals and psychologists or both. Maybe ask around.

Is it too much?

Can the Swiss government afford the cost of such a reward program? The answer to this question will come from evaluating what the pandemic is costing Switzerland right now. Just for comparison, the best estimates for the new fighter jets the Swiss military wants is over CHF 6B. 8B to get the pandemic largely under control in Switzerland doesn’t sound exorbitant. It sounds eminently reasonable.

The Edit by Mr. FishCOP26 has come and gone and many people, if not most of them, didn’t even notice. It was the 26th meeting of world leaders to discuss which measures they can all agree to put into place in order to address climate change.

A few of the other summits are famous by their city names: Kyoto in 1992, where the U.S.—by far the biggest polluter at the time—refused to ratify it; Copenhagen in 2009, where the world’s worst per-capita polluter Canada torpedoed everything so that they wouldn’t have to restrict mining tar sands; Paris in 2015, where the U.S. did sign, but only after diluting the agreement by forcing everything to be purely voluntary. Then Mr. Trump left that agreement entirely, but Mr. Biden put the U.S. back in it.

That’s all he and his administration did, though: the U.S. didn’t follow through on very much of what it had volunteered to do. According to the article Roaming Charges: Split Identity Politics by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch),

“An investigation by the Washington Post reveals that the gap between what industrialized countries have pledged, in terms of CO2 emission reductions, and what they’ve actually done is startlingly wide. The gap ranges from at least 8.5 billion tons of CO2 equivalent to as of underreported emissions. Because since pledges often rest on this data, these shortfalls have huge implications for potential success of the COP26 Glasgow Accords.”

Or that, in the last five years, “[…] US crude oil exports increased [750%] after Obama signed the Paris accords in 2015.”

No-one can figure out a solution to stop ravaging the planet that works within the confines of the market system. Our fearless leaders don’t even want to try. They don’t even acknowledge or understand that the system is part of the problem. That they are part of the problem.

All the while, the clock ticks.

A whole lot of nothing

It’s unclear why we would expect anything useful to come out of these conferences. [1] The conference basically has the same attendees as the WEF (World Economic Forum) and no-one expects them to come up with anything that doesn’t funnel money upward like a conveyor belt. This conference is no different—not really.

The COP26 summit was no more strict in responding to the urgency of the problem than its predecessors. The article The major climate pledges made at COP26 so far by Noah Garfinkel (Axios) explains that nothing they decided in Glasgow is really enforcable.

“The pledges made so far are just that: pledges. They are not mandatory, and no one will be punished for failing to live up to them.”

On the contrary, though, and, if I may: we will all be punished severely if we fail.

The promises listed in that article are even more half-hearted than the pledges at Paris—and none of the countries even came close to coming through on their pledges. China has accounted for about 50% of the reduction in CO₂ output in the last decade. It is the biggest current emitter, so that’s a good start. So far, it’s all—if you’ll pardon the expression—hot air.

The article COP26 climate summit ends in failure by Patrick Martin (WSWS) provides more detail on what was decided—and which country, as usual, stood in the way.

“Business Insider declared the event a “historic failure,” while an editorial in the Financial Times spoke of “More hot air than progress at COP26,” noting that the US’s decision not “to sign up to a deal to phase out coal production… struck a severe blow to what was meant to be a flagship policy of COP.””

The only voices of sanity were to be found outside of the conference, in the streets, protesting the hypocrisy and self-aggrandizement on the part of the co-called leaders of the free world.

“It is hard to argue with Thunberg’s characterization of the summit as “two-week-long celebration of business as usual and blah, blah, blah.”

“She told the huge crowd, “The leaders are not doing nothing. They are actively creating loopholes and shaping frameworks to benefit themselves and to continue profiting from this destructive system. This is an active choice by the leaders to continue to let the exploitation of people and nature, and the destruction of present and future living conditions to take place.””

The article goes on to point the finger of blame on the absolutely bankrupt, corrupt, and non-representative political system in the U.S. There is no party worth backing there; they will all nuzzle at corporate teats for more money until every coastal city in the world drowns and climate refugees threaten their highly secured strongholds and enclaves.

“House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats will pretend that the infrastructure bill they just approved and the social spending and climate bill they just agreed to postpone add up to a huge US commitment to resolve the climate crisis.

“The truth is just the opposite. Both the Democrats and Republicans are willing to slash the consumption of American workers in the name of climate change, but not to cut a penny of the profits of American corporations.”

As we will discuss below, the U.S. shares a gigantic part of the historical blame for CO₂ and, per-capita, is one of the most wasteful countries today, landing in second place for total production. For it to continue to pretend that it is doing something useful while doing the exact opposite is a complete abdication of responsibility. Is there some way to vote the U.S. off the planet?

Which country do you suppose stood in the way of letting the phrase “phase out coal” remain in the COP26 Agreement? Instead, we get “phase down coal”. See Why Our Climate Isn’t Jumping for Joy After COP26 by Vijay Prashad & Zoe Alexandra (CounterPunch) to read about how Switzerland called them out on it,

“During the last hours of the COP26 summit on November 13, Swiss Environment Minister Simonetta Sommaruga took the microphone and expressed her “profound disappointment” with the change. “The language we had agreed on coal and fossil fuel subsidies has been further watered down as a result of an untransparent process,” she said.”

The solution isn’t exactly the straightforward one of everyone stopping coal-use. But countries that can afford to do so, should. The British have already announced a slew of nuclear-power plants to replace coal. China, too—about $450B over the next five years. Those aren’t perfect, or maybe even great, solutions, but at least the Chinese were coherent at COP26:

“Cutting coal tomorrow will condemn billions of people to a life without electricity (about 1 billion people still have no electricity connection, with most of them living in the Global South). Second, Zhao said, “We encourage developed countries to take the lead in stopping using coal […]”

Satire articles like Climate Summit Sets Ambitious Goal To Phase Out Fossil Fuels By Time Earth Runs Out Of Them (The Onion) just feel like regular reporting. Cartoons like the following are just facts, only darkly funny—because you have to either laugh or cry. And I always choose to laugh.

Ted Rall: Promises Kept (10.11.2021)

COP26 might as well be Comicon but, instead of booth babes, they have high-priced escorts. Why do you think Uncle Joe was so sleepy? The jet-lag? Pull the other one.

Blame it all on China and Russia (as usual)

Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin weren’t there. That’s fine, though, isn’t it? Are they really the best people to negotiate these details? Look at who America sent: Biden (asleep with jetlag), Pelosi (full of shit), Pallone (utterly lost), and God knows who else. What did Biden do there? Lend gravitas? Are you sure about that?

When people say that it’s an insult that Russia and China didn’t show up, I call bullshit. The rest of the so-called advanced countries expend 90% of their energy pissing on China and Russia and then turn around and say “see, look how evil they are, they don’t even come to this important climate conference.” That’s not true, though. China and Russia both sent delegations—just not their presidents, who would have been useless there anyway.

Moar circus plz

It’s all a farce anyway, with no hope of bringing about real change. The fate of our world is in the hands of relatively few people and they are all very comfortable, thank you very much. They feel no pressure to change anything because, as far as they’re concerned, things are just ducky. Sure, the supply chain could be a bit faster, but let’s not quibble. As the article Roaming Charges: Muzak for the Cancer Ward by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch) put it,

“The leaders of island nations are given a few moments before the cameras to declaim how many acres of their land mass have been lost to rising seas since the last summit and the members of the press try earnestly to recall how to spell the names of their countries before they disappear altogether.”

It’s not about saving the world for the morons who were stupid enough to let themselves be in the 99.9%. No, now it’s about a self-perpetuating business called “climate-change mitigation”, where players make it look like they’re actually trying to do something useful while raking in a bunch of money. It’s the same as every other damned hustle, really, but with a lot more money on the table.

Here’s St. Clair again,

“Hurray! Progress has been made, if not toward reducing emissions, at least, and this is, naturally, the most important thing, toward planning the next summit, sure to be the most important one yet, when the planet’s atmosphere will have breached the once unthinkable level of 420 ppm. Book your flights now.”

Business before Survival

So what actually happened? What did they decide? The usual. The powers-that-be don’t like to acknowledge that the things that they do are going to kill us all because it makes them very, very much richer than everyone else. If they do acknowledge it, then they absolutely don’t want to do anything about it that involves reducing the disproportionate amount of income and wealth flowing in their direction. If we could only figure out how to save everyone without changing that dynamic. If we have to choose, … well … we have. Chosen, that is. We’re going to keep everything the way it is. We still have a good 10-20 years left. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.

The article The Cop26 message? We are trusting big business, not states, to fix the climate crisis by Adam Tooze (The Guardian) writes,

“Cop26 delivered no big climate deal. Nor, in truth, was there any reason to expect one. The drastic measures that might – at a stroke – open a path to climate stability are not viable in political or diplomatic terms. Like climate breakdown itself, this is a fact to be reckoned with, a fact not just about “politicians”, but about the polities of which we are all, like it or not, a part. The step from the scientific recognition of a climate emergency to societal agreement on radical action is still too great.”

But wait! What’s that? In the sky? It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s … corporations. They,

“[…] can direct trillions towards the energy transition in low-income countries, if the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are there to “derisk” the lending, by absorbing the first loss on projects in Africa, Latin America and Asia. Even more money will flow if there is a carbon price that gives clean energy a competitive advantage.”

As always, the villain is capitalism. The world can’t open its pursestrings directly, and the enormous businesses that have sucked up most of the world’s capital—like BlackRock, for example—will only invest if those same countries guarantee a minimum rate of return and no loss of principal using roundabout mechanisms like the IMF and World Bank.

The money “comes” from BlackRock, but it’s a no-lose investment, with the same countries that can’t pull their thumbs out of their asses playing lender of last resort, but in a way that their citizens won’t notice. It’s a money-laundering scheme to get more money flowing through and to Blackrock and all of the other big winners of the last forty years of financial scams.

As Tooze writes,

“BlackRock’s backstop idea is the logic of the 2008 bank bailouts expanded to the global level – socialise the risks, privatise the profits.”

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

“Advocates of the Green New Deal have long urged big government-led industrial policy. The approach of Kerry and his team seems to follow a more low-key, pragmatic script. As Danny Cullenward and David Victor write in their book, Making Climate Policy Work, rather than attempting a contentious grand bargain, the key is to find coalitions of the willing and drive change sector by sector, raising ambition through repeated rounds of bargaining.”

This would possibly be a fine approach, but it’s not going to be enough. A slower approach like this only gives the opposition—not those who don’t believe climate change is happening, but those who don’t care enough about it to risk their profits—time to figure out how to game it. It’s bailing out the boat with a thimble. Meanwhile, the hole in the bottom of the boat grows.

The article The Recognition by James Howard Kunstler (Clusterfuck Nation) points out that the financial system is, to a large degree, debts incurred based on cheap fossil-fuel energy. That is,

“[…] all of our modern money rests on promises to deliver future volumes of energy (and products of value made from it) and those promises are without basis in reality, so the money itself is increasingly worthless. Thus, the cost of getting that future energy exceeds the promises embedded in the money based on the energy. How’s that for a paradox? We’re the proverbial snake eating its own tail and now we’ve bitten off more than we can swallow.”

To each their own, and none for all

The problem really is that the only approach that anyone seems to be able to consider is fundamentally libertarian: everyone or every country looks out for themselves and it will all work out as well as it possibly could. Everyone does an incremental solution that addresses their immediate problems and no-one does root-cause analysis and tackles the problem that’s causing all of the other problems. Instead, we just nibble around the edges—but the monster is growing more quickly than we can cut it back. It’s the proverbial hydra.

In a situation like that—and with solutions like those proposed—we’re essentially in a defensive, reactive position. We don’t really have a goal for the world. Instead, we have a goal for ourselves and the world can sort itself out. Does it matter that these “solutions” generally favor the already-rich, which is the group primarily responsible for this crisis? Not to them, it doesn’t.

The most precious resource right now is time, and COP26 shows that the world’s leaders are not really worried about wasting that, either. As the article After the failure of Cop26, there’s only one last hope for our survival by George Monbiot (The Guardian) writes about the fossil-fuel industry,

“[…] if they can thwart action for long enough, the eventual victory of low-carbon technologies might scarcely be relevant, as Earth’s systems could already have been pushed past their critical thresholds, beyond which much of the planet could become uninhabitable.”

And, no, electric cars won’t save us. It’s pathetic that people cling to that myth, as if we could just buy our way out of the crisis, when buying stuff is what got us into it. Electric cars are cleaner than fossil-fuel vehicles (throughout the lifetime), but they still have massive open questions about where batteries come from, where they go, and whether we can realistically produce enough batteries to satisfy our enormous needs.

Instead, we need to reduce our consumption, reduce our energy needs. We need to live near where we work, so that we don’t need cars anymore. We need to eliminate food deserts.

Monbiot again,

“A genuinely green transport system would involve system change of a different kind. It would start by reducing the need to travel – as the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, is doing with her 15-minute city policy, which seeks to ensure that people’s needs can be met within a 15-minute walk from homes.”

“[…] simply flipping the system from fossil to electric cars preserves everything that’s wrong with the way we now travel, except the power source.”

Which businesses, exactly?

Which corporations—other than financial giants like BlackRock—are jumping on the shambolic, lurching zombie of humanity as it wanders to its doom?

To no-one’s surprise at all, there’s the fossil-fuel industry. However, many of the existing huge players have shown a willingness to pivot to other predatory business models that kill the planet more slowly. The primary goal stated above—keep the margins high and the money flowing disproportionately to them—must be satisfied first, but companies like Shell, Exxon, etc. are willing to do it with renewable energy, whatever. As long as they still get to control everything, they’re on board with not destroying humanity anymore.

Other companies, like the U.S.‘s so-called defense industry, not so much. They see their role as defenders completely unchanged. In fact, they are selling themselves as defenders of the border even more so than usual. That means more money for them, more war, more conflict, and more profligate use of fossil fuels (because it’s the only game in town for the military).

The podcast Border walls and the climate crisis / Nick Buxton (This is Hell!) was very interesting and some important things to say about this very topic.

Nick summarizes his thesis [2],

“Nick: It’s really important to understand that behind this is not just the national security apparatus that is always looking for threats − there’s also a powerful industry that has made huge amounts of money in the last two decades, and is now using climate change to argue for more military and border spending. Quite a few of the big military and border firms have a lot of influence in the corridors of power, they are lobbying constantly for increased spending on borders. Many of these same border firms also provide services to the fossil fuel industry.”

At 48:00, Nick poses the same question anyone else sensible is posing: if the system isn’t working, then why don’t we change the system?

“Nick: We’re really getting to a crunch point. We have a choice ahead of us: are we going to continue to support an economic system that is perpetuating the crisis or are we going to look to rebuild a system that can actually tackle some of the underlying causes of the injustices that we see today and which will wreak havoc in future. ”

At 49:00, he discusses how we already have open borders—but only for the elite,

“Nick: On one level: if you’re a rich businessman, you can travel across any border. It doesn’t matter what nationality you have, if you have money, you can travel. So, borders have kind of become a way to structure, … whose lives are worth it, and to structure labor markets. It either determines that your life is expendable, or it determines that your labor is exploitable.”

At 1:02:40, he and host Chuck Mertz discuss how the migration engendered by climate change allows countries to double down on exactly the revolution needed to address climate change.

“Chuck: To what extent are these security approaches an organized attempt by wealthy nations to stop the possibility of revolution, even global uprising, against the market? Is capitalism threatened and its most ardent adherents are building walls to protect capitalists’ way of living? Is border security an attempt by the G7 to not be held accountable for their role in plundering the world?

“Nick: Absolutely. We have two choices at this moment in history. Do we really tackle the causes, which means some really fundamental issues around equity, around injustice, around who’s been affected, around the fact that the wealthiest countries are the biggest part of the problem right now. Or, do we just respond to the consequences? And if you respond [only] to the consequences, you’re essentially saying, ‘I want the status quo. No matter how dangerous, no matter how deadly, no matter the human consequences. The status quo, the political system, the economic system, that benefits a certain minority right now, matters more. That’s the choice that’s being made. It’s very much about that. It’s saying it’s more important to…it’s more important to build up arms, militarized against the consequences rather than tackle the causes. And that’s really the choice that’s being taken right now.”

At 1:06:30, Nick presents his vision toward which we should be working,

“Nick: An open-borders policy is a long-term solution. I think people should have the right to move and to migrate and to be supported and to live dignified lives. And we shouldn’t have a system, as I said, which is built around exploiting, or making people expendable, whoever they are in the world. That’s my long-term vision. And I think that’s a kind of moral vision to head towards. I think there are steps we can take toward that—I’m not saying that’s the world we can create overnight—but that’s the vision that I aspire to. And I think that it’s a vision that already exists for quite a few people. Like I already said, if you have wealth, you effectively live in a no-border world. I just want that world to be accessible to all. And that’s something we have to fight and struggle and move towards.”

The U.S. Military > Everything Else

Building on the Nick Buxton interview is the following video. It’s a succinct, 3.5-minute illustration of how the U.S. handled itself at COP26.

Abby Martin Confronts Nancy Pelosi Over Pentagon Spending at COP26 by Empire Files (YouTube)

The amazing Abby Martin asked,

“Speaker Pelosi, you just presided over a large increase in the Pentagon budget. This Pentagon budget is already massive. The Pentagon is a larger polluter than 140 countries combined. How can we seriously talk about Net Zero if there is this bipartisan consensus to constantly expand this large contributor to climate change, which is exempt from these conferences. Military is exempt from climate talks.”

She didn’t really ask a question, but that’s OK. I’m kind of shocked they even let her in. Anyway, it was pretty clear what she meant. She makes a good point: why isn’t a reduction of the military’s CO₂ footprint being considered? Why are many of the countries at COP26 blithely increasing the size of their militaries?

It is unfortunate that the parties decide to meet and talk about climate change and, instead of “leaving all options on the table”—as the U.S. loves to say as a euphemism to express their willingness to use nuclear weapons—many things are off the table before the discussions have even started.

I understand that some things are off the table: slaughtering 20% of each country’s population to reduce consumption is an extreme idea that doesn’t even need to be discussed, for example. But reducing the climate footprint of an already grotesquely oversized military should definitely be on the table. These countries take so many things off the table that there is no way of achieving the goal with what is left on the table.

I acknowledge that there is an argument to be made that the U.S. will need its military more than ever when the climate crisis intensifies. (It’s the argument that the military and the defense industry itself is making, as described above by Nick Buxton.) The U.S. will finally need to use its troops to actually defend its own border against climate refugees rather than rove around the world. In all likelihood, the U.S. would elect to do both: defend borders and rove around the world to take advantage of climate-induced desperation (i.e. Shock Doctrine). This attitude is them giving up before they’ve even begun. Just admit it, guys. You don’t care to fix the problem. Stop pretending. Lead, follow, or get out of the way

Commentators on the video were snarky that Nancy Pelosi said something about the organizers needing to “clean the room” after this question, intimating that she was trying to avoid fully answering the question. However, she and Frank Pallone [3] spent three minutes answering the question. Pallone reformulated twice. Pelosi at least three or four times. There wasn’t any more information forthcoming than they’d given. What else did these commentators want or expect to hear?

The U.S. delegation, as represented by Pelosi and Pallone, was very clear: the U.S. military is more important than addressing climate change. You may not like the answer, but it was pretty clear. There will be no military reduction because that’s not an option. You could see that, for Pallone and Pelosi, the very idea was nearly inconceivable. The best those two could come up with was, as wonderfully summarized by Chris Carr in a comment on the video, “We need the military, which is the world’s bigger polluter, to confront the national security threat of pollution.”

The rich are the problem

Nancy Pelosi is one of the wealthiest people in the world (she’s worth about $120M at last count). She only knows other rich people. She literally has no idea. The article Fresh Hell (12.11.2021) by Jason Arias (The Baffler) mentions that,

“Nancy Pelosi recognizes the moral responsibility of the United States to, after decades of deferrals and non-binding assurances, finally do something about the climate crisis. That’s why, hours after she secured the passage of President Biden’s trillion-dollar love letter to freeways, Pelosi hopped on a plane back to California so that she could officiate the wedding of oil heiress Ivy Love Getty […]”

Further, from the same article, we see how things work for the really rich,

“[…] owners of private aircraft are now—thanks to the 2017 Trump tax cut—able to claim 100 percent bonus depreciation on their jet within the first year of purchase. Additional expenses, such as fuel, maintenance, and management costs, are also considered tax-deductible if the aircraft is used for “business purposes” at least 50 percent of the time. It’s almost as if the government is paying extremely rich people to do extremely cruel things to the environment!”

According to the article Rich People Are Destroying the Planet by Luke Savage (Jacobin),

“In the United States, those in the top decile of income account for half of household emissions, while those in the bottom half account for under 10 percent.”

And,

“Taken as a whole, those in the global top 1 percent of income account for 15 percent of emissions, which is more than double the share of those in the bottom half. The extremely wealthy have only gotten richer over the past thirty years and, as the data shows, their carbon footprints have gotten much bigger as well.”

Leading to the conclusion that,

“The rich, in effect, need to be made much less rich if we’re going to reduce global emissions — and, if we want to fight climate change, taxing their wealth is both a moral and an environmental imperative.”

Again, we need to change the system. New taxes won’t help. We need to rebalance things and start again, this time making sure that aberrations like “3 people own as much as 50% of the country” no longer happen. Taxing income is inefficient—it would be much better to prevent such exorbitant inequality, wealth, and incomes in the first place. If rich people never got that rich, we wouldn’t have to fight to take it back. It would be much easier that way.

We need China and the U.S. on board

Unfortunately, the world needs the U.S. to quit its bullshit. Why is the U.S. so important at COP26? According to the article How to Save the World From a Climate Armageddon by Michael T. Klare (ScheerPost),

1. The temperature is rising if we stay the course, to very destructive and disruptive levels. Life on planet Earth will not be the same. Certain things that are possible today will no longer be possible. Humanity’s horizons will have been reduced. [4]

   “According to the U.N.’s analysis, even if all 200 signatories were to abide by their pledges — and almost none have — global temperatures are likely to rise by 2.7 degrees Celsius (nearly 5 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels by century’s end.”

2. We are actually not even just staying the course. We’re going in the wrong direction.

   “To limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius, by 2030, scientists believe, global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions would have to be reduced by 25% from 2018 levels; to limit it to 1.5 degrees, by 55%. Yet those emissions — driven by strong economic growth in China, India, and other rapidly industrializing nations — have actually been on an upward trajectory, rising on average by 1.8% per year between 2009 and 2019.”

3. The U.S. and China both need to quit their bullshit. The U.S. needs to stop saber-rattling and match China’s environmental goals.

   “It all boils down to this: to save human civilization, the U.S. and China must dramatically reduce their CO2 emissions, while working together to persuade other major carbon-emitting nations, beginning with fast-rising India, to follow suit. That would, of course, mean setting aside their current antagonisms, however important they may seem to U.S. and Chinese leaders today, and instead making climate survival their number one priority and policy objective. Otherwise, put simply, all is lost.”

Let’s find out more about the data underlying Klare’s conclusion.

Who Contributes What?

If we’re finger-pointing about who’s “more responsible” for climate change, we can look at not who’s currently most responsible for climate change, but who has emitted the most CO₂ cumulatively. The article Who has contributed most to global CO2 emissions? by Hannah Ritchie (Our World in Data) has a great graphic showing the cumulative CO₂ contribution from various countries and regions since the beginning of the industrial age. The U.S. is in the lead overall and very much in the lead per-capita.

Global Cumulative Emissions

The cumulative number is perhaps a good way of assigning responsibility and culpability for climate change (e.g. for reparations), but it’s not a good way of determining how to stop it. For that, we need to find out who’s contributing the most to climate change right now. The chart below is from CO2 Emissions (World-o-Meter). It shows that, while China was the overall greatest emitter in 2020—emitting just over twice as much as the U.S.—the U.S. still has over twice as much CO₂ emissions per capita.

Annual CO2 Share By Country

According to The History of Carbon Dioxide Emissions in 2014 (World Resources Institute), China has been the biggest emitter of CO₂ since 2004. Before that, it was still the U.S., despite having less than ¼ of China’s population.

Some would say that China should reduce their pollution because they produce the most of it, but isn’t China producing most of the world’s stuff and still has lower per-capita CO₂ emissions than the U.S.? Or some other countries in Europe for that matter? China’s increased usage can be at least partially explained by the fact that it has become the manufacturing capital of the world. Europeans and Americans constantly joke about how “everything is made in China” while simultaneously complaining the China is emitting more greenhouse gases. There is room to argue that greenhouse gases that a country produces to manufacture goods for export shouldn’t be solely attributed to that country. Without the external demand, China would manufacture less.

Even given that, China is in 12th place in emissions per-capita, whereas the U.S. is in 4th place. Canada emits the most CO₂ per capita of any country in the world, followed by Australia and then Saudi Arabia. Wouldn’t it be better to get those countries to stop wasting so much energy/carbon-footprint per citizen? Wouldn’t that be more fair?

Questions of fairness and justice aside, though, the world can’t solve climate change without China reducing its CO₂ output.

We have to pull together and think about the whole world—because if the whole world isn’t on board with this, it won’t work. (Which is why it probably won’t work.) We don’t do very well with solidarity, with sacrificing for the common good, with eschewing something that we think—or that we’d been told—will make our lives because it will make other people’s lives worse. Don’t buy that phone because it was made by slave labor. Don’t fly so much because people in other countries will suffer more for the CO₂ your flight produces.

And hell, even if we do that, it won’t matter so much because

“[…] even under the rosiest scenarios of electric cars, more sweaters and eating vegan, less than 8% of the needed reduction can be achieved through individual behavior changes.”

I understand where that’s coming from, but individual behavior changes also include standing together and forcing industry to change the other 92%. That’s not individual so much, but I think it doesn’t make any sense to claim that just 100 corporations emit 70% of the greenhouse gases and then pretend that that has nothing to do with us. They’re not producing it for fun, are they? They’re selling us stuff. We should stop buying it. We should vote for people who make them stop selling it.

We’ve tried with market forces and boycotts and, honestly, they’re just much better at that game than we are. Too many of us capitulate to consumerism and low prices and run right back into their arms. We have to learn how to stand strong and move the needle in a bigger way—together.

Who’s in the 1%? Which one?

If you’re in Switzerland, working a white-collar job, you’re almost certainly in the global 1% for income. Do you make more than CHF35,000 per year? Welcome to the global 1% for income. For wealth, you’d need to have at least CHF5M to be in the top 1% of Switzerland, but less than CHF1M to be in the top 1% worldwide. I took my numbers from articles citing the 2018 Global Wealth Report by Credit Suisse, which no longer seems to be available. The 2021 Global Wealth Report by Credit Suisse is, however, available. And guess what? Switzerland pushed its way to the top in several categories.

I take this to mean that, if you live relatively well in the first world, then you have an obligation to pump the brakes on your lifestyle rather than figuring out how you can get even richer and consume more or settle into an early-retirement, crypto-fueled lifestyle.

People who compare themselves only to other Swiss in this country are setting themselves up for disappointment because it has the highest density of millionaires and super-rich and so on. The average wealth is over CHF600K now. The median wealth is CHF124K. It’s a lot easier to get into the global 1% than into the Swiss 1%. Just being able to live and work here is already a massive privilege.

If the most privileged can’t see their way to reducing the way in which their privilege ruins the planet for everyone else, then we’re doomed. I’m not super-hopeful that we’re going to find a fair and just way through this. We’ll probably end up doing too little, too late. [5] It’s going to get more uncomfortable for everyone—even the privileged. It doesn’t really matter whether they want to believe it.

The DACH region ([D]eutschland, [A]ustria, S[CH]weiz) is looking down the barrel of its worst COVID wave yet. We are a good 20 months into the pandemic and nearly a year after the general availability of a highly effective vaccine. To be fair, most people under 65 were not able to get the vaccine until May or June (in Switzerland, at least). However, it’s been 5 months since then.

Stuck in the lifeboat

That’s more than enough time for a civilized and well-educated public to do the right thing for itself, no?

It’s more than enough time to patch the hole in the bottom of the boat. Instead, we’ve got 1/3 of the population claiming that the hole in the bottom of the boat either doesn’t exist—despite the water rushing in and (A) making a lot of noise and (B) making everything wet and (C) bringing the gunwales uncomfortably close to the surface of the water—or that we don’t really need a boat without holes, or that each person should be able to decide for themselves whether the hole should be patched, or that their own personal beliefs are more important than the reality of a gaping hole on a hostile ocean. So, here we are! These are the people in our lifeboat! There’s nothing for it but to soldier on, nurture sweet dreams of tossing them overboard, but still try to get everybody to shore intact. It’s a terrible burden having principles and morals sometimes.

How are we doing?

Germany is hitting new records for number of cases per day several times over the last week (with 65,371 cases yesterday and an incidence of 336). Switzerland also has case numbers increasing by exponential leaps and bounds (with 5,594 cases yesterday and an incidence of 319). Austria went from poster-child for handling the pandemic to completely out-of-control. This screenshot is from a few days ago, but it’s pretty representative. It was at 14.416 cases and an incidence of 941 yesterday.

Incidence Levels through the Roof

It’s not just the DACH region, either. [1] Russia has a tremendous number of cases, but also very high deaths. Great Britain seems to have settled in at about 35,000 to 40,000 cases per day. The U.S. is inching upward, but seems to have settled at about 100,000 cases per day. [2] And so on and so on.

The countries that have it under control—Spain, Portugal—are those with very high vaccination rates. Go figure.

Most of the countries where it’s hitting hardest were proudly declaiming that they’d dropped all COVID measures and had declared their vaccination campaigns complete at about 60-65% penetration. Most of them did this for nakedly political reasons—Germany just had a big election [3]—as if the virus gave a shit. The virus does not care. It grinned from ear to ear, affixed a bib around its neck, grasped a fork in its right hand, a knife in its left, licked its chops, and dug right in.

What do we do?

So far, the disease has not been deadlier than it was in other waves, but hospitalizations lag cases…and deaths lag hospitalizations. It’s really only a matter of time. People hoping that we’re leaping somehow to herd immunity only have 2-3 more years to wait for that little dream to come true. In the meantime, all human medical efforts will be directed toward fixing the effects of a treatable disease for which we have a very effective vaccine. [4] During this time, precious little else will get done because (A) we’re not great at concentrating on multiple things at once and (B) it will be extremely lucrative to be addressing the only disease anyone cares about, so the brain drain will be enormous.

What’s a better solution? The same as it ever was: vaccinate (get the booster as soon as you can! [5]), keep your distance where possible, wear masks indoors (where it makes sense), keep your contacts down, etc. Nothing has changed in how we could tackle this. We have completely lost the will to solve big problems. People are more focused on their own personal rights—no matter how small—and believing in fairy tales about the vaccine than in pulling together to beat this thing. The virus is winning.

Hell, we won’t even get the chance to square off against the big boss: climate change.

I keep finding people who suggest that the vaccine is “potentially sacrificing millions of citizens like so many experimental fruit flies.” That is one of the more reasonable formulations, as the author of the article Medicine Wants to Kill You by James Howard Kunstler (Clusterfuck Nation) has included the word “potentially” to hedge his bets against the fact that many of us have not (yet!) fallen over with an acute case of death brought on by what they deem an untested—or under-tested—vaccine. [1]

They also seem to believe—and almost rejoice in—the apparently waning efficacy of the vaccine. But now I’m kind of confused. Does it not work at all or does its protection wane more quickly than we’d hoped? Or is it all three? That is: It doesn’t work, but, even if it does, it doesn’t last long and, if it doesn’t kill you first. Maximum conspiracy-theory achievement unlocked.

The citation above is shown in context below,

“Historians of the future, savoring ‘possum goulash around their campfires, will marvel that modern medicine squandered its authority, its credibility, and its sacred honor in the Covid Panic of the 2020s, when public health officials and doctors in clinical practice colluded to force mass vaccinations while suppressing news of the harms and injuries the vaccines caused — potentially sacrificing millions of citizens like so many experimental fruit flies.”

It’s nicely written and would make quite an impact, had it anything to do with reality. I’ve been reading Kunstler’s column for years, through his good and bad times. While he’s written a couple of non-fiction books that I very much enjoyed [2] and I continue to enjoy his writing style, he’s gone a bit more around the bend in the last year or so (in my opinion). Lately, like Mark Crispin Miller [3], he’s been dead-on convinced that people are dropping like flies, even though I only ever hear about it from people like Kunstler and Miller.

They usually offer either no corroborating information at all or they offer a literal rabbit-hole of shady-looking and statistically catastrophic pages and interviews. [4] Many of the link journeys end in dead, private for-pay pages that are only for “true believers” who are willing to pay for their information—unlike the sheep who just gobble up what is publicly available—information that is, therefore, simultaneously wrong and manipulated to benefit authoritarianism.

But people are dying!

What is the likelihood that this bit of news—that millions of people are dying directly after having been vaccinated, in particular young people—would be completely ignored in a media system that has never seen a scandal (real or imagined) that they wouldn’t exploit?

“[…] young vaxxed athletes drop dead of heart failure in shocking numbers on high school gridirons, soccer fields, cricket pitches, bike trails, and running tracks around the world […]”

Even if media organizations were so in the tank for the vaccine, do you really think no-one would crack and grab the millions of clicks that this kind of story would generate? They don’t all have that much discipline. But I follow a plethora of sources and no-one—other than the absolute fringe of auto-didactic researchers without anything resembling an official source—has anything to say about this. It’s not being reported because it doesn’t exist. I can’t help but notice that these statements are never accompanied by links to supporting documents or reports.

Kunstler writes of confronting a medical professional—his own doctor—whom he claims to trust,

“My own doctor tried to persuade me to get vaxed-up during a routine physical in October. I asked him if he was aware of the thousands of deaths and disabling adverse events reported on the CDC’s VAERS system. He said the numbers were not true and went on to say that he had “one hundred percent confidence in the vaccines.” He’s always appeared to be a smart and capable person. A year or so ago he was enlisted to act as an executive administrator in the health care org he practices in, and now only sees patients two days a week. Perhaps that leaves him no time to follow the news. Or maybe he has no inclination to follow any news except what comes from sources like cable TV channels, which are almost entirely sponsored by the Pharma industry.”

Instead of questioning his own information, he questions his doctor’s being “a smart and capable person”. Kunstler has his story and he’s sticking to it. I guess so is the doctor? But the doctor’s story is accompanied by billions of successful vaccinations and hospitals filling up with COVID patients where there are still too many unvaccinated. [5] Kunstler’s story is accompanied by news sources that he never cites and bodies that he can’t produce. And yet, he writes on his own blog about this sad experience with his doctor—who is obviously the deluded party here. I understand the doctor’s dilemma: the longer it takes for the vaccine to start killing us all, the harder it is to lend credence to Kunstler’s version of reality.

Don’t get me wrong: I think Kunstler makes a good point about media. It’s not like there’s no point to mentioning that “[…] cable TV channels, […] are almost entirely sponsored by the Pharma industry.”. This is both true and certainly restricts what and how those channels will be willing to report on. However, just mentioning that fact does not prove that these channels would obviously ignore the wholesale slaughter of millions of young Americans. That’s a pretty big leap, but all of the intervening points to be made are elided and just assumed to be true. The mainstream media is bad, but it can also be trusted to jump on a story about human misery.

Kunstler goes on,

“The bottom line for me is that he has compromised my faith in his judgment.”

It’s almost like he can’t see the irony that the doctor probably thought the same thing about him.

Like, what is a pandemic anyway?

But this intrepid reporter of the truth keeps on plugging away, questioning even whether we’re having a pandemic at all—or having one worth worrying about,

“It’s also getting harder to tell how much of a crisis this actually is or ever really was. There’s no reliable way of knowing how many people really died as a direct result of Covid, or just tested positive for the virus […]”

So, his theory is that we detected a new virus and we were all warned about it. Then, hospitalizations and deaths and illness spiked—despite heretofore unthinkable and drastic lockdown, isolation, distancing, and masking measures—but the deaths and hospitalizations weren’t due to that virus, just because scientists and the media and administrations around the world said that it was. It’s like the theory is: If that many people are in agreement, you almost have to be suspicious, right? How could this all be explained by a virus? It’s only happened a dozen times before, but not recently, so what are the odds? Use your brain. [6]

They think that all of this suffering and death just happened on its own for other reasons, none of which could have been prevented because it’s all so unpredictable. These people would rather have a much riskier world where no-one can be faulted for just continuing with their lives as they’ve always done, instead of sacrificing anything for the common good. It’s easier to think, “what’s the point of sacrificing doesn’t help anyway? I might as well get mine.”

Let the virus win

Instead, they advocate a very medieval approach: let the virus rip! And just let it kill whomever it’s going to kill. We have the technology to combat a pandemic, but we no longer have the morality to do so—and we don’t have anywhere near the solidarity required.

The following is a not-uncommon sentiment these days,

“It bears repeating that whatever Covid-19 actually is or where it came from, it’s a disease not a whole lot more deadly in the general population than the flu in a bad season; that in the natural course of things, it would have probably only killed mostly the very old and already sick, and that the rest of the population would have soldiered through it and acquired a sturdy natural immunity superior to anything the vaxxes might confer (even in theory).”

That is wildly untrue, unless he’s also suggesting that we let at least some, possibly many, of those people go without hospital care, possibly dying or becoming disabled. That is, if you caught COVID, then we’d have to keep enough people out of hospitals—choosing who suffers and dies from it—to make sure that those hospitals would retain enough capacity to treat the population affected non-COVID diseases. Right?

I mean, that’s the problem, isn’t it? I’m assuming that we all consider it a problem when a reasonably advanced society is able to afford endless military hardware and bailouts for its investor class, but to be incapable and unwilling to face a pandemic against a virus whose basic technology we’ve understood for over 150 years and that can be fought by keeping our distance and wearing masks. High-tech stuff, that. It’s even more of a problem when there is an actual vaccine available but not nearly enough people get it.

But, once again, for the rest of the class, let’s reiterate the problem that so many seem to keep deliberately forgetting. If COVID is like a “bad flu season”, then the hospitals will fill up quickly. In the scenario above, with everyone getting it at once, the weakest will fill the hospitals immediately, taking a nice, long time to die—or do we not help them? Do we really act like animals and leave the weak to die behind the herd? I’m not making a judgment here [7]—but that’s what he’s talking about when he talks about letting it rip.

But we went through all of this logic in March 2020—and have now conveniently forgotten the perfectly valid reasons for restricting behavior in the face of a pandemic. “Conveniently” because doing so means we no longer have to restrict ourselves. It’s almost always other people—and their families and friends—who are getting sick and dying and stuff anyway.

Our medical system is completely inadequate for caring for the order-of-magnitude higher influx of patients that a policy like that would engender. So, you’d have to pair it with a policy of “death panels”, choosing who gets treatment and who does not. Knowing our world, we would just take care of the rich and let the poor die. But isn’t being poor kind of like a co-morbidity?

Why even listen to people like this?

The short answer is: because enough other people seem to listen to what they’re preaching that vaccination levels in a lot of countries have stalled at wholly inadequate levels.

Why am I still following Kunstler and Miller? Because I don’t want to be like them, ignoring everything that doesn’t already agree with what they think. I don’t give them as much weight in my worldview, but I do periodically consider whether they might have a point. They have a point about creeping authoritarianism in some countries, but they muddle it all with wild and completely fantastical allegations about spying via apps and discriminating against the unvaccinated and piles of hidden bodies and weird authoritarian agendas that don’t gibe at all with most countries revoking their measures too soon.

The COVID initiative in Switzerland

Here in Switzerland, our local versions of Kunstler and Miller are putting up posters against the COVID referendum we are voting on soon. Their posters say “Impfzwang”, which means “vaccine mandate”. That is not at all what the referendum is about. The referendum just wants to continue using the Covid Certificate to regulate people’s access to common, indoor areas where the chance of spreading COVID is known to be higher. People can still get tested, but they also have to continue to pay. Nothing changes from today. The measures just becomes “official” rather than “emergency”.

Some call it a “mandate” because you’ll need a test or a certificate (recovered or vaccinated) in order to get inside a restaurant or bar or to go to a concert. You can sit outside without a certificate, but it’s getting colder, so that’s not really a viable option until spring. That’s why people feel like they’re being “forced” to get the vaccine: because now it’s getting annoying for them personally not to have the vaccine. As we read above, if you also believe that the vaccine will kill you, then this initiative is exactly like the state trying to kill you just because you wanted to eat out in a restaurant.

What’s really going on is that the restrictions are finally hitting people where it hurts. They don’t want to get vaccinated, they don’t care about solidarity, they don’t believe anything, but now they won’t be able to dine out without a certificate, so they’re claiming they’re being “forced” to vaccinate. [8]

Nobody’s forcing anyone to get vaccinated; you just can’t sit inside the Café Spettacolo anymore. That’s where the other argument comes in: they claim that it’s “splitting society”. But, we’ve already accept that in other ways, haven’t we? If you don’t have enough money for a CHF5.- coffee, you can’t go into the café either. Nobody’s splitting society any more than it already has been. It’s just a split along a different line—and for a much better, epidemiologically reasonable reason than something arbitrary like whether you have money. People are comfortable with keeping out the poor, but not the unvaccinated. I’m the opposite.

Also, the “Überwachungsstaat” (big brother) part of their argument isn’t true either. The COVID apps (tracker and certificate) are a couple of the few on your phone that explicitly don’t share your private information and data with everyone. They’re open-source; anyone can go look at how they work and many security researchers have done so and verified that there’s nothing shady going on.

For Christ’s sake, these people complaining about the COVID apps are probably all in giant WhatsApp groups and on Facebook complaining about it, just bleeding their data all over the place … then complaining about the two apps that don’t do anything at all. Sure, you show the restaurant your name before you go in, but almost everyone pays digitally with cards that identify them anyway.

The thing to remember is that these are temporary measures. Some states—like the country of Denmark and many U.S. states—have already repealed some measures, often more hastily than the science called for. How is that authoritarian creep?

There is no way that restaurants are going to want to continue doing this when it’s no longer epidemiologically necessary. It’s possible that they will, but then we can get up in arms and have it repealed. Right now, it just looks silly to not use tools that would help us live with the pandemic when the upside is so much larger than the downside.

I’m all for anti-authority and privacy laws—but not when there’s a legitimate reason for temporary infringement, like we have now. The pandemic is real. COVID is real. People who don’t need to get hurt or die will get hurt or die. If we were making all of these laws to combat something like, say, terrorism, which, statistically speaking, never happens here, then I’m against it.

We shouldn’t have to deal with this

But we shouldn’t even have to talk about the phone apps or the certificate-checks because we have a vaccine. The problem is all of the people who don’t want the vaccine are the ones who make it necessary to keep these measures in place to combat COVID. And they hate these measures, too. But the only alternative solution they offer is to ignore COVID. Just put your fingers in your ears and pretend it doesn’t exist.

The original point was to get a high enough vaccination rate to make it very unlikely that anyone has it. It’s not rocket science. We’ve gotten herd immunity for a dozen other diseases with vaccinations. Now, we’re back to basics and believing in voodoo and hating science because people are convinced that anyone who knows anything is just a bossy know-it-all and a show-off.

The people who really shouldn’t get the vaccine—immunocompromised, allergic, what-have-you—are the ones everyone else is supposed to be protecting. If everyone who didn’t have a legitimate concern were to get vaccinated, then we would be able to handle the handful who have a good reason. The problem is that there are so many people who can catch it so easily that, if you just let them into a restaurant, untested or unchecked, they would be more likely to infect even vaccinated people, who are not super-powered, but just less likely to be infected. Less likely to be infected, but they’ll still have a good chance of catching it if they spend three hours in the Chäschäller Restaurant in winter with someone shedding virus right behind them.

That’s why it makes it dangerous to have completely unvaccinated people around. It makes the vaccinated—perhaps with waning immunity [9]—more susceptible and they are almost certainly not aware of it. We wouldn’t have to really worry about any of that stuff at all if we were like Portugal, with almost 90% vaccination. Instead, we’re over here at 64% and acting like that’s good enough, like a child trying to round their D up to an A without doing the work.

The virus doesn’t care how you feel about your performance. You don’t get points for trying.

People in Switzerland are pretty much done with being vaccinated, according to the video report FOKUS: Impfbereitschaft in der Schweiz am Limit (SRF), Switzerland has managed to fully vaccinate 63% of the population (64% at the time of writing) but pretty much everyone who’s not gotten vaccinated yet is not planning to do so.

“Das Impf-Potential in der Schweiz scheint ausgeschöpft, wie die neuste Sotomo-Studie zeigt. Personen, die jetzt noch eine Impfung ablehnen, haben ihre Meinung gemacht.”

The following screenshot from the video shows that 74% of the unvaccinated would “definitely not” get vaccinated, while 21% said they were “unlikely” to do so. 4% said they were likely to get vaccinated, while only 1% said they would definitely do so.

Anworten von Ungeimpften in Prozent

Why are they not getting vaccinated? According to the screenshot below, for 78%, it’s because they “fear harmful effects” from the vaccine itself or they think that they are healthy enough to withstand COVID without the vaccine. 68% don’t think that the vaccine works anyway, and 44% are not getting it out of spite: they don’t like being told what to do. [1]

Meistgenannte Gründe für nicht Impfen

It’s understandable that, if you think that the vaccine doesn’t work and it will harm you, that you don’t want to get it. You’d have to really look away from the enormous pile of evidence to the contrary—i.e. 63% of Switzerland has it and we’re not all dying in droves—but that’s why this is more of a religious question than anything else. They just believe in these things. Faith doesn’t need evidence.

Unfortunately, they’re completely forgetting that we live in a society and, as members of an advanced social-welfare state, you have some duties and obligations to go with your massive privileges; those duties include not only thinking of yourself when you’re fabricating a worldview full of shadowy perpetrators of doom, but to think of the people who can’t afford to indulge in flights of fancy because the reality of COVID for them is very real. This is called solidarity.

It doesn’t matter if they’re pretty sure that COVID won’t hurt them personally—they have to think of all of the people that their getting COVID will potentially infect who aren’t as strong or amazing—or young and healthy—as them.

To be fair to them, though, can we really fault these people for only thinking of themselves? Isn’t that what our advanced societies hammer home into our heads, day after day after day, with marketing and advertising and just general ideology through media? Can you blame them if they completely forget about duties no-one ever bothered to tell them they have, because those duties might cause them to restrict their consumption and think of others.

You can’t sell unnecessary stuff to modest people who care about others and their planet. And selling unnecessary stuff is our jam, man! That is literally how the entire world economy works: everyone buys stuff they don’t need so that other people have jobs creating stuff no-one needs. If too many people jump off of this carousel, it stops turning.

Just as an example for how people could be misled into thinking that the vaccine not only doesn’t work, but that it actually kills everyone, there’s this “article” [2] as an example: They will (gladly) kill 117 children to (theoretically) save ONE child from “death by COVID” by Mark Crispin Miller. It claims to be based on several “studies” [3]. These studies seem to exist, but the conclusions that they draw are completely at odds with reality.

Just think: If the vaccine kills 117 people for every one that it saves, then where are the bodies? With over 4 billion people vaccinated by now, where are the bodies?

These people are in a cult. They are not unlike the people who continue to follow a leader who keeps mis-predicting the day of reckoning. They believe the study, but then hand-wave the fact that people are not dropping like flies. They think, instead, that the entire world is engaged in a cover-up. That no-one is talking about this other than them, even the families of the people affected.

They think that literally billions of people are too scared to say that the vaccination has killed their family and friends. Not only that, but that they then line up to get the vaccination themselves. People like Miller think that this is completely plausible—that he and his sources are the only ones with their eyes open enough to see what’s really going on. Everyone else is just cowed into saying nothing about the government having deliberately killed 90% of their families. Just because you don’t know any of these people that have died doesn’t mean that it’s not happening. Wake up, sheeple.

Look, you can decide not to get the vaccine, fine. But you don’t get to believe in this obvious claptrap. It’s just not even on the scale of plausible.

Miller—a “Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication” at New York University, who teaches courses on how to interpret propaganda, ironically enough—discusses the analysis by completely ignoring selection and confirmation bias with the following abstract.

“That’s according to a risk-benefit analysis done by risk-benefit expert Dr. Toby Rogers. His analysis has been viewed by over 22,000 readers. No mistakes were found. Nothing but praise.”

Miller questions everything but this kind of stuff, oddly enough. I get that he’s suspicious of the mainstream media, but there’s no reason to then believe nearly everything that’s not mainstream. I sometimes wonder whether his web site is just him perpetrating a big joke. I continue to follow him because I like to keep my thumb on the pulse of many segments of thought—including the ones that I personally don’t believe, but a lot of other people do.

The doctor who wrote the original article summarized,

“[…] to put it simply, the Biden administration plan would kill 5,248 children via Pfizer mRNA shots in order to save 45 children from dying of coronavirus. For every one child saved by the shot, another 117 would be killed by the shot.”

What are the odds that this is true? Do none of these people ask themselves that? What are the odds that one or two people on SubStack are the only ones who see that the Biden administration is not only comfortable with, but actively promoting, killing children, in the name of … what? What’s the purpose behind this? Do they even bother coming up with a mens rea?

And what is the likelihood that the Biden administration—which has very much stumbled out of the gate on everything else—is competent enough to kill a bunch of children without anyone knowing about it? Like, if that was their goal, what makes these people think that the Biden administration would be competent enough to actually hide it from everyone except these few geniuses on SubStack, who see through the subterfuge?

Miller sums his take up with “Not surprising to me.” Of course it’s not—because he’s so far down the rabbit hole that he hasn’t seen daylight in years. He goes on to cite the popular, libertarian, non-solidarity description of mortality rates by age cohort:

“[…] people in the 65+ demographic are five times as likely to die from the inoculation as from COVID-19 under the most favorable assumptions! This demographic is the most vulnerable to adverse effects from COVID-19. As the age demographics go below about 35 years old, the chances of death from COVID-19 become very small, and when they go below 18, become negligible.”

This is all true, but the conclusion that they draw—that no-one under 35 needs to be vaccinated—is completely wrong for battling a pandemic. The reason we sheltered in place and put up with lockdowns and “remote all the things!” was because we pulled together as a society to help protect the most vulnerable parts of the population.

Younger, less vulnerable people should get vaccinated not so that they themselves won’t die—an eventuality with low likelihood—but so that they don’t catch COVID and pass it on to more vulnerable populations. Older people don’t have good immune systems and, even with the vaccine, will still be more likely to catch a disease than much younger people.

But this logic doesn’t seem to hold for very long. Even here, in Switzerland, where solidarity is at least somewhat more popular than in the U.S., people pulled together for a few months, but then their need to go on vacation overrode any social instincts they had. People decided that pulling together was all well and good, but that they should be able to decide when it’s over. And they’ve done that. So, back to our scheduled programming of egocentricity.

The article Fossil fuels doomed in New York as regulator blocks new gas power plants by Tim De Chant (Ars Technica) writes,

“New York’s climate law requires polluters to account for two sources of emissions: from the plants themselves and from the natural gas supply chain. Once the latter was included—figures which in the past were nearly always ignored when determining a power plant’s pollution—the emissions quickly exceeded the DEC’s thresholds, the decisions say.”

I think that this is a good way of looking at it, and I’m glad that they’re finally forced to consider these pollution vectors. It makes no sense to consider only the point-of-use without considering how much methane is loosed during production and transport of natural gas. E.g. fracking produces quite a bit of methane in all but the most optimal of scenarios, and that’s even without considering what fracking does to the environment where it’s employed.

“In that time, scientists and regulators became increasingly aware of the lifetime carbon footprint of natural gas, particularly along its supply chain. While natural gas burns cleaner and produces less carbon pollution than other fossil fuels like coal, leaks from wellhead to turbine tip the scales. Methane, a major component of natural gas, is a potent greenhouse gas, with one ton warming the atmosphere 84 times more than one ton of carbon dioxide over 20 years. The potency means that leaks along the supply chain represent a significant fraction of natural gas users’ carbon pollution.”

There is, however, the niggling issue that current energy requirements are for a grid that is always-on and provides steady energy night and day. That means that, if the primary source of energy becomes intermittent, then there still needs to be some form of energy that can be put online on-demand (in a way that solar and wind cannot).

Current battery storage capacity doesn’t even come close—nor are any estimates of what we could build with the resources available on the planet and current technology even remotely feasible for covering humanity’s current needs, despite the claims of techno-evangelists who would try to sell us these solutions. (I.e. “you have to start somewhere—why not start by giving me a ton of money!”)

Natural-gas power-plants are one way of doing this that have, to date, been deemed far less polluting than coal (also not as on-demand as many think) or diesel generators (very good on-demand features; horribly polluting, though). [1] However, if the honest evaluation of the CO₂ impact of natural gas is less rosy than heretofore imagined, that leaves the world without an on-demand source to fill the gaps left by solar and wind.

This implies that we might have to—horror of horrors—seriously consider a world where the grid works differently and, perhaps, less reliably than it does now. Or, we would have to consider reducing our energy demands so that the intermittent and clean energy sources together with realistic—and non environmentally impacting or CO₂-impacting—storage mechanisms would be sufficient.

The article continues, detailing how companies will say pretty much anything in order to make the books balance in their favor, regardless of the actual environmental impact.

“The DEC also faulted the logic both companies used to suggest that the new plants would displace emissions elsewhere on the grid. The problem, the agency said, was that their modeling relied on too many assumptions—particularly “projected reductions that could occur at other GHG emission sources across the State” (emphasis in the original). In other words, since neither company can control the actions of other polluters, they don’t get to count speculative reductions elsewhere as their own.”

This is just fraudulent and they should be lucky to get away with only having their request denied instead of being fined heavily—or having their corporate charter taken away for trying to defraud the government and trying to waste the common resource that is our environment for their own gain.

In the near term, though,

“Both Danskammer and NRG were proposing to upgrade some of New York State’s dirtiest power plants. They’re older, producing many times more NOx emissions than newer gas-fired power plants.”

This may sound noble, but the reasoning is, though, that no-one should be replacing dirty natural-gas plants with less-dirty natural-gas plants. We have to find another solution. Unfortunately, no-one really has a scalable one yet. This is almost certainly for lack of trying because the incentives in our economy are still very, very strongly biased toward just using fossil fuels.

Hey, maybe when power finally gets more expensive, the economy will finally be confronted with the reality that it will have to use less of it, which would satisfy the climate-change-combatting goals we actually should have. We would have to be careful, though, because using austerity to limit use has, historically, backfired—or ended up harming the most vulnerable either first or exclusively. The wealthy get what they want anyway, more or less by definition.

On the other, other hand, the currently very dirty fossil-fuel plants are almost certainly already located in the neighborhoods of the most vulnerable, so the temporary fix of building less-polluting gas plants would help those people, in the short term. The supply-chain pollution of delivering natural gas affects people along the way—and all of us, generally, in that methane warms the planet—but that pollution does not specifically impact the people who live near the power plant that uses the natural gas.

Question: Couldn’t the existing plants be made less polluting without rebuilding them completely? I would imagine they could, but no-one wants to do it—because where’s the money in that?

The article Biden Wakes Up From The Strangest Dream That He Was Attending International Climate Conference (Babylon Bee) is a joke, but…is it really? It feels true, doesn’t it?

I am an optimistic man and, yet, we must be realistic. These people at COP26 are nearly literally all of the same people who’ve done nearly nothing since Kyoto. Remember Kyoto? Nah, no-one does. That was COP3 in 1997. Almost a quarter-century ago. Back then, it was absolutely necessary that something be done. Nothing was done.

It’s not likely that something will be done this time, although it’s long past midnight on this doomsday clock. The article These 4 charts explain why the stakes are so high at the U.N. climate summit by Lauren Sommer, Connie Hanzhang Jin, Rina Torchinsky (NPR) does a reasonable job of summing up why something needs to be done.

Everyone know it’s important. But it’s such a big job. It would mean changing how we live in the so-called modern world—it would mean changing capitalism. I’m an optimist, but…I don’t see capitalism and technology solving this problem—its incentives drive us (no pun intended) in the other direction. The world has already decided that TINA (There Is No Alternative) because socialism and communism have always failed. Duh.

Well, sometimes, you have to hit rock-bottom before you realize how wrong you were. We’re not there yet. We kind of know what it will look like; there are plenty of well-sourced books outlining what’s in store. Greta is right: “[…] the climate and the biosphere don’t care about our politics and our empty words for a single second.” Once we’ve wasted all of our planet’s resources and remaining carbon budget making Bezos or Musk the richest man on the planet, maybe we’ll give socialism a whirl again—in a less-livable, smaller, and emptier world.

And here we are, looking down the barrel of a gun and pretending it’s not there because we’d rather make money instead. Or, we’d rather pretend that we’re going to make money while a handful make real money and fool us into thinking that the gun’s not there so that they can make money. I don’t know where they think they’re going to spend it in a world of climate chaos and refugees, but I’m sure they’ll think of something. We are all just Ark B Golgafrinchans (h2g2).

Paris? OMG Paris. COP25 that was. Voluntary reductions. The world did about 1% of the promised reductions combined. They were voluntary, so who cares? There’s no punishment, right? RIGHT?

Buckle up. We’re all in for a bumpy ride. In other news, Hertz, a company that was in bankruptcy 10 months ago, has announced that it is buying 100,000 Teslas with $4.2B that they somehow now have. Both Tesla and Hertz were up about 7% on the news.

You wanna know what won’t affect Tesla’s share price? Something silly like this: Tesla recalls 11,706 vehicles over Full Self-Driving Beta software bug by Jonathan M. Gitlin (Ars Technica). I mean, why should over-promising features for years negatively impact a business? What are you—a party pooper? TO THE MOON BABY. [1]

Tesla now has a $1T valuation, more than every other car company on the planet combined. Talk about hopeful! The market is hopeful! It is putting all of its money on a future-facing automotive solution! Good for them! Either that, or people are just trying to get in on whatever’s happening (ignoring the barrel of a different gun). Either way, moar cars is good for the environment, just you wait and see!

I can’t wait to see what amazing plan they come up with at COP26! I bet that the more amazing it is, the more positively the markets will react to it! I bet that the degree to which it is actually a workable plan to address climate change won’t be inversely proportional to the market change. I told you, I’m an optimist!

I was browsing the COVID situation on Corona Zahlen Weltweit yesterday and sorted by %-deaths for the first time. I was quite shocked to see that a sizable country like Mexico had a lethality of 7.6%. Peru is at 9.1%.

Mexico COVID infection and death rates

The only countries higher than that are the tiny, island nation of Vanuatu (with only 4 infections total), Yemen, Peru, and Sudan. Yemen and Sudan are well-known to be in dire straits six ways from Sunday, with multiple humanitarian crises happening all at once, including war and famine, so, callous as it may sound, it’s no surprise that they would not be able to corral the lethality of COVID-19.

But what happened in Peru and Mexico? Is their medical infrastructure so much work than their neighbors? Does Mexico suffer from its proximity to the United States, which almost certainly provided a constant flow of COVID-19 cases for the last 20 months? Or do Peru and Mexico just lack too much infrastructure to handle COVID?

The article Covid: Why has Peru been so badly hit? on June 1, 2021 (BBC) writes that,

“There’s also been shortage of oxygen needed to treat Covid patients, and the entire country has around 1,600 intensive care unit beds − far less than some neighbouring countries.”

and

“Peru’s vaccination drive has been slow, with less than 4% of the country fully vaccinated.”

and

“About 70% of the employed population in Peru work in the informal sector, which is one of the highest rates in Latin America.”

and

“More than 40% of households in Peru do not have a refrigerator, according to a 2020 government survey. […] “They have to go out to stock up frequently and especially go to the markets,””

and

“Cramped housing makes social distancing harder and allows the virus to spread more easily.”

As for Mexico, it’s likely that it suffers from many of the same social issues as Peru, with informal employment, crowded housing, low vaccination rates, and people forced to leave their homes for basic staples.

The article At 8.8 per 100 cases, Mexico leads in Covid fatality rate among most affected countries on January 4, 2021 (Mexico News Daily) shows that Mexico’s lethality rate due to COVID was worse 10 months ago and has dropped to 7.6% from 8.8%.

These numbers should serve as a dire warning for how COVID is likely to continue tearing through the more impoverished parts of the world (i.e. most of it). It’s unlikely that India is faring as well as it appears to be faring—the combination of the Modi government along with the infrastructure deficiencies it shares with Peru and Mexico indicate that its numbers are quite low so far. The numbers at “Corona Zahlen Weltweit” are pretty good, but they also don’t let you choose a cut-off point. It would even be good to have a few pre-selected cut-off points, like

• June 1st, 2020 (initial lockdowns over in most countries)
• January 1st, 2021 (vaccinations begin to be available)
• June 1st, 2021 (a good number of vaccinations available)

Then you could eliminate data from earlier phases that are no longer relevant going forward. Still, COVID continues to look quite aggressive, especially in places without the most advanced medical infrastructure and living conditions. In particular, the rest of the world doesn’t have access to antivirals, vaccines, hospitals, ICUs, respirators, medical staff, sufficiently sanitary and isolated living conditions, ability to work from home, and so on—all things that we take for granted in the handful of countries that have all of these things. And, looking at Europe, we’re squandering these advantages by using them inefficiently.

From a comment on the article, Vaccine Success, Media Misery: Is Good News Taboo in the Trump Age? by Matt Taibbi (TK News)

“I find it interesting that for all the takes on who will and who won’t take the vaccine- and why- a simple reason is commonly overlooked: For many people in good health and of a certain age group, the virus poses little to no real threat. Yes, there have been terrible cases reported in surprising victims, but as far as the data goes, they continue to be anomalies.”

This is exactly the kind of reasoning that torpedoes a common effort. That’s why the vaccines will work for those who get them, but they’re doomed as far as preventing COVID from becoming endemic (that ship has largely sailed in western countries anyway).

The ego rules. Each individual decides for themselves that they don’t want the vaccine because it probably won’t happen to them. It ends up happening to enough people to swamp the hospitals, leading to unnecessary deaths from both COVID and also from people who can’t get treatment for other medical problems.

The ego does not think about that, cannot comprehend this level of abstraction, does not care. The ego is afraid for itself, so it just make its own little, short-sighted decisions, not caring that these decisions, multiplied millions of times, ends up causing a much bigger problem. Chaos theory is hard. Math is hard.

These people are afraid of the vaccine because it hasn’t been approved yet. They’re all waiting around for those of us who took it to die. When that doesn’t happen, they won’t bother to question their own behavior. They will be afraid for themselves next time as well.

While we’re on the subject: do these people try to convince their loved ones not to get the vaccine? Are they good or bad Christians? Do they fight to convert their loved ones to keep them out of hell? Or do they believe strongly enough that the vaccine is bad to want to protect themselves, but not to protect their loved ones? Or do they not care about their loved ones? How do they reconcile this?

Infecting Vaccinated People

People ask how Israel can have such a high incidence when so many people have already been vaccinated. They hypothesize (without numbers) that this is because of breakthrough infections and conclude that the vaccines are no longer working effectively. They conclude that either the vaccines don’t work against the delta variant or they are losing efficacy over time.

But Israel has about 11M people. They claim to be 70% vaccinated. That means 3.3M people are not vaccinated. We can assume that these remaining people (which constitute a good-sized country) are “clumped” rather than evenly distributed. That is an advantage for the virus.

They had an incidence of 417 on the day I wrote this, corresponding to 4500 cases. That is very high, but delta is very infectious. At this rate, though, it will take 2 years to go through the remaining, unvaccinated population. That is not a realistic herd-immunity strategy.

Virologist Christian Drosten was very good on his weekly podcast, (88) Impfmission possible by Das Coronavirus-Update von NDR Info (Apple Podcasts). In this episode, he lays down the cold facts: COVID will become endemic in the west. Get vaccinated or get COVID. There is no choice (C).

An English translation follows the German citation.

At 48:00,

“Christian Drosten: Jeder wird immun werden. 100%. Nicht 70% oder 80% sondern 100% in der Bevölkerung werden unweigerlich—ich würde mal sagen, in einem Fenster das von jetzt noch so anderthalb Jahre läuft—immun werden. Und zwar entweder durch die Impfung oder durch eine natürliche Infektion.

“Denn dieses Virus wird endemisch werden. Das wird nicht weg gehen. Und wer sich jetzt beispielsweise aktiv dagegen entschiedet sich impfen zu lassen, der wird sich unweigerlich infizieren. Da kann man nichts dagegen tun.

“Denn, die Massnahmen werden dann irgendwann immer weiter zurückgefahren—zum Glück—und dann zirkuliert das Virus in der Bevölkerung. Es wird zirkulieren im Rachen von Leuten die geimpft sind, die gar nichts davon merken, dass sie das Virus tragen. Es wird natürlich zirkulieren im Rachen von Kinder unter zwölf die natürlich noch nicht geimpft werden können.

“Das Virus wird unerkannterweise unter eine Decke des Immunschutzes sich weiter verbreiten und dann trifft es immer auch auf Leute, die nicht immunisiert sind durch eine Impfung, die voll empfänglich sind und für die gelten die jetzigen Risikoprofile.

“Da geht’s dann auch wieder nach Alter und Grunderkrankung und wer sich dann natürlich infiziert, wird auch dann, wenn er ein hohes Risiko haben [sic], möglicherweise auf der Intensivstation landen. Wir werden also auch im nächsten Winter Leute auf der Intensivstation haben wird schwerem COVID-19 Verlauf.

“Und diese Lücke, diese 30%—wenn wir an 70% denken; diese 20%, wenn wir an 80% Impfquote denken—die übrig bleibende 20%, die werden sich infizieren. Und die Frage ist, natürlich, die werden natürlich auch nach dem Sommer und im Herbst noch immer wieder die Gelegenheit bekommen das zu überdenken und zu sagen will ich mich nicht doch lieber impfen lassen statt mich natürlich zu infizieren. Und die können diese Gelegenheit auch dann noch ergreifen.

“Aber wenn sie sich nicht impfen lassen, werden sie sich natürlich infizieren. Das hat jetzt nichts mit politischen Debatten oder Impflicht oder irgend einer Art von auch ethischer Debatte zu tun. Das ist eine freie Entscheidung, die man letztendlich auch trifft. Nur ich glaube diejenigen die aktiv gegen die Impfung entscheiden, die müssen wissen, dass sie sich damit auch aktiv für die natürlich Infektion entscheiden—ohne jede Wertung.”

This is pretty important, so I had Deepl translate to English. [1]

“Christian Drosten: Everyone will become immune. 100%. Not 70% or 80% but 100% in the population will inevitably—I would say in a window that runs from now to in another year and a half—become immune. And that will be either through vaccination or through natural infection.

“Because this virus will become endemic. It’s not going to go away. And whomever now, for example, actively decides against getting vaccinated, will inevitably get infected. There’s nothing you can do about it.

“This is because the measures will at some point be reduced more and more—fortunately—and then the virus will circulate in the population. It will circulate in the throats of people who are vaccinated, who don’t even realize that they carry the virus. It will circulate naturally in the throats of children under twelve who, of course, cannot yet be vaccinated.

“The virus will spread unrecognized under a blanket of immune protection and then it will always hit people who are not immunized by vaccination, who are fully susceptible and for whom the current risk profiles apply.

“There it goes again by age and underlying illness and who becomes infected then naturally, also, if he has a high risk, will possibly land in the intensive care unit. So we will have people in the ICU next winter as well who have severe COVID-19 symptoms.

“And that gap, that 30%–if we think about 70%; that 20%, if we think about 80% vaccination rate–that 20% that’s left, they’re going to get infected. And the question is, of course, they will still get the opportunity, of course, after the summer and in the fall, to reconsider that and to say don’t I want to get vaccinated instead of getting infected naturally? And they can still take that opportunity then.

“But if they don’t get vaccinated, of course they’re going to get infected. Now this has nothing to do with political debates or mandatory vaccination or any kind of even ethical debate. That is a free decision, which one also makes in the end. Only I believe those actively against the vaccination decide, which must know that they decide thereby also actively for the naturally infection—without any judgment.”

Biden recently informed the nation that things would be back to normal by July 4th—as if the virus cares.

Biden peddles national self-delusion on pandemic anniversary by Patrick Martin (WSWS)

“The language of collective loss, suffering and sacrifice, however, ignored the brutal fact that one section of American society, the super-rich, has lost nothing at all from 12 months of the worst pandemic in a century.

“While 527,000 Americans died, the billionaires increased their wealth by $1.4 trillion. While the economy collapsed, millions lost their jobs and hundreds of thousands of small businesses closed their doors forever, the stock market reached new record highs, a process that continues to this day.”

“Far from Biden’s rosy picture of happy Fourth of July gatherings, the likely prospect of his campaign to reopen the schools is a new wave of mass infections and mass death that turns the summer into a more terrible version of the winter months when the death toll rose above 3,000 a day.”

That’s honestly what I’m afraid of, as well. I fervently hope they’re right and I’m wrong, but it seems rash, going against the advice of the best scientists—those who’ve been right every step of the way.

Report: CDC May Relax Its Disastrously Strict School Distancing Rules” by Matt Welch (Reason)

“[…] (CDC) is considering changing its school distancing guidance of just one month ago from six feet between each person inside a classroom to three. That simple adjustment, which would bring the United States in line with most of the rest of the industrialized world, could mean the difference between remote learning and in-person instruction for millions of American K-12 students.”

No more distancing? Weird. Switzerland still has it. Must be bunk.

It’s a bit suspect that Welch is citing FOX News citing an op-ed from the USA Today, though, as if that were gospel.

“[…] a damning USA Today op-ed Tuesday accusing the CDC of misinterpreting their own work to maintain a six-foot rule that “no science supports,””

Obviously, it’s the CDC that’s misinterpreting the science. No science supports distancing? Sure, I guess all of those aerosol studies have been debunked. I suppose you can all sit on top of each other with a respiratory disease and nothing will happen. Can you imagine if it were contagious? And spread through the air? Then we might have to distance. But since it doesn’t spread, it never existed.

Then we get to the real point:

“The most union-friendly president in generations got his $200 billion K-12 wish list. There’s no reason left to hold school reopening hostage.”

Obviously that money will be put to use over the weekend to make the schools safe and then the kids can start Monday. That’s how things work. If only it were harder to get things done, right, Welch?

“If sports stadiums are packed and Fourth of July celebrations back to normal […]”

Well, if that’s the case, then yes, the additional vector of schools shouldn’t be a noticeable problem beyond what a full sports arena will supply for patients. Israel is 40% vaccinated and their numbers are still rising. The U.S. has a way to go before it gets to where Israel is (about 3x further down the line).

“Schools are safe, they got the money, vaccines are spreading, hospitalizations and deaths are plummeting, spring is here. It’s time not only to open the damn schools full time, but to punish politically anyone standing athwart the schoolhouse doors yelling “Stop!””

He must be pretty sure or he wouldn’t be sticking his neck this far out, right? It doesn’t sound like he’s afraid of another wave at all. COVID-19 disappears in the spring and summer—everyone knows that. We have a single data point without causation to prove it through correlation. That numbers are plummeting is somewhat suspicious, honestly, but if they really are, it’s because of the lockdown, no? Or is the lockdown not helping drive the numbers down? They went down by themselves? Because … COVID got bored with us? Or because it’s spring?

Also, make sure that anyone who urged caution gets pilloried for expressing a perfectly supportable opinion. What should we do with you, Mr. Welch, if you turn out to be dead wrong? Nothing? Right? Because you’re not accountable for anything.

On the other hand, real experts like Herr Doktor Christian Drosten are much more sober in their analysis.

Coronavirus-Update #80: Dritte Welle ohne Impfung nicht beherrschbar by NDR Ratgeber (YouTube)

I didn’t do a transcript this time, but I took notes on the general gist of what was discussed. See the YouTube page for a meticulous breakdown.

At 30:00, Drosten talks about the inevitability of B.117 taking over Germany. There are not enough tests to stop the virus. There were never enough tests, even last year (as incorrectly discussed in many talk shows.) Those were different tests. Germany is not going to get enough tests to really warrant a lockdown stop. And it’s also not going to have enough vaccine.

At 42:00, he recommended that maybe parents should back off on their own travel plans, as long as their kids are in school. E.g. don’t go to Mallorca. That would be a way of minimizing contamination. Instead of just taking part in all of the possible ways to expose yourself, you could limit yourself a bit. That is, of course, unlikely to happen.

At 47:00, he described the situation as “brenzlig”. We need to vaccinate. People are going to die.

At 56:00 He noted that we have enough data now and the B.117 mutation is definitely more dangerous. It’s not yet clear that it’s 60-70% deadlier, but it’s looking that way. So it’s more contagious and deadlier and the people are done with the lockdown and are going to walk face-first into this thing.

At 59:00, Drosten noted that the research coming from England is excellent. Germany has a lot to learn from them as far as generating such precise and clean results at such a tempo.

At 1:38:00 He discussed some good news. He thinks that we’ll need an update of the vaccine, but almost certainly only one in the near- to mid-term. After that, we should be able to stick with a single vaccine for a good long while (that is his hope, based on the data). At the same time, we’ll have to see who should get an annual or biennial booster—but certainly not everyone will need one.

Debunking internet myths about PCR testing by potholer45 (YouTube)

Fact checking claims about lockdown (and Sweden) by potholer45 (YouTube)

We—humans—are terrible at planning for long-term stuff. We always question whether the long-term plans are worth it.

When Will the Planet Be Too Hot for Humans? Much, Much Sooner Than You Imagine. by David Wallace-Wells on July 9th, 2017 (New York Magazine)

“The present tense of climate change — the destruction we’ve already baked into our future — is horrifying enough. Most people talk as if Miami and Bangladesh still have a chance of surviving; most of the scientists I spoke with assume we’ll lose them within the century, even if we stop burning fossil fuel in the next decade. Two degrees of warming used to be considered the threshold of catastrophe: tens of millions of climate refugees unleashed upon an unprepared world. Now two degrees is our goal, per the Paris climate accords, and experts give us only slim odds of hitting it.”

This article predates his 2019 book The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (my notes).

So, what should we do about Miami? If it would take years to evacuate Miami in an orderly fashion, do we have enough evidence to convince people to do it? Would that be possible? We know Miami is gone in 20 years. Do we invest a ton of effort and energy trying to save it anyway?

These people are all like children, just yelling in the backseat of the car, whining that “we’re not there yet,”

Just keep yelling at scientists for extrapolating from data and making recommendations that save lives.

The article CDC study finds c. 78% of people hospitalized for COVID were overweight or obese by Mark Crispin Miller contains the following text and the link below it.

“A study from the CDC, reported by CNBC, and yet it slipped right down the memory hole, despite—or because of—the further light it sheds on the entire COVID narrative, which has millions of slim, healthy people tightly masked and terrified of human contact.”

The article he linked, CDC study finds about 78% of people hospitalized for Covid were overweight or obese by Berkeley Lovelace Jr. (CNBC), is nearly deliberately incorrect.

Miller is—a (former?) professor of media and propaganda studies at NYU—pushing a narrative that the authorities are exaggerating the pandemic for their own purposes. It’s unclear what those purposes are, but they’re assumed to be nefarious. Destroying the economy and livelihoods is just part of the master plan to … we don’t know.

At any rate, Miller just uncritically spews stuff like this into his blog (to which I’d initially subscribed because I saw a good interview with him on Useful Idiots, where he seemed rational, but now remain subscribed to keep my thumb on the pulse of this Querdenker foolishness. It’s a good way of seeing what sort of factual basis underlies many of the claims that you hear repeated uncritically (and without sources)..

Miller recently published a link to an absolutely scammy web site run by a “doctor”/blogger who wanted you to sign up for his web site before you could even read a single sentence. This is the kind of scam that these MLMers love—if they weren’t pissing away their money on stuff like this, they’d have houses full of egg-scramblers that they have to try to sell to other idiots, even further down the MLM chain than them.

He just published another quick blog Most governments that banned the AZT “vaccinations” have resumed them (he rarely writes more than a sentence or two) indicating that “[t]hat piece was, sad to say, inaccurate.” He didn’t apologize for misleading people by not doing any research whatsoever. He didn’t even try. I’d followed his initial link and, within at most a minute, I was able to ascertain that the guy to which he’d linked (a Dr. Mercola) was full of shit. Also, AZT is an AIDS treatment, not AstraZeneca; he can’t even bother to get the few words in his title-only blog right.

But then he’s off to the races again with a link to “This is a new Holocaust”: Israeli doctor finds that the toll of Pfizer’s COVID-19 “vaccine” is far greater than the official figures indicate, which links to an article that concludes that ““The data in the table, rather than indicating the vaccine efficacy, indicate the vaccine’s adverse effects,” the authors conclude.”

They’re claiming that everyone else in the world has read the data incorrectly. Instead of being around 90% effective, the vaccines cause “adverse effects” in around 90% of inoculants. I’m surprised they didn’t just claim that it kills 90% of inoculants instead because, sure, why not?

Anyway, back to the CNBC article. It lists some “key points” at the top, including that “About 78% of people who have been hospitalized, needed a ventilator or died from Covid-19 have been overweight or obese” and that “Just over 42% of the U.S. population was considered obese in 2018, according to the agency’s most recent statistics.” This is either deliberately manipulative (my bet) or just shoddy research or stupidity (always possible).

The author bothered to find the Obesity and Overweight (CDC) study from 2018 with the latest numbers on America, but then misquoted them. The percentage of the population that is “overweight, including obesity” is 73.6%, which isn’t really that far off from the 78% of people who were strongly affected or killed by COVID. It’s not even really statistically significant, probably. But who’s going to write an article titled “COVID seems to affect fat people the same as skinny people”?

It took me 30 seconds to find that article from the CDC. It was the top hit after I searched “what percentage of americans are overweight or obese” in DuckDuckGo.

It’s horrifying that such a large percentage is obese or overweight, don’t get me wrong, but that’s another story. There doesn’t seem to be a story about obesity and COVID, unless you deliberately compare apples to oranges for clicks.

Another link from Miller that he seems to be uncritically forwarding without having read (succumbing to the allure of clickbait that happens to agree with what he already thinks) is the “study” Facemasks in the COVID-19 era: A health hypothesis (National Center for Biotechnology Information). It looks very authoritative and starts with the following abstract,

“Many countries across the globe utilized medical and non-medical facemasks as [a] non-pharmaceutical intervention for reducing the transmission and infectivity of coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19). Although, [sic] scientific evidence supporting facemasks’ [nice job!] efficacy is lacking, adverse physiological, psychological and health effects are established. Is [sic] has been hypothesized that facemasks have compromised safety and efficacy profile [sic…and what?] and should be avoided from use. [sic] The current article comprehensively summarizes scientific evidences [sic] with respect to wearing facemasks in the COVID-19 era, providing prosper [sic] information for public health and decisions making. [sic]”

This abstract has so many typos and grammatical errors, there’s no way this was peer-reviewed. I can spare myself the job of reading the rest. I’d included it in my reading list to see what new information they’d brought to light about the efficacy of facemasks. The abstract is already a minefield of errors, so what’s the point of even reading the study?

The most recent one that Miller breathlessly posted as “proof” that the media was ignoring how ineffective the vaccines are is Despite vaccination success, Hungary sets daily record COVID deaths (Euro News), which writes,

“Hungary is suffering a devastating surge in COVID-19 deaths, despite the fact it has the highest vaccination rate in the European Union. […] It set a new daily death record on Wednesday with 302 fatalities and currently has the highest weekly death rate per one million inhabitants in the world.”

They try to make this sound bad, but Hungary’s COVID-19 situation has been very bad for a number of weeks—and deaths rise when the hospitals are full. Once again, a quick check of some readily available resources, like the Health Data for Hungary (Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME)), their hospitals are running at near capacity, exactly the conditions under which COVID illnesses are most likely to lead to death.

A check of Fälle, Impfungen, Übersterblichkeit: Corona-Zahlen weltweit (SRF) shows that Hungary has managed to fully vaccinate 9% of their population—and they really only ramped up at the end of March (just a couple of weeks ago). While it’s a tragedy that so many people are dying, it’s not because the vaccine doesn’t work. It’s because not enough people have gotten it.

The vaccine doesn’t magically protect the 91% of the population that hasn’t been vaccinated. Neither can you stretch that 9% to the 70% needed for anything like herd immunity. Those 9% are protected. Good for them. Having the “highest vaccination rate in the EU” sounds impressive until you see it’s only 9%. That means that they’re the leaders in a very slow-running and pathetic race. The conclusion that EuroNews and Miller draw from their few atoms of data and a strong reluctance to fact-check is completely unsupported by the evidence.

Coronavirus-Update #82: Die Lage ist ernst by NDR Ratgeber (YouTube)

Drosten’s pissed. I’ve heard “irreführende” about 90 times now. He thinks there are two options: let it rip and collapse the health system or go back into lockdown (“der Holzhammer”) … Germany doesn’t seem capable of doing anything in between.

He said “private Kontakte” are definitely where infections are coming from now. It’s no longer true that “wir wissen einfach nicht wovon die Infectionen kommen…”

At 37:30, he said

“Bei keinem diesen Viren gibt es eine “Dauerwelle”. Der Begriff “der Dauerwelle” behört in in den Friseursalon und nicht in die Infektionsepidemiologie. Wir kennen diesen Begriff dort überhaupt nicht. […]

“Das Virus kommt braucht mehrere Anläufe, um die Kontaktnetzwerke ganz zu nutzen. Es kommt einmal und infiziert diejenigen, die zu dieser Zeit miteinander in Netzwerken Kontakte haben. Dann sind die all immun oder tot. Dann wird dadurch das Virus sich beruhigen, weil keine Infektionsopfer zur Verfügung stehen.

“Dann durchmischt sich aber die Gesellschaft wieder. Die Angst geht weg; man geht wieder raus; neue Leute lernen sich kennen; Jobs werden gewechselt; usw.; … es wir gereist. Dadurch entstehen neue Kontaktnetzwerk und, nach einigen Monaten, ist dann wieder genügend […] Futter für das Virus zur Verfügung—also, neue empfängliche Personen, die noch übrig sind als empfängliche Personen in der Gesellschaft sind dann wieder neu miteinander in Kontakt.

“Dann kann das Virus wieder durchlaufen. Dann sind Perkolationseffekte oder andere physikalischen Schwellenwerte wieder überschritten. Dann gibt es die nächste Welle. Mit einer Dauerwelle hat das alles nichts zu tun. Diese Argumente sind hier vor allem bei dem Pseudoexperten und Logik Fehlern sind im Moment sehr frappierend in der Öffentlichkeit.”

At 43:00, he discussed how the “Querdenker” are never happy and they’re shockingly unscientific.

“Die Gegenpartei sagt, naja, ihr habt vorausgesagt wir werden ein paar Monaten so viele Fälle bekommen und jetzt war eure voraussage falsch. Wo aber dann vollkommen ausgeklammert wird, dass es ja auch eine Interventionsmassnahme gegeben hat, dass ein Lockdown unterwegs.

“Und es gibt in vielen anderen Motiven beispielsweise diese—die Virusleugner—ah, das Virus ist ja nie isoliert worden … dann kommt ein Journalist und präsentiert fünf oder sechs Beispiele wo das Virus tatsächlich isoliert worden ist. Das führt aber nicht dazu, dass dann anerkannt wird: naja gut da haben wir uns getäuscht; das Virus ist tatsächlich isoliert worden.

“[…] Wir wollen mehr, wir wollen wirklich das Isolat selber als Beweis bekommen und man fragt sich irgendwann, was wollt ihr denn jetzt noch. Soll ich euch eine Ampule mit Infektiösen Virus per Post nach Hause damit ihr daran infizieren könnt? Oder wie ist jetzt die Vorstellung des Nachweises eines Virusisolats?

“[…] Auch das dann reicht ja wieder nicht. Dann ist ein infizierte Hamster wieder nicht genug. Das ist eben “moving the goalposts”.”

At 48:00, he described how it’s “damned if you do; damned if you don’t” as a public scientist.

“Zum Beispiel, [einem] unterstellt man der hat ne PCR erfunden, die das Virus gar nicht zeigt sondern irgendwas anderes und damit verdient er auch noch Geld.

“Und die Tatsache, dass diese Experte darauf öffentlich nicht äussert, weil das einfach so an den Haaren herbeigezogen ist, dass man gar nicht erst mit anfangen braucht sich dagegen zu äussern, weil es so objektiv falsch ist, wird dann aber wieder so rumgedreht, dass die Tatsache, dass dieser Angegriffene sich nicht äussert ja wohl bestätigen muss, dass diese Vorwürfe stimmen.”

At 56:45, he discusses … the scientific process? Because not enough people are following it? Plan, predict, collect data, evaluate, report, come up with measures based on data.

“Solche Bewertungen braucht man zumindest auch im Nachhinein aber eigentlich braucht man die von Vornherein. […] was sind eigentlich die Kriterien: ist das die Zahl der positiven Antigentests? Was wollen wir eigentlich definieren als Marker der Evaluation? Und dann, als nächste eine Evaluationsplan.

“Also, wann wollen wir eigentlich den Rückblick machen? Das muss man vorher festlegen. Wan erwarten wir ein Effekt? Man kann nicht sagen, wir gucken mal. Wenn die Situation sich so ein bisschen umkehrt, denn sagen wir ziehen ein Schlussstrich und fangen das an zu evaluieren. Das geht schief. Man muss vorher sagen, wann man evaluieren will. […] Komme was wolle.

“Ob man das jetzt gut findet oder nicht gut findet. Ob man erwartet, dass es gut oder schlecht ausgeht, es wird ausgewertet und diese Auswertung wird nicht übersprungen und die wird nach bestimmten Kriterien gemacht und die Kriterien muss man vorher festlegen, denn im Nachhinein solche Kriterien zu definieren. Das ist nie gut.

“Also, man muss sagen: heute können wir eigentlich unsere damalige Auffassung evaluieren. Damals haben wir gedacht, dass folgende Parameter zum guten oder schlechtern ändern werden und jetzt schauen wir, wie sich das entwickelt hat. […] Und wie gehen wir mit den Ergebnisse um? […] In welcher Form können jetzt andere Städte das anwenden?”

Kurz gefasst: Ein Appel an Wissenschaftliche Normen.

Epidemiologist warns that the fourth COVID-19 surge is under way in United States by Benjamin Mateus (WSWS)

“Osterholm was blunt in dismissing the actions of state and federal governments in relaxing restrictions and reopening schools, particularly in light of the spread of new variants like B.1.1.7.

““We are the only country in the world right now experiencing this increasing number of cases due to this variant and at the same time, opening up, not closing down,“ he told host Chris Wallace, who seemed taken aback by the forthright warning. “The two basically are going to collide, and we are going to see a substantially increased number of cases.”

“Osterholm continued, “I understand the absolute resistance in this country even to consider that and you know—it’s kind of like trying to drink barbed wire—but the bottom-line message of the virus is it’s going to do what it’s going to do, and we are going to have to respond somehow.” He added that this might involve pulling “back on some of the restrictions that we’ve loosened up on.””

“Osterholm, who served as a member of President Biden’s COVID-19 transition advisory board, has been phased out since his blunt warning in January that the drop in coronavirus cases was “the eye of the hurricane” and not genuine progress.”

Osterholm and Drosten seem to be in perfect agreement here. Both are crying into the wilderness, unheeded as the governments they try to counsel go ahead and do their unscientific thing—and will afterwards pretend that no-one could have known what carnage was to follow.

“Throughout the month of March, Osterholm was warning that the American people “are walking into the mouth of this virus monster as if somehow, we don’t know it’s here, and it is here.” This is an apt description of an historic crime, one being committed against the American people by the US ruling class and its political servants.”

Vor einem Jahr habe ich zum ersten mal von Herr Doktor Christian Drosten erfahren. Heute höre ich nahezu wöchentlich seinen Podcast mit Moderatorin Korrina Hennig auf Staatssender NDR mit. Er ist beruflich Virologe und kann sich sehr gut nicht nur über das Thema sondern auch die mit der Pandemie damit verbundenen gesellschaftlichen und politischen Themen diskutieren und verständigen lassen.

Coronavirus-Update #76: Astra-Impfstoff viel besser als sein Ruf by NDR Ratgeber (YouTube)

Bei 00:46:57 wird die berühmte Astra-Impfstoff-Studie aus Südafrika diskutiert mit Schwerpunkt auf der Bedeutung für Deutschland. Kurz zusammengefasst: die Studie wurde nicht optimal durchgeführt und ist so oder so für Deutschland nicht zutreffend. Eher die englische Variante als die südafrikanische wir in Deutschland Überhand nehmen.

“Wenn wir auch auf die Südafrikanisch Mutante gucken können und dann werden wir sehen, dass wir in Deutschland deutlich niedriger liegen. Das ist nicht so, dass wir in allernächste Zeit erwarten müssen, dass diese südafrikanische Mutante bei uns überhand nimmt, sondern hier, bei und, in Deutschland sollte der Fokus gerichtet sein auf der englische Mutante und da wiederum wissen wir ja, aus der anderen Studie, dass der keinen Nachteil hat in der Schutzwirkung durch die Astra Vakzine.

“Was uns hier angeht, haben wir gleich eine ganze Reihe von Gründen, die wir aufführen könnten, um zu sagen, diese südafrikanische Studie, die soll jetzt mal schön begutachtet werden und die soll jetzt mal ihren Eingang in die Literatur finden aber kann uns hier sicherlich nicht beeindrucken für die Planung unserer Vakzinestrategie in Deutschland.

“Wir sollten unbedingt auf dieser Astra Vakzine bauen in Deutschland. Ich finde diese ist eine sehr gute Impfstoff. Nach vielen Dingen, die ich sehe. Und ich finde nicht, dass diese Einschränkungen, die in Südafrika sicherlich sehr wohl gelten und die sich vielleicht erhärten werden, wenn wir grössere und qualitativ bessere Studie noch obendrauf setzt. Das ist bei uns von geringerer Bewandtnis und man muss eben immer Impfprogramme im nationalen Kontext sehen.”

Bei 1:03:40 wiederholte er, dass die “Astra Vakzine ist gut […] nicht auf eine bessere Impfung warten.”

00:49:35 diskutierte er weiter, dass die “T-Zelle Immunrepertoire” der Astra-Vakzine weisst Verluste auf, sind aber nicht von genügendem Nachteil, um nicht unbedingt weiter zu fahren.

“Es gibt ein anderen interessanten Datensatz, denn man wohl aus der grösseren laufenden Untersuchung da zugetan hat zu diesen Manuskript und das sind so erste Daten zu zellulären Immunität und da kann man was interessantes sagen. Man hat also das T-Zelle Immunrepertoire durch eine molekulardiagnostische Untersuchung angeschaut und hat 87 T-Zelle Epitope ausgemacht, die in dieser Bevölkerung vorkommen und die die T-Zellen gruppieren lassen in klonalen Gruppen. Und man hat gesehen, dass von diesen 87 T-Cell Epitopen 75 erhalten sind in der […] südafrikanischen Fluchtmutante. In kurzen Worten […] man sieht bei der Schutzwirkung und bei dem neutralisierenden Antikörperergebnis deutlichen Verluste auftreten. Halten sich diese Verluste bei der T-Zelle Immunität doch sehr in grenzen und das ist ja genau das was wir eigentlich immer auch argumentativ schon so aus dem allgemeinen aus gesagt haben.”

58:27 gab er seinen Standpunkt zu den vielen vor kurzem veröffentlichten Studien. Er meinte, wir sollen uns von denen nicht ablenken lassen und damit das Vertrauen in guten Vakzinen durch Panik zerstören lassen.

“[…] diese Studien werden schnell gemacht nach kurzer Beobachtungszeit während wir aber genau wissen, dass gerade bei denjenigen, die die Astra Vakzine und andere vector wachsen bekommen haben, die Immunität noch nachreift. Und diese nach gereifte Immunität, die schützt auch nochmal besser. Also diese ganzen kurzen Botschaften, da kommt ein Preprint und eine Pressemitteilung und schon steht’s in der NYT und von da steht’s in grossen deutschen Zeitungen und zwei Tage später steht’s dann in eher kleinere Zeitungen und auf jeder Stufe kommt es zu einer weiteren Vereinfachung der Information. Das muss man ganz vorsichtig sein, weil das im Moment das vertrauen der Bevölkerung in dieser Impfstoffe ja zerstört.”

1:34:00 meinte er als Zusammenfassung, dass Deutschland soll ja “Nägel mit Köpf’” machen und die einfache Sache erledigen: Impfstoff besorgen und möglichst viele Leute damit impfen. Die Schweiz könnte das auch mal überlegen. Aber ganz easy, da haben wir doch Zeit.

“[…] wir müssen alles dran setzen jetzt so schnell wie möglich in die Breite zu impfen. Die Impfstoffe, die wir haben, die sind extrem gut gegenüber dem was man erwarten konnte. Es gibt immer irgendwo ein Haar in der Supper und manche schauen da mit dem Vergrösserungsglas drauf. Das sollte man nicht tun. Man sollte eher überlegen was kann man da beitragen. Also, ganz klar: wenn ich mich impfen lasse, denn habe ich mit der allergrössten Wahrscheinlichkeit für mich selber die Angst erst mal weg. Also ich habe keine Angst mehr von einem schweren Verlauf.”

“Ich lasse mich auch impfen, […] weil ich weiss, dass meine Impfung der gesamt Bevölkerung hilft. Also die Impfung ist eine altruistische Leistung.”

Die Sendung #77 war auch gut aber da gab’s von mir keine Notizen. Der Drosten war nicht da. In Folge #78 war der wieder da und hat sich ein paar mal wieder beeindruckend genug ausgedrückt, dass ich wieder ein bisschen davon Abschreiben wollte.

Coronavirus-Update #78: Die Uhr tickt by NDR Ratgeber (YouTube)

13:00 Zu den saisonalen Effekt.

“Wir haben einige Stimmen in der Öffentlichkeit, die jetzt schon wieder sagen, das ganze wird sich in März erledigt haben, weil es ein saisonalen Effekt gibt. Ich gebe darauf sehr wenig auf solche Einschätzungen. Die sind für mich nicht wissenschaftlich haltbar. Es gibt viel mehr wissenschaftlich haltbarere Einschätzungen, die Sagen maximal 20% Reduktion durch eine saisonale Effekt zu erwarten ist.”

1:15:20 wollte er klar stellen, dass wir reden immer von den schlimmsten Auswirkungen von COVID—eben, weil die oft genug vorkommen, dass der Gesamteffekt auf der Gesellschaft katastrophal sein könnte. Aber um klar zu sein, die meiste Menschen kommen ohne irgendwelche Nachteile davon weg. Für die überwiegende Mehrheit kommt das Ding und geht wieder, ohne bleibende Spuren zu hinterlassen.

“Das muss man sich auch immer noch klar machen für die überwältigende Mehrheit aller sogar immunlogische naiven ein harmloses Virus. Das wird immer wieder vergessen, dass der normale Verlauf ein milder Verlauf ist. Und das ja nur ein Teil der infizierten ein schweren Verlauf kriegt aber es sind eben bei einer durchlaufenden pandemischen Welle so viele davon, dass man das nicht tolerieren kann.”

Bei 1:21:00 fragte Korinna, was ist mit den anderen Varianten wovon wir z.Z. immer wieder hören? Damit meinte sie z.B. die neuere aus Kalifornien, nicht die Variante B117 aus Grossbritannien, die uns schon seit mehr als einem Quartal begleitet.

“Das ist mediale Überaufmerksamkeit. Im Moment das muss ich wirklich noch mal sagen. Das sollte vielleicht auch eine Priorität in einer journalistischen Recherche sein ist die Frage: wie kommen wir schnell dazu, dass den Impfstoff, den wir nach Ostern durchaus in grossen Mengen bekommen in Deutschland, dass wir den geimpft bekommen und hier eine Bevölkerungsimmunität aufbauen.

“Dann nach dem Aufbau einer Bevölkerungsimmunität werden wir immer wieder Virusvarianten sehen. Und das wird weiterhin die Fachwelt unterhalten und beschäftigt halten aber die Medien werden darüber nicht mehr berichten müssen, weil wir dann dieses grosse gesellschaftliche Problem nicht mehr haben

“[…] und wir kommen aus diesem gesellschaftlichen Problem—das ist ein gesamtgesellschaftliches Problem—das geht eben nicht nur, um Individualschutz sondern es geht auch um den Bevölkerungs- und Wirtschaftsschutz und darüber wieder zurück reflektiert auf den Individualschutz derjenigen die sich nicht durch die Impfung individuell schützen können oder es einfach nicht kapieren, dass sie das besser tun sollten. Das ist da ja alles einbezogen und das ist die gesamtgesellschaftliche Aufgabe, der sich die Politik durchaus stellt.”

The podcast episode 134 | Robert Sapolsky on Why We Behave the Way We Do by Sean Carroll (Wondery) was a really interesting introduction/look at the science of free will as described in far greater detail in his book Behave (which I have not yet read).

Robert M. Sapolsky's BehaveI’ve included a partial transcript of the parts that I found the most interesting. The following comes from the end of the episode, where they both did an excellent job of summarizing the preceding discussion’s points as well as pointing out logical conclusions for e.g. legal proceedings. I.e. if environment and breeding and upbringing account for a large part of your default behavior—against which you can actively fight, but first you have to notice that there’s something you wish to change—then to what degree can you really be held responsible for at least some of your actions?

“Carroll: Something makes me think if more people were aware of how much of our everyday behavior was not completely rational, rule-based, cognitive…and how much of it was automatic, visceral, driven by heuristics that we’ve inherited from thousands of years ago, it would cast our decisions in a slightly different light. I think a lot of people stick to their guns about their decisions because they’re convinced that they’re rational, even if they’re not and, maybe, sowing a little bit of doubt in that conviction would be a good thing.

“Sapolsky: The psychologist Josh Green at Harvard stated it really well, that, when people saying I have a right to be doing that, what they’re saying is I can only rationalize why I want to do that, I don’t actually have a rational reason. I can’t tell you why I wanna do it, but I wanna do it so much that I’m going to declare it to be right. That’s exactly a circumstance like this. In an even broader sense, if you accept that we are nothing more or less than our biology—incredibly complicated biology—from one second ago to one million years ago and interacting with environment, […] If we are nothing more or less than our biology, and those are biological influences over which we have no control, […] you can never feel justified in thinking that you are entitled to anything more than anyone else because whatever it is that you have done, which you believe has earned you praise or entitlement, you had nothing to do with, and if you really, really believe this stuff, you have no rational grounds for every hating anyone. Because they didn’t have a damned thing to do with whatever they did, no matter how horrific or hurtful it was, and if you really think those ways, this could be a very different world, and I would think those ways for about 3.5 seconds at a time […] but if you really believe this stuff, those are the only conclusions you can reach.

“Carroll: Couldn’t you just say, ‘I really like being a bundle of visceral heuristics’ and just … go with it? Lean in?

“Sapolsky: Yeah, except then you have to ask: so what are the circumstances that brought you to the point of liking being a bundle of heuristics? The legal system deciding if somebody intended to something or not and, if they intended to, you’re in trouble. They legal system never says: where did that intent come from? [1]

“That came from the combination of these seven gene variants, this thing that happened during second trimester, these cultural values during childhood or the day that they got exposed to that toxin when they were 18 and then got hit in the head.

“Carroll: Well, you know, I do appreciate your uniquely optimistic version of existential anxiety and dread.”

People’s behavior vis á vis COVID-19 at this point—ten months after the onset of the virus—is like when an action movie’s hero is in the swamp with a straw in his mouth, sucking a barely adequate supply of air through it, while his pursuers are still somewhere up there, looking for him. [1]

Were they still within earshot? Would they hear him if he just came up quickly for a good, solid breath? Were they completely gone? Was he suffering underwater for nothing? They’re not still around, right? I mean, how could they be? They might still be here, but not right here, right? Just a quick peek wouldn’t hurt, would it? He’d go right back down after a good breath.

This sounds a lot like the arguments I’ve heard recently about COVID-19. As if the virus cares.

Still, the pressure to get out becomes enormous, especially as the psychological damage mounts. It’s the devil’s choice between risking death by COVID-19 or death by a thousand cuts imposed by self-isolation.

That, at least, is the perceived calculus. In reality, it’s not death by a thousand cuts, but inconvenience, for the most part.

No doubt: it’s a long time to experience inconvenience. We’re not used to not getting our way pretty much all the time. And, for some, it’s not just inconvenience, but actual acute suffering. But the most vocal advocates of “opening up” act, first of all, as if they just invented this mantra and, second of all, as if they aren’t the ones riding this thing out in relative luxury, many of them extreme.

There’s another crucial difference: In our action hero’s case, he would risk only his own life by coming up for air. In our case, getting COVID-19 means, most likely, spreading it to others and helping spread misery to others. Solidarity is needed.

I played Kahoot [1] the other day with the family. The quizzes are pretty wide-ranging and pretty decent fun, especially for a mix of ages. One of the quizzes concerned sound and electromagnetic waves and I tried to explain why one of the answers was incorrect “in the moment”, as it were. Concerned that my explanation had engendered rather than answered questions, I take another crack at it below.

Radio vs. Sound Waves

I was thinking again about how you didn’t seem to convinced by my fumbling attempts to explain the difference between sound and radio waves. The point I was trying to make is better made by the article Difference Between Radio Waves and Sound Waves (Pediaa), which writes,

“[…] radio waves are a type of electromagnetic wave that can travel when there is no medium, whereas sound waves are a type of mechanical wave that cannot travel if there is no medium.”

In describing how the two do interact, I used the words “encode” and “decode”. Sound waves are recorded by a microphone, transformed to a digital or analog signal, transmitted via radio waves, transformed to a digital or analog signal, and, finally, used to drive a mechanism like a speaker to reproduce the original sound by “playing” them on a speaker, which is generally a vibrating surface that generates sound waves in the air near you. There’s a whole lot more detail to the encoding format, process, the electronics, etc., but that’s the basic gist.

Taking Pictures

You didn’t sound convinced even by that, so I thought of what is, perhaps, a better analogy.

When you take a picture with your phone, you’re doing nearly exactly the same thing, but with electromagnetic waves in the visible spectrum. These waves are visible in a particular place; they strike the CCD (charge-coupled device) in your camera, which records millions of data points, encoded with a picture format (e.g. JPEG or RAW).

When you send that picture, you don’t think of it as “sending the light waves over radio waves”, though, do you? You think of it as sending the picture. But that picture is just a frozen representation of light waves that once existed in a certain place and time.

That you then use your phone to encode radio waves to transmit the picture to someone else (or to store in the cloud) has nothing to do with the original light waves. You could just as easily have copied the JPEG to a computer, onto a USB stick and transported it that way.

That’s what I meant when I said that sound waves don’t have anything to do with radio waves. The radio wave is not intrinsic to the process of hearing sound waves; it’s just a common transmission mechanism for all sorts of data (digital or analog, though increasingly digital these days).

Recording and Playing Sound

In the olden days, the vibrations of a microphone (a piece of vibration-sensitive membrane connected to a sensor (generally piezoelectric) that transforms or encodes the vibration into a voltage with a certain amplitude and frequency, which drove a needle the inscribed a wax cylinder or vinyl disc. You could then carry (not transmit) this cylinder to somewhere else, where you could use a device that, essentially, reverses the recording process to decode the sound and “play” it. No radio waves in sight.

You can extrapolate the example of the picture to a series of moving pictures that even includes sound (a video). In that case, you are capturing information using two detectors (a microphone and a camera/CCD) and the software in the phone combines these inputs into a single recording, storing it as a file, 30-60 times per second. That file has nothing to do with radio or sound or light waves.

“Files”

Even the “file” isn’t anything like the metaphorical mental picture we tend to use for it. The flash storage in which it resides is a block of material that records trillions of individual “values” in the form of a physical property that is in one of two distinct states, each of which can be read by yet another sensor. This sensor applies a voltage to these distinct regions of the material and interprets the results as 1s and 0s. Hard drives use magnetism instead of electrical charge.

A file comprises a region of these physical states that the phone can read and write and the software can reliably interpret as 1s and 0s. It is read with these sensors, interpreted by the software to produce signals that play it by applying further voltages to red, green, and blue emitters in the “screen” that emulate the original light waves—doing the same for the original sound waves using a speaker, as described above—but those are new light and sound waves.

A miracle in your hand

It’s actually kind of a miracle that any of this works at all, don’t you think? I’ve got a 3-year-old used iPhone 6s that can record 4k video at 30FPS (33.3ms per frame) and store it in a format that can be immediately replayed and shared. Not only that it works, but that it can do all of this so efficiently, using so little power relative to the task—and in the palm of your hand. Amazing, really.

And don’t even get me started about how that phone talks to space all day long (using radio waves). Check out that the video All you need to know to understand 5G by Sabine Hossenfelder (YouTube).

Facemasks

The article Here’s what WHO says your mask should have to prevent COVID-19 spread by Beth Mole (Ars Technica) details the technical specifications for making your own facemask.

tl;dr: “you’re probably doing it wrong, guidance suggests.”

The WHO says:

• “[…] masks should only ever be used as part of a comprehensive strategy in the fight against COVID.”
• “WHO now recommends that healthy members of the public wear homemade or commercially-available fabric masks in places where the new coronavirus is circulating widely and where physical distancing (staying 6-feet apart, etc.) is not possible or is difficult.”
• “[…] a minimum of three layers is required for fabric masks”
• “[…] these masks are for source control only, not personal protection—that is, they can help prevent the person wearing the mask from spreading the virus, but they will not necessarily protect the wearer from becoming infected.”
• “Masks are not a replacement for physical distancing, hand hygiene, and other public health measures,”

Here in Switzerland, there is still no mask requirement almost anywhere in public. It is strongly recommended to wear them on public transportation, but the SBB reports that 90% of people aren’t wearing them. It is honestly a mystery to me how Switzerland ended up with the #1 ranking for combating COVID-19. The numbers speak for themselves, though—the spread is, for all intents and purposes, at a standstill.

Once I start commuting again, I will be wearing a mask. I wasn’t interested in being part of the first wave. My interest in being part of the second wave is similarly low.

Pre-symptomatic transmission

The article WHO butchers asymptomatic COVID comments. Here’s what they meant by Beth Mole (Ars Technica) takes the WHO to task for “butchering” their message, but honestly makes quite a mess of summarizing the WHO message nearly as badly.

Still, more than halfway through the article, she finally sums up the relevant terminology.

• Symptomatic case = Someone who is infected and has symptoms at some point.
• Asymptomatic case = Someone who is infected but never develops symptoms.
• Pre-symptomatic = The phase of a symptomatic infection when a person may test positive for the virus and/or may spread the virus but has not yet developed symptoms.
• Pre-symptomatic transmission = Spread of the virus from a symptomatic case during their pre-symptomatic phase.
• Asymptomatic transmission = Spread of the virus from an infected person with no current symptoms. This transmission could be from a pre-symptomatic person or a truly asymptomatic case, depending on how the terms are being used.

“The WHO has consistently used asymptomatic transmission only when talking about truly asymptomatic cases.”

Where I think I disagree with the author is where she deems the WHO “confusing” when they have been consistent and others have constantly misinterpreted the terminology, using their own definitions. That’s honestly not the WHO’s fault. It may be their problem, but it’s not their fault.

There are a few points of interest:

1. Many people mean pre-symptomatic when they say asymptomatic. Truly asymptomatic people are very rare with COVID-19, although their known prevalence may increase as more is known about the disease.
2. As far as public safety is concerned, there is no need to distinguish between pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic transmission: both indicate individuals who can infect others without knowing that they have the disease. As far as contagion is concerned, it doesn’t matter whether they exhibit symptoms a week later.
3. Judging by how well certain countries have this first wave of the pandemic under control (Switzerland is a good example), pre-symptomatic transmission doesn’t seem to be as large a problem as some seem to think. E.g. Fauci in the U.S. thinks 25%-45% of cases might be transmitted this way. If that were the case, it would be much harder to trace and squash COVID-19 to the degree that some countries have.

I’m cautiously optimistic that pre-symptomatic transmission is less of an issue than some think. It would mean that it’s possible to keep COVID-19 under control by tracing super-spreaders and squashing outbreaks quickly.

The U.S.‘s inability to squash its rate has less to do with pre-symptomatic transmission and more to do with an utter lack of planning, discipline, and organization. People in the U.S. don’t trust anyone or anything and they’re not particularly well-trained at doing anything for the common good, so their follow-through has been much less effective than in European countries.

Professor Christian Drosten is a virologist working at the Charité University Hospital in Berlin. Since the beginning of March, he’s been doing an informative podcast in German called Coronavirus-Update. I’ve found him to be highly informative and factual in a world filled with propaganda, conspiracy theory and shoddy science.

The following interview with Drosten was one I found in English, which he also speaks fluently. I thought the 30 minutes, in particular, were very enlightening (citations below).

DiEM25 TV: 'Virology − total transparency vs fake news' with Christian Drosten and Angela Richter on May 13th, 2020 (YouTube)

Excess Mortality

At about the 1:05:00 mark, Drosten discusses excess mortality and puts a wooden stake through the theory that COVID-19 is a slightly more contagious and therefore only slightly more deadly flu.

“You can look at the excess mortality. In Germany 850,000 people die per year. There is something like an average mortality per unit of time. You can compare the average mortality against the mortality for December-March, which is the flu season. This yields the influenza-related excess mortality. This can be between 8000 and 30,000 per year, in Germany. [presumably depending on whether the influenza vaccination was properly targeted. –ed.]

“For the countries that have already reported their mortality figures for this year—and they are reporting for March/April of this year—[…] what you see is an increase of mortality in the population that hasn’t been seen before—and this is with a lockdown in place.

“This is from countries with an efficient reporting system and with a national health-care system that enacted an early and efficient lockdown. Belgium, Netherlands … even UK. For Sweden, we don’t have numbers yet. But for many, we do have numbers and it’s out of any question that, in spite of the lockdown, the excess fatality rate in this period of time is so much higher than previously seen that this whole discussion about whether the virus is similar to influenza in terms of fatality, this is concluded. We don’t have to discuss this anymore.

“All we have to do is take care that we don’t see the true excess mortality that this virus could cause, without a lockdown. And I’m afraid we may see such figures in poorer countries of the global south. I can’t predict what the different age profiles in these countries will cause. Poor African countries have much fewer old people in their population. They have many more general immuno-modulatory diseases like warm infections that we don’t have, so all of this may even be beneficial—and we may not see the horrifying number, but I can’t predict. Nobody can predict.”

And, as Angela Richter points out, “There is a lot of underlying immunity [to influenza] in the population due to vaccination and also due to prior infection,” a factor that doesn’t affect COVID-19 in the least, in this, its first year. Drosten concurred that “It doesn’t look like the common cold is delivering a similar effect, or at least not a strong one.”

Lasting Damage?

They then discussed a topic that I only rarely hear discussed: what are the outcomes in between a full recovery and death? Very few people are discussing the likelihood of prolonged reduced lung capacity or possibly chronic, life-long malady associated with having had the disease. It’s clear that there are those who get mild symptoms. It’s clear that some get hit by a proverbial truck and will take a long time to recover (e.g. from intubation, from weight loss, from having lain prone for weeks on a ventilator, etc.).

Richter asks about the reports of “organ damage”, for which Drosten has a more reassuring reply. He talks about how some of the receptors in blood vessels are the same as those that attach to COVID-19 in the lungs and that makes it possible for the virus to travel to other organs (Cytokine storms, strokes, blood clots). It can attack the heart and the kidneys, with “coagulation sources”. The primary attack vector is the lungs, but there are rare cases where other organs are attacked (but very rare … 30 cases per country, e.g. Germany). “In adults, it’s not the prime manifestation”. These cases are only just being examined because they’re quite rare.

Learning from other pandemics

The next podcast is in German and is from Drosten’s bi-weekly show.

Coronavirus-Update #42: Bei der Schweinegrippe kam alles anders on May 19th, 2020 (YouTube)

The first fifteen minutes is the most interesting for the current crisis. After that, he discusses the flus of 2009 and 2014 and the inapplicability of the measures or medicines to COVID-19.

I picked up the following take-aways, which I have translated faithfully but loosely.

Meat

There is no chance that you’ll catch the virus from meat. It’s stored for a long time, there are lots of other organisms on meat that attack the virus, and you’re almost certainly going to cook it. The connection to meat is that the people packing the meat work in very close quarters and in very cold temperatures, which seems to lead to a higher contagiousness for COVID-19.

Excess Mortality Redux

As previously mentioned, there are new studies that show that the excess mortality for many European countries is clear and, in some places, much, much higher. In one region in Italy, a new study shows 150 dead in just one quarter, so it’s already at 15x the normal rate. 10 per 1000 usually die in the region. Maximum 21. In March of 2020, 155 died. At least 85 of these had tested positive for COVID-19.

There is no reason to believe that this excess mortality is due to a worse health-care system (it’s one of the richer regions in Italy) or that there were older people there (it wasn’t particularly excessive, no more so than other European countries). This was a region where they were caught by surprise, but were actually in quite a severe lockdown for most of March.

So there was clear excess mortality even with a lockdown and the lockdown started only just as the exponential curve was starting. If there had been no lockdown, the region would have experienced the full brunt of the exponential curve, which would have pushed excess mortality (and other damage) much, much higher than 15x normal. This is quite sobering.

Outbreak in Kano, Nigeria

Recently, in some countries in the global south, there are reports of, for example, Kano in Nigeria. It’s clear that they have a massive outbreak and it will most likely proceed there naturally because lockdowns are more difficult to enforce there. Nigeria’s actually doing well, all things considered. But they, too, have one study where 21 doctors in just one hospital tested positive for the virus (they actively had it). Even some of the lab personnel had it, even though they have no contact with patients.

Even anecdotally, a questionnaire of 100 family members and friends of one of the study authors yielded that nearly every member had had symptoms with loss of sense of smell and taste for a few days. It’s unclear what this will mean for death in these countries. Can they flatten the curve? Or will they look like New York City? Or something in between?

NYC as first-world warning

What is also unclear for those who don’t read/listen to English news is what happened in New York City. It tore through there like a firestorm. Germans seem to be largely unaware of what can happen if proper measures are not followed and the disease really spreads its wings. They believe that they, as a first-world country, can protect themselves no matter what. Drosten says that this leads to a much higher rate of denialism in both the population and media, both of which are highly counterproductive and could lead to more suffering if and when a second wave appears.

Swine Flu

As for the Swine Flu, we underestimated it. About the same number of people died of it as died of the standard flu. Only 20% of those who died were over 65 years old, which is very different than the standard flu. There follows a long discussion of the various flus that continue to circulate and their relative dangers. There is unfortunately not very much similar between the Swine Flu and COVID-19, so we learn nothing from it that will help us in the short-term.

Finding the Red Marble

The most recent podcast from Friday discusses the importance of not only contact-tracing, but “controlling the red marble” i.e. stopping so-called super-spreaders.

#44: Die rote Murmel kontrollieren on May 28th, 2020 (YouTube)

I thought the most important take-aways from this most recent podcast were the following:

• Proximity × time = infection rate
• Being inside is vastly more risky than being outside. One reliable study from Japan shows you’re 19x as likely to be infected indoors as outdoors.
• That would indicate that we can take advantage of the summer by moving our public lives outside. Cafés could be encouraged to maybe not have the same distance requirements outside as inside.
• Masks should help inside, but not over longer stretches of time
• Being outside is very low-risk, as long as proximity rules are respected (e.g. garden party with a few people or while hiking)
• A lockdown is an admission that we don’t know where the disease might be; we use it to minimize number of simultaneous outbreaks
• Reliable tracing is the only way to avoid using lockdowns
• Tracing is made more difficult by probabilities. There is a decent chance that everything looks OK for a long time until a super-spreader activates a new outbreak. The is the “red marble” of which Drosten speaks. In his analogy, when you reach into a bag of 100 marbles, you might get the one red marble on your first try; or, it might take a dozen tries over months before you get the red marble. An outbreak awaits the whole time.
• The best way forward without full lockdowns is finding, tracing, and stifling clusters. This means quarantining anyone who can be associated with a positive result without testing first (as we do now). Instead, we should isolate, then test. Guilty until proven innocent works better for reigning in super-spreaders.
• The asymptomatic, potentially infectious phase is shorter than we at first thought—it is sufficient to wait only one week instead of the heretofore recommended two to catch all but the most extreme cases.
• E.g. If a teacher gets sick, then all students associated with that teacher should stay home for a week. Whoever doesn’t have the disease after a week can go back to school. For those who do, apply recursive tracing. The (new) good news is that you don’t need to keep people in lockdown for 2 weeks and you almost certainly don’t have to close the whole institution (unless perhaps there are multiple, simultaneous outbreaks).

Asymptomatic Patients

In the podcast, Drosten recommends the science-writing of Kai Kupferschmidt, a German who happens to write in English for the magazine Science. His most recently articles are in fact quite informative. The article Study claiming new coronavirus can be transmitted by people without symptoms was flawed by Kai Kupferschmidt (Science) examines the by-now notorious pre-print that led many to believe that asymptomatic people were shedding viruses.

It turns out that the lady at the center of the study was not asymptomatic, but just had milder symptoms that were not as obvious to colleagues, who’d all reported that she “didn’t seem sick”. When they finally interviewed the woman herself, she readily reported that she’d felt tired and under-the-weather during her entire stay in Germany. A rush to publication and sloppiness in language led to a report that ran around the world and likely still serves as the kernel of people’s belief that COVID-19 can be spread by asymptomatic people.

“The German cluster does reveal another interesting aspect about the new virus, Drosten says. So far most attention has gone to patients who get seriously ill, but all four cases in Germany had a very mild infection. That may be true for many more patients, Drosten says, which may help the virus spread. “There is increasingly the sense that patients may just experience mild cold symptoms, while already shedding the virus,” he says. “Those are not symptoms that lead people to stay at home.””

Stopping Clusters and Super-Spreaders

The article Why do some COVID-19 patients infect many others, whereas most don’t spread the virus at all? by Kai Kupferschmidt (Science) discusses the k-value (dispersion factor) versus the R-value (reproduction number). A lower dispersion number means a higher number of people with an R of zero with a low number of people with a very high R (super-spreaders).

“Sometimes a single person infects dozens of people, whereas other clusters unfold across several generations of spread, in multiple venues.

“Other infectious diseases also spread in clusters, and with close to 5 million reported COVID-19 cases worldwide, some big outbreaks were to be expected. But SARS-CoV-2, like two of its cousins, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), seems especially prone to attacking groups of tightly connected people while sparing others. It’s an encouraging finding, scientists say, because it suggests that restricting gatherings where superspreading is likely to occur will have a major impact on transmission, and that other restrictions—on outdoor activity, for example—might be eased. (Emphasis added.)”

It also means that increased mobility between countries—even those with unequal R-values—will be less risky than previously thought.

“If k is really 0.1, then most chains of infection die out by themselves and SARS-CoV-2 needs to be introduced undetected into a new country at least four times to have an even chance of establishing itself, Kucharski says.”

The article also discusses how the virus seems to be spread—i.e. trying to explain why the k-value would be lower.

“Most published large transmission clusters “seem to implicate aerosol transmission,” Fraser says.

“[…]

“Individual patients’ characteristics play a role as well. Some people shed far more virus, and for a longer period of time, than others, perhaps because of differences in their immune system or the distribution of virus receptors in their body. A 2019 study of healthy people showed some breathe out many more particles than others when they talk.”

The interviewed scientists also emphasize that the outdoors is really our friend for limiting COVID-19 outbreaks. While the heat of the coming summer is unlikely to affect the virus itself, the fact that people are more likely to be outside will limit transmission vectors and help to kill it off—at least for now.

“The factor scientists are closest to understanding is where COVID-19 clusters are likely to occur. “Clearly there is a much higher risk in enclosed spaces than outside,” Althaus says.”

This means, though, that white-collar workers (e.g. software developers, like myself), should stay in home office in order to reduce needless risk incurred by being inside. Drosten even recommends that schools start holding classes outside, wherever possible.

“If public health workers knew where clusters are likely to happen, they could try to prevent them and avoid shutting down broad swaths of society, Kucharski says. “Shutdowns are an incredibly blunt tool,” he says. “You’re basically saying: We don’t know enough about where transmission is happening to be able to target it, so we’re just going to target all of it.””

“Fraser […] says: “Understanding these processes is going to improve infection control, and that’s going to improve all of our lives.””

Conclusion

All of this information is encouraging in that it’s showing the way for shaping a society that knows how to live with a disease like COVID-19 while keeping mortality low, offering acceptable social activities, and being economically viable. We still don’t have a good answer for foreign vacations or foreign travel, but at least we might know how to hang out with friends without risking an outbreak. That should tide us over until the fall and winter, when “being outside” becomes much more difficult. This is us now…perhaps only for a few years, perhaps forever.

The article Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, The Coronavirus Chronology From Hell by Dilip Hiro (Tomgram) provides an excellent and impartial review of the four months of history we have so far. In particular, he contrasts America’s inchoate response with the measured and ostensibly empathetic reaction of China. China reacted by increasing production capacity of PPE, masks, and ventilators. [1]

“By mid-March, the Chinese government and the Jack Ma Foundation, part of the giant corporate conglomerate Alibaba Group, had sent doctors and medical supplies to Belgium, Cambodia, France, Iran, Iraq, Italy, the Philippines, Serbia, Spain, and the United States. The foundation announced that it would ship “20,000 testing kits, 100,000 masks and 1,000 protective suits and face shields” to every country in Africa and added that Ethiopia’s Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed, would “take the lead in managing the logistics and distribution of these supplies to other African countries.”

“Of the 89 countries that, by March 26th, had received emergency assistance from China to fight the pandemic, 28 were in Asia, 16 in Europe, 26 in Africa, nine in the Americas, and 10 in the South Pacific. Such medical supplies mainly included testing kits, masks, protective suits, thermometer guns, and ventilators. ”

This is easily verified and largely undisputed [2]. What is a bit harder to understand is the oft-repeated success story of South Korea, which seems to have stopped Covid-19 in its tracks, presumably by testing.

“By heeding the WHO’s battle cry of “test, test, test,” South Korea had managed to avoid the kinds of lockdowns implemented by China, many Western European countries, and some American cities.”

According to World-o-meters, Korea has tested over 600,000 people, but that’s only 1.2% of their population. This puts them far below the testing penetration of most of Europe. Many countries there are over 3% tested. Is it because South Korea guessed correctly that the disease was only in one part of their country? Or that they locked down international travel sooner? What was the exact secret? No-one seems to be going into specifics that result in plausible explanations. I’m not saying that there isn’t an explanation, just that “they got lucky” seems to be the best explanation so far.

That goes the same for the Sweden worship: I keep hearing that their measures are more “relaxed”, but I don’t know what that means. I’ve already done a small analysis in my article I’ve been talking to idiots, part II of whether Sweden actually is doing better than similarly sized countries (Spoiler alert: it doesn’t look like it), but what exactly is the difference?

For example, Spain and Italy were on a much stricter lockdown than here in Switzerland (a country no-one seems to be talking about). Germany was stricter than Switzerland. France was stricter than Switzerland. [3] I think the UK went pretty hardcore as well, although I have a good friend living in London who’s getting in a lot of biking these days, so they can at least go outside.

What does that mean? Spain didn’t let kids play outside for six weeks. I think Italy was the same. I’m not sure about France, but probably the same. Germany closed all playgrounds and children’s groups (Kitas).

Kids were never restricted in Switzerland. No-one was. For a little while, the cops would drive by once a day and try to scare the kids into groups of five, but they stopped that pretty quickly. No-one was restricted from going outside in Switzerland. There is no compulsory mask law. Anyone can go outside, even older people. People are asked to avoid stores if they’re older. People are asked to stay apart and avoid groups larger than five people (there’s a fine for that one, right now).

The restaurants closed here, but not the takeaways. I think I read somewhere that Sweden left their restaurants open (but with distance measures?).

Switzerland is doing better than most of these countries right now, having squashed the curve so well that, even with having opened some stores and services last Monday, they can actually accelerate their plans for opening. It’s typically Swiss: cautious and preferring to promise less and deliver more. [4]

Other than closing the restaurants, I don’t know if Switzerland locked down much harder than Sweden. I don’t know if it locked down more or less than South Korea. I know that Switzerland is looking at the light at the end of the tunnel and dipping a toe in the pool of starting up more services. Schools will open again in a little over a week. Full public transportation services will be restored by June 8th.

It won’t “go back to normal”; we’re all a lot more cautious now. But Switzerland protected its businesses and workers and people, preferring to bump its debt-to-GDP ratio and bridge its population over this first wave.

Fingers crossed.

Everybody’s talking about ‘em: facemasks. Which kind? Where can you buy them? How do you get your outsized ass to a hospital that needs them? Should you wear one? Should everybody? Which kind? In which situations?

The beleaguered CDC

The lynching party seems to be out in the States for the CDC, which is being blamed for trying to kill everyone by telling them that they don’t need facemasks. This is the same advice being given the world over by anyone qualified to have an opinion.

In the States, though, they’ve focused laser-like on the CDC’s perfidy in having the same opinion for the last ten years and conjured up all sorts of conspiracy theories for why the CDC would be trying to eliminate the population of the United States. Apparently, it beats focusing on issues of import—which is kind of S.O.P. over there.

Could people be wrong?

But it makes sense that they would work, no? Why do doctors and nurses wear them? It’s common sense.

If it’s common sense, then how can experts be telling us the opposite? Does that ever happen? That an expert in the field knows something that the unwashed masses can’t intuit gastrically?

It kind of happens all the time. LeBon first wrote The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (Wikipedia) in the century before last—and not a lot has changed since then. We still believe all kinds of outlandish shit.

We knock on wood, we carry evil eyes, we pray to Jesus—hell we just had Easter, where a bunch of us celebrated a resurrection that a lot of people will swear on their mother’s graves actually happened, just that one time, though.

Or like that time the whole world drank water and called it medicine or ate sugar pills infused with the same water and called it medicine. Or the time a significantly large number of people stopped getting vaccines because they no longer believed in them. Or when a good part of America became materials and structural scientists and knew exactly how a building in NYC came down. People can believe in WMD. A majority of Americans believe they live in a great nation, better than everywhere else, with the best health care and the best intentions and the moral high ground.

People can be super-wrong about things that seem right to them. They can believe in things that have extremely obvious and well-known incontrovertible evidence. They can believe in that shit even when their lives depend on what they believe not being true.

Would I be surprised to hear that the scientific consensus is one thing and 99% of the rest of the world acts differently? Not at all.

But people all over Asia wear them. They can’t all be wrong, can they? Yeah, they could. Easily. They’re not really harming themselves, so nobody stops them, but it’s not a given that what they’re doing is an overall positive for them. I bet there are some downsides to wearing a mask all the time. The discomfort, for one.

How do you choose a plan of action?

So I’m just saying “but everybody else is doing it” is not what got us where we are today as a species. We have the scientific method to thank for that.

Could that have failed us, though? It doesn’t hurt to ask, every once in a while.

So, I’m open to opinions on this, but I’m not going to run out and buy masks just because most of Asia wears one. I’m going to listen to expert opinion. I’m going to find some experts and go with their opinion because, while I can make sound judgments based on evidence, I don’t have enough evidence and I don’t know enough. I feel that there’s a good chance that a mask will help in some situations (e.g. close quarters, like mass transit), but that any of the situations in which I’ve found myself in the last six weeks wouldn’t have been helped or hindered by a mask. That’s my gut feeling.

Is that going to bite me in the ass? Am I missing something? Am I being overly daring? Not cautious enough? Have I not considered the percentage confidence that those experts have in their opinions? At what percentage does it become more useful for me to just wear a mask anyway? 5%? 10%? 20%? 50%?

It’s not at all easy to make a choice, so I guess Rush’s Freewill takes effect and I’ve chosen not to wear a mask by not choosing to wear a mask. I’ve listened to the experts.

How science decides

Medical science—pretty much science in general, but especially medical science—won’t swear to anything until there’s solid evidence. That’s what makes it science. The studies to-date have either been ambivalent or have evinced negative results for efficacy or they’ve applied to specific and unrelated situations—i.e. many studies have been done on lab and hospital settings, but very few for the general population.

The article A Failure, But Not Of Prediction by Scott Alexander (Slate Star Codex) puts it very nicely:

“Doctors will not admit any treatment could possibly be good until it has a lot of randomized controlled trials behind it, common sense be damned. This didn’t come out of nowhere. They’ve been burned lots of times before by thinking they were applying common sense and getting things really wrong. And after your mistakes kill a few thousand people you start getting really paranoid and careful. And there are so many quacks who can spout off some “common sense” explanation for why their vitamin-infused bleach or colloidal silver should work that doctors have just become immune to that kind of bullshit. Multiple good RCTs or it didn’t happen. Given the history I think this is a defensible choice.”

We are basically stuck between believing everything about quack medicine that sounds good and trying to test things that we don’t have ethical tests for. How do you test the efficacy of face-masks? Who wants to be in the control group? The article cites a “joke” study that compares some studies to verifying whether parachutes actually help: you’d have to get a control group that jumped without parachutes, just to be sure.

Which experts to you choose?

Again, from Alexander’s article:

“But in terms of giant institutional failures that everyone is angry about, the face mask thing barely makes the top ten. […] The role of science journalists is to primarily to relay, explain, give context to the opinions of experts, not to try to out-medicine the doctors. So I think this is a good excuse.”

I did the same thing: I listen to a daily podcast in German with the top virologist at the top clinic in Berlin, Germany, probably one of the most renowned experts in Europe. He said that you don’t need a mask when you go outside. If you stay away from people (as you should), then a mask won’t do a damned thing. He allowed as how you’d probably put your fingers in your face less (at the very least, your mouth). That probably helps, considering how many people I see touching their faces on the rare occasions when I go out.

Alexander points out that a salient question (and one to keep in mind for the future) is: “what was the experts’ percent confidence in their position?” Experts are required to have an opinion, but how sure are they of it? I often joke to people when they ask me if I’m sure that, “I’m 100% certain. I might be wrong, but I’m 100% certain.” Certainty isn’t the same thing as being right. A lack of certainty (absolute or otherwise) is also no guarantee for being wrong.

Some shaky analogies

Not to harp on Alexander’s otherwise good article, but I’m not quite sure about some of his analogies: I think they feel a bit pat and too convincing. They may be accurate, but now he’s got me being suspicious of everyone—including him.

For example,

“People were presented with a new idea: a global pandemic might arise and change everything. They waited for proof. The proof didn’t arise, at least at first. I remember hearing people say things like “there’s no reason for panic, there are currently only ten cases in the US”. This should sound like “there’s no reason to panic, the asteroid heading for Earth is still several weeks away”.”

The odds he cited earlier were that there was a 10% chance of a pandemic, which is significantly less than the 100% chance of an asteroid strike. Do you see what he did there? He conflated the possibility of a pandemic with the certainty of a strike to convince you that your lack of response to the risk of a pandemic was highly irrational. It might have been lacking but it wasn’t the active denialism that ignoring an asteroid would be.

The asteroid one analogy applies to “a potentially world-changing pandemic within the next few decades” more than “this specific pandemic”. But its hard to act on something “in the next few decades”, though some nations are better-prepared by having stockpiles and plans of action that they can just use instead of making shit up as they go along.

The analogy definitely and tragically applies perfectly to climate change, worries about which have taken a backseat this year.

The uniqueness of the U.S. situation

Remember, too, that Alexander is writing from the States, specifically the Bay Area in California. The stumbling and belated response of the U.S. combined with the utter lack of preparation on the part of society in general there (no reserves, stripped hospitals, overextended staff, etc.) as well as having no policies in place—they have, instead, an ideology that is actively hostile to handling pandemics humanistically—makes Americans considerably more desperate and looking for a finger to point. His description below is a case in point.

“Gallant wouldn’t have waited for proof. He would have checked prediction markets and asked top experts for probabilistic judgments. If he heard numbers like 10 or 20 percent, he would have done a cost-benefit analysis and found that putting some tough measures into place, like quarantine and social distancing, would be worthwhile if they had a 10 or 20 percent chance of averting catastrophe.”

This is exactly not what the U.S. did because everyone responsible for running things or disseminating information—officially, via the press office of the executive branch, or via the mainstream media, or via the ad-hoc rumor mill of social media—ignored the pandemic until it was overwhelming them. There were three months of warnings.

The description above is pretty much how the European governments reacted: Switzerland closed down early—it could have been a smidge earlier, but they were pretty on top of it. Now, several weeks later, we are benefitting from an obviously squashed curve. Switzerland is making plans for the next month. Things are going to relax a bit and we’ll see where we go from here. Granted, we’ve only got 8 million people, but we’re organized and methodical and scientific and united. There is every reason to believe that if there is a lower-impact way of getting past this pandemic, we will find it.

The Overton Window has shifted considerably

Similarly, Alexander mentions later that the experts/media message should “[…] have looked like ‘We’re not sure how this will develop, so you should definitely stop large gatherings.’”. This is exactly what we heard across the political spectrum in most of Europe. It didn’t happen overnight, but definitely within a week, most if not all countries in the EU region had done this.

However—and I cannot emphasize this enough—people are extremely cavalier about talking about “shutting down the economy for a few weeks” as if that was a policy thing before the end of February 2020. It went from nearly completely inconceivable to “why didn’t we just do that earlier?” inside of a month.

Hindsight truly is 20/20, but if you’d asked anyone how likely it would be for the OECD countries to drop their economies by 30-70% (Switzerland claims 30% reduction while the U.S. claims 70% reduction), you’d have been put into a straitjacket.

I conclude from all of this that we have very little hope of handling similar, future catastrophes better than Europe and Asia already have. The U.S. is a special case and suffers from so many deficits that it’s hard to even pinpoint which one contributed the most to the basket of extra problems that it’s created for itself.

For example, SARS, MERS, and Ebola all failed to circle the world, despite pretty dire warnings, failed to materialize (There were predictions of 1M Ebola victims worldwide with actual 30K in three west-coast African countries.) This predisposes people and governments to downplay the risk of the next prediction. This is natural and not necessarily a stupid reaction. Now that we have a new data point—that 20% of these pandemics actually materialize and total the economy—we will adjust our future behavior. At least some of us will.

Choosing Experts

Alexander gets a bit lost in the weeds, I think, when he says that “[Zeynep Tufecki’s] superpower is her ability to treat something as important even before she has incontrovertible evidence that it has to be.” How do we tell the difference between a non-domain-expert but smart person like Zeynep (who was actually one of the ones who mis-predicted Ebola) and someone who’s just predicting doom and gloom with other, but insufficient evidence that appeals to our gut? There are plenty of those out there—how do we ignore their noise? And how do we get the media to ignore them?

I don’t see the solution as simple as “listen to the right experts” that Alexander seems to be ending up at. It’s what we all do with our information streams—I make conscious choices about who I follow and who I don’t, who I trust in a byline, etc. Decades of experience reading about, studying, and thinking about an area is a huge plus.

People can sound very credible and smart (case in point: Alexander himself … or even yours truly, hopefully), but haven’t actually done the work and are mostly working on intuition. We’re certainly not always domain experts. Even for those who seem to be wide and deep in several areas, that’s no guarantee of infallibility. We discern between these people based on evidence.

Examining SARS-CoV-2

But now we need to work without evidence because it isn’t always available. Or it’s not available yet. That’s fair enough—that’s reality. If hard decisions were easy…they wouldn’t be hard.

But we can’t have adjusted our future behavior based on information that we didn’t have yet. Though a lot of things went wrong, we can’t kick ourselves for not having already shut down Europe at the end of January.

Once I started researching COVID, I realized that there are facets of it that make it uniquely difficult to deal with and likely to cause more death than the flu.

• It’s quite contagious
• We don’t understand the transmission very well
• We don’t have good predictive data
• We don’t know who it affects (children less? Or just milder symptoms?)
• We don’t know about re-infection rates
• We don’t know the asymptomatic carrier rate
• We don’t know the lead time for contagiousness before symptoms appear
• We know it causes severe respiratory issues
• We know that they can only be treated with ventilators
• We know that our medicine will not just let people go
• We know that people tend to be in ICU for weeks
• ICU staff is highly trained/expensive/rare

From that, it made sense that we had to self-isolate/quarantine—reducing the spread with very prosaic means (the hammer)—to buy time to figure out a better plan.

Through a confluence of luck and life choices (and those that I was able to make because I’m lucky):

• We have a good amount of supplies at home already
• We cook all the time and don’t go out often
• We don’t live in a city
• We spend time outside in nature
• We exercise outside
• My job can be done just as well from home as from an office (literally changed overnight with no reduction in productivity).
• We have enough books, movies and TV shows to keep us busy for years
• The Internet service is top-notch

So, yeah, it’s a bit easier for me to say “go ahead and shut it all down, just to be on the safe side” because this all barely affects me directly. [1] The long-term effects of a starkly reduced economy will, of course, affect us all.

I’ve settled on using the Coronavirus (World-o-meter) tracker. It seems to update relatively quickly and reasonably accurately and is also well-sourced. About a week ago, they finally added two new columns: total tested and tested/million people, which helps you compare the case numbers of countries more accurately (i.e. if a country has no cases and is testing like mad, then that’s good news; if they have few tests, then you can’t really conclude anything, but it’s probably not good news).

For Switzerland, there’s also the source data (used by World-o-meter) at Cases of Coronavirus in Switzerland, which breaks the numbers down by canton, with tons of charts and details.

It’s not like we can’t have a little fun with the numbers, right?

Number of the Beast

Jesus ist ne Woche zu früh dran (Jesus came a week early)

The interview The Tip of the Iceberg: Virologist David Ho (BS ‘74) Speaks About COVID-19 (Caltech) includes the following:

Why different symptoms? Mutated strains?

No.

“This virus is mutating but it has mutated very little so far. There are differences but probably they are functionally not important, so that’s not the explanation for why you see different disease courses among the infected.”

Can you get re-infected?

No.

“Only one study was formally done and it is not a human study. It’s a macaque study. They infected macaques with this virus, then waited until the monkeys recovered and tried to re-infect them. They could not. This just came out in the past few days. That bodes well for human immunity.”

How long are you contagious?

~3 weeks.

“[…] one individual in China was shown to have persistent virus shedding for over a month. But typically, we’re looking at a three-week period from onset of symptoms.”

What about a vaccine?

With luck, September 2020. [1]

“[…] of course, people are working on vaccines. A lot of companies are working on vaccines and those vaccines are at various stages. A couple are within weeks of entering human testing and that’s quite, quite remarkable. There is one thing about vaccines, though: Some of the experiments previously done on SARS suggested that when animals developed antibodies and then were given the virus, they had greater lung injury due to the presence of the antibodies. The scientific community would have to resolve that issue quickly and its resolution would either halt the current approaches or unleash them to move full speed ahead.”

How long, though?

Lockdown for 5-6 weeks. Yo-yo-ing between lockdown and partially up-and-running for 18 months or until a vaccine provides an offensive weapon. [2]

“[…] it’s not going to be a few months as our president suggests. It’s going to be much longer than that. I would say 18 months, or 24 months. I think we are all facing tough challenges ahead.”

The 25th COP (Conference of the Parties) or United Nations Climate Change conference (Wikipedia) has come to an end in Madrid. Other instances of this conference were COP3 in Kyoto (the first agreement that the U.S. agreed to and which the Congress completely ignored), COP 15 in Copenhagen (where Canada and the United States worked together to torpedo any agreement) and, of course, COP21 in Paris, with the much-touted Paris Accords that Obama signed and that Trump officially left—and which all other signatories have unofficially ignored.

To absolutely no-one’s surprise at all, the U.N. Climate Talks Collapsed in Madrid by David Wallace-Wells (NY Mag/Intelligencer).

“The conference was meant to formalize the rules by which the Paris accords would be implemented, and begin the process by which the commitments made in those accords could be systematically ratcheted up over time.”

The Paris Accords were toothless because they were purely voluntary: countries could come up with their own targets and didn’t have to agree to or propose any measures for enforcing them. There is no framework within which to enforce or punish any CO₂-based crimes. COP 25 was supposed to address that problem. It utterly failed to.

Somehow the U.S. was still in attendance. It left the Paris Accords, then blocked anyone from coming to an agreement on closing gaps in those accords.

“As has become a common refrain among climate advocates since the IPCC’s blockbuster special report on 1.5 degrees last October, the U.N. believes we have only about a decade to cut global emissions in half to safely avoid catastrophic warming.”

One year later, there is a “lack of ambition and no urgency”. The “conference couldn’t even manage to “accept” the IPCC’s 1.5C report”

Australia’s on fire, its air quality is catastrophically bad and it’s unraveling in many other ways. See the linked article for more information. And they couldn’t even “accept” the IPCC’s report.

Where I live in Switzerland, it’s the first time in 18 years of living in this area that it hasn’t snowed once in October, November or December. Not even close. I went biking outside today. It’s anecdotal, but the hills are green here. If you go high enough, the mountains are white, but you have to go over 1200 meters to find more than a couple of centimeters of snow on the ground.

Since COP has failed completely, is there anything to be done? Wallace-Wells writes,

“I’ve heard from a number of economists, in the last few months, who would like to see the establishment of something like a WTO for climate — an independent organization, capable of not just rewarding participation but also punish bad behavior by nations.”

Why would that work where COP has failed? The worst offenders (U.S. and China) accept no outside authority. They couldn’t even agree to believe the science. Wallace-Wells thinks maybe something like the,

“[…] nuclear nonproliferation agreements forged between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the late 1980s — the planet’s two superpowers reaching a kind of consensus about a global existential threat, taking significant (if not complete) steps to mitigate that risk, and then more or less bullying the rest of the world to follow suit.”

Maybe, but it doesn’t sound very likely. No-one with any power seems to be overly concerned about planning for the medium- and long-term over the extreme short-term. It’s going to get ugly.

The article Here’s how much global carbon emission increased this year by Scott K. Johnson (Ars Technica) includes some sobering, if utterly unsurprising charts.

Not Even Close

This first chart is the most sobering one: it shows that we’ve most likely [1] slowed our CO₂ production from 2018 to 2019. But we’re still increasing. That is, it’s a positive development, but not nearly enough.

% increase in fossil-fuel usage

We need to get to zero CO₂ emissions by 2050 (or maybe even 2040) in order to avoid completely nightmarish scenarios. With the CO₂ we’ve already emitted, we’ve built a future for this planet that will be completely different from the ecological pocket that birthed us. It will be less predictable and much more violent and there will be far fewer places that will be considered habitable (for humans).

So we’re ostensibly increasing less (more on that later), but it’s no reason to pat ourselves on the back. We’re still accelerating. We’ve not even topped out, to say nothing of slowing down.

Linked to the Economy

The next chart shows the change in output for different countries/blocs. Europe has been trending downward since 1980, whereas the U.S. began steadily increasing then [2], until about 2005, since when it’s been trending downward as well. From 2000–2010, China increased its output massively but has since plateaued. There was a slight uptick in recent years (matched by the U.S., actually). India has been trending upward slightly non-linearly.

Annual CO2 output

It’s unclear what contributed to these figures: if they’re self-reported, then we have to very careful about the numbers as all of these governments are quite adapt at lying with statistics. (See the second footnote below.)

If the numbers are accurate, then we can see how strongly our economic system affects CO₂ output: in 1990, at the Asian Economic Crisis, “All Others” dropped significantly, but recovered quickly. China’s big leap coincides with the U.S. and Europe having moved a lot of manufacturing to China in those decades. That China has now “topped” out might be a mix of market saturation and China’s increased focus on the environment and decreasing pollution.

Efficiency

The final chart shows slight improvements in generating energy without CO₂ (the CO₂/Energy went down slightly). Similarly, the amount of energy for GDP has also gone down, indicating that we’re figuring out how to generate economic activity with less energy. It’s unclear which factors led to this. [3]

Ratios of energy/GDP/CO2

The other day, I responded to I’ve read the actual reports on Chernobyl. I’ve worked in the nuclear industry by TracyMorganFreeman (Reddit) with three comments.

Nuclear is a Sane Option

The linked comment jibes with my other reading (outside of Reddit, heaven forfend) on nuclear power and safety, as well. E.g. there’s Soonish
The Lost Chapter, Advanced Nuclear Power (SMBC). It’s a relatively clean power source with a worse reputation than it deserves—on paper.

Unfortunately, the industry that’s attached to it is an absolute public-money-sucking boondoggle full of exploded budgets and shattered deadlines.

There are real problems to solve in using nuclear power to get to zero emissions—making it safer is not one of them.

Even disposal isn’t even close to the problem it was with earlier models. It’s a lot less waste that produced by our current fuel sources (which still provide 90% of power). Crucially, none of it goes into the atmosphere.

Yeah, we need to find somewhere to put what we can’t burn (and new plants would be able to burn more than ever), but we could also just pay someone to take it instead of being surprised that no-one is volunteering to do it for free.

When people who’ve actually read up on nuclear end up supporting it, one interpretation is to assume that every one of them is a sub-IQ, easily swayed sheep with a “hard on” for nuclear, another is that they in the employ of big nuke … or maybe once you know more about it, you learn that the well-known facts about nuclear aren’t 100% true.

Cost Overruns

I totally hear what you’re saying about cost overruns. I mentioned it in another comment as the #1 problem with nuclear. On the other hand, the Pentagon just about choked to death laughing about how worked up we’re getting about a mere 120% cost overrun of only 5 billion dollars. (I’m using the Olkiluoto-3 example above.)

I’m thinking the JSF-35 program over the last 30 years has vastly more overruns than that and it’s barely even flying. This is likely due to the same deep-seated corruption that dooms any large projects like nuclear plants.

Cost overruns—but especially unconscionable delays—are the biggest problem. These are real problems to solve, but are organizational rather than core issues with nuclear safety. It’s entirely possible that we can’t solve them. We’ve never been very good at that. We don’t have much time to learn.

However, something with low emissions and storability needs to jump in to replace fossil fuels. Or … we just stop using a lot less power. That would work, too. Also something we’ve never been particularly good at.

I think I hear the Pentagon laughing again.

Storing Energy and Sustaining the Grid

I, too, am for other solutions, like a drastic reduction in energy use.

I just don’t think that’s going to happen.

We have massive energy requirements, growing every year. We have dirty fuel providing the vast majority of that energy. We have renewables becoming cost-effective and efficient at collecting power, but we don’t have a replacement for the stored-power feature of fossil fuels.

Without stored power, the grid doesn’t work like it works now—providing steady power 24 hours a day. Hydroelectric only works in some countries, ditto for pumping water to elevation.

There are other ideas (storing containers at elevation, then dropping them to produce power; molten salt, etc.), but nothing ready to take over from fossil fuels. Nothing that scales.

To sum up, we can:

• Reduce usage and free ourselves from the tyranny of the grid
• Switch from fossil fuels to nuclear (high-density stored power)
• Come up with some other way of storing power—and fast

We don’t have the luxury of a lot of time for coming up with another way of running our grid. If we take nukes off the table, then when nature forces us to reduce fossil fuels, life for the advanced societies is going to change drastically—but not in a well-planned way.

So, either we use nukes as a stopgap, allowing us to avoid changing energy requirements or we blow up the climate because we can’t stop using fossil fuels or we drastically change civilization by destabilizing the grid that nearly everything we know depends on.

Nukes are one way to arrange for a soft landing for our soft selves in the so-called first world … because we’ve proven so terrible at doing anything else.

I’m not holding out much hope, though.

I am in no way doubting evolution. I am simply admitting that my mind cannot truly encompass the chasm of time required to build this creature incrementally.

Iranian spider-tailed viper tricks bird by SciNews (YouTube)

h/t to The Lure of the Spider-Tailed Horned Viper by Jason Kottke.

The article China makes history by landing on the far side of the Moon by Eric Berger (Ars Technica) has pretty exciting news.

“a Beijing-based control center commanded the spacecraft to begin the landing procedure at 9:15pm ET Monday (10:15am, Tuesday, local time), from an altitude of 15km above the lunar surface. During an 11-minute descent, Chang’e-4 slowed its speed from 1.7 km/s to nearly zero before it landed in the Von Karman Crater in the South Pole-Aitken Basin.”

This is a science mission, but I’m really hoping that they’re going there to check out resources, as well. If we ever want to get serious about space, we need to get robots mining materials on the Moon to build structures for orbit. The only things we should be heavy-lifting from Earth are (maybe) humans and any rare-earth or other minerals that are not available on the Moon.

And, of course, since it’s Ars Technica and they have a couple of guys who are always on the lookout for the next cold war, the article ends by chiding the Chinese for lack of “openness”.

“It is also notable that China’s state news service provided no live coverage of Monday night’s landing attempt. Many of the country’s launches—and more difficult efforts in space—are only reported after the fact, when they are successful. This echoes the Soviet approach during the space race in the 1960s, when many of their spaceflight activities took place covertly, while NASA had its successes and failures covered in real time.”

This is actually untrue: NASA covered its successes and failures in real time because it wanted to rub everyone’s nose in what it was doing. That was the whole point of the Space Race as far as America was concerned. You can’t brag about winning if no-one knows you ran, right? And how much space stuff have we seen since the end of the cold war? The U.S. finally has hegemony and has seemingly lost all interest in space because it’s no fun without competition. [1] So it’s moved to private industry—because obviously they’ll be able to do it much better than the gubmint.

If we want to call it cultural, let’s call it cultural. The US would have had 96 hours of coverage in advance, complete with 8-talking-head-panels to tell us how this was the final nail in the coffin for the Chinese and the Russians—no disrespect, of course. The Chinese did it, prepared a presentation and released it. I honestly prefer the latter. I wouldn’t have taken part in a see-it-live circus, anyway.

But Berger wasn’t done. Not only did the Chinese not broadcast it properly and according to well-established, Western standards of media presentation, there is a more sinister note.

“This may reinforce the concern of some lunar scientists and spaceflight experts, who warn that if we want to see the Moon developed under Western norms of freedom and openness, then NASA and US businesses had better lead the return and development of the Moon during the coming decade.”

OMG, the Chinese are taking over the Moon. Run. Hide.

This attitude is so tiresome, really. Americans just can’t view any issue other than through the lens of their own patriotism. What could possibly lead anyone to believe that the US would be doing things any more “free and open” than the Chinese? Is there any history that leads you to that conclusion? Wasn’t/Isn’t Russia a so-called restricted and closed society? Who’s been carting American asses into space since the Space Shuttle program ended? The Russians, that’s who.

This is just bullshit saber-rattling based on a completely fallacious reading of history from a resident of the United States of Amnesia. It’s the same shit that gets trotted out every time the Empire sees anyone else make any progress at all.

The article Just 20 percent of e-waste is being recycled by Scott K. Johnson (Ars Technica) provides a good overview of the global recycling situation, based on a recent report from the United Nations’ International Telecommunication Union.

As you would expect, amount of recycling and waste produced per region differs considerably.

“Africa, for example, accounted for only about five percent of the total e-waste generated—roughly zero of which was recycled. Europe and Russia combined to generate about 28 percent of the world’s e-waste, but recycled it at a higher average rate of 35 percent. That’s partly due to recycling rates of around 70 percent in Switzerland, Sweden, and Norway.

“The United States produced 14 percent of e-waste and recycled less than a quarter of it—just above the global average. China, which has four times the population of the US, came in at about 16 percent of the world’s e-waste, with about 18 percent getting recycled.”

So the U.S. has about an average recycling rate, but produces 14% of e-waste with only 4.5% (Wolfram Alpha) of the world’s population. China generates ¼ as much e-waste per-capita.

Switzerland has an enviable 70% documented recycling rate. This doesn’t come as a complete surprise, as any store that sells electronics in Switzerland must also accept any and all electronic and electrical items for recycling. It’s as easy as dropping it off when you go grocery-shopping.

Americans have, once again, noticed that the electoral college is odd. And undemocratic. And odd.

There are much more democratic systems out there. “First past the post” is not one of them. YouTube and CGP Grey to the rescue.

The Trouble with the Electoral College by CGP Grey (YouTube) and Re: The Trouble With The Electoral College – Cities, Metro Areas, Elections and The United States by CGP Grey (YouTube)

These two videos combine to explain how the electoral college works and how it’s undemocratic. That is, regardless of whether it happens to have produced results that you agree with, it’s a ticking time-bomb of unfairness.

The Problems with First Past the Post Voting Explained by CGP Grey (YouTube)

This video explains why the U.S. should not be totally boneheaded about it and replace the electoral college with a “first past the post” system. This system is also undemocratic, regardless of how many more votes your candidate won in the popular election this time around. It inevitably leads to a two-party system and you’ve seen how absolutely awesome that’s turned out.

Gerrymandering Explained by CGP Grey (YouTube)

This video discusses the dangers of allowing representatives to choose their own electoral boundaries, even in a system that has local representatives.

Mixed-Member Proportional Representation Explained by CGP Grey (YouTube)

This video shows how it’s done in a real democracy (e.g. Switzerland). Proportional representation is the goal and this system achieves it as closely as can be expected.

Politics in the Animal Kingdom: Single Transferable Vote by CGP Grey (YouTube)

Finally, this video shows what a world with instant-runoff, single-transferable-vote elections could look like. Instead of voting for a single candidate, you rank your choices. This also achieves very democratic results. Jill Stein was pulling for this system because it would let the States get away from the two-party duopoly.

So what does would I recommend?

1. Pass a constitutional amendment to replace the electoral college with IRV/STV for president.
2. Or, replace the president with a council of 7 or 11 or whatever sounds appropriate (e.g. like Switzerland). Essentially, let us elect the cabinet.
3. In the same constitutional amendment, replace all parliamentary (senate/congress) elections with MMPR to encourage third-party candidates and get away from the insipid, tedious and elite duopoly we have now.

What’s going to happen?

Probably nothing. The U.S. will just keep the electoral-college system and bitch about it again in four years.

This is a video by the always-interesting and funny Sean Carroll on physics (naturally) and on things that we know about life, death, entropy and the afterlife. It’s a really interesting talk that is very technically deep while still being more accessible than other, similar talks.

Emperor Has No Clothes Award Acceptance Speech by Sean Carroll (YouTube)

Near the beginning, he addresses heaven and the afterlife and the explanations that non-scientists have embraced.

What to make of the evidence for an afterlife?

Some ill-defined metaphysical substance, not subject to the known laws of physics, interacts with the atoms of our brains in ways that have thus far eluded every controlled experiment ever performed in the history of science,

–or–

People hallucinate when they are nearly dead.

He goes on to present entropic concepts, the heat-death of the universe and other deep-time themes that you may know from such hard-science authors as Greg Bear (The City at the End of Time), Gregory Benford (Deep Time) and Greg Egan (Diaspora).

The article Big data: are we making a big mistake? (Financial Times) bursts the bubble of the wide-eyed, overconfident and underinformed techies who think that their giant piles of data will fix everything. The article contains many interesting examples, some of which are touched on in the conclusion, cited below:

“Uncanny accuracy is easy to overrate if we simply ignore false positives, […] The claim that causation has been “knocked off its pedestal” is fine if we are making predictions in a stable environment but not if the world is changing (as with Flu Trends) or if we ourselves hope to change it. The promise that “N = All”, and therefore that sampling bias does not matter, is simply not true in most cases that count. As for the idea that “with enough data, the numbers speak for themselves” – that seems hopelessly naive in data sets where spurious patterns vastly outnumber genuine discoveries.

““Big data” has arrived, but big insights have not. The challenge now is to solve new problems and gain new answers – without making the same old statistical mistakes on a grander scale than ever.”

The upshot is that you think your data is “big” but it is most likely not big enough. Whereas sampling bias is diminished compared to smaller datasets, the claims made based on the big data are correspondingly bigger, eradicating the increased confidence. Selectively filtering results to focus on the expected result is a pitfall not necessarily of bad statistics, but of bad scientists/engineers as well.

The article is a good read for those who can get behind the FT paywall or who haven’t used up all of their “free views” for the year.

Perhaps uncharacteristically, this post will consist mostly of citations of other articles about the nature of addiction. I have relatively little contact with addiction, but the truth of what these ex-users write is evident to anyone of a rational bent who is reasonably informed about the world.

The article Philip Seymour Hoffman is another victim of extremely stupid drug laws by Russell Brand (Guardian) writes,

“People are going to use drugs; no self-respecting drug addict is even remotely deterred by prohibition.”

This seems non-debatable as the truth of it is borne out by decades, if not centuries, of empirical evidence. The truism extends to many other crimes, especially those born of desperation: a punitive judicial system has very little prohibitive effect.

“What prohibition achieves is an unregulated, criminal-controlled, sprawling, global mob-economy, where drug users, their families and society at large are all exposed to the worst conceivable version of this regrettably unavoidable problem.”

Check. Legalization reduces crime. Duh.

“Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death is a reminder, though, that addiction is indiscriminate. That it is sad, irrational and hard to understand. What it also clearly demonstrates is that we are a culture that does not know how to treat its addicts. Would Hoffman have died if this disease were not so enmeshed in stigma? If we weren’t invited to believe that people who suffer from addiction deserve to suffer? Would he have OD’d if drugs were regulated, controlled and professionally administered? (Emphasis added.)”

The emphasized portion is especially interesting in light of how many of the same people who think of themselves as good Christians also condemn and fail to forgive those who succumb to addiction.

The older article, my life without drugs by Russell Brand in March 2013 (Guardian) included some more insights into the mind of an addict.

“Recently for the purposes of a documentary on this subject I reviewed some footage of myself smoking heroin that my friend had shot […] When I saw the tape a month or so ago, what is surprising is that my reaction is not one of gratitude for the positive changes I’ve experienced but envy at witnessing an earlier version of myself unencumbered by the burden of abstinence. I sat in a suite at the Savoy hotel, in privilege, resenting the woeful ratbag I once was, who, for all his problems, had drugs. That is obviously irrational. (Emphasis added.)”

I think that this is the main take-away: we pity those with cancer and shower them with love and affection, upending personal lives and donating scads of money to trying to cure it or at least ameliorate its effects. But drug users, who science has long since shown suffer from a disease, get none of this. This, despite such a large part of the population being users themselves (alcohol and nicotine are also drugs that just happen to be legal in most countries).

Brand goes on to distinguish between users and addicts.

“Without these fellowships I would take drugs. Because, even now, the condition persists. Drugs and alcohol are not my problem, reality is my problem, drugs and alcohol are my solution. […] If this seems odd to you it is because you are not an alcoholic or a drug addict. You are likely one of the 90% of people who can drink and use drugs safely. (Emphasis added.)”

Those of us who judge drug addicts so harshly are usually just the kind of people who don’t have the kind of horrible lives that must be washed away by chemically induced euphoria or calm. And even if we do, there are good odds that we won’t get addicted. [1] The admonition and recrimination is similar to the phenomenon of those in the upper classes telling the poor that they should just get jobs and stop mooching. Even were the already-rich to make the same mistakes the poor make, they would not suffer the same punishments. Mme. Antoinette has yet to be to be improved upon; what’s old is new again.

“It is difficult to feel sympathy for these people. It is difficult to regard some bawdy drunk and see them as sick and powerless. It is difficult to suffer the selfishness of a drug addict who will lie to you and steal from you and forgive them and offer them help. Can there be any other disease that renders its victims so unappealing?”

“Peter Hitchens is a vocal adversary of mine on this matter. He sees this condition as a matter of choice and the culprits as criminals who should go to prison. I know how he feels. I bet I have to deal with a lot more drug addicts than he does, let’s face it. I share my brain with one, and I can tell you firsthand, they are total fucking wankers. Where I differ from Peter is in my belief that if you regard alcoholics and drug addicts not as bad people but as sick people then we can help them to get better. (Emphasis added.)”

Peter Hitchens is Christopher Hitchens’s brother. He is even more right-wing, obnoxious and tiresome than even Chris had managed to become before succumbing to cancer. Where Hitchens argues for ever longer and more inventive punishments, Brand issues a plea for a rehabilitative system. Science and evidence is on Brand’s side. While a rehabilitative system does not satisfy the cultural need for revenge, it is the most effective at addressing the core problem: preventing the most harm for the most people.

And, finally, the article Strength and compassion: a note to drug abuse concern trolls, concerning Philip Seymour Hoffman by Matt Zoller Seitz (RogerEbert.com) also included some good advice for those with an itchy trigger finger vis à vis telling drug addicts what horrible people they are [2]:

“Addiction is a beast. It’s powerful. Sometimes it overwhelms even those who fight hard against it for decades. […] When I see people saying, of Hoffman’s death, “What a waste” or “Pity he was so selfish” or “Why would anybody do that to their children?” or “While we’re praising him, let’s not forget the man was a junkie” or other such hateful blather, I wonder if they know what addiction is, or have chosen, for reasons of anger or preening self-regard, to pretend that they do not.”

It’s much more likely that these people are just like most of the unwashed masses: even were they capable of anything but the most superficial introspection or rational thought mechanisms, they still wouldn’t consider denying the world their pithy, unconsidered insight for five minutes in order to use said mechanisms first. Because where’s the fun in that? Right when there’s such a grand opportunity for displaying your superiority—now, thanks to the Internet—to the entire world? [3]

“There’s a reason why, when you’re in any kind of Twelve-Step Program and you ritually state your name and name your addiction, you use present tense, not past. […] This is not a linguistic affectation. All addicts remain, forever, in some fundamental sense, addicts—but hopefully some of them get to a place where they’re non-practicing.”

Hoffman was, apparently, on the wagon for about two decades, before he so spectacularly capitulated. He jumped off with gusto, with both feet. They found lots of drugs in the apartment he made his final resting place. Is there anyone who could reasonably assume that he’d thought of his family at that time and said to himself: “fuck it, I’m going to kill myself with drugs instead”. Clearly, that smacks of illness.

“We all have destructive habits. If we’re lucky, it’s watching too much TV when it’s inhibiting our productivity, or looking at porn when we think it’s a sin, or lying, cheating, overeating. If we’re lucky, our addictions won’t kill us.”

We all have this illness, this need for pattern and consistency. We need to while away the luxurious lengths of time afforded to us by modern civilization within the constraints of the social isolation often engendered by same. You can be even luckier if you become addicted to exercise, I guess. But don’t let’s pretend that someone who runs 100 miles a week isn’t suffering from an illness mentally similar to that of a heroin fiend.

“But for an unfortunate group, the need to keep going becomes as pervasive as the need to eat or sleep. And we call them selfish, as if they would prefer to be a slave to the thing that’s ruining everything good in their lives.”

Take a deep breath. Step back. Does that sound plausible? Is the mighty power of the atom, harnessed by decades-old technology, likely to be able to effect such mighty change?

Because the Pacific Ocean is huge. Like, really gigantic. It has 16 times as much surface area as the entire United States of America. Hell, there’s a Pacific Garbage Patch whose estimated size is about the surface area of the US of A and we can barely even tell it’s there.

The article True facts about Ocean Radiation and the Fukushima Disaster by Kim Martini (Deep Sea News) examines a few of the more extraordinary claims made about Fukushima in recent weeks as well as their supposedly corroborating evidence that comes in the form of superficially convincing false-color diagrams and maps.

Non-absolution for TEPCO and Japan

This is in no way to say that the Japanese authorities and TEPCO are not handling the situation in a poor, if not criminal, manner. Nor is it to provide support for the nuclear industry as we find it today in its corrupt and highly subsidized and under-regulated form. Nor do I wish to offer any opinion or particular hope that we could reap the benefits of nuclear power without the heretofore unavoidable corruption engendered by any business so reliant on government largesse.

This is to provide support to the facts and avoid misinformation that only does damage to a cause that has its heart in the right place but seems incapable of controlling itself when it comes to disseminating untruthful and deliberately manipulated propaganda.

Terms and units

Before you even start talking about radiation and its effect on humans, you have to be clear on the units.

• Becquerel[Bq] or Curie[Ci]: radiation emitted from a radioactive material (1 Ci = 3.7 × 1010 Bq)
• Gray [Gy] or Rad[rad]: radiation absorbed by another material (1Gy = 100 rad)
• Sieverts[Sv]* or “roentgen equivalent in man”[rem]: how badly radiation will damage biological tissue (1 Sv = 100 rem)

The exact doses that are considered dangerous to humans differ based on they type of radiation as well. If you’re more of a visual person, then check out this Radiation Dose Chart by Randall Munroe (XKCD), which does a decent job of putting the relative numbers in perspective.

Pretty maps and charts!

I already wrote about one of these shenanigans in Radiation is everywhere! (And we’re all gonna die.). It included a link to Fukushima Emergency (Snopes), which debunks one of the fancy we’re-all-gonna-die charts that’s been making the rounds.

The article by Martini [1] includes several more images, many of which I’ve seen posted on social-networking sites. As usual, the hyperbole is based on a grain of truth: “radiation probably has reached the West Coast but it’s not dangerous.”

• A site called EnviroReporter posted a graphic that it claimed showed how radiation was spreading across the Pacific. What it actually documented was “the estimated maximum wave heights of the Japanese Tohuku Tsunami by modelers at NOAA”.
• Another graphic actually does show “an ocean model that […] predicts where radioactive particles will be pushed around by surface ocean currents”, which sounds promising until you note that there is no legend in sight and the false colors are disavowed by the company that put out the chart as not being a “representation of the radioactive plume concentration.”
• The bright-red map also shows “the decrease in the radioactive concentrations of Cesium-137 isotopes since being emitted from Fukushima” (Emphasis added), the upshot of which is that all of the levels indicated are not harmful to humans at all.

Pretty colors in the PacificMaximum wave heights of the Japanese Tohuku TsunamiDecrease in the radioactive concentrations of Cesium-137 isotopes

Seriously, how bad is it? Am I gonna die?

Instead of thousands or millions times higher radiation, the conclusion is that:

“Even within 300 km of Fukushima, the additional radiation that was introduced by the Cesium-137 fallout is still well below the background radiation levels from naturally occurring radioisotopes. By the time those radioactive atoms make their way to the West Coast it will be even more diluted and therefore not dangerous at all. (Emphasis added.)”

The emphasis draws attention to the reality that radiation is everywhere, in one form or another. But it’s at such a low dose that we will die of old age long before it has an effect on us. Therefore, this so-called background radiation is considered harmless—because it will utterly fail to kill you quickly enough to prevent something more dangerous from doing so (like texting while driving, for example).

Even 300km away, the radiation levels caused by the meltdown at Fukushima are well below the level of background radiation. Even should you find yourself swimming off the coast of Fukushima, you’d be exposed to “less than 0.03% of the daily radiation an average Japanese resident receives.”

In Los Angeles, you’re almost 30 times farther away (just over 8600km). Radiation intensity falls off at the square of the distance (Wikipedia), so the dose in L.A. is infinitesimal.

You can stay skeptical to keep those with vested interests from blowing sunshine up your ass, but don’t let that instinct lead you astray. Instead, apply a healthy skepticism for everything you hear on this complex topic instead of just the stuff that agrees with your predisposed view. Always check your sources and don’t believe every cover-up conspiracy you hear.

Dara Ó Briain is London-based Irish comedian with a show on BBC2 called Dara Ó Briain’s Science Club. His act is a good deal bawdier on stage though the focus remains on promulgating a pro-science agenda. In the segment below, he discusses a show he did with physicist Brian Cox in which the topic of astrology just happened to arise.

Some choice tidbits from this segment:

“The astrologers get going on Twitter and write, ‘if you were really a scientist, then you’d be more open-minded.‘ And I go, ‘well lucky for me, I’m a comedian.‘ (flashes two fingers)”

“And they all wanted to come onto the show, onto this BBC science show to give their side of the “argument”. And you’re going, no, you can’t come on. Why? It’s a science show. You can’t come onto it because your work clothes are a cape with stars sewn onto it.”

And then he starts on his finale with “[r]acism is way better than astrology…”

Astrology by Dara Ó Briain (YouTube)

This other segment is more representative—and better—in my opinion. The tag line is “Get in the fookin’ sack.” Well worth your six minutes if you like science, the Irish, comedians or any combination of the above.

Again with the tidbits:

“There’s this kind of a notion that everyone’s opinion is equally valid. My arse! Bloke who’s a professor of dentistry for forty years with some eejit who removes his teeth with string and a door.”

“Jaysus, homepaths get on my nerves, with their ‘well, science doesn’t know everything…’ Well, science knows it doesn’t know everything; otherwise, it’d stop, wouldn’t it? And, just because science doesn’t know everything doesn’t mean you can just fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you. (Emphasis added.)”

“Herbal medicine…oh, herbal medicine’s been around for thousands of years. Indeed it has. And then we tested it all and the stuff that worked because “medicine”. And the rest of it is just a nice bowl of soup and some potpourri. [1]”

“You never see the balance thing with really hard science. You never see the guy on from NASA, talking about the space station. And they go, Mr. NASA guy, you’re building a space station, well that’s very interesting. And then they go and they say for “balance” we must now turn to Barry, who believes the sky is a carpet painted by God.”

“If someone says that they’re a nutritionist, be slightly wary. “Dietitian” is the legally protected term [2]. Dietitian is like dentist and nutritionist is like “toothiologist”.”

Dara Ó Briain on Science, Quackery and other Stuff by Dara Ó Briain (YouTube)

Amazing clip. Tears.

A story of Fukushima radiation is making the rounds, reported variously as Navy sailors have radiation sickness after Japan rescue by Laura Italiano and Kerry Murtha (NY Post) and 70+ USS Ronald Reagan Crew Members, Half Suffering From Cancer, to Sue TEPCO For Fukushima Radiation Poisoning by Brandon Baker (EcoWatch) (with a re-post at AlterNet). Other source cited in the articles are the Washington Times and FOX News, paragons of journalistic integrity.

The user comments on the article are uniformly horrible and make you despair for mankind. They are a cornucopia of stupidity. Helen Caldecott is cited heavily in the comments and historically her statements have ranged from hyperbolic to outright false.

All of the articles include a quote from a sailor that “[m]y thyroid is so out of whack that I can lose 60 to 70 pounds in one month and then gain it back the next.” I am not a doctor but I don’t think that can be true. It sets off warning bells, at the very least.

That the mainstream media isn’t reporting this story doesn’t at all mean that it’s not true. There are plenty of places that usually report stories that are deliberately ignored—and they’re not reporting this either. That makes me more than a bit suspicious. Instead, personal and heavily one-sided activist sites and blogs are cited as sources. If you bother to check those sources, you find that they all reference each other, all citing the same statistics, which seem to have no verifiable or reliable source.

Buried at the end of one of the articles cited above is this nugget, though,

“San Diego Judge Janis L. Sammartino dismissed the initial suit in late November, but Garner and a group of attorneys plan to refile on Jan. 6.”

No detail is given as to why the case was dismissed. It’s a safe assumption that the case was thrown out for lack of evidence or validity, rather than because of a worldwide conspiracy. The case was thrown out of court in November and news that it will be appealed in January is reported without a hint of restraint. I’m not passing any judgment on other stories about Fukushima but I’m not buying this particular one.

I was recently sent this link, presumably because I enjoy short nature documentaries.

Man vs. Wild − Eating Giant Larva by Bear Grylls (YouTube)

Some thoughts:

• Do larvae really get bigger the older they get? Isn’t a larva a limited stage of development? How is it that some are so much larger than others? Isn’t it more likely to be related to food intake rather than age? [1]
• People are weird. If Bear were to eat fluffy baby animals (say chicks) rather than slimy ones (larvae in this case), he would be drummed off the air.
• Bear Grylls: Allergic to Bees is a related video. The poster on the video shows a face that looks like the elephant man. Oh, YouTube, you temptress.
• YouTube comments have not gotten any better. Some genius named “lury Sette” wrote that “[h]e should be on Wreakless Eating”. I can only just barely understand what that means.
• What kind of a name is Bear Grylls? Did he try other spellings first? Like “Bare Grills”? Would anyone on YouTube have noticed the misspelling?

The article NASA’s Plutonium Problem Could End Deep-Space Exploration by Dave Mosher (Wired) discusses a resource shortage that will be hard to address: plutonium.

Plutonium was produced in much larger quantities during the nuclear-arms race of the mid to late 20th century. Though the arms race was morally reprehensible and fantastically expensive, a byproduct was that there was more plutonium available for scientific endeavor. Pound for pound, it is unparalleled as a long-lasting energy source. As of the end of 2013, the US now has only “enough to last to the end of this decade”, according to the article.

“And it’s not just the U.S. reserves that are in jeopardy. The entire planet’s stores are nearly depleted. […] The country’s scientific stockpile has dwindled to around 36 pounds. To put that in perspective, the battery that powers NASA’s Curiosity rover, which is currently studying the surface of Mars, contains roughly 10 pounds of plutonium, and what’s left has already been spoken for and then some.”

This isn’t the first time that alarm bells have gone off about resource scarcity. We take much of our world for granted and tend to assume that there’s always more than enough available of, well, whatever we need to sustain whatever we’d like to do. Dreams are limited only be capital, not by physical reality.

This reminded me of a couple of diagrams I’d seen before. The two below show that some of the basic elements that we use in almost all of the items to which we’ve become accustomed—basically all electronic goods—will run out within a dozen years to a few decades, at current rates of consumption.

Amount of natural resources left (The Conservation Report)

Stock check: estimated remaining world supplies of non-renewable resources

And I’m almost certain that no one has a plan for what happens when we run out of lead, copper, indium, zinc, tin and silver. Probably a heap of resource wars will ensue, as the powers of the world jockey for supplies to create the next iPhone model.

Granted, some of the materials are recovered by recycling, which can be increased to some degree. Entropy ensures that we won’t have a 100% closed cycle; greed and the skewed way we calculate value will ensure that even more is wasted than absolutely necessary.

The numbers are also based on the sources known today. It’s possible that we will find other sources, but the planet is only so big and the sources aren’t guaranteed to be easily extractable or even accessible.

These are interesting numbers to keep in mind the next time you think you need to upgrade your smart phone for the second time in a year. Or perhaps the next time you see an airport absolutely full of televisions, all broadcasting inane content on LCDs whose production consumed precious resources that could have been used for something perhaps more useful.

A little while back, I read about the mantis shrimp (Wikipedia) in a comic called Why the mantis shrimp is my new favorite animal (The Oatmeal). The comic is both amusing and informative, describing and depicting the shrimp’s unbelievable visual organs (here, citing Wikipedia):

“The midband region of the mantis shrimp’s eye is made up of six rows of specialized ommatidia. Four rows carry 16 differing sorts of photoreceptor pigments, 12 for colour sensitivity, others for colour filtering. The mantis shrimp has such good eyes it can perceive both polarized light and multispectral images.”

However, as also noted in the comic and Wikipedia, the mantis shrimp is probably pound-for-pound the most flat-out psychotic hunter-killer that has ever evolved on this planet.

“[…] mantis shrimp sport powerful claws that they use to attack and kill prey by spearing, stunning, or dismemberment. Although it only happens rarely, some larger species of mantis shrimp are capable of breaking through aquarium glass with a single strike from this weapon”

It’s so utterly overpowered for its ecological niche, one wonders what kind of predator would even go near such a thing. All sources see fit to mention that you keeping one in an aquarium is just asking for a bloodbath.

The comic author hypothesizes that the worlds as observed by such a sensorium must be achingly beautiful. See the screenshot to the right or click through to the comic itself.

I was reminded of the cartoon when Ze Frank recently covered the mantis shrimp with another in his ongoing “True Facts” short-video series. The footage does not disappoint; watch until the end to see a 10-inch mantis shrimp chasing an octopus 20 times its size.

True Facts About The Mantis Shrimp by Ze Frank (YouTube)

NB: Don’t worry if you don’t understand this introductory paragraph; feel free to blow right through it and see how you fare with the alternate explanations and analogies below.

The news so far is that the scientists at CERN have announced that they have consistently been able to generate bosons at around 126GeV with a certainty of 5 sigmas. The Standard Model of physics predicts that this energy level is sufficient to generate the long–sought-after Higgs boson, which is the only predicted particle that has not yet been confirmed to have been detected.

That carefully worded description of the discovery is a good deal less hyperbolic than other headlines or articles you may have read. The media tended toward the less accurate and more down-to-Earth, spouting “God Particle Found!”, “Higgs Boson Discovered!” or “Scientists Find Particle Responsible for Why We Weigh so Much!” But what does it mean for you and me? I suppose the most important question for many will be: why should I care?

An Audiovisual Presentation

If you haven’t seen it already and you think you’ve got the scientific chops, the following video does a lovely job of explaining the discovery.

The Higgs Boson Explained by PHD Comics (Vimeo)

If you watched that and drifted off to check Facebook a couple of times before it finished…but would still like to know more, you’ll have to soldier on.

It’s hopeless, so don’t even try

Before we try to answer the question of why you should care (posed above), we’ll have to address the very realistic possibility that many people will, by dint of their experience or education, simply be wholly and entirely incapable of understanding what the hell happened and why it’s important in any but the most superficial of ways. [1]

Explaining why this discovery is important may be doomed to failure for reasons best explained by one of the best explainers of physics who ever strode the Earth, Richard Feynmann, as cited in Diving deeper into the metaphorical molasses by Ben Zimmer (Language Log). In the video (cued to 06:09) and the transcript (included below), Feynmann tries to explain magnetism or, rather, he explains why it’s hopeless to even make an attempt at explaining magnetism to his interviewer. It’s not arrogant because it’s true.

'Fun to Imagine' 4: Magnets (and 'Why?' questions…) by Richard Feynmann (YouTube)

“I can’t explain that attraction in terms of anything else that’s familiar to you. For example, if we said the magnets attract like as if rubber bands, I would be cheating you. Because they’re not connected by rubber bands. I’d soon be in trouble. And secondly, if you were curious enough, you’d ask me why rubber bands tend to pull back together again, and I would end up explaining that in terms of electrical forces, which are the very things that I’m trying to use the rubber bands to explain. So I have cheated very badly, you see. So I am not going to be able to give you an answer to why magnets attract each other except to tell you that they do. And to tell you that that’s one of the elements in the world − there are electrical forces, magnetic forces, gravitational forces, and others, and those are some of the parts. If you were a student, I could go further. I could tell you that the magnetic forces are related to the electrical forces very intimately, that the relationship between the gravity forces and electrical forces remains unknown, and so on. But I really can’t do a good job, any job, of explaining magnetic force in terms of something else you’re more familiar with, because I don’t understand it in terms of anything else that you’re more familiar with. (Emphasis added.)”

And that, right there, might be the long and the short of it. If you lack too much understanding—whether it’s a background in physics or the sciences or just familiarity with thinking about how things work and working from axiom to logical conclusions—you may very well have no hope of understanding this discovery. The explanation of what scientists at CERN just accomplished will sound like so much magic to you. It will be, to paraphrase the late, great Arthur C. Clarke, “a sufficiently advanced technology that is [to you] indistinguishable from magic”. You may, however, still be able to understand how it may affect you. Most people don’t understand how their cars or smart-phones or GPSs work, but they know that they can do more stuff because of them.

Pressing on nonetheless

If you fail to understand not only the news of the discovery but also have no idea of any of the dozens of levels of scientific underpinnings for it, how do you even stand a chance of ranking the importance of this news vis à vis other seemingly more pressing news, like Katie Holmes leaving Tom Cruise? In what way does this news differ from the latest discovery in crystal healing? How the hell can you tell the difference?

Does it mean that the next generation of smart-phones will be even faster? Are we getting jet-packs or hover-cars?

None of the above. [2]

How science works

Conservation notice: the following section is a pretty pedantic, long-winded and largely self-congratulatory exercise in describing the scientific method. YMMV.

Well, what sort of magic can we look forward to, then?

None, I’m afraid.

The only conclusion we can reach so far is that CERN has produced promising results that are almost certain to provide evidence that the best model we have about how the universe is structured at the lowest level is not wrong. Therefore, the predictions made based on that model have a higher likelihood of being, if not correct, then useful.

The latest results from CERN are simply science doing what science does. Science is about (1) making guesses—hypotheses—about the way the world works; and (2) running experiments to test those hypotheses. If the experimental results agree with the prediction, it provides evidence that the guess might be correct. There is almost no way to prove that the guess is correct, although some theories have a tremendous amount of evidence to support them.

Take the theory of matter—that matter is composed of atoms—we have seen these atoms with electron microscopes, which seems to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that atoms exist. Electron microscopes operate on other principles that contain assumptions about light, wavelength and so on. That the microscope works as expected—that any piece of technology works as expected—provides support for the various theories on which that technology is based. The existence of such functioning technology doesn’t prove the hypothesis, but it provides strong evidence for its usefulness—that other results and theories can be derived from and based on it.

The LHC (Large Hadron Collider) is an enormous piece of technology based on the same principles and theories on which much of our consumer electronic culture is based. Scientists predict that cell-phones will work and then, when we build them, they function as expected, which while not proving beyond a shadow of a doubt all of our theories about light and energy, it certainly shows that enormously useful results can be obtained from predictions based on unproven theories. Scientists came up with a model of how the universe works at the most basic level—the Standard Model—and they’ve spent decades searching for the particles that the theory predicts.

How do you find particles that you can’t see? How do you know when you’ve found one? How can you trust the particle detector? The LHC accelerates particles in opposite directions through dozens of miles and then collides them at very close to the speed of light to excite them into high-energy states that they hope will result in the particle that they’re looking for. Theory predicts the myriad ways in which these particles can decay into other particles. Theory predicts which particles are created initially and that the technology in the LHC will contain and accelerate those particles through the tubes. Theory predicts how the detector react to particles tearing through them and theory predicts that the computers will retain this information, crunch the numbers and display the results.

It’s all theory and it sounds like a Rube-Goldbergian contraption but the point is that scientists made many, many predictions about what they thought would happen, based on their new theories and using equipment built to specifications dictated by other theories—a veritable pyramid of millions, if not billions, of assumptions about how the world works, all having acquired the sheen of veracity simply because they have proved to be extraordinarily useful and reliable predictors of reality—and all of these experiments came out as expected, providing a lot of evidence to support these theories, particularly the Standard Model.

What if they hadn’t found the particle they were looking for at the energy-level at which they expected it? Before the recent discovery, there was already a lot of talk about throwing out the Standard Model and having to try again. In fact, some scientists were looking forward to being able to start from scratch because progress on closing the gaps and removing the hacks from the Standard Model has been so slow and seemingly hopeless.

Though we don’t know for certain (or with 5 sigmas of confidence) that the particle is the Higgs boson, we may soon. The odds of tossing out the Standard Model entirely went down significantly already; if the particles that the LHC is generating match the other expected parameters of the Higgs, those odds will drop again.

Models with a lot of evidence to support them are more reliable. They are a very good thing.

Thank you, science! [3]

The article There is something and not nothing by Roger Ebert (Chicago Sun Times) waxes a bit philosophic about scientists and how the scientific method is “the awesome” and how we should be more than a bit in-awe of those among us who can hypothesize on such a grandiose and abstracted level. You know, instead of calling them nerds and pushing them until they cry. Or ignoring them completely and letting the world burn. But I digress.

“The mind of a theoretical physicist must be a wonderful place. It can consider things that for me are only words, and will always be words. It can make play with multiple dimensions. It can contemplate black holes. It can not only theorize the existence of the Higgs boson, but can devise an experiment to find it–an experiment that succeeds.”

“Here is where we get to the heart of the question. The scientific method has no interest in belief. What you believe is of interest only from an autobiographical viewpoint. Scientists (1) regard a phenomenon they would like to explain, (2) suggest a hypothesis to explain it, and (3) devise an experiment to test their hypothesis.”

It’s the Internet, so there’s a cartoon about this (SMBC):

Not a scientist

Forget the “God” particle

Somehow the Higgs boson has earned the epithet “The God Particle”. This seems to be a name promulgated by those who don’t understand what’s going on at all.

It’s the highest-energy particle predicted by the Standard Model. That’s the reason it took so long to find. It’s not because it’s evidence of a God that has managed to remain hidden from our heathen eyes until the ruthlessness of science managed to prize it from God’s omnipotent—and yet still helpless-to-resist—hands.

The article Worth the Wait: A timeline of the Standard Model of particle physics (The Economist) includes the following chart that depicts how long it took to discover the other particles in the Standard Model:

A timeline of the Standard Model of particle physics

Now that you’re better-versed in these matters, you may have noticed that they incorrectly indicated that the Higgs Boson has been discovered. Though it’s a strong possibility that 126GeV spike indicates the presence of the Higgs Boson, we’ll have to wait until CERN gathers more data and publishes results either at the end of this year or early next year to know for sure (or, to be more precise—because we’re scientists!—to know within 5 sigmas).

What does 5 sigmas mean?

Does 5-sigma = discovery? (Physics Buzz)

“When physicists announce that they have a 5-sigma result, that means that there’s a 1 in 3.5 million chance that it was the result of a statistical fluctuation over the spectrum of experiments they performed. Particle physicists working on the CMS and ATLAS experiments are looking for “bumps” in their data that stand out from the background. When these bumps reach the 5-sigma level, they have very good reason to believe that they’ve discovered or observed a new particle.”

Alles klar? I hope so. Because it’s not going to get any easier than that.

Ok, fine. The CMS and ATLAS are other particle accelerators—like the LHC at CERN—that were also busily smashing particles together. The data from all of the machines are combined to create a huge pile of data which, hopefully, will provide enough collisions for the probabilistic noise to subside into the background and let the desired signal appear. In the form of an anti-climactic bump on a graph.

What is the Standard Model?

The article Gotcha! The hunt for physics’s most elusive quarry is over (The Economist) describes the model as follows:

“[T]he Standard Model [is] the best explanation to date for how the universe works—except in the domain of gravity, which is governed by the general theory of relativity. The model comprises 17 particles. Of these, 12 are fermions such as quarks (which coalesce into neutrons and protons in atomic nuclei) and electrons (which whizz around those nuclei). They make up matter. A further four particles, known as gauge bosons, transmit forces and so allow fermions to interact: photons convey electromagnetism, which holds electrons in orbit around atoms; gluons link quarks into protons and neutrons via the strong nuclear force; W and Z bosons carry the weak nuclear force, which is responsible for certain types of radioactive decay. And then there is the Higgs.”

If you never took chemistry and your understanding of neutrons, protons and electrons is already shaky—not to mention the particles of which they themselves are composed—the paragraph above means nothing. For you, the take-away is that there’s a theory called the Standard Model that predicts the building blocks of everything and we’ve been able to verify the existence of all of these particles save one: the Higgs boson. Batting 16 for 17 would, in most fields be considered quite good. For science, it’s only a good start.

Though the Higgs was predicted by the Standard Model, there are other theories—supersymmetry, extra dimensions, etc.—that stand ready to account for any deviations from the properties predicted by it, should any such deviations appear in the data. The official Higgs announcement thread (Reddit) includes the following rather cryptic description of some of these.

“If it’s really a Higgs, then we need to solve the Hierarchy problem or abandon the idea of naturalness. The problem is that the Higgs is “unaturally light”, since quantum corrections would “naturally” make the Higgs mass as big as the Planck scale (1019 GeV compared to the 126) and to make it light we need a an arbitrary cancellation that is heavily fine-tuned. The best candidates were supersymmetry and large extra dimensions, but it seems that both are very unlikely now.”

Supersymmetry and extra dimensions—both associated with most versions of string theory—something you may also have heard of if you watch The Big Bang Theory—were alternate ways of looking at the problem in an attempt to get around some of the less elegant ramifications of the Standard Model.

This is all getting into quite heady territory, though. We can just leave it at scientists getting all itchy when their theories of how the universe works involve too many “magic numbers” and hand-waving in order to work. It would be nicer if all explanations and proofs proceeded without any “hacks” or assumptions about optimal conditions.

Is it the Higgs boson or isn’t it?

You keep writing that CERN hasn’t yet determined that it’s the Higgs boson, but many sources—including the Economist above—are equating the discovery of a particle with the discovery of the Higgs boson.

The short answer is that the LHC has detected many particles at the energy level predicted by the Standard Model for the Higgs boson. Particles have other properties than just energy, though, so further data-mining will have to determine whether the detected particles match more than just the energy level of the Higgs boson.

A longer answer can be found in the official press release, CERN experiments observe particle consistent with long-sought Higgs boson (CERN):

“The results are preliminary but the 5 sigma signal at around 125 GeV we’re seeing is dramatic. This is indeed a new particle. We know it must be a boson and it’s the heaviest boson ever found […] The implications are very significant and it is precisely for this reason that we must be extremely diligent in all of our studies and cross-checks.”

That part should be pretty clear. We’ve definitely found something and it’s very promising, but easy does it with iggs-Hay oson-Bay.

“The results presented today are labelled preliminary. They are based on data collected in 2011 and 2012, with the 2012 data still under analysis.”

Data-mining proceeds apace, but there are petabytes of data to analyze. Cool your heels, world media. We’ve waited forty years; we can wait a few months more. The article CERN celebrates as Higgs signal reaches significance by John Timmer (Ars Technica) mentions that CERN is pushing onward as fast as it can to get more data:

“CERN has indicated it will extend this year’s LHC run by several months in order to get enough data to know more things about the newly discovered boson. This is the last chance they’ll get before the extended shutdown for upgrades, and they probably have some sense of what it will take to push key measurements into statistical significance now.”

So why is so hard to figure out if we found a Higgs or not? The particles are really, really small and exceedingly fleeting. That means the Higgs, when produced, decays almost immediately into other, more stable particles. These are the particles picked up by the detector. It’s the presence of these particles—as well as their energy levels, spins, etc. [4]—from which scientists can construe that a particle with a certain energy had to have caused it.

A comment on Ars Technica by a scientist working at CERN provides more detail on the mechanics of the detectors:

“Basically each detector is made of sub-detector: “trackers” that sense electrically charged particles passing through and “calorimeter” that have enough material to stop particles (except muons and neutrinos) and measure their energy deposit. That’s the “raw data”, [on the] order [of a] few MB per collision, [a] few PB of data per year. These low-level informations are then processed to “reconstruct” the path of charged particles (their path in a magnetic field allows to measure their momentum) and the energies and properties of deposits in calorimeters.

“For the Higgs decaying in two photons, one would then require two energetic energy “blobs” in calorimeters with a shape that makes them look like photons and calculate the invariant mass. Unfortunately there are many other ways to produce two photons with no Higgs involved so other properties of the collision need to be used to reach a good sensitivity.”

As you can imagine, this is all bloody difficult. The article CERN celebrates as Higgs signal reaches significance by John Timmer (Ars Technica) talks about this a bit.

“Finding the Higgs was always a matter of probability. We can’t detect the particle directly, but the Standard Model tells us what its decay pathways will look like, provided we feed the equations a specific mass. So, for example, we can calculate that a Higgs boson weighing in between 115 and 135GeV (the range suggested by the Tevatron data) should decay into two photons with some frequency; two Z bosons with a different frequency, and other combinations of particles with additional probabilities.

“The challenge comes from the fact that the Standard Model also predicts that processes that don’t involve a Higgs will also produce similar looking patterns of particles. So, we’re left with probabilities. Do we see an excess of these events that can’t be accounted for by non-Higgs decays? How statistically significance is that excess?”

“Particle physicists have settled on a specific measure of significance called five sigma (or five standard deviations) before they’re willing to accept that we’ve spotted a new particle.”

So, not only do we have to play Sherlock Holmes with the detected data, it turns out that it’s not only a Higgs boson that can cause the Higgs-like pattern that theory predicts and that we’re looking for.

Imagine a forensic scientist who picks shards of pottery out of the wall and determines that something had blown up a bunch of pottery in that room. But she also knows that there were three cops in that room shooting like crazy and it stands to reason that there are pottery shards in the wall. There seem, however, to be more pottery shards than expected, which lends credence to her theory that there was a fourth shooter involved.

Now take the scenario and run it millions—or billions? trillions? I don’t even know—of times and see if the data consistently shows the presences of a fourth shooter. That’s how you get to five sigmas of certainty and that’s how you extract a signal from all of the noise.

And next? Imagine if she now had to figure out where the fourth shooter was standing and what color his pants were. [5]

Does the Higgs make me fat?

The last thing that needs to be addressed are the wild claims—some accompanied by demonstrations with sand and ping-pong balls—that this particle imbues everything with mass. The post, Lets get this right: The Higgs Boson does *not* give “us” mass by Foolie (Reddit), takes the wind right out of the sails of that argument:

“99% of the proton mass (and similarly the neutron mass) is coming from the strong nuclear force and not the Higgs mechanism, and we have one electron per proton in the universe at 0.0005 GeV, compared to the proton mass of 1GeV. (The electron does get all of its mass from the Higgs mechanism, it’s just not very much).”

The strong nuclear force is one of the four known fundamental interactions (electromagnetism, weak nuclear force and gravitation are the others). It’s the one that binds protons to neutrons at the core of atoms. Again, if that doesn’t make any sense to you, then the take-away is that the Higgs mechanism imbues atoms with almost none of their mass. Your Sunday-morning talk show was misinformed.

The article CERN celebrates as Higgs signal reaches significance by John Timmer (Ars Technica) also takes a crack at describing the place that the Higgs occupies in the Standard Model.

“Physics’ Standard Model describes the fundamental particles that make up all matter, like quarks and electrons, as well as the particles that mediate their interactions through forces like electromagnetism and the weak force. Back in the 1960s, theorists extended the model to incorporate what has become known as the Higgs mechanism, which provides many of the particles with mass.”

Again, the particles to which the citation refers are some of the more exotic, ephemeral of the particles in the Standard Model and not the ones that our high-school physics courses are talking about. In other words, the Higgs has nothing to do with your weight. It’s the Twinkies.

The official press release, CERN experiments observe particle consistent with long-sought Higgs boson (CERN), also alludes to the effect that the Higgs boson is theorized to have on the mass of other particles.

“The next step will be to determine the precise nature of the particle […] Are its properties as expected for the long-sought Higgs boson […] Or is it something more exotic? The Standard Model describes the fundamental particles from which we, and every visible thing in the universe, are made, and the forces acting between them. All the matter that we can see, however, appears to be no more than about 4% of the total. A more exotic version of the Higgs particle could be a bridge to understanding the 96% of the universe that remains obscure.”

You see, discovery of the Higgs, while huge for scientists, is not so huge that they’re going to sit on their laurels. Instead, in the official press release, they’re already looking beyond what is a fantastic result, but a predicted one [6] to see if they can figure out what’s up with all the dark matter?

What’s dark matter? That’s a discussion for another article. Or Wikipedia is just a few clicks away if your interest in the dark arts of physics has been piqued.

The Fukushima I Nuclear Accidents (Wikipedia) page is quite good and the “Reactor status summary” somewhere in the middle of the page is updated often.

Wikipedia Reactor Status Summary

In addition to the reactor status information, there is a crowdsourced map of microsievert values from 215 Geiger counters across Japan. These are (ostensibly) real-life readings, but it’s hard to know whether to believe it or not. They certainly look legitimate, but it’s the Internet, so take it with a grain of salt.

Status as of March 27th, 2011

Rounding out the images is a the following chart, which illustrates the relative sizes of various radiation doses, including the current output of Fukushima (illustrated in green in the bottom left-hand corner of the upper right-hand box). It includes a couple of measurements that show 365 times the background radiation at a few places 50km from Fukushima, but also notes that other locations nearer to the plant showed barely any elevation. Again, it’s just information; don’t forget your Mark Twain. [1]

Radiation Dose Chart (XKCD)

And then there’s the article Going Critical by George Monbiot with a quite pragmatic look at the energy situation, posing a lot of thought-provoking questions. [2] He, too, referenced the XKCD graphic above:

“For a clearer view, look at the graphic published by xkcd.com(2). It shows that the average total dose from the Three-Mile Island disaster for someone living within 10 miles of the plant was one 625th of the maximum yearly amount permitted for US radiation workers. This, in turn, is half of the lowest one-year dose clearly linked to an increased cancer risk, which, in its turn, is one 80th of an invariably fatal exposure. I’m not proposing complacency here. I am proposing perspective. (emphasis added.)”

He goes on to discuss alternatives to both nuclear and fossil fuels, noting that there are a lot of questions that remain largely unanswered by the more strident proponents. For example, intermittent energy sources like solar and wind are not well-suited to the instant- and always-on grid to which we’ve become accustomed (about getting rid of that lifestyle, more below). The one truly scalable battery for such needs is converting power to potential energy by pumping water into mountains and getting hydroelectric out of it on demand.

“As the proportion of renewable electricity on the grid rises, more pumped storage will be needed to keep the lights on. That means reservoirs on mountains: they aren’t popular either.

“[…]

“And how do we drive our textile mills, brick kilns, blast furnaces and electric railways? Rooftop solar panels? The moment you consider the demands of the whole economy is the moment at which you fall out of love with local energy production.”

This line of argument presupposes a national or international energy grid; perhaps we can also rid ourselves of such a thing and go to local power. Even if we could get everyone to reduce, the energy demands of nearly 7 Billion people cannot be met efficiently without global pooling of resources. If every community goes it alone, the world will quickly devolve into a post-industrial-revolution-level nightmare of pollution and destruction. While things are not nearly perfect—or even good—today, things are still far better than they were when power was deregulated, highly localized and, necessarily, privatized. As Monbiot mentions, “[t]he damming and weiring of British rivers for watermills was small-scale, renewable, picturesque and devastating […] wiping out sturgeon, lampreys and shad as well as most seatrout and salmon”

So we can’t localize power anymore—not unless we can really see our way to going back to a stone-age existence [3]—and low-impact, alternative energies are either not quite ready (missing battery-reservoirs) or never will be able to take over current demand without becoming just as dirty as the solutions we have now. If nuclear is to be abandoned at the same time, countries will go running back to fossil fuels, where there will be immensely powerful corporations welcoming them with open arms and soothing words.

But back to Monbiot:

“On every measure (climate change, mining impact, local pollution, industrial injury and death, even radioactive discharges) coal is 100 times worse than nuclear power(10,11). Thanks to the expansion of shale gas production, the impacts of natural gas are catching up fast(12).”

Given that as an alternative, we should be very careful about allowing ourselves to be scared into abandoning nuclear power. The crisis at Fukushima has not yet been resolved, but it has also not yet turned into the Chernobyl that was predicted by some of the hotter heads. That disaster may still come, but it does us no good to ignore the possibility that nuclear may still be the cleanest fuel choice we have, despite all of its faults.

There are no easy answers.

Perhaps we should instead focus our energies on getting nuclear power out of the hands of “the liars who run the nuclear industry” and into the hands of another organization. Sure, the government may also end up screwing everything up, but it hasn’t yet proved that it will. [4] In fact, it’s government regulation that’s kept the nuclear industry in check enough that, so far, “[a]tomic energy has just been subjected to one of the harshest of possible tests, and the impact on people and the planet has been small”. Perhaps we should just get the private industry out of the equation entirely—it’s not like they’re willing to do anything without subsidies anyway. We’re already paying for nuclear with our taxes, we might as well be running it.

Two articles drifted down my news-pipe today that caught my eye: Is anything nuclear ever really super safe small and simple? by Robert Cringely and The no-BS info on Japan’s disastrous nuclear operators by Greg Palast.

We’ll start with Palast, who was formerly employed as a “lead investigator in several government nuclear plant fraud and racketeering investigations”. He’s also the guy who proved that Bush & Co. stole the election in 2000 and who’s been working in England almost exclusively because no one will hire him in the States. In England, he works for BBC Newsnight, which is not too shabby and lends credence to his reporting. The reason he needs said credence is that he shoots early and often and is exceedingly hyperbolic. He’s often right as well, but he doesn’t make every effort to dot his i’s and cross his t’s and mixes correlation with causation and just loves circumstantial evidence.

That said, I like the guy; I’ve read some of his books, I follow his newsfeed and I like his interviews (like a recent one on the radio program, This Is Hell!). But the blog post linked above doesn’t actually prove what it purports to prove: that corruption led to shoddy construction and poor generator maintenance in Japan. It seems like Palast was employed exclusively in the States when he was inspecting nuclear plants, but he applies his conclusions to “[t]he industry”.

He goes on to claim that the fact that the “Emergency Diesel Generators […] didn’t work in an emergency is like a fire department telling us they couldn’t save a building because “it was on fire.”” While a cute comment—Palast’s specialty—it’s not strictly true, as the post linked yesterday described such plants as having multiple fallback scenarios, of which the first line of diesel generators is only one. Is it possible that the generators didn’t run because they weren’t maintained properly? Of course it is. Is it possible that they didn’t work because of the earthquake/tsunami? Also a plausible explanation. Does Palast offer anything other than an assertion that corruption and idiocy were to blame? No. At this early stage, there’s no point in speculation except to draw attention. The correlations throughout the article are not evidence in any way. For example, look at how Palast tries to cast aspersions on Toshiba:

“One of the reactors dancing with death at Fukushima Station 1 was built by Toshiba. Toshiba was also an architect of the emergency diesel system. […] [America’s new reactor] will be made substantially in Japan by the company that bought the US brand name, Westinghouse — Toshiba. […] I once had a Toshiba computer. […]”

Though I want to acknowledge Palast’s ideas—because he really has been right about so much in the past—these are nothing but the ravings of a madman. If Glenn Beck or Alex Jones had written this, I’d have thrown it out immediately. Palast spends the rest of the article actually talking about crookedness and faked compliance tests in the industry, but in the States, again simply assuming that what goes on there must also go on in Japan. He may be right, but he hasn’t really made a case yet. He says he’s working on an investigation, though, so time will tell.

I’ve heard from other sources that Japan’s nuclear industry is as corrupt and apt to cut corners as any other large corporate beast, but we’re trying to deal here with the proof that Palast provides (if any). What I’ve heard is also conjecture from sources that have a healthy dose of cynicism about big business, but not much more. I count myself among these people, but I’m trying to keep my big yap closed until I know more—or at least enough to feel confident enough to think I know what’s going on. The problem with a lot of the coverage I’ve read is that this level of prudence doesn’t seem to be shared and there are a lot of grainy pictures of smoky cooling towers, haz-mat suits and headlines with the word “MELTDOWN” in them—and followed by question marks to keep the lawyers at bay.

The other article is by Robert Cringely, who I was surprised to find also had experience in the nuclear industry because I’ve known him only as a tech pundit for the last 20 years or so. He’d already posted once about the reactors to note that it appeared that the delays on Japan’s part were all-out efforts to avoid having to actually kill their reactors and never be able to start them again.

It’s a very pragmatic concern that shows a lot of cool-headed judgment actually. If you have to let 1000 people possibly die of radiation poisoning in order to retain 20% of your country’s power network, would you do it? Or do you take the course that not one person may die as a direct result of either action or inaction…but that 1000s will die as a result of a 20% loss of electrical capacity, but that no one will ever be able to blame on you? There’s also the matter of the cost of rebuilding this lost energy-production capacity. How many will suffer because these dozens of billions will be spent on replacing power plants instead of hospitals? And all to replace atomic power plants that had to be shut down so hard that they will never run again? Did you do enough to save the plants and the wasted cost? It’s not like the company running the plant is the only one to benefit if it’s not destroyed: the people and businesses getting their power from that plant also benefit.

A pragmatist would have weighed all of these concerns before pulling the kill switch on those plants; only a sentimentalist with no responsibilities could say—immediately—that a handful of human lives is worth more than a whole country. These questions are not as easy to answer as the media and other armchair analysts make them out to be.

But let’s get back to Cringely’s second article, which deals with comparisons to Chernobyl, of which there have been so many—and why not, they’re both about nukular plants, right? But I digress. Cringely contacted an old compatriot who’d actually worked on containing Chernobyl:

“These Japanese reactors are old and fairly well understood while Chernobyl was brand new. These Japanese reactors had already been in service for 16 years when Chernobyl melted down. In comparative terms there is no comparison — Chernobyl was vastly worse.”

I wasn’t aware that these plants were so old, actually. Cringely goes on:

“These Japanese nuclear accidents come down to the simple fact that nobody back in the 1960s designed nuclear plants to run for 40 years then go through an 8.9 earthquake.”

Given their age and relative resilience in the face of catastrophe, it’s hard to countenance shouts of corruption and incompetence within days of the accidents. As mentioned above, it may turn out that incompetence and corruption did make the problem worse, but why assume that when the plants withstood an earthquake 5 times stronger than their designs foresaw? It’s like the guy who complained about the iPad 2's battery life because it exceeded its specifications by less than the iPad 1 did.

Cringely, unlike Palast, is quite bullish on the Toshiba technology, called 4S (Super Safe Small and Simple), which are factory-produced and small. There have been regulatory issues so far but those will probably be swept aside in an effort to replace lost capacity. Of course, that will just give conspiracy-mongers more material from which to theorize that the nuclear power companies actually caused the earthquake and subsequent tsunami, only so they could sell their next-generation power plants.

Who’s right? I don’t know. Cringely sounds more reasonable than Palast and has at least a few citations rather a mix-and-match of hyperbole and allegations. The point is, if you’re making gross generalizations about Japanese culture or business practice, you’re probably wrong. Unless you’re an expert, which you’re probably not.

So, I don’t know either, but I know that I’m going to wait until the dust has settled a bit and we know how much and which damage was actually caused before joining in any finger-pointing.

Seriously, calm down. Stop babbling about how the Japanese are a closed society that would rather immolate our whole planet, taking us all down with them as they refuse to admit any mistakes made in an effort to avoid losing face.

It’s all bullshit, just like all such blanket statements about millions of people are.

I’m going to put this right here: Why I am not worried about Japan’s nuclear reactors by Dr Josef Oehmen.

Read it. It explains pretty well why a small explosion on top of a cooling tower in no way implies that radioactive rain will be melting faces in LA tomorrow.

First, the earthquake was “5 times more powerful than the worst earthquake the nuclear power plant was built for”. The control rods were introduced and the reactor was shut down. The next step was to get rid of the remaining latent heat. However, the “tsunami took out all multiple sets of backup Diesel generators”, which were transporting that heat away. The engineers had to fall back a few “Depths of Defense” lines and ended up preparing for a meltdown because they could not get sufficient power with which to disperse all of the latent heat. However, this had also been planned for and the “the core catcher and third containment” were built to manage and contain such a meltdown with no radiation leakage. Those parts were not damaged by the earthquake in any way that would have prevented them from doing that job.

Even if there were to be a full meltdown, there would not have been another Chernobyl:

“It is worth mentioning at this point that the nuclear fuel in a reactor can *never* cause a nuclear explosion the type of a nuclear bomb. Building a nuclear bomb is actually quite difficult (ask Iran). In Chernobyl, the explosion was caused by excessive pressure buildup, hydrogen explosion and rupture of all containments, propelling molten core material into the environment (a “dirty bomb”).”

But before we get ahead of ourselves, the engineers were still managing the heat, hoping to be able to get a cooling solution in place before they had to accept a full meltdown. So they “started venting steam from time to time to control the pressure”; that means that huge clouds of white “smoke” (steam and radioactive nitrogen with a short half-life that decayed and was rendered inert within seconds) appeared and the world media went into OMG “radiation leakage”!!! overdrive.

However, periodic venting was not enough and the control rods had just about boiled away enough water that they became exposed to air.

“But Plan A had failed – cooling systems down or additional clean water unavailable – so Plan B came into effect. This is what it looks like happened:

“In order to prevent a core meltdown, the operators started to use sea water to cool the core. I am not quite sure if they flooded our pressure cooker with it (the second containment), or if they flooded the third containment, immersing the pressure cooker.”

The article ends with a wonderful bullet list of how science will save us all (that last was written with no sarcastic intent whatsoever). Of course, you can also believe that nuclear scientists the world over are trying to radiate you just like climate scientists are trying to make you give up your carbon lifestyle.

Those of you who cling to your conspiracy theories like a security blanket as you cower on the bed wondering whether the boogie-man will come from the closet or from under the bed will continue to do so no matter what you read. However, it seems that the Japanese power plants performed above and beyond the call of duty (or, in this case, above and beyond their design parameters). Thank you, science.

Further reading:

• Battle to stabilise earthquake reactors (World Nuclear News)
• Efforts to manage Fukushima Daiichi 3 (World Nuclear News)
• Media updates on nuclear power stations in Japan (ANS Nuclear Café)
• Discussion Thread – Japanese nuclear reactors and the 11 March 2011 earthquake (Brave New Climate)

The Gulf of Mexico fills with oil. This disaster is short-term insoluble, even for highly-advanced, 21st-century, western nations. Medium- to long-term, there is likely to be a solution. There always is. The cleanup process will be long and painstaking, but it will be out-of-sight for most people. Once the problem is solved and years have passed, the shortness of human memory will serve to help us forget what happened—and to be surprised the next time it happens.

Petroleum is intrinsic to almost all facets of a westerner’s life. It’s the base from which plastics are made, which are essential to our electronic gadgets, our household goods, almost all packaging and countless other goods. It’s used as a base for fertilizers, without which our hapless agricultural system [1] would grind to a halt; the same system uses a tremendous amount of petroleum to harvest this food. It’s also the primary fuel for the transportation system that shuttles cattle, feed and other goods all over the country. Jet fuel needs highly-refined petroleum; the food system as we know it today—far-flung and still tightly integrated enough to deliver perishables from the other side of the globe—would collapse without it. And our high-flying lives with it. And then there are our cars, our personal transportation without which so many Americans could never get to their jobs or their stores or pretty much anything.

The sentiment above is completely understandable when contrasted with the heart-wrenching photos of animals floundering in our mess. To say nothing of the humans that are suffering loss of livelihood and home. It is, however, not enough. We can’t boycott petroleum until we have either (A) another fuel source that is as portable and powerful as refined petroleum or (B) we change our lives significantly to not need so much portable energy.

Choice (A) is a pipe-dream for now. Fusion is the only possible way out—and it’s always 20 years away and it will never be portable (at least not in the short- to medium-term).

That leaves choice (B). We stop depending on food shipped all over the world; we stop pretending that petroleum is cheap; we stop wrapping everything in plastic; we stop disdaining healthy tapwater for individual-sized portions of water wrapped in plastic; we cure ourselves of our deep, deep illness that will continue to kill the planet and produce photos like those above.

So, yeah, hop on a bike if you can; but nothing is solved until we make much deeper changes to our expectations, our lifestyles and, most of all, our ethics.

Bill Gates is the world’s most generous philanthropist and has made curing malaria and combating viruses of all kinds his new goal in life (see Mosquitoes, Malaria and Education by Bill Gates (TED) for the video). However, he’s changed his focus to climate change because, though preventing disease is a huge concern for the third world, rampaging climate change will make many more things far worse for the world’s poor. As he put it in his talk, Innovating to zero! by Bill Gates (TED):

“But energy and climate are extremely important to these people, in fact, more important than to anyone else on the planet. The climate getting worse, means that many years their crops won’t grow. There will be too much rain, not enough rain. Things will change in ways that their fragile environment simply can’t support. And that leads to starvation. It leads to uncertainty. It leads to unrest. So, the climate changes will be terrible for them.”

Innovate to Zero! by Bill Gates (TED)

Bill provides a good overview of the effort needed to address climate change as well as pragmatically explaining what it means to do so and what, exactly, such efforts entail. The equation he presents is CO2 = P × S × E × C. P stands for popoulation, which he sees headed to about 9 Billion people from our current 6.8 Billion. He expects that estimate to come down by about 10 or 15 percent “if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services”. This does not mean that Bill plans on peddling vaccines that will kill the world’s poor—as has been seriously suggested is his intent on less reliable news sources—but that populations with access to “reproductive health services” and especially societies in which women play a bigger role and have more to say about social life—those tend to have lower birthrates.

Suggesting that population should be cut even more drastically or by means that are less evolutionary is currently still a no-no [1]. Gates has faith that technology will get us all the energy we need with zero emissions, so the question of how many members of the human race should the planet be expected to house can be safely tabled for another day.

The S stands for services and is somewhat less controversial, as long as he leads by saying that “it’s a great thing for this number to go up” so as not to perturb any capitalists and only suggests that members of the first world “probably could cut back and use less”, but doesn’t require it. It’s the no-sacrifice plan: Keep breeding and using energy as much as you like, ‘cause we’re going to figure out how to get it without further screwing up the planet. You’re welcome.

The E is efficiency, in which an increase is not necessarily a good thing. That is, increasing efficiency doesn’t usually mean that less energy is used overall: Rather, it means that the more efficient service just got cheaper and gets used even more than ever, raising the total energy usage. Again, this is not a problem if you put all your money on the final letter in the equation.

Finally, we have C, which is the amount of CO2 put out for each unit of energy used. This is the one that Gates thinks will go to zero and save us all. It’s kind of the one that has to go to zero because we’re not going to enact any population controls (à la China). We’re also not going to enforce service reductions because once you’ve given people something, you can’t take it away—and once people see other people getting something, they’re all going to want it too (and justifiably so). Even if you’re not going to enforce cuts in lifestyle (services), you could still enforce efficiency standards to make that lifestyle less energy-intensive, but, as mentioned above, an increase in efficiency is likely to be negated by an increase in usage of that service (because it got cheaper).

So, we’re left with hoping that there is some magical fuel source out there that uses no CO2 and is cheap and safe and increases male potency. As Gates puts it, we need energy miracles. Gates goes through the usual suspects—fossil fuels, nuclear and renewables—and points out the weaknesses of each: Fossil fuels are CO2-intensive, nuclear power is complex and expensive and renewables suffer from an energy density & storage problem.

Gates is backing the Terrapower horse:

“The idea of Terrapower is that, instead of burning a part of uranium, the one percent, which is the U235, we decided, let’s burn the 99 percent, the U238. It is kind of a crazy idea. In fact, people had talked about it for a long time, but they could never simulate properly whether it would work or not, and so it’s through the advent of modern supercomputers that now you can simulate and see that, yes, with the right material’s approach, this looks like it would work.”

This sounds quite interesting, as burning a pile of U238 is a much more controllable reaction and coincidentally also burns up most of the waste left over from traditional fission reactors. The pile would basically smolder in the ground for 60 years until it had burned its way through all the fuel. Energy is harvested in the traditional way, with steam generated by the heat of the burning pile driving turbines.

Sure, there’s a lot of work to do, but there are at least a couple of decades in which to do it. Of course, the last Copenhagen conference didn’t go very well and pretty much no country hewed to its required reductions under the Kyoto agreement (5% reduction from 1990 levels by 2012) and the latest financial meltdown has not been met by any real regulatory reform in any country with a big hand in financial markets. And, hey, it only took the U.S. nearly two years to come up with some regulatory reform that will likely die on the floor of the Senate. And it only took over a year to get a gutted corpse of a health care bill to almost be passed—and then only because nearly the whole budget for it will be promised to America’s most important citizens: Corporations. So here’s hoping that Bill and Terrapower can save us from ourselves: Because our governments sure as hell aren’t politically capable of doing it. [2]

If you’ve been looking for an introduction to Quantum Computing and how it surpasses our current binary computing, the article A tale of two qubits: how quantum computers work by Joseph B. Altepeter (Ars Technica) is a great place to start. The language is about as accessible as it’s going to get and there are helpful diagrams sprinkled throughout. For example, the engine of a quantum computer—entanglement, and its result: “action at a distance”—is analogized thusly:

“Imagine if someone showed you a pair of coins, claiming that when both were flipped at the same time, one would always come up heads and one would always come up tails, but that which was which would be totally random. What if they claimed that this trick would work instantly, even if the coins were on opposite sides of the Universe.”

Partial and Full DecoherenceThe final two pages delve into the quantum physics and present some of the main concepts—and equations—which is where things get a good deal hairier, if it’s been a long time since you’ve seen notation of this sort. However, any discussion of quantum physics soon blurs the line between hard, measurable physics and philosophy. At some point, the equations abandon us and it becomes very difficult to know what’s going on or even to know what we know about what’s going on or to be able to trust that which we observe or that which our carefully planned experiments observe because even our most careful selves are still influenced by us being ourselves and being constrained by the physical system in which we enjoy degrees of freedom.

Scientists have already reached the point where they are presented with an “equation [that] means that every part of the experiment, even the experimenter, are all part of a single quantum superposition.” (Emphasis in original.) Heisenberg showed long ago that an observation influences that which it observes; in the world of quantum computing, the systems—or superpositions of states—being observed are so delicate and involve such miniscule energies that the measuring instrument exerts an even greater influence because the energy introduced into the system by the act of measurement is disproportionate to the energy of the system itself. The really strange thing is that if, as stated above, the experimenter is part of the superposition, all attempts to follow the chain of superposition to find an end where there is a so-called collapse of the waveform and things are decided one way or the other—à la Schroedinger’s cat—have failed to find it.

The article concludes:

“Maybe, at some point, it all gets too big, and new physics happens. In other words, something beyond quantum mechanics stops the chain of larger and larger entangled states, and this new physics gives rise to our largely classical world. Many physicists much smarter than myself think that this happens. Many physicists much smarter than myself think it doesn’t, and instead imagine the universe as an unfathomably complex, inescapably beautiful symphony of possibility, each superposed reality endlessly pulsing in time to its own energy. To be honest, we just don’t know yet.

“But as far as we’ve looked, it’s turtles all the way down. [1]”

How the hell are you supposed to build a computer based on that? We know how to build 2- and 3-qbit computers, but the 100-qbit computer will likely have to wait until we can answer some of the seemingly unanswerable questions outlined above. As with every generation that looks up toward the next, just before a quantum leap of intuition and reasoning, it seems impossible. But imagine how impossible all that we take for granted today would seem to someone from just a century ago. Maybe humans in just a few generations will take “acting outside of the superposition of reality” for granted and be able to perform the most breathtaking calculations in no time at all. More likely, though, they’ll be taking quantum computing for granted and most will be using it without even knowing it—perhaps to make the Genius mode on their iPods seek out much cooler playlists.

Though it sometimes seems that religion always has the upper hand in public debate, there is usually at least one crusader per generation willing to come out strongly in favor of the Enlightenment and against superstition. The article Mencken, Islam, and Political Correctness (Capitalism Magazine) cites the early 20th-century journalist H.L. Mencken on the subject of religion and other closely related superstitions.

“What the World’s contention amounts to, at bottom, is simply the doctrine that a man engaged in combat with superstition should be very polite to superstition. This, I fear, is nonsense. The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous.”

Note that Mencken railed against “superstition” and not just religion. Superstition is that which one believes despite a lack of any supporting evidence or even despite strong evidence to the contrary. Superstition is that which is taken on faith and used as a guiding principle. It is entirely acceptable in a post-Enlightenment world for superstitions—and their supporters—to have to defend themselves on the basis of provable, reproducible facts. It does not suffice to point to a text more than two millenia old and of dubious origin to “prove” that miracles occurred at some point. Even if they did, that they no longer do and seem to be wholly unpredictable in that regard makes them irrelevant as tools in the modern world.

And the only way to go after an idea is to go after its supporters. In the case of religion—and in the specific case of the U.S.—every politician is a supporter. It is, in fact, hard to imagine anyone being elected in the U.S. to a high office with an explicitly non-religious platform. And aspirants would do well to stick to high-falutin’ Christianity, if they want to have any chance whatsoever. But Mencken would not approve of this; why let fools who believe in unprovable fairy tales and superstitions anywhere near the levers that control our society? We wouldn’t let these buffoons anywhere near anything important (like a nuclear power plant, Homer Simpson notwithstanding), so why do we so blithely let them God Bless America their way into office time and again?

Again, Mencken:

“Is [a superstition], perchance, cherished by persons who should know better? Then their folly should be brought out into the light of day, and exhibited there in all its hideousness until they flee from it, hiding their heads in shame. True enough, even a superstitious man has certain inalienable rights. He has a right to harbor and indulge his imbecilities as long as he pleases, provided only he does not try to inflict them upon other men by force.”

Would that that were the case. Instead an airing of their fantastical opinions only seems to strengthen the support they enjoy from their equally fanatical base.

Despite the many counterexamples in modern American politics, Mencken is, factually, right, and the superstition and misinformation to which he refers lurks everywhere…not just in religion. It seems even the most careful of us make assumptions about subjects in which we are not adequately educated. It’s the embodiment of the principle that “a little bit of knowledge is dangerous”: We learn just enough to convince ourselves that we know everything and start espousing opinions based on that knowledge.

As a case in point, the author of the Mencken article himself avers about 2/3 of the way through the article that “[t]here is no pick and choose, or mix and match, no half-doses of belief in Islam, as there is Christendom, as the numerous varieties of faiths and sects in it attest.” This is just a silly thing to believe, regardless of how “numerous” the “varieties of faiths and sects” he interviewed. There is just as much discussion over the true meaning of sections of the Koran—ranging from basic translation to determining whether something was intended as metaphor or literally or whether a particular Sura is considered canon or not—as there are of the Bible. Just because some people interpret the Koran as ordering all believers to kill non-believers (having perhaps, but not necessarily, failed to convert them first) doesn’t mean that a given practicing Muslim actually believes this or is likely to act on it. Certainly no more so than their Christian counterparts are likely to actually believe that their non-Christian friends will end up in hell. It is only our all-too-human love for alienation of the other that lets us believe some obviously preposterous lines of reasoning (or to be swayed by them when employed by others). Most people who identify as Christian probably interpret that whole Judgment Day/Heaven/Hell thing a little more abstractly than their own particular sect dictates. But, the Muslim is the other and so we feel perfectly comfortable ascribing to him an otherworldly discipline—especially when it comes to wishing for all of our deaths.

Richard Dawkins enthusiastically takes up Mencken’s mantle in the 21st-century; in Haiti and the hypocrisy of Christian theology by Richard Dawkins (Washington Post), he discusses Pat Robertson’s putatively horrendous reaction to the earthquake in Haiti (he blamed it on the Haitians having angered the one true God by practicing Voodoo):

“Loathsome as Robertson’s views undoubtedly are, he is the Christian who stands squarely in the Christian tradition. The agonized theodiceans who see suffering as an intractable ‘mystery’, or who ‘see God’ in the help, money and goodwill that is now flooding into Haiti, or (most nauseating of all) who claim to see God ‘suffering on the cross’ in the ruins of Port-au-Prince, those faux-anguished hypocrites are denying the centrepiece of their own theology. It is the obnoxious Pat Robertson who is the true Christian here.”

It is Dawkins at his finest, simply citing the Christians’ own scripture back at them. To which most will scratch their heads and proclaim that they do not believe this, that they instead believe in turning the other cheek and being the Good Samaritan and all that rot. For those, Mr. Dawkins elucidates further, making his point quite crystal-clear:

“Dear modern, enlightened, theologically sophisticated Christian, your entire religion is founded on an obsession with ‘sin’, with punishment and with atonement. […] Educated apologist, how dare you weep Christian tears, when your entire theology is one long celebration of suffering: suffering as payback for ‘sin’ − or suffering as ‘atonement’ for it? You may weep for Haiti where Pat Robertson does not, but at least, in his hick, sub-Palinesque ignorance, he holds up an honest mirror to the ugliness of Christian theology. You are nothing but a whited sepulchre. (Emphasis added.)”

It takes a Dawkins to shake the agnostics out of their rut and remember (realize?) that Christianity does not involve too many sunny moments, actually. Christianity is very firmly about slogging through a sin-encrusted mortal life in the hope that things get better in an unconfirmable beyond. And, with the recent idiocy about the anti-choice commercial aired during the Super Bowl, Dawkins also has something to say about the highly specious reasoning employed to justify not having aborted said Tim. The argument goes something like this: since the mother decided against all logic not to abort her fifth child and, since he grew up to play football really well, all abortions are wrong. Dawkins cites the idiotic faux-syllogism about Beethoven happily bandied about by the anti-choice crowd and then concludes (from the article The Great Tim Tebow Fallacy by Richard Dawkins (Washington Post)):

“If you follow the ‘pro-life’ logic to its conclusion, a fertile woman is guilty of something equivalent to murder every time she refuses an offer of copulation. […] As far as anything that matters is concerned, an aborted fetus has exactly the same mental and moral status as any of the countless trillions of unconceived babies.”

An abortion is just one way of not conceiving a potential genius, though perhaps that’s the reason Catholics are not to spill their seed wastefully (a topic most thoroughly covered by Monty Python in The Meaning of Life with Michael Palin leading off with “The Sperm Song” [1]). Bill Hicks also already covered this ground long ago in his comedy routine. [2] Dawkins is certainly not alone—and should be proud to be in such august company—but he’s one of the few (like Mencken) with enough gravitas to get published in a halfway mainstream newspaper…and thank goodness for that.

In search of the world’s hardest language (The Economist) is an interesting read, proposing candidates based on number of sounds, number of genders or genres, number of individual sounds, number of difficult-to-make sounds, number of consonants, consistency of spelling (adherence to consistent phonetic rules) or agglutination (combining of words to express concepts).

So, for example, spelling in French and English are not particularly predictive, so that makes them difficult to write error-free without a lot of practice. While French has two genders for nouns, English has none, which makes it much easier in that regard. None of the major western languages have a lot of sounds, with languages from Eastern Europe, Africa and South America providing languages with many more sounds.

As far as declension goes, English is an absolute godsend, with very little to worry about in that regard, compared to a nightmare like German, which has several generally used cases, each of which has different rules depending on noun gender (three of ‘em: masculine, feminine and neutral) and there are, of course, exceptions. While German is in the witness chair, we’ll also note that genders are pretty much randomly assigned, with very few rules to guide a non-native speaker to the right one. Then there are the many foreign words (Fremdwörter) that are generally neuter … unless they’re not. In some cases, the foreign word is so strongly assimilated that it gets a masculine or feminine gender, sometimes—but not always—taken from the gender of the word in German that it replaced.

The Economist article notes that Tuyuca has a “feature that would make any journalist tremble”, which is a requirement that a verb ending correlate to whether or not the implied speaker of the sentence knows something happened or whether the speaker is positing that it did. German’s got this one too: It’s called the subjunctive. For many common verbs, the subjunctive shares a suffix with the case of other non-subjunctive cases so, when you’re first learning German and you’re reading a newspaper, you keep thinking someone doesn’t know how to write German because they keeping screwing up the cases. Later, when you learn about the subjunctive, you realize that all those times you read something as fact, it was actually an unsubstantiated allegation.

Though Tuyuca gets the prize for hardest language—it has between 50 and 140 noun groups (or genders)—German gives it a run for its money. German is much more common and yet contains a large number of the features that make a language hard to learn and master. The article didn’t even mention different verb forms depending on relationship of the addresser to the addressee. Here, German mercifully has only two (formal and informal), but it adds another layer of complexity to the act of properly conjugating and declining a verb or choosing a pronoun or possessive. The romance languages have this as well, but they’re missing some other tricks that make German so much fun.

Another very interesting article on a language not mentioned in the Economist article above is Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard? by David Moser

“There is truth in this linguistic yarn; Chinese does deserve its reputation for heartbreaking difficulty. Those who undertake to study the language for any other reason than the sheer joy of it will always be frustrated by the abysmal ratio of effort to effect. Those who are actually attracted to the language precisely because of its daunting complexity and difficulty will never be disappointed. Whatever the reason they started, every single person who has undertaken to study Chinese sooner or later asks themselves “Why in the world am I doing this?” Those who can still remember their original goals will wisely abandon the attempt then and there, since nothing could be worth all that tedious struggle. Those who merely say “I’ve come this far – I can’t stop now” will have some chance of succeeding, since they have the kind of mindless doggedness and lack of sensible overall perspective that it takes.”

Another very common language not mentioned in the Economist article is I’m Trying To Learn Arabic (Slate):

“MSA [Modern Standard Arabic] has about the same role in the Arab world that Latin had in medieval Europe: It’s the language of writing, religion, and formal speeches, but it is no one’s native spoken language any more. Arabic has long since become a series of “dialects,” which are actually more like separate languages, as many varieties are mutually incomprehensible. […]

“So, if I go to Egypt or Lebanon in a year, having managed to get some near grip on my classroom language, I will be walking down the street asking people for a bite to eat in something that will sound almost as conversationally inappropriate to them as Shakespearean English would to us.”

Human Space Exploration MapSaturn at Equinox (75 exposures)Hubble's final servicing missionWith recent rumblings from NASA as to the successor to the aged and mostly retired space shuttle fleet, National Geographic published the lovely graphic of human space exploration seen to the left. Also very recently, NASA has been trumpeting their images of Saturn as sent back over the years by the Cassini probe. The second image to the left is from the photo essay, Saturn at equinox (Big Picture/Boston.com). The final image on the bottom is from another photo-essay called Hubble’s final servicing mission (Big Picture/Boston.com). Click the images to make them bigger; click the links to see many more pictures.

Though the phrase above was originally intended to apply to technological gadgets, it applies equally well to any concept of sufficient complexity. The trick is often used to get people to believe things that are wrong or that they would not believe in were they mentally equipped to follow the reasoning. Instead of simply reserving judgment because they don’t know enough, most people will elect to bluff and simply agree with the most competent-sounding person in the room or, failing that, the loudest.

However, instead of being baffled about advanced alien technology (as in Clarke’s case), people are baffled about most of the world around them. They survive only because the world has been so thoroughly idiot-proofed, drawing laughable conclusions that a five-year could tear apart logically, but buoyed in their beliefs because of all of the similarly mentally under-endowed people who agree with them. They perceive their argument as gaining weight based solely on the number of people who believe it and the volume at which they shriek it to others. Since these people have no actual information, they also don’t believe that there is such a thing as actual information. Everything becomes a matter of opinion, a matter of faith. It’s just too bad for them that the real world doesn’t care what they think. Reality does not forget history or basic physical laws.

This mechanic is in ample evidence today as the world tilts into an abyss of its own making. The economic situation is complex and involves many, many factors on which sound decisions about public and domestic policy must be based. The relationship between causes and effects—not to mention second- and third-order effects—is not always obvious and is often counterintuitive.

Nevertheless, people who’ve heretofore spent no time educating themselves about history, the workings of the government or the actual conditions in the nation or the world, are holding forth with opinions. Though this dearth of experience applies to people you know, it also applies to most of the people in the media as well. People are lent credence merely because they express themselves with confidence and use a large vocabulary. They may not use it correctly and the basis of their argumentation may be utter hogwash but, for many people, it is indistinguishable from magic. They believe it because it sounds believable and they are woefully unequipped to dispute it.

For example, a meme currently cruising the airwaves—mostly courtesy of Fox News—is that FDR caused the Great Depression with his social spending plans. The first thing to note is that there no longer seems to be such a thing as lying in American News anymore. In America, everything is a matter of opinion, even historical facts. Fox’s egregious attacks on written history will likely never see a retraction, nor will anyone be thrown off the airwaves for incompetence. This will not happen because no one sees this as a problem; the line between fact an opinion does not exist, so there will never be need for a retraction or correction again. It’s true because they say it is. If you disprove it will “facts”, well, that’s just your opinion, man.

America’s last depression started well before FDR became president. The effects of the depression were being beaten back mostly with social spending, all heartily endorsed by the wisest economist to have ever walked the planet, John Maynard Keynes. When political pressure forced an end to this social spending before it was economically wise to do so, the country resumed its calamitous nosedive into a depression, from which only World War II could rescue it.

Now, the version of history above is easily corroborated—especially with the sheer awesomeness of the Internet—by checking the sequence of events in history books. And, no, a book by a famous television personality does not count as a history book. However, if a person doesn’t know anything about history and doesn’t question authoritative voices, they could easily be convinced that the upswing between FDR’s election and the plummeting return, five years later, to depression conditions, simply never existed. That is, with history and economics firmly in the “magic” category for them, people would then believe that, while social spending is incapable of preventing or fixing a depression, military spending works gangbusters. Though logic says that spending is spending, it’s all magic to them, so they accept the expert opinion on faith.

Unfortunately, because of their information-poor state, they can’t tell the difference between facts and complete bullshit. They are, in fact, woefully unqualified to have an opinion at all, putting them on par with most of the talking heads with whom they agree. With a minimum investment of energy, the system is self-perpetuating and, all of a sudden, they’ve got people with much better things to do spending all of their time debunking argumentation that should never have even seen the light of day. Instead of talking about how to get out of Iraq and stop waging war around the world, you end up mired in a conversation about whether or not there were WMDs; instead of talking about energy policy, you end up in a conversation about whether or not there are waste products from nuclear power plants or whether or not the word “clean” when applied to coal is really all sunshine, unicorns and rainbows. With no history and no information and only magic, useful discussion is dead before it begins.

There are such things as facts and there are such things as opinions that are worth much more than others. (As the old saying goes, “opinions are like assholes…everybody’s got one.”) People who don’t know anything about anything are still strongly encouraged to question what they hear; the whole point is not to simply believe what one hears because it’s been presented in an appealing way. Think about what you hear and learn and don’t accept overly simplified reasoning about or solutions for problems that are clearly much more complex. A good rule of thumb is to disbelieve the person who claims to have the answer to everything and to listen closely to the person who clearly delineates what he knows and clearly indicates that he is only offering a well-educated guess. And, for God’s sake, stop believing things that are so clearly illogical and impossible just because it’s easier than actually learning something or thinking.

The ruminations above were triggered by a few sources.

Compared to the problems caused in the first world, third world problems can generally be solved relatively cheaply. It costs well north of a trillion to even make it look like you’re doing something about saving the U.S. economy, but it takes a few paltry tens of billions to feed everyone in Africa. How much is that? A couple of months in Iraq? We can spend our money on blowing things up, but not on feeding people or controlling disease. While building a military machine to grind the world under its bootheel seems to quite clearly be the government’s job, the job of curing eminently curable diseases and feeding the world’s poor is apparently left up to previously rapacious tech-industry tycoons who’ve turned over a new leaf (I’m looking at you, Gates). Whereas Gates doesn’t yet have anything to do with the invention described in the article, Inventor’s 2020 vision: to help 1bn of the world’s poorest see better, it’s a safe bet he will.

It’s also a relatively safe bet that the U.S. government will find some way to disparage the idea and offer zero funding for it because they won’t be able to figure how to monetize or militarize a cheap pair of glasses. After all, how can one even conceive of getting glasses cheaply to the world’s poor? We can conceive of a six-year operation like the one going on in Iraq, with hundreds of billions of dollars spent, hundreds of thousands of people involved and military infrastructure like this world has never seen, but bring up the idea of distributing cheap glasses to the poor in Africa and everyone will look at you like you have three heads for even thinking that such a thing is possible.

Instead of dwelling on the negative though (like we do), let’s hear about these glasses:

“Inside the device’s tough plastic lenses are two clear circular sacs filled with fluid, each of which is connected to a small syringe attached to either arm of the spectacles. […] The wearer adjusts a dial on the syringe to add or reduce amount of fluid in the membrane, thus changing the power of the lens. When the wearer is happy with the strength of each lens the membrane is sealed by twisting a small screw, and the syringes removed.”

Coupled with increased programs to combat the diseases and maladies that make so many of the world’s poor (prematurely) blind in the first place, these glasses could be just the thing for so many people in need. Unfortunately, some can’t see the utility, as with the members of the Reddit community, who could only point out that the prescription wouldn’t be spot-on or that it wouldn’t be able to address stigmatism or produce bifocals or trifocals … and so on. Their negativity was apparently based on their complete inability to think of how much less miserable life for tens of millions would be if they could actually see anything at all. Instead, they based their analysis on what they thought the glasses could do for their rich, pampered asses, which is a sadly typical reaction.

Here’s hoping these glasses find some funding and find some way of being manufactured in quantities and at prices that will really help. Let’s hope fervently that they don’t end up cursed by ridiculously high prices, like many drugs, medicines and seeds whose patents belong to the international pharmacological and agricultural concerns. We’ve got enough things on the “stuff that could be produced cheaply and sold at-cost to the poor, but we’re not socialists, are we now?” list.

Silicon Tracking DetectorThe LHC (Large Hadron [1] Collider) is located in France and Switzerland at CERN [2]; the first experiments begin in early August 2008 and a full test of all 27km of track is planned in September. Project members expect to be analyzing the first collisions by the end of the year. The entire track will be cooled to just 1.75ºC shy of absolute zero (to -271.25ºC) and will be in-use for decades. The big expectation is that the long-sought Higgs Boson [3] makes an appearance.

The article Large Hadron Collider nearly ready (Big Picture) has dozens of high-quality images showing this incredibly large-scale machine.

Just as governments seek to justify everything they do—regardless of how violent or fascist—as being in the name of democracy or the greater good or for moral reasons, other dubious ideas have glommed onto the idea of portraying themselves as science in order to accumulate more than their fair share of respect. It seems that the cloak of science is just the spoonful of sugar the media needs to make any crackpot idea go down without a hiccup. Two areas in particular are swirling with boasts of provability and scientific evidence: intelligent design and denial of anthopogenic climate change. The second agenda, in particular, has been accused of not having support in the form of peer-reviewed journal articles. Seeing that acceptance without peer review was not easily forthcoming, the various support systems for this point-of-view have set about generating scientific consensus.

Given enough financial means and enough power, this isn’t so difficult to do; what is difficult is to build a preponderance of evidence. That’s where the media will be very helpful, as they are notoriously reluctant to take a position of any kind in any issue, regardless of how much less justifiable one side may be. [1] So, with issues of climate change, it suffices to say that a world coalition of scientists have issued a report that climate change is driven by human activity … however, other scientists disagree. Now, your average, hurried viewer is going to absorb the idea that everything’s up in the air, and the media will not have lied. They will merely have misrepresented as one side is represented by a concordance of scientists from all over the world, whereas the other is a much smaller group of individuals—primarily from the U.S. and primarily in the employ of or heavily funded by right-wing think-tanks or energy companies—who have formed their own, much smaller echo chamber.

It is in this way that peer review can be twisted to the purposes of any idea. Last Words on Saletan by Cosma Shalizi (Three-Toed Sloth) puts it quite well:

“A journal’s peer review is only as good as the peers it uses as reviewers. If everyone, or almost everyone, who referees for some journal is in the grip of the same mistake, then they will not catch it in papers they review, and the journal will propagate it. In fact, since journals usually recruit new referees from their published authors or people recommended by old referees, mistakes and delusions can become endemic and self-confirming in epistemic communities associated with particular journals. … Put simply, the problem is that any group of quack scholars with a shared delusion can put together a journal, dub each other peer reviewers, and go on their cheerful way by endorsing each others’ work for their journal.”

Naturally, our media should be aware of this and avoid it, if they were at all interested in the end result of a better-informed public regardless of the interests of their corporate masters. Even without assuming evil intent on the part of those that half-ass their jobs as journalists, it’s reprehensible how easily so many of them tend to get it wrong the first time, then only occasionally apologize for their stupefying incompetence some time later. It seems there is no way to get fired from some jobs these days.

To some degree, the reluctance to take sides can be regarded as a form of politeness, an especially liberal disease toward any other opinion. In a generous mood, one could toss journalists this bone and forgive them their transgressions as niceness rather than incompetence. It’s an almost purely liberal disease as the right wing (and not just in the U.S.) almost never reciprocates, happily steamrolling over other ideas in what for them is quite clearly an ideological war with only one clear winner.

This is such a big heap of partisan right-wing bullshit… (D-squared Digest) goes into more detail:

“Why are American liberals so damnably obsessed with extending intellectual charity to right wing hacks which is never reciprocated? It reaches parodic form in the case of those tiresome “centrists” […] They’re practically 50% of the way between Republicans and Democrats! Yeah, specifically they’re right-wing Democrats in non-election years and party line Republicans any time it might conceivably matter.”

The argument breaks down, however, when you consider to whom liberals are willing to extend this eternal olive branch. Seeing good qualities in political opponents extends only to those that espouse the more hard-line stance of those in power or in control of major purse-strings. That is, while the most extreme warhawk, poor-pillaging opponent is given the benefit of the doubt that he or she [2] truly believes their ideas will work for the greater good in the long run, Communist or labor opponents are attacked as simpletons, madmen or evildoers. So it’s clearly not “intellectual honesty [or] pure scholarly decency” that drives them. We must therefore assume that it’s compliance with a prevailing mindset within which they must make their living … and to which they are willing to sacrifice truth and honesty in the name of their careers and personal comfort. If you express honest ideas that don’t slam immigrants, terrorists, communists, labor unions or other such scum accordingly, you’ll find yourself looking for a job or looking the wrong way over the fence in Cuba. You have freedom of speech; but everybody knows you have to watch what you say. [3]

The universe is, apparently, quite big. This is made all the more amazing in light of how small its constituent components are, since it clearly takes quite a lot of them to make up something so mind-bogglingly huge as the universe. Brian Cox at LIFT Conference (LIFT07) gave a brilliant talked aimed at the layperson—if the lay-person happened to be versed in the basics of particle physics. Dr. Brian Cox explains nuclear physics is another, wider-shot video of the same event, on which you can actually see the things he’s constantly gesticulating at and referencing to in the first version of the video. [1]

The talk goes on for perhaps 20 minutes, with question & answer taking another 10. Cox starts small, working up from the smallest particles, stretching analogies and metaphors to the breaking point in an effort to get across just how brobdingnagian the dimensions truly are. Many of us don’t look up from our daily lives – our small, local worlds. Perhaps we hang on to the edge of our seats every night, wondering which lucky contestant walks away with two rectums thanks to Simon on American Idol or perhaps we think ourselves above the hoi-polloi because we take part in—or, at the very least, follow—local politics. Perhaps we’re computer savvy or savvy about national or even world politics, knowing the ins and outs of suffering peoples everywhere and the exacts steps necessary to solving the Middle East, if only someone would listen.

And then, there’s Brian Cox, on stage, telling you how the image you’re looking at is the equivalent of a dime held up to the sky at a distance of 75 feet from you and, that within that speck of sky are a hundred thousand galaxies, each of which holds a hundred billion stars [2]. And then, like magic, there’s time-lapse footage from the Hubble telescope—the greatest data-gatherer ever created by man—showing two galaxies crashing into each other and proving the existence of dark matter. [3]

His explanation of gravity sweeps even the most stalwart listener away to the fantastical 11-dimensional landscape of string theory, which posits an actual universe much stranger than the observable one. A universe in which the strong forces are strong compared to gravity only here, in the limited 4-dimensional space that it is our lot to be able to observe. He first cordones off gravity as the odd-man out of forces because of its extraordinary weakness (1040 times weaker), proving it by reminding you that you can pick up a piece of paper, despite the entire planet pulling on it in the opposite direction. He then uses the piece of paper to represent our paltry 4 dimensions, in which the other forces are so strong, within the auditorium, which represents the universe’s 11-dimensions, throughout which the force of gravity is dispersed.

And, for just a minute, you’re in his world, and making the particles—and the Greek letters that represent them—get in a row and dance the Conga is all that matters. Purely Earth-based problems and issues seem trite and small in comparison to converting 4 million tons of hydrogen to pure energy per second [4]. It’s easy to be seduced into thinking that it is more important to know what happened one billionth of a second after the Big Bang, that if we can only find the Higgs Particle, we can finally know that the incredibly elegant theory we have [5] for everything—everything, from the very big to the very small, from the very fast to the very slow, from the very strong to the very week—is correct. But, then come thoughts of the many people that don’t have the luxury of caring more about the universe than where their next meal is coming from or where their next billet will be. But, it’s good that the Brian Cox’s of the world can clear these things up and, hopefully, make all of our lives better in the long run.

The audience was either over- or underwhelmed, making the responses in the q&a session much more pedestrian, focusing on the technology used to store and process all of the data from the LHC. This kind of talk generally pulls different people in different directions: for the unindoctrinated, it can sound just as much like a fairy tale as the Bible. This is an unfair conclusion because, where the Bible is made up out of whole cloth (more or less), theories of the Higgs particle and strings are built on gosammer lattices of logical thought, with each piece strengthening and reinforcing the whole. In science only the fittest of ideas survive, not necessarily the most entrenched. More understandable is the response of “who cares?” from those who see enough life-threatening problems to solve close by. But humanity—since the enlightenment—has always been dragged forward by science, which tells it what is and isn’t possible.

Watch the video; it’s a half-hour well-spent.

The BMI, or Body-Mass–Index, has been in the news a lot lately. Whether because of runway models, whose BMIs are dangerously low, or because of kids in first-world countries, whose BMIs are dangerously high. The BMI myth by Peta Bee (The Guardian) takes a look at the utility of this measurement in determining health. As usual, now that the public (as well as insurance companies and government agencies) has glommed on to this statistic as the final say in health, scientists have taken a look at it and found it wanting.

Calculating BMI

The BMI has gained popularity because it can be calculated from easily obtainable statistics. Using weight in kilograms and height in meters, calculate:

BMI = kg / (m × m)

Americans will have to do a bit more work, either converting from pounds and inches to the metric system (yuck!) or using the formula below:

BMI = (lbs / (in × in)) × 703

The magic number, 703, normalizes the value back to the same scale as that calculated with metric inputs. [1]

Now that you know how to calculate it, realize that it’s more or less useless for athletes or any other reasonably fit and active people. The problem, in a nutshell, is that it doesn’t take body composition into account. Muscle weighs more than fat; therefore, an athlete weighs more than a non-athlete of similar build. In fact, many top athletes have BMI ratings of “obese” precisely because of this. According to other research, in order to determine actual health (rather than just obtaining a numeric evaluation of conformance with society’s beauty standards), “[t]he important thing to consider is how body fat is distributed around the body, as the real problems occur when fat accumulates in the central abdominal region”.

Two things comes out of this research:

1. Measuring the percentage of fat in a person is very useful in determining fitness and health
2. Measuring the distribution of fat in a person is very useful in determining risks of disease

Measuring Percentage Body Fat

According to How to Calculate Body Fat, there are a few ways to measure the percentage fat in a body.

Skinfold Calipers

The size of the fat above the hips (the “love handles”) is measured; this is accurate only when done by an experienced and trained person (though you can teach yourself, of course).

Hydrostatic Weighing

The most accurate method, but the most difficult to do, as it requires a hydrostatic weighing tank in which you are completely submerged and the amount of fat in your body is measured using Archimedes Principle.

Home Body Fat Scales

This is probably the easiest method:

“A low-level electrical current is passed through your body and the “impedance”, or opposition to the flow of current, is measured. The result is used in conjunction with your weight and other factors to determine your body fat percentage.”

However, the accuracy of this method is severely affected by “amount of water in your body, your skin temperature and recent physical activity”. They recommend not exercising or eating for at least 4 hours before the test in order to improve accuracy. If you have one of these at home, this is pretty easy to achieve, in that you simply step on the scale right after getting out of bed. [2] This method’s precision is not at all related to its accuracy: measuring under the same conditions day after day results in extremely consistent readings. Therefore, this method is very useful for determining change, as when dieting.

Measuring Fat Distribution

The most effective of the quick methods for determining overall health is waist-circumference measurement, as “it is a direct measure of the part of the body that tends to accumulate fat”. In order to normalize this measurement for all body types, including children, doctors recommend using a waist to height ratio [3]. Just the waist measurement alone, however, is enough to determine whether you’re at high-risk for heart disease:

“Having a waistband of more than 88cm (35in) in women and 102cm (40in) in men indicates the highest risk of cardiovascular and metabolic disease. There is an increased risk of the diseases for women with measurements of more than 80cm (32in) and men whose measurement is over 94cm (37in).”

Do It Yourself

Though the BMI is the de-rigour standard, it is extremely inaccurate for determining actual health or fitness. Body fat scales are relatively cheap and quite precise, if not 100% accurate, and can be used for determining changes over a period of time. Waist measurement is even lower tech and is also a fairly accurate indicator of susceptibility to the number one killer—in America anyway—heart disease. These two used in conjunction offer a relatively cheap and effective way of tracking health at home.