Let's Talk Books And Politics

Tuberculosis: The Forever Plague

2026-02-24T11:14:00.000-08:00

Tuberculosis (TB) is a disease it has become easy to forget about. Pria Anand reminds us that it has not gone away and we still don’t have effective means to deal with it. Her article, The Plague That Won’t Die, appeared in the New York Review of Books. It mainly focused on the volume “Phantom Plague: How Tuberculosis Shaped History” by Vidya Krishnan.

TB has been around as long as humans have been recording their history, perhaps even longer. For much of its history it was better known as “consumption.” TB was first identified as a bacterial disease by Robert Koch in 1882. It is best known as a disease of the lungs, but it is more complicated than that.

“Tuberculosis can seem inscrutable, a protean disease that can settle in virtually any organ in the body. In the lungs it causes the bloody cough and gasping breath that ravaged the Brown family; in the lymphatic system it causes swollen masses that can press on the soft muscles of the vocal cords, robbing victims of their voices; in the guts it causes raw, bleeding ulcers and obstructed bowels. The disease is airborne: colonies of bacteria are exhaled from the lungs of a person with pulmonary TB in a fine mist of particles that can linger suspended in the air for hours. How long the bacteria survive in the air depends on the surrounding conditions; in spaces with poor ventilation—an enclosed car, for instance, or a windowless room—they can last hours or even days.”

“Our lungs are a strange paradox: they are protected by the hard carapace of our ribs but also tremendously exposed to airborne bacteria, which can slip in with a single breath. To prevent infections, the labyrinthine passages that make up each lung are lined with white blood cells. But Mycobacteria tuberculosis are impenetrable. Each cell is surrounded by a thick barricade made of fats and proteins. In the lungs they are consumed by white blood cells but not digested, surviving undisturbed as more white blood cells arrive to wall off the infection, forming scarred balls called tubercles. Here the bacteria can live for decades or even a lifetime, forming a latent infection and replicating slowly within an unwitting host, undetected until they take advantage of an aging or suppressed immune system to explode into full-blown consumption… Malnutrition, pollution, and illnesses like HIV and diabetes can all contribute to TB activation.”

In the nineteenth century, when Koch identified the cause of the disease, TB was the primary cause of death. Poor sanitation and overcrowding seemed to be contributing factors in infection rates. In moving from the nineteenth to the twentieth century overall hygiene improved for most people and the disease became more closely identified with the urban poor and less of a threat to the financially well off. Treatments were essentially nonsensical until the development of antibiotics in the 1940s. In 1921 the BCG (Bacillus Calmette–Guérin) vaccine became available providing some benefits but it is incapable of controlling the disease. It took 40 years to develop this vaccine. A century later and we still have nothing better. Even with antibiotics capable of treating an infected person the treatments are complex and last for several months. To make matters worse, antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria have appeared and are becoming more common.

One gets the feeling that TB is not getting sufficient attention as a dangerous disease. It suffers from being mostly a disease of the unfortunate, making it easy for the fortunate to ignore. In addition, the need for vaccines and antibiotics face severe market disadvantages because they are one-time treatments when there is more money to be made in long-term treatments. Pria Anand has similar feelings.

“The treatment regimen for an active tuberculosis infection is crude: months of toxic antibiotics that have the potential to harm nearly every part of the body. One of the treatments can strip the nerves and leave patients’ feet numb and tingling, while another turns both tears and sweat orange—patients are advised not to wear white T-shirts when taking the drug. Both medications can damage the liver. The treatment can take anywhere from three to nine months depending on the drug combination, and once it has begun, a patient cannot miss a dose. The first-line drugs we use to treat TB were all developed decades ago—one more than a century ago—and many of our second-line treatments for drug-resistant TB were originally developed to combat other infections before they were repurposed for the burgeoning plague of consumption.”

“…tuberculosis remains the leading infectious cause of death worldwide. Nearly a century and a half after Koch’s first attempts to devise an inoculation, we still have no effective vaccines. Globally, one in four people carries tuberculosis, though most are neither contagious nor symptomatic. In the United States, where the prevalence is closer to three in one hundred, the disease thrives primarily in the conditions created by social injustice: overcrowded prisons, for instance, or temporary shelters. Yet programs to curb the spread of TB are among those hit hardest by both the Trump administration’s closure of USAID and its assault on the National Institutes of Health, attacks that are projected to lead to millions of avoidable TB deaths over the coming decade.”

The three-in-one-hundred rate of infection means there are about 13 million infected people in the United States. About ten percent are expected to end up with an active infection, predicting over a million tuberculosis outbreaks in our future. This is not a negligible threat. Perspective is provided by the article Recent Tuberculosis outbreaks in the U.S. are a call to action.

“Yet more than 30 years after an emergency declaration for TB - the world's next-most lethal infectious disease, which is both preventable and curable - progress has been woefully inadequate and there is no end in sight.”

“In just the last few months we've seen TB outbreaks in Alabama, Virginia, Arizona, New York and Canada. In Washington state, a woman with active TB disease who refused to isolate or be treated was imprisoned.”

“It is estimated that one person with active TB disease has the potential to infect 10 other people around them. Like COVID, TB could very quickly create a large scale public health emergency - one that can only be contained with robust TB infection testing and contact tracing.”

Anand finishes by telling us what Krishnan hoped to accomplish with her book.

“Her book, she writes, ‘has one intended audience: readers who have the good fortune to have remained ignorant of TB but can ill afford to be so any longer.’ To imagine that Black and brown people, incarcerated people, and poor and unhoused people are somehow uniquely vulnerable is to be ignorant of TB’s long history, forever linked with our own. ‘No one is safe,’ she writes, ‘until everyone is’.”

College Admission in the US and China: Who Does It Best

2026-02-16T10:08:00.000-08:00

Even though the term meritocracy was first popularized in a dystopian satire in which “meritocratic” elites take control of a nation that practices meritocracy, and the satire das been demonstrated to be highly predictive, nations still rely on the practice. The path forward for individuals in advanced societies is usually by gaining admission to a top university. Meritocratic practices are used in the US and in China to determine who gains entry to these schools. Which nation has the best selection processes?

Iza Ding provides a useful discussion of how meritocracy in university admissions is being handled in the two countries in a review of the book The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China by Ruixue Jia and Hongbin Li with Claire Cousineau. This appeared in the Londen Review of Books under the title Studying is harmful.

China provided the initial example of applying meritocratic methods to determine who was worthy of entering elite positions in society.

“The keju, or imperial civil service examination, selected scholar-officials who had mastered the Confucian canon – after years, if not decades, of study – for entry into the ruling elite. The exams were initially restricted to nominees, but by the early seventh century eligibility had expanded to most free men. This was centuries before European leaders began to debate whether to extend the franchise beyond propertied males.”

The exam persisted into the twentieth century into Mao’s era. Apparently, he had trouble passing the test and the title of Ding’s piece comes from a quote attributed to Mao. Soon after Mao’s passing the custom of testing to gain a position returned and the gaokao for university admission was back in business.

“Today, more than thirteen million teenagers (and some adults) take the gaokao each June. The tests are conducted over several days, under tightly controlled conditions. Universities in China don’t look at personal statements or hold interviews. Only test scores count: in history, geography and politics for the liberal arts track; physics, chemistry and biology for the science track; and Chinese, maths and English for everyone. The questions are strictly guarded and double anonymity is enforced between the candidates and markers. For weeks, the gaokao dominates the news.”

There is no equivalent faced by US youth. There are standardized tests like the SAT and ACT, but they are not the equivalent in being totally important in admission considerations. While the Chinese system can be a brutally demanding experience for young students, US youth face a similarly demanding process to gain access to the best universities. Rather than focusing intensely on a single exam, they must create for themselves a persona that the universities will find impressive. Besides good grades and test scores, they must demonstrate, over several years, participation in extracurricular activities such as sports, topical club activities, and public service. Evidence of competent participation and leadership potential is expected. Introverts will thrive in the Chinese system; success is much less likely in the US.

“In his book Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (2014), William Deresiewicz writes of his students at Yale: ‘Look beneath the façade of affable confidence and seamless well-adjustment that today’s elite students have learned to project, and what you often find are toxic levels of fear, anxiety and depression, of emptiness and aimlessness and isolation’.”

The question of interest is which of the two approaches in fairest in providing opportunity to the best individual students. In both countries there is an unfair advantage for urban students over rural counterparts. A similar advantage goes to the wealthy over the poor.

“In spite of its flaws, the gaokao’s equalising power outstrips the admissions machinery of American universities by a wide margin. In China, children from the wealthiest families are 2.3 times more likely than the poorest to attend top universities; in the US, the gap is nearly elevenfold.”

China seems to be making progress in providing more opportunities for rural children to get a college education.

“According to Jia and Li, in 2003 only 7 per cent of children from the poorest rural counties entered any kind of college, against nearly half of their urban peers; six in a thousand rural high schoolers reached a top university. The figures have improved but remain stark: by 2015, 35 per cent of rural students were going to university, compared to 51 per cent of urban students.”

Consider what happens when the gaokao results are released in China.

“Performing well in the exam can be life-changing. The highest scorers become national celebrities, lauded in the press and given gifts – cash, cars, even flats – by eager patrons in the private sector. Top universities enter scholarship bidding wars to secure their enrolment. A degree from one of these universities offers entry to the upper rungs of Chinese society. The gaokao has been called a rite of passage, a great equaliser and a ritual of China’s secular religion, education. Its political weight and its status as a recurring spectacle of collective fervour have led to comparisons with the US presidential election. In a country plagued by corruption, the gaokao is remarkably clean. ‘Open and competitive’ are the watchwords of democratic elections, but they are also the defining features of China’s exam empire. Exams are its functional substitute for the ballot box. The gaokao is more than a test; it’s an enduring political institution.”

This system provides China with the scientists and engineers and other professionals needed to run its society and its economy, satisfying the wishes of its rulers. Once thought of as being deficient in creativity and inventiveness, the world now fears the system will allow China to become the dominant power in the world.

The system is also a means of solidifying the leadership of the Communist Party. Fostering the belief that the process is fair provides the leaders with support from the people. Ding provides a comment that could never be applied to education in the US.

“More important, the gaokao has maintained faith in social mobility. A perception of fairness, especially among the less fortunate, has lent legitimacy to the political order. The system will continue as long as the losers believe that they, and not the system, are to blame for their lack of success.”

A Trump Legacy: A More Powerful China

2025-12-09T10:42:00.000-08:00

Donald Trump seems to be driven by the need to produce evidence of a magnificent legacy for himself. His name is emblazoned on any available edifice or institution. He takes credit for all that he thinks is good in the news and blames someone else for the bad. He pleads for awards that would enter his greatness into civilizational history. He came to his present position by claiming his aim was to Make America Great Again (MAGA). His performance thus far suggests a new goal: MDGF (Make Donald Great Forever). MAGA demands long-term plans that need to be executed with forethought and precision. What we are seeing is frantic careening from one target of opportunity to another.

A person cannot define his own legacy. Actions taken may produce immediate highs or lows, but they also produce long-term consequences. It is those latter effects and how they are viewed in the future that define a legacy.

One of Trump’s MAGA duties should be actions taken to ensure that the United States does not fall behind China economically, technically, militarily, or politically. The Economist suggested this hypothesis about Trump’s actions.

“His chaotic policymaking means many now see China as a stabilising presence. In the eyes of the world, China seems to be growing into an awesome rival to America.”

This notion was investigated in the article China’s growing global fan club.

“To test this thesis, The Economist, working with GlobeScan, a consulting and polling firm, asked 32,000 people in 32 countries for their views on China and America between July and September. The results are startling. Since we last asked the question a year ago, China has made big gains as the world’s preferred ‘leading power’…”

This chart exhibited some of the results’

“China wants to be seen as America’s peer. Preference for China as the world’s leading power has risen in every place sampled by GlobeScan. Perhaps most surprisingly, that includes America, where support for Chinese leadership doubled to (a still low) 6%. Meanwhile, two in every five Americans thought that China’s influence in the world was ‘mainly positive’, up from a quarter during Mr Trump’s first term.”

“When it comes to picking China as the leading power, the largest regional increases were in Latin America and Europe. In Brazil, Canada, Mexico, South Africa and Spain, preferences for China rose (and support for America fell) by about 20 percentage points.”

“For perhaps the first time, more than half of respondents in Africa and the Middle East opted for China. Many already liked the country anyway, which may be partly thanks to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. In the past decade the scheme has seen tens of billions of dollars invested in those regions. Still, this most recent bump of nine points takes China over the majority mark, so lends some credibility to China’s claims to lead the global south.”

Being viewed favorably by another country is considered “soft power.” In such an instance that country is more likely to be a collaborator or an ally.

“Soft-power victories matter both to China and to its president, Xi Jinping, in the country’s bid to be a superpower.”

China has had a Make China Great Again Plan since the 1950s. Xi Jinping has long-term plans that are being executed with forethought and precision.

“Mr Trump has picked fights with South Africa over false claims of a ‘white genocide’ and Brazil for prosecuting its former president and MAGA-ally, Jair Bolsanaro. America’s neighbours, Canada and Mexico, have both been hit with tariffs and threats of invasion. America’s star tends to dim under Republican presidents and sparkle under Democrats, but what is new is that the fall in affection for America is so clearly to the benefit of its biggest rival.”

Trump seems to view soft power as some sort of DEI hoax unworthy of real Americans.

Capitalism and Climate: Fossil Fuels, and the Earth, Will Burn Until the Revolution

2025-11-24T12:21:00.000-08:00

Wolfgang Streeck is frequently called on to bring some insight to whatever socioeconomic antics seem to be in play. His primary background is in sociology, thus viewing economic turmoil in the context of the interaction with society in general. This perspective produces a rather jaundiced view of the path down which neoliberal capitalism is taking us. His views are summarized in a collection of essays in his book How Will Capitalism End?: Essays on a Failing System.

Streeck sees capitalism as a highly unstable construct that is incapable of self-regulation and must be continually forced to remodel itself as society and stakeholders, such as its needed workers, constrain its behaviors. Economic crises would arise regularly except during world wars when matters were highly controlled by nations with their own crises to battle. The slow relaxation of state control after World War II led to a few decades of relative stability but comes the 1970s and capitalism began to escape from state constraints by promoting neoliberal ideas. Meanwhile, capitalists yearned once again to flex their muscles and once again make outrageous profits.

However, neoliberal capitalism is inconsistent with the welfare state democracies produced in the postwar era. The continued accumulation of wealth in the hands of a very few, that is an intrinsic property of market capitalism, has supported a herd of oligarchs who use their money to influence political policies, and they use their philanthropy to recast society into a form with which they are more comfortable. Streeck points out three trends that have been running in concert over several decades that suggest the problems with capitalism are long term and intrinsic. He focuses on lower growth, increasing inequality, and ever larger levels of both public and private debt. These are long-term global trends. The three feed off each other. For example, low growth justifies wage stagnation, but wage stagnation and the inability to accommodate more debt limit aggregate demand, leading to continuing low growth. Extreme inequality and low demand lead the wealthy to seek essentially nonproductive ways to increase their wealth. This is likely a source of the extreme risk taking that has permeated financial markets. Wealth, with nowhere productive to go, bids up asset prices and leads to bubbles and crashes.

A society in which a few extremely wealthy people continue to make money while everyone else treads water and watches cannot go on forever. Streeck considers a few situations which could drive a need to shed the current version of capitalism and create a better model. Climate change is the driver of change of interest here. Global warming has the potential to impose catastrophic changes on climate and the environments in which nations must exist. This will require advanced planning and resource allocation on a broad scale. Will states weakened by generations of neoliberal market-driven propaganda have the strength to counter the profit-driven oligarchs and their legions of lobbyists? Can profit-driven capitalists be expected to come to their own rescue? Streeck believes change will be difficult.

“Not just capital and its running dogs, but also their various oppositions lack a capacity to act collectively. Just as capitalism’s movers and shakers do not know how to protect their society from decay, and in any case would lack the means to do so, their enemies, when it comes to the crunch, have to admit that they have no idea of how to replace neoliberal capitalism with something else….”

“Before capitalism will go to hell, then, it will for the foreseeable future hang in limbo, dead or about to die from an overdose of itself but still very much around, as nobody will have the power to move its decaying body out of the way.”

This has been a modest introduction to a detailed description of capitalism’s behavior in our era of climate change provided by the book Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton. These authors argue that by the time of the Paris Accords of 2015 the nations who could have made a difference in the carbon emission rates had already resigned themselves to the fact that they could not or would not take the steps necessary to meet the 1.5°C warming limit, tacitly believing somehow later it would be able to return to lower atmospheric carbon levels. They refer to this as the “Overshoot” strategy and ask how this view came to arise.

“How was it that —despite all the reports, summits, pledges, agreements and, above all, observations and experiences of disasters striking harder and harder—the curves were still pointing in the wrong direction, the emissions were still growing, the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure proceeding apace as if nothing was happening? What spell had been cast on this world that just would not be broken.”

The short answer is simply, as Streek feared, states weakened by generations of neoliberal market-driven propaganda did not have the strength to counter the profit-driven oligarchs and their legions of lobbyists. Malm and Carton provide an in-depth answer that is quite interesting in its details, but in the end, it is the nature of neoliberal capitalism to argue that the goal of any economic endeavor is to maximize profit. One CEO after another will make the claim that “it is my duty, it is against the law for me to not maximize the profit of my investors.” Perversely, as time went on it became more and more difficult and expensive to gain new fossil fuel sources while renewable sources such as solar and wind became much less expensive, it would be the economic nature of fossil fuel extraction that would make it more profitable than the development of free renewable solar and wind energy.

A few corporations tried to live in both worlds, developing renewable energy as well fossil fuel projects. They soon discovered profits on investments of 4-8% on renewables, and 20-30% on fossil fuels. The obvious result was to move all investments to the most profitable sector. While scientists and much of the public believed that new fossil fuel sources must not be developed and as little of existing fossil fuel reserves as possible should be utilized if warming limits were to be met, fossil fuel corporations knew their best strategy was to continue on as if global warming did not exist.

“Not one more pipeline could be built if the world were to avert warming by more than 1.5°C. But in 2022, there were 119 oil pipelines under development—planned, under construction, nearing completion—with a total length of 350,000 km, enough to encircle the globe at the equator more than eight times. Not one more gas pipeline could be added: but in 2022, there were 477 in progress, with a combined length girdling this planet twenty-four times. Over 300 liquified gas terminals were in the works. Not one more coal mine or plant could burden the Earth, but underway were 432 new mines and 485 new plants.”

The more expensive the search for new fossil fuel resources, the more powerful the fossil fuel corporations became. The bigger they became as a component of the economy, the bigger the disaster of limiting their activities would become. Terminating their exploration and eliminating the value of their fuel reserves would pose existential threats to the companies themselves, to the technical and financial enterprises that serviced them, to the shareholders who invested in them, and to the industries that consumed their products.

The authors tell us it would be impossible to derive an accurate fiscal answer to the consequences of stranding the assets of the fossil fuel producers, but they would be great.

“One study found that the stranding of reserves would directly rob the producers of fossil fuels of between 13 and 17 trillion dollars, if temperatures were to halt at 1.8°C or 1.5°C. By way of comparison, the great recession of 2009 reduced world GDP by a little more than 3 trillion. Another study rather put the sum at a maximum of 4 trillion for 2°C, while yet another reached a whopping 185 trillion in a scenario with a fifty-fifty chance of staying below that limit. In 2022, world GDP was 103 trillion.”

So, the strategy of the fossil fuel companies provides the world, and our leaders with the choice of maintaining the status quo or limiting a long-term climate disaster by causing an immediate economic and social disaster. The fossil fuel providers seem destined to keep winning. Their plan to continue growing their activities matches the consequences of constraining them relative to the growing climate threat.

How does this end? Malm and Carton conclude that there is no alternative to ending the status quo. This would require a revolution in which a nation’s leaders take control of the assets and powers of the economic elites and do what is necessary to limit the climate threat.

“When carbon budgets run out and temperature limits come into sight, a war of manoeuvre is the option that remains. There has to be a lightning strike, a coup de main that knocks down enemy defences precisely because there is so little time left (if any).”

“As things now stand, the crisis will not wait for anything less than a blitz to strip elites of the assets they hold and defend.”

Streeck predicted that neoliberal capitalism would die from an overdose of itself. Such a result could be coming.

Let’s Give Sunlight Some Credit for Health Benefits

2025-11-13T08:47:00.000-08:00

We have so often been warned about the nasty ultraviolet (UV) radiation the sun sends our way and its potential to cause skin cancers that some act as if any exposure to sunlight is risky. However, evolution seems to be telling us that too little exposure to the sun can be unhealthy as well. Humans emerged from Africa with dark skin designed to limit the damage from UV in the African environment. As people spread out into more moderate climates they tended to develop lighter complexions. If all UV exposure was bad, one would expect the dark skin to be maintained. Instead, as lesser sunlight intensities were encountered evolution apparently decided to lighten skin color in order to experience higher UV exposures. The Economist provides some emerging data that suggests that limiting exposure to sunlight is not necessarily a good idea. Data has begun to show that those who do not experience the proper amount of sunlight have higher mortality rates than those who do. The argument is presented in The health benefits of sunlight may outweigh the risk of skin cancer.

It is well established that sunlight on the skin produces essential vitamin D. We may not worry about this vitamin enough because it is so available in supplement form. However, the effectiveness of supplements is being called into question.

“UV radiation is necessary for the body to make vitamin D, a lack of which can cause soft bones and skeletal deformities in children. Higher levels of vitamin D in the blood are associated with all sorts of potential health benefits, from better heart health to lower cancer risk. But several big studies into the effects of vitamin D supplements have had disappointing results, says Amaya Virós, a skin-cancer researcher at the University of Manchester. (In 2022 an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine argued that, given those findings, doctors should stop recommending their patients take them for general use.)”

The closer researchers look at the effect of sunlight on skin the greater the benefits seem to be.

“There is no shortage of candidates: sunlight seems to affect the expression of many different genes. One mechanism that has attracted particular attention involves nitric oxide, a signalling molecule that, among other things, relaxes blood vessels and lowers blood pressure. In 2009 a group of researchers based in Germany showed that UV irradiation converts chemicals in the skin into nitric oxide, which then makes its way into the blood—and that whole-body exposure caused a quick and substantial drop in blood pressure.”

“That throws suggestive light on existing data showing that blood pressure tends to rise the farther from the equator you go. One 2017 paper found an increase of roughly 5mm of mercury (the units in which blood pressure is measured) for every thousand kilometres north of the equator. High blood pressure is a risk factor for heart disease—and death rates from heart disease in high-latitude countries also show a striking seasonal pattern, being highest in winter and lowest in summer.... Some of that is down to colder weather, changes in diet and the like. But some researchers wonder if at least some of it could be down to lack of sun, too.”

“Another intriguing line of evidence concerns UV radiation’s effects on the immune system. For multiple sclerosis (MS), it appears to offer relief (like high blood pressure, MS seems to be more common in higher latitudes). Some scientists are exploring whether UV’s effects on the immune system might also improve its ability to combat cancers.”

Let us also recognize the epidemic of myopia that is thought to originate from a lack of bright sunlight that our children’s eyes need to experience outdoors.

“A lack of sunlight is thought to be an important reason why, in some Asian cities, more than 80% of teenagers now need glasses. Bright light—of the sort that is hard to generate indoors—appears vital to regulate the growth of children’s eyes.”

These results may be just the first few drops in the bucket. Other studies indicate that health benefits from sunlight exposure are quite broad with a definite effect on mortality rates.

“These include protections against heart disease, cancer and autoimmune diseases. A study published last year, for instance, examined medical data from 360,000 light-skinned Brits and found that greater exposure to UV radiation—either from living in Britain’s sunnier southern bits rather than the darker north, or from regularly using sunbeds—was correlated with either a 12% and 15% lower risk, respectively, of dying, even when the raised risk of skin cancer was taken into account.”

“That fits with the results of another big study published a decade earlier. Led by Pelle Lindqvist, an epidemiologist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, it followed 30,000 Swedish women for 20 years. It likewise found that, even after correcting for things like age, wealth and health, sun-seeking behaviour was associated with a lower chance of death from all causes. People with the most sun exposure had only half the risk of dying compared with those who had the least exposure.”

These findings suggest we have been poorly served by the focus on skin cancer. The following seems somewhat better advice.

“’The big picture is that the benefits of sunlight outweigh the risks—provided you don’t get sunburnt,’ argues Richard Weller, a dermatologist at the University of Edinburgh and one of the authors of the British study.”

The Fertility Cliff: Projecting Human Population

2025-10-03T11:32:00.000-07:00

When I was a young man books and articles were discussing fears of an ever-growing population threatening the future of human civilization. Phrases such as “population explosion” were regularly encountered. Today, books and articles are considering the threat of falling populations for the future of human civilization. Phrases such as “population collapse” are appearing in public discourse. The early concerns about the food supply being unable to accommodate a rapidly growing population proved wildly inaccurate. Today nations fear a falling population will make the status quo untenable and force changes in the way society is managed. This seems more an inconvenience than a threat and may be providing an opportunity for significant progress.

A recent article in The Economist examined the current demographic trends, choosing as its title Humanity will shrink, far sooner than you think. Demographers use the term total fertility rate (TFR) to quantify birth rates. This is the average number of children born to women in a population group. To maintain a population level TFS, or just fertility, must reach 2.1

“Fertility rates have been dropping for centuries, mostly for benign reasons. Social security systems mean that people need not rely on their offspring to pay for them in old age—and, because childhood mortality is so much lower, do not feel the need to produce spares. After the baby boom of the 1960s in America, and in many parts of the world today, falling fertility reflected the liberation of women, who began to spend more time in education and exercise greater choice over their careers and use of contraception. Teenage pregnancies have become rarer.”

Fertility has varied from society to society, and still does, but all are now seeing not only a decline, but in many cases an acceleration in the rate of decline.

“What is striking and unexpected is that the decline in fertility is accelerating. The pace of global falls doubled between the 2000s and 2010s and has doubled again in this decade, sinking, on average, by almost 2% a year. In many places the fertility rate is dropping much faster. Levels that once would have been unimaginably low are becoming routine. South Korea has had a TFR of less than one for seven years. If that is sustained, its population will shrink by more than half in a single lifetime.”

The UN Population Division is responsible for tallying demographic data and providing population projections. The article includes some national data as well as global data on fertility and its projections.

The UN demographers clearly assume fertilities will level off eventually, and with no good way to predict when, they assume the leveling will begin immediately. The results are predictions that look like so much wishful thinking. Many demographers disagree with the UN and expect fertilities to continue to fall in the coming years.

“Rather than climbing until 2084, as the UN currently foresees, to 10.3bn people, it may stop growing in the 2050s and never exceed 9bn. At that point, the world’s population will start to shrink, something it has not done since the 14th century, when the Black Death wiped out perhaps a fifth of humanity.”

It is interesting to consider the actual fertility data for Turkey, China, and South Korea. Each country is at a different level, but there are similarities in the shapes of the curves. All would have fertilities drifting downward from the social factors the article mentioned earlier, then is a pause where the fertilities seem to attempt to stabilize but then followed by a rapid decline. What signals was society sending to men and women as these changes occurred?

In the 1960s when population explosion was the topic, society, using peer pressure, was signaling that men and women got married in the early 20s and marriage led to having children. It was easy to believe that evolution provided women with an innate desire to have children. It is more likely that evolution merely provided men and women with the desire to have sex. That worked so well that it thought its work was done. That maternal instinct, if it exists, does not seem strong enough to resist the calls from society that now remind people that having children is economically and socially inefficient. Most countries have feared a falling birth rate and have tried economic incentives to encourage births. All attempts seem to ultimately fail. Perhaps such incentives could explain the brief flattening of the fertility rates, but what can explain the rapid decline that follows?

Is it possible that once the number of births becomes so low that encountering an infant in one’s lifetime becomes unlikely, that society begins sending messages that children are not only unnecessary, but perhaps even unwelcome? Gideon Lewis-Kraus provided some interesting insights into the South Korean society in The End of Children: Birth rates are crashing around the world. Should we be worried?, an article for The New Yorker. Consider these observations.

“Korea’s demographic collapse is mostly taken as a fait accompli. As John Lee, the political analyst, put it, ‘They say South Korea will be extinct in a hundred years. Who cares? We’ll all be dead by then.’ The causes routinely cited include the cost of housing and of child care—among the highest in the world. Very little in Korean society seems to give young people the impression that child rearing might be rewarding or delightful. I met a stylish twentysomething news reporter at an airy, silent café in Seoul’s lively Itaewon district. ‘People hate kids here,’ she told me. ‘They see kids and say, “Ugh.”’ This ambient resentment finds an outlet in disdain for mothers. She said, ‘People call moms “bugs” or “parasites.” If your kids make a little noise, someone will glare at you’.”

“In the southern city of Gangjin, I stopped at a coffee shop and encountered a sign on the entrance that read ‘This is a no-kids zone. The child is not at fault. The problem is the parents who do not take care of the child.’ The doors of Korean establishments are frequently emblazoned with such prohibitions. The only children I saw on Seoul’s public transit were foreigners.”

Lewis-Kraus found many demographers to talk with about fertility issues. Here are a few interesting observations. This from the Norwegian demographer, Vegard Skirbekk.

“Two decades ago, Skirbekk helped contrive a thought experiment called “the low-fertility trap hypothesis,” which proposed the possibility of an unrecoverable downward spiral. Ultra-low fertility meant far fewer babies, which meant far fewer people to have babies, or even to know babies; this feedback loop could even shift cultural norms so far that childlessness would become the default option.”

“This eventuality had seemed remote. Then it more or less happened in Korea. When I asked Skirbekk if other countries might follow suit, he replied, ‘Quite a few, possibly’.”

This from a Finnish demographer.

“Rotkirch, the Finnish demographer, underscored the notion that reproductive cues are social. ‘In a forthcoming survey, I want to ask, “Have you ever had a baby in your arms”?’ she told me. ‘I think in Finland it’s a sizable portion that hasn’t’.”

South Korea, at the moment, does seem to have fallen into a fertility death spiral. Will other nations enter the same state? China seems a potential candidate, and perhaps Turkey as well.

It is probably unlikely that the exact population collapse occurring in South Korea will be reproduced in other low-fertility nations but falling fertility rates are universal and many societies will have to learn to live with population decline—perhaps a great decline. It seems time for economists, political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists to begin researching paths forward for nations undergoing this transformation. Necessary change is coming. We should prepare while there is still time. It could provide an opportunity to fix the things that are not working well in our societies.

Heat: Climate and Politics: Is It Time to Move Back Up North?

2025-09-17T12:23:00.000-07:00

A recent article in The Economist sheds some light on trends in the US housing market: America’s housing market is shuddering. It indicates that trends established during the pandemic are receding and, perhaps, reversing. For a long period, a desire for undertaxed, underregulated southern cities led to a booming housing market. That is no longer happening.

The article focuses on traditional market factors for explaining any changes.

“Prices are still creeping up in the north-east and the mid-west, but the west and, in particular, the south are hurting (see map). Pity the homeowner in Dallas or Phoenix who bought last year. They are carrying a beefy mortgage rate of 7% or so and the value of their house is already down a few percentage points in nominal terms, or more after accounting for inflation.”

“Worse, public perception of the cities has changed. Austin and Miami failed to attract enough superstar firms when they were in favour; few tech bros today tout them as the new Silicon Valley.”

“The state that fares worst of all…adds a few peculiarities of its own. It is Florida, where prices have fallen by 4% in the past year. Aziz Sunderji, an independent analyst, points to high and rising home-insurance premiums owing to climate change ($11,000 or so a year in Florida, versus $2,400 nationwide). Other reasons are a sharp drop-off in demand from rich Canadians (a surprising number of whom flee cold winters to Florida) and expensive new safety rules that came in after a condominium in Surfside, a Miami suburb, collapsed in 2021.”

The major factor in housing prices is the demand for housing. One of the seemingly safe assumptions has been that people from the cold states will continue to move to friendlier climates in the sunbelt. However, with global warming, northern regions will benefit from milder temperatures while the southern states will get ever hotter. Could we reach a point at which that trend will reverse? Consider this chart that the article provided.

At the current moment, it seems net migration to the three sunbelt states is diminishing, while the northern and western giants of New York and California are losing people at a slower rate. If these trends continue, the flow could be reversed in a year or two.

It should be noted that people considering moving to a new place face not only climate temperature gradients but also political temperature gradients. When assessing the potential quality of life in a location, local climate and local politics must both be considered, and both are changing rapidly.

There is a phenomenon that psychologists refer to as schismogenesis. It was observed when two individuals argue over an issue and in the process, with each determined to gain dominance, the argument will spread to other concerns over which there may have been no previous disagreement. David Graeber and David Wengrow, in their book “The Dawn of Everything,” observed examples of neighboring societies where each developed cultures that seemed intended to be exact opposites. One would develop a practice that would annoy or infuriate the other and the other would respond in a similar fashion. This type of relationship does not usually end well. One example posed by those authors was the ancient pair of Sparta and Athens, which eventually led to warfare. We, in the United States, seem to be splitting our population into two cultures with each found infuriating by the other. It is frightening to consider how this might end.

A response to such a situation is for each culture to collect in specific geographic locations. That is what has been occurring over the last few decades. In choosing a location, one doesn’t want to be stuck in the wrong culture.

Changing climate factors into which culture makes sense in a given location. The southern coastal states appear to be the most at risk from climate change. Increasing temperatures invite unfamiliar tropical diseases to migrate into these warmer regions. An AI query of tropical diseases invading the southern US provides these examples: Chagas disease, Leishmaniasis, Melioidosis, Dengue fever, and Chikungunya. As these invasions develop, the favored administration in these regions is attacking vaccines and vaccine science, implying that vaccinations are dangerous and science can’t be trusted. Past diseases assumed long gone are beginning to reappear as vaccination rates fall. Those of us who predate polio vaccines remember the fear that spread through families each summer during the polio season, and how grateful we were for the vaccine. Some attitudes make no sense, but they do infuriate political opponents.

Temperatures are rising and the favored administration in the south is determined to keep them rising by supporting fossil fuel consumption over the development of carbon free energy sources. If this trend continues it is possible that our children will see a day when southern Florida is underwater and most of the Gulf coast is as well.

It is best to think carefully when considering a location in which to live. Current housing price is not the only consideration.

New Insight into Mental Illness: Autoimmune Psychosis

2025-09-02T10:22:00.000-07:00

Dealing with mental illnesses in our societies is fraught with uncertainties. At one time, psychiatry and neurology were two approaches to understanding the same health threats. Over time, however, the two disciplines split off with neurology focusing on mental conditions known or thought to be determined by measurable conditions in the brain such as dementia. Those for which there were no known physical indicators of disease, including schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, and others were left to psychiatrists who drifted toward treatments with medications in hopes not of curing a disease but of managing symptoms of the various conditions.

Rachel Aviv provided an interesting article for The New Yorker that indicates neurology is back in the mental health business: Mary Had Schizophrenia—Then Suddenly She Didn’t.

Some conditions such as depression and anxiety are relatively easy to identify, but schizophrenia is an example of a disease that is less easily diagnosed.

“For decades, scientists have been searching in vain for a biological marker that would confirm whether someone has schizophrenia. Last year, in a paper in Schizophrenia Research, seventeen international experts concluded that schizophrenia was defined by no single etiology, symptom, or biological mechanism. “It is prudent to wonder if the construct around which we are organizing this information is fundamentally flawed,” the authors wrote.”

Recently, some startling medical turnarounds have been observed for people diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia.

“A 2017 study in Frontiers in Psychiatry described a woman with a twenty-five-year history of schizophrenia. She also had a skin disease, for which she was given drugs that reduced inflammation and suppressed her immune response. Her doctors noticed a pattern: when they treated her skin lesions, her psychosis went away. They hypothesized that the rash and the psychosis had been caused by a single autoimmune disorder, and were cured by the same drugs.”

“Another paper in Frontiers in Psychiatry described a man with ‘treatment-resistant schizophrenia’ who developed leukemia. After a bone-marrow transplant, which reconstituted his immune system, he startled his doctors by suddenly becoming sane. Eight years later, the authors wrote, ‘the patient is very well and there are no residual psychiatric symptoms’.”

“…a Washington Post article from 2023 about a woman named April, who had fallen into a catatonic state at the age of twenty-one and been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Sander Markx, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia, first encountered April at a psychiatric hospital on Long Island when he was a medical student; twenty years later, he was dismayed to find her at the same hospital, in the same condition. ‘She has not been outside for twenty years—out of sight,’ he said, at a symposium at Weill Cornell’s medical school. He and his colleagues gave her an extensive workup and found that she had lupus, an autoimmune disorder that, in rare cases, can induce inflammation in the brain, causing symptoms that are indistinguishable from those of schizophrenia. After undergoing immunosuppressive therapy, including rituximab, April emerged from, essentially, a ‘twenty-five-year-long coma, and was able to tell us everything,’ Markx said. ‘We don’t have a script for this. We don’t see patients coming back from this condition’.

Aviv identifies April’s case as the one that finally got neurologists back in the mental health business.

“April’s case helped give momentum to the founding, in 2023, of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (S.N.F.) Center for Precision Psychiatry and Mental Health, at Columbia, which is working to uncover biologically distinct subtypes of illness that have been obscured by the broad categories in the DSM.”

DSM stands for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental disorders, a handbook published by the American Psychiatric Association.

Neurologists are on the move proposing a new category of mental illness labeled “autoimmune psychosis.”

“The S.N.F. Center is embarking on a project, beginning this fall, to screen all the patients hospitalized in the New York State mental-health system for autoimmune, metabolic, and genetic disorders, to see if there are people whose symptoms can be traced to a distinct biological mechanism.”

Considerable progress has already been made, but there is likely a long way to go.

“…scientists have identified more than twenty new antibodies linked to psychiatric symptoms… Christopher Bartley, the chief of a unit at the National Institute of Mental Health which investigates the role of immune dysfunction in mental illness, said that the twenty known antibodies may be a ‘drop in the bucket.’ There could be countless targets in the brain that antibodies attack, some subset of which may alter people’s perceptions and behavior. ‘We have to have epistemic humility and accept that there are alternative models of disease,’ Bartley said.

This new focus on autoimmunity as a source of psychoses has produced dramatic improvements in the health of affected persons. There are two questions still too early to answer. First, how prevalent is autoimmune psychosis, and how many other physical conditions will be found to contribute to psychoses.

“Bartley estimates that between one and five per cent of people who have been diagnosed with schizophrenia actually have an autoimmune condition—a figure he based on his own lab’s research, which has not yet been published, and also on a German study of a thousand patients, the most extensive study of autoimmune psychosis so far. ‘Even one per cent ends up being almost a million people in the world who should be treated with a different kind of medicine,’ he said.”

This development in the field of mental illness reminds us that in the fields of medical science there have been endless numbers of surprises and there are many more yet to come. We need to encourage our best people to participate and provide them the resources to continue to extend our knowledge.

Placebos Can Relieve Medical Problems, Why Not Use Them

2025-08-17T10:54:00.000-07:00

Gavin Francis is a primary care physician who was asked to review two books addressing the role of placebos in medical care: Placebos by Kathryn T. Hall, and The Power of Placebos: How the Science of Placebos and Nocebos Can Improve Health Care by Jeremy Howick. His effort appeared in the New York Review of Books as the article What Do You Expect?.

A placebo is most commonly an inert substance given in clinical studies of medicines to compare results obtained for patients receiving the medication with those who only received the placebo. There are also placebo usages designed to deceive a patient into believing a procedure has been performed when it has not. These are used to test the efficacy of an operation for example.

One can describe a sugar pill as a placebo and claim it is physiologically inert, but it need not be psychologically inert, and psychological effects have long been known to affect health outcomes. Based on his own experience, Francis issues this statement.

“The idea that the mind has no power over the body is absurd: from the simplest stress headache or nervous bladder to situations in which the dying seem able to hold off the moment of death until a family member arrives, the power of belief and expectation over the progression or regression of illness is inescapable. In my clinic every day I attempt to gauge what kind of doctor the patient before me wants or expects—is it a collaborative, arm-around-the-shoulder kind of doctor, a guide through the landscapes of illness? Or an old-school, paternalistic doctor who will simply lay down the medical law? Or perhaps an interpreter of science, able to make sense of the dizzying diversity and contradictions of the latest research papers? Judging which kind of doctor that patient needs me to be goes a long way toward being more effective, whether they’re suffering from a low mood or an infected ear. The old Cartesian idea of a split between an ethereal mind and a mechanistic body is increasingly (and thankfully) going the way of bleeding with leeches. The mind influences both how ill health is experienced and how that illness evolves. Though the relationship is poorly understood, it is real.”

One is easily convinced that the mind plays a role in how illness is perceived, but the role it plays in the evolution of an illness is a little harder to grasp. Francis points to the value of the physician in recognizing the mood of the patient and accommodating it or modifying it. A simple Google search for the effect of mood on immune response provided a document provided by the NIH (National Institutes of Health): Mood configurations and their relationship to immune system responses: Exploring the relationship betweenmoods, immune system responses, thyroid hormones, and social support. The following conclusion was determined.

“In the field of psychoimmunology or affective immunology, researchers have shown that immune system responses and moods are related. However, findings are not always consistent.”

So, mood can make a difference in health outcomes. Francis seems to be on to something here.

He provides a short tour through recent history to point out that until the era of modern medicine, less than a century ago, placebos were regularly prescribed and were responsible for most cures obtained.

“To use a placebo was ethical because it both harnessed the formidable power of belief and avoided poisoning the patient.”

It is easy to understand the effect of a placebo when the malady is purely psychological. It was recognized long ago that if you give people suffering from depression a pill and tell them this pill can alleviate their depression they will hope for and expect to experience some relief. And they often do. In clinical studies of antidepressant medications, the patients do not know if they have received medication or a placebo, but they seem to have the same expectations. People receiving the placebo have about the same probability of relief as those receiving the medication.

“Later meta-analyses confirm this observation: the effect of all our common antidepressant drugs is at best marginally better than that of placebos.”

Psychiatrists who are aware of this result might argue that it would be unethical to charge a patient for medication and deliver a placebo. But where are the ethics in prescribing an expensive drug with known serious side effects when one recognizes that a sugar pill might work just as well.

Negative expectations can lead to nocebo effects on health.

“Another man, part of a drug trial for antidepressant pills, took an overdose of his medication. His blood pressure crashed and he had to be carried to the ER, only to later learn that he’d been taking the placebo.”

“She [Hall] and Howick both describe the case of a twenty-nine-year-old builder brought to Leicester Royal Infirmary in 1995 with a six-inch nail through his boot. Any attempt to remove the nail caused him to scream in agony. A clinical team heavily sedated him, pulled out the nail, and removed the boot—only to find that the nail had passed harmlessly between his toes. His foot might have been unharmed, but there was no doubt among the team that he had been experiencing real pain.”

These expectation-driven placebo results also can show up in medical procedures.

“…we still pour money into procedures that are no better than placebos: Howick says that annually around £67 million in the UK and $5 billion in the US are spent on knee washout arthroscopies for osteoarthritis, yet it has been shown that simply anesthetizing the patient and giving them a scar on the knee so that it looks as if they’ve had surgery is just as good at reducing subsequent pain. ‘When considered in light of these arguments, placebo treatments are not just ethical; they are ethically required,’ writes Howick.”

Can one consider a placebo as a continuing treatment? What happens when the patient realizes that the medication is inert? Apparently, there is good news for placebos.

“Placebos seem to work on the basis of expectation, and one of the most curious aspects of their function is that they continue to have benefits even when you know that what you’re taking is a dud. These ‘open-label’ placebos are nevertheless commercially valuable: some I looked up recently retail at more than one hundred dollars a bottle, though the label reads, ‘No active ingredients whatsoever’.”

If one is inclined to using a placebo on a patient, Hall provides some useful advice.

“We know that expensive placebos work better than cheap ones, capsules work better than tablets, and colored capsules work better than white ones. Blues and greens work better as sedatives, while pinks and reds work better as stimulants and painkillers. (Unless you’re an Italian man: Howick notes that blue is stimulating for Italian men, perhaps because the Italian soccer team wears blue.) Medium-size placebos are the least effective; it seems that we trust either tiny pills or big ones—the latter because they’re more impressive, and the former presumably because tiny capsules must contain powerful drugs.”

The three authors, Francis, Hall, and Howick, agree that physicians should not use deception in getting patients to try placebos. The appropriate approach is to educate the patient about the data available suggesting the efficacy of their use and convince the patient that the mind and its expectations can affect bodily functions. This approach is not consistent with a single 15 to 20 minute session, but it can be consistent with lower cost health care and better health outcomes.

Francis finishes with this statement.

“A revolution is long overdue: as the costs of conventional medicines spiral ever upward and the returns on those costs diminish, doctors owe it to their patients to make room for a different approach, with more humility, curiosity, and compassion. It’s extraordinary that our culture has become so medicalized and reductionist that warm and empathetic care, with its immense proven benefits for the way that a patient feels and heals, has been deprioritized to an optional extra rather than a core element of medicine. A rebalancing is in order: doctors need more time with their patients and, yes, more use of honest placebos—because they work.”

China and Fentanyl: Opium and China’s Century of Humiliation

2025-08-10T11:15:00.000-07:00

It is often claimed that China has responsibility for the epidemic of fentanyl addiction and the related overdose deaths. It does not produce fentanyl and smuggle it into the US, but it provides chemicals necessary for production to those who do. Negotiators with China often return from meetings claiming that China’s leaders have promised to take actions to restrict the dissemination of these so-called precursor chemicals. But that doesn’t seem to ever happen. Could there be a reason why China might enjoy watching the US and other western nations struggle with addiction? Let us consider some important China history.

Opium was used for a long time as a form of medicine. At some point it was discovered that smoking opium produced an addictive high, increasing the demand for it and increasing the incidence of undesirable social behaviors. In the mid-nineteenth century three converging trends would lead to conflict and what would be referred to as the First Opium War. China’s leaders wanted to make opium illegal. Britain, on the other hand, had a brisk trade with China in porcelain, silk, and tea, all of which had to be purchased with silver. The problem was that it had no significant product desired by the Chinese to balance out that trade, and it was running low on silver. In nearby India, a productive textile industry was limited by its British rulers who wanted consumers for their own textiles not competitors. Indian cotton farmers were directed to produce opium crops knowing there would be a strong market for smuggled opium in China. All Britain had to do was to sell a lot of opium in China.

In 1839, China’s government chose to get aggressive in enforcing its prohibition of the opium trade. This included destroying warehouses stocking opium owned by Britain and its East India Company. A naval expedition would be sent to extract reparations and try to force China to open opium trade. This would become known as the First Opium War. China was no match for the British military and was forced to make concessions. It was no match for any European colonial power and soon the US, Russia, and Japan also came making demands on China.

The period from the First Opium War to the end of World War II has come to be known by Chinese nationalists as the Century of Humiliation. It is believed by many that resentment over its treatment in that period has generated a plan for revenge referred to as The Hundred-Year Marathon, which aims at making China the dominant world power by 2046.

One has to wonder how a China that is perhaps interested in revenge would respond when a country that forced China to buy a dangerous drug from it almost 200 years ago is now asking China to protect it from a dangerous drug.

In April of 2024, a House select committee issued the report Investigation Findings: The CCP's Role in the Fentanyl Crisis. These points were made.

“The PRC, under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is the ultimate geographic source of the fentanyl crisis. Companies in China produce nearly all of illicit fentanyl precursors, the key ingredients that drive the global illicit fentanyl trade.”

The committee identified the following actions taken by China in contributing to the fentanyl crisis.

“Directly subsidizes the manufacturing and export of illicit fentanyl materials and other synthetic narcotics through tax rebates.”

“Gave monetary grants and awards to companies openly trafficking illicit fentanyl materials and other synthetic narcotics.”

“Holds ownership interest in several PRC companies tied to drug trafficking.”

“Fails to prosecute fentanyl and precursor manufacturers.”

“Allows the open sale of fentanyl precursors and other illicit materials on the extensively monitored and controlled PRC internet”.

“Censors content about domestic drug sales, but leaves export-focused narcotics content untouched.”

“Strategically and economically benefits from the fentanyl crisis. The fentanyl crisis has helped CCP-tied Chinese organized criminal groups become the world’s premier money launderers, enriched the PRC’s chemical industry, and has had a devastating impact on Americans.”

Seems there may be some revenge being gained.

How Christianity Created and Propagated Antisemitism

2025-07-10T11:25:00.000-07:00

The term antisemitism is thrown about regularly in public discourse these days. Perhaps, now would be a good time to review some historical perspective on the term.

Early Christians were Jewish followers of Jesus, while the majority of Jewish people were not. The Christians wished to claim the legacy from the Biblical prophecies and welcome Gentiles into their religion. The existence of the Jewish nonbelievers was at best an embarrassment. Christians had to convince others that they were the true beneficiaries of God’s covenant with Abraham not the nonbelieving Jews. Magda Teter writes about how this dogmatic conflict drifted into social conflict and led to the recognition of Jews as a unique class of humans in her book Christian Supremacy: Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism. The nature of anti-Jewish sentiment would evolve over the centuries and develop into an extremely threatening form often referred to as modern antisemitism. David I. Kertzer, in the book The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican's Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism, provides perspective on the role of the Vatican and the Catholic Church in encouraging antisemitism in the years leading up to the Holocaust.

From Teter’s book we learn the earliest attempt to resolve the issue of how to deal with the non-Christian Jews is attributed to Paul.

“In Galatians, seeking to dissuade Judaizing Christians from following Jewish rituals and ceremonies, he wrote: ‘For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave woman and the other by a free woman. One, the child of the slave, was born according to the flesh; the other, the child of the free woman, was born through the promise. Now this is an allegory: these women are two covenants. One woman, in fact is Hagar, from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery…But the other woman…she is free and she is our mother.’ Christians were now, Paul continued, the children of promise, like Isaac. Jews, who continued to follow God’s commandments, were in turn, Hagar’s children, ‘born into slavery’.”

The free woman was Abraham’s wife, and the son was promised by God. The son by the slave woman was a mere act of fornication. Paul’s interpretation would always place Christians in a position superior to the “born into slavery Jews, and thus be popular with Christians, both Jews and Gentiles. God’s covenant with Abraham was thus transferred to the Christians, and practicing Jews were deemed inferior to Christians before God. This self-serving interpretation would consign practicing Jews to servitude and ultimately to slavery to their Christian masters.

Through the early centuries as Christians aspired to an influential role in the Roman Empire. How to live with the Jews was often discussed, but only from the perspective of superior Christians. This viewpoint probably had little effect on the Jews until Constantine the Great allowed a greater degree of freedom for Christians. Ultimately, in 380 AD, Emperor Theodosius I would make Christianity the state religion and provide Christian leaders the power to insert their feelings towards Jews into public practice. The subservience of Jews must be maintained. An initial horror over the possibility that a Jew might have control over a Christian slave evolved over time to spread to restricting Jews from any occupation that would suggest even the slightest ability to control a Christian.

“In pre-Christian Roman Empire, Jews were able to hold public office and were granted accommodations for their religious observance. There was no concern about Jewish power over non-Jews, and the only concern about Jews’ holding slaves was over the slaves’ conversion to Judaism. But in Christian Roman imperial law, the anxiety over proselytism was increasingly mixed with anxiety over Jewish authority and power. The first explicit prohibition against Jews holding public office came in 418, declaring that ‘the entrance to the civil service [militiae] shall be closed from now to those living in Jewish superstition’.”

These sentiments would then be officially entered into canon law where they could be implemented in any nation with Christian leanings.

“A similarly explicit language was used by the VI Council of Toledo in 638, which ruled that ‘Jews should not be allowed to have Christian slaves, or buy them, or acquire them through gift of any man whatever; for it is monstrous that members of Christ should serve the ministers of Antichrist.’…Such anxieties about Jewish authority and power, in relation to public offices, especially judges and tax collectors, entered canon law through compilations by Burchardt of Worms or Gratian’s Decretales, thus becoming part of the long legal tradition that would have an impact for centuries to come. In these legal texts and legal corpus, Jews were marked as inferior members of society, whose presence was not questioned but whose status was to be controlled.”

“There were no comparable laws for any other specific group in antiquity, Greek or Roman, pagan or Christian.”

Declaring a whole people to be inferior and in need of control places that whole people at risk of all sorts of abuse. If they need to be controlled, one will question what they might do if they were not controlled. The more different and the more unliked they are the more bizarre the speculation is likely to be. A constant source of irritancy to the Christian leaders was a lack of gratitude on the part of the Jews for the Christian permission for them to coexist.

The religious did not always follow the commands of their religious leaders. There were always places where Jews and Christians learned to get along. This infuriated Pope Innocent III who in 1205 issued Etsi Judaeos reminding people that it was ungodly to treat Jews as equals.

“’While Christian piety accepts the Jews, who, by their own guilt, are consigned to perpetual servitude because they crucified the Lord…and while [Christian piety] permits them to dwell in the Christian midst…the Jews ought not to be ungrateful to us and not requite Christian favor with contumely and intimacy with contempt.’ The pope then recounted ‘how Jews have become insolent’ and ‘hurled unbridled insults at the Christian faith,’ relating alleged reports that Jews made Christian nurses who had taken communion ‘pour their milk into the latrine.’ To stem this ‘insolence’ and violation of canon law that prohibited Jews from having Christian servants, he urged the king of France ‘to restrain the excesses of the Jews that they shall not dare to raise their neck, bowed under the yolk of perpetual slavery,’ and ‘to forbid them to have any nurses nor other kinds of Christian servants in the future, lest the children of a free woman should be servants to the children of a slave; but rather as slaves rejected by God, in whose death they wickedly conspired, they shall by the effect of this very action, recognize themselves as the slaves of those whom Christ’s death set free at the same time that it enslaved them’.”

The pope was reminding Christians of other nations that they must treat Jews as slaves just as their church does. This was an attempt to propagate the church’s anti-Jewish practices into national legal systems. This would certainly qualify as propagating what we would now call antisemitism.

Another pope, Paul IV, would provide the ultimate example of how to treat Jews in 1555 by enclosing them in a ghetto in Rome.

“In Cum nimis absurdum, Paul IV did not just reiterate the concept of Christian freedom and Jewish servitude; he wanted to embody it in real life—to reify it. One of the most dramatic and tangible of outcomes was the creation of a restricted Jewish quarter ‘with one entry alone, and so to one exit,’ controlled by Christian authorities. The premise of the bull was then implemented across Papal States and then in other principalities in Italy, where Jews were forced to live in ghettoes.”

From Wikipedia:

“The bull restricted Jews in other ways as well. They were forbidden to have more than one synagogue per city—leading, in Rome alone, to the destruction of seven "excess" places of worship. All Jews were forced to wear distinctive yellow hats especially outside the ghetto, and they were forbidden to trade in everything but food and secondhand clothes. Christians of all ages were encouraged to treat the Jews as second-class citizens; for a Jew to defy a Christian in any way was to invite severe punishment, often at the hands of a mob.”

This may be suggesting that anti-Jewish sentiment was restricted to the Catholic version of Christianity. However, Teter tells us that no one was more virulently anti-Jewish than Martin Luther. He expressed his feelings in On the Jews and Their Lies.

“’They live among us, enjoy our security and shield, they use our land and our highways, our markets and streets.’ But the princes and lords do nothing, and ‘permit the Jews to take, steal, and rob from their open money bags and treasures whatever they want. That is, they let the Jews, by means of their usury, skin and fleece them and their subjects and make them beggars with their own money. For the Jews, who are exiles, should really have nothing, and whatever they have must surely be our property. They do not work and they do not earn anything…and yet they are in possession of our money and goods and are our masters in our own land and in their exile.’ The social hierarchy, thus, was turned upside down, the Christian social order disrupted. More ominously, any material possessions and wealth Jews had was considered ill-gotten and illegitimate.”

But Luther had recommendations to make that would influence generations of antisemites in the future.

“Luther ended his long venomous work on Jews with recommendations of expulsion to ‘their land’ and their elimination from Christendom. But his ideas would not gain ground until the late nineteenth and twentieth century, when modern antisemites rediscovered this particular work and began to use it as a font of new antisemitic ideas or to justify them by grounding them in historical sources.”

David I Kertzer is interested in whether the Vatican was guilty of contributing to the events that led to the Holocaust. The Catholic leadership was forced to ask itself the same question. It is not surprising that a commission that was founded managed to find the Church innocent. The argument was that although the Church was guilty of generating anti-Judaic feelings over religious stances, these had nothing to do with the Holocaust. Rather, the forms of nationalism developing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries changed the focus on Jews from their religion to their social and economic activities. It would be from that perspective that the Holocaust would develop. The church claimed it had nothing to do with that evolution.

Kertzer will have none of this.

“This argument, sadly, is not the product of a Church that wants to confront its history. If Jews acquired equal rights in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was only over the angry, loud, and indeed indignant protests of the Vatican and the Church. And if Jews in the nineteenth century began to be accused of exerting a disproportionate and dangerous influence, and if a form of anti-Judaism ‘that was essentially more sociological and political than religious’ was taking shape, this was in no small part due to the efforts of the Roman Catholic Church itself.”

“What, after all, were the major tenants of this modern anti-Semitic movement if not such warnings as these: Jews are trying to take over the world; Jews have already spread their voracious tentacles around the nerve centers of Austria. Germany, France, Austria, Poland, and Italy; Jews are rapacious and merciless, seeking at all costs to get their hands on all the world’s gold, having no concern for the number of Christians they ruin in the process; Jews are unpatriotic, a foreign body ever threatening the well-being of the people with whom they live; special laws are needed to protect society, restricting the Jews rights and isolating them. Every single one of these elements of modern anti-Semitism was not only embraced by the Church but actively promulgated by official and unofficial Church organs.”

Kertzer provides the following selection of quotes to prove his point. They were taken from articles written for Civiltà cattolica, the unofficial medium by which the Vatican disseminated its views, and for L’Osservatore romano, the Vatican’s own publication. They were published in the late nineteenth century.

“The Jews—eternal insolent children, obstinate, dirty, thieves, liars, ignoramuses, pests and the scourge of those near and far….They managed to lay their hands on …all public wealth…and virtually alone they took control not only of all the money…but of the law itself in those countries where they have been allowed to hold public offices.”

“The whole sinew of modern Judaism—that is of the antisocial, antihumanitarian, and above all anti-Christian law that the Jews now observe believing that they are obeying mosaic law—consists essentially in that fundamental dogma according to which the Jew cannot and should not ever recognize as his fellow human being anyone other than a Jew. All others, whether Christian or non-Christian, must be considered, by every good Jew observing his law,…as hateful enemies, to be persecuted and, if possible, exterminated…from the face of the earth.”

“…brotherhood and peace were and are merely pretexts to enable them to prepare—with the destruction of Christianity, if possible, and with the undermining of the Christian nations—the messianic reign that they believe the Talmud promises them.”

“…if this foreign Jewish race is left too free, it immediately becomes the persecutor, oppressor, tyrant, thief, and devastator of the countries where it lives.”

“The whole Jewish race…is conspiring to achieve this reign over all the world’s peoples.”

“…the Jews truly do murder Christians to use their blood in their detestable Talmudic and rabbinical rites…”

“Content yourselves…with the Christians’ money, but stop shedding and sucking their blood.”

Even when war struck and the Holocaust was already underway, the Church was in no position to complain about the poor treatment of Jews because the ready rejoinder from the Nazis and Italians was always “we are merely treating the Jews the same way you treated them.”

Even more ominously, the Vatican made it clear to civil governments that they had the right to address the problem of Jews in any way they saw fit. Kertzer provides an apt quote from a sermon given by the Bishop of Cremona in 1939 as Mussolini was implementing his racial laws against the Jews.

“Only a few weeks after the second wave of Italian racial laws was announced, the bishop told his congregation: ‘The Church has never denied the state’s right to limit or to impede the economic, social, and moral influence of the Jews, when this has been harmful to the nation’s tranquility and welfare. The Church has never said or done anything to defend the Jews, the Judaics, or Judaism.’ The sermon received broad attention, and was quoted in the Vatican’s own Osservatore romano.”

This is a history that too few are familiar with, a history that needs to be told and understood for what it reveals. We must realize that religion can be a powerful yet dangerous thing. Perhaps the most frightening words ever spoken are “God is on our side.”

A new definition of antisemitism is being promoted: any criticism of Israel is antisemitic. There are reasons why Israel should be criticized. There are reasons why Israel should be detested. Punishing anyone who possesses these views does nothing to protect Jews from actual antisemitism. Most Jews live in the diaspora. Do any of them feel safer because of what Netanyahu and Trump are doing?

The Counterintuitive Nature of Cancer Screening

2025-06-29T11:32:00.000-07:00

The first rule of cancer recovery is the extreme need for early discovery and treatment. Researchers are continually seeking more accurate methods to deliver those early discoveries. Yet, when physicians discuss cancer screening, they seem hesitant in recommending it, as if screening too often or too early might be bad for a patient. Siddhartha Mukherjee provides a enlightening summary of the relevant issues in a The New Yorker article: The Catch in Catching Cancer Early.

Mukherjee tells the reader that several things must be recognized to understand the issues. The first is that not all cancers are equal. In fact, not all cancers are even dangerous. Detecting them is one thing, responding to them is another.

“We have become adept at locating cancer’s physical presence—its corporeal form—but remain largely blind to its character, its behavior, its future. We employ genomic assays and histopathological grading, but many early-stage tumors remain biologically ambiguous. They might be the kind of early cancers that surgery can cure. They might be slow-growing and unlikely to cause harm. Or, most concerning, they might already have metastasized, rendering local intervention moot. Three possibilities—yet we often cannot tell which we’re confronting.”

The second concern that must be recognized is that there can be numerous false positives leading to unnecessary medical interventions that might risk the health of the patient. Mukherjee uses the example of a group of 1000 smokers being screened with one case of cancer being present. The screening procedure seems quite good with an accuracy of 99%.

“So what does it signify if someone in the group tests positive—what are the chances the person actually has cancer? Bayesian arithmetic gives a surprising answer: the test can be expected to identify the one person who actually has cancer, but it will also wrongly flag about ten people who don’t. That means there will be roughly eleven positive results, but only one of them is accurate. The chance that someone who tests positive has cancer, then, is just over nine per cent. In other words, eleven people would be sent for follow-up procedures, such as biopsies. And ten of them would go through a risky and invasive process—which can involve a punctured lung, bleeding, or other complications—with no benefit.”

It is critical that the statistical reality from this example be understood. Apparently, it is either not understood, or it is being ignored.

“The consequences of ignoring these principles are staggering. In 2021, according to one estimate, the United States spent more than forty billion dollars on cancer screening. On average, a year’s worth of screenings yields nine million positive results—of which 8.8 million are false. Millions endure follow-up scans, biopsies, and anxiety so that just over two hundred thousand true positives can be found, of which an even smaller fraction can be cured by local treatment, like excision. The rest is noise mistaken for signal, harm mistaken for help.”

There are other statistical approaches that have been used to suggest that screening is always beneficial, but Mukherjee debunks them and concludes that the only way to show that screening works is to demonstrate that people who were screened actually live longer than those who were not. This is a long and expensive process, but it has been done.

Colonoscopies have been proved to be beneficial as a screening process. A colonoscopy is a rather risk-free process that allows a suspicious structure to be extracted as part of the procedure for detailed study after the fact. The nature of the cancer can be identified if it is cancerous.

“The point isn’t that screening can’t pay off. The success stories are real. In 2022, The New England Journal of Medicine published the results of a landmark colonoscopy trial involving 84,585 participants in Poland, Norway, and Sweden. After more than a decade, the data showed an estimated fifty-per-cent reduction in deaths associated with colorectal cancer among those who received colonoscopies. Every four to five hundred colonoscopies prevented a case of colorectal cancer. The benefit was real—but demonstrating it required years of painstaking research.”

Not all endeavors have been so successful.

“The effectiveness of screening varies dramatically by cancer type. Consider ovarian cancer, a disease that often remains hidden until it has scattered itself across the abdomen. In 1993, researchers launched a major trial to test whether annual ultrasounds and blood tests could lower mortality. The scale was extraordinary: more than seventy-eight thousand women enrolled, half randomly assigned to screening. For four years, they endured transvaginal ultrasounds; for six years, routine blood draws. Then came more than a decade of monitoring.”

“And what did we learn? Among the screened, 3,285 received false positives. More than a thousand underwent unnecessary surgeries. A hundred and sixty-three suffered serious complications—bleeding, infection, bowel injury. But after eighteen years there was no difference in mortality. Even with three to six additional years of follow-up, the results held.”

There is an intriguing opportunity to replace the current screening procedures with a simple blood test—simple for the patient at least. As part of the normal cellular life cycle, cells die and spread their DNA in bits and pieces into the blood stream. Researchers have determined that cancer cells go through the same process and DNA from cancerous tumors can be detected in a blood sample. In principle one could detect the existence of cancer this way and also determine properties of the cancer that would provide an informed treatment plan. Also, in principle, one could detect not just one form of cancer but screen for many options. There are research teams out there trying to accomplish that and demonstrating potential for the approach. It seems an incredibly difficult task, but one absolutely necessary. Mukherjee details the state of progress and ends with guarded optimism.

“Perhaps, in time, we’ll build tools that can not only detect cancer’s presence but predict its course—tests that listen not just for signals but for intent. Early work with cell-free DNA hints at this possibility: blood tests that may one day tell us not only where a cancer began but whether it’s likely to pose a threat to health. For now, we dwell in a liminal space between promise and proof. It’s a space where hope still outpaces certainty and the holy grail of perfect screening remains just out of reach.”

Boys Seem to be Losing in the Parenting Game: Gender Preference

2025-06-21T11:10:00.000-07:00

Evolution has tried its hardest to produce equal numbers of male and female babies. However, humans are cultural animals, and they develop preferences that effectively alter the ratio by abortion, infanticide or other means of disposal of an unwanted gender. For most of recorded human history male cultural dominance has produced a tendency to view a male offspring as more important than a female one. A fascinating article in The Economist, More and more parents around the world prefer girls to boys, tells us that this attitude is changing.

In some developing cultures, male preference has created an overabundance of males, or a cohort of disappeared females. This was a common situation in countries such as China and India, but recent data from developing nations indicates that fewer girls are disappearing and gender ratios are approaching the natural value. That is definitely a significant and pleasing discovery. However, recent data from wealthier countries seems to indicate that it may be part of a trend favoring girl children over boys.

When women wanted to revolt against male domination they took to the streets to protest their plight and worked and studied hard to compete with men for jobs and other positions. As girls/women became more prominent in society’s activities, many boys/men seem to be unwilling or unable to compete.

“The growing desire for daughters may also reflect the social ills that afflict men in much of the rich world. Men still dominate business and politics and earn more for the same work almost everywhere—but they are also more likely to go off the rails. In many rich countries, teenage boys are more likely to be both perpetrators and victims of violent crimes. They also are more likely to commit suicide. Boys trail girls at all stages of education and are expelled from school at far higher rates. They are less likely than women to attend university.”

This has led to many activities aimed at helping boys become more functional members of society.

“A telling sign of the general alarm about boys in the rich world is the interest politicians have begun taking in the subject. Last year Britain’s Parliament opened an investigation into male underachievement in schools. Norway has gone a step further, launching a Men’s Equality Commission in 2022. Its final report in 2024 concluded that tackling challenges for boys and men would be the ‘next step’ in gender equality.”

“Legislators across America’s political spectrum are making similar noises. Utah’s governor, Spencer Cox, a Republican, has created a task-force on male well-being; Maryland’s governor, Wes Moore, a Democrat, has committed to 'targeted solutions to uplift our men and boys'; Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, a woman (and a Democrat), wants to get more young men into Michigan’s colleges and vocational courses.”

Prospective parents are aware of these issues, and they seem to take them into account when considering having a child. The article provides plenty of evidence that preferences are strongly tilting towards girl babies

“In the rich world…evidence is growing of an emerging preference for girls. Between 1985 and 2003, the share of South Korean women who felt it ‘necessary’ to have a son plunged from 48% to 6%, according to South Korea’s statistics agency. Nearly half now want daughters. Similarly in Japan, polls suggest a clear preference for girls. The Japanese National Fertility Survey, a poll conducted every five years, shows that in 1982, 48.5% of married couples wanting only one child said they would prefer a daughter. By 2002, 75% did.”

“In America parents with only daughters were once more likely than parents with only sons to keep having children, presumably to try for a boy. That was the thesis set out in a study published in 2008 by Gordon Dahl of the University of California, San Diego, and Enrico Moretti at the University of California, Berkeley. The report, which analysed census data from 1960 to 2000, concluded that parents in America favoured sons.”

“That preference has since reversed, however. A study in 2017 led by Francine Blau, an economist at Cornell University, found that having a girl first is now associated with lower fertility rates in America. The research, which uses data from 2008 to 2013, suggested a preference for girls among married couples.”

Adoption and IVF provide opportunities for prospective parents to express their gender preferences.

“Adoptive parents, too, tend to want girls. Those in America were willing to pay as much as $16,000 to secure a daughter, according to a study published in 2010. In 2009 Abbie Goldberg of Clark University asked more than 200 American couples hoping to adopt whether they wanted a boy or a girl. Although many of them said they did not mind, heterosexual men and women and lesbians all leaned on average towards girls; only gay men preferred boys.”

“IVF and other fertility treatments are also becoming cheaper, more effective and so more common. In America, where sex-selective IVF is legal, around a quarter of all IVF attempts now lead to live births, compared with 14% during the 1990s. Some 90% of couples who use a technique called sperm-sorting to select the sex of their child said they wanted a balance of sons and daughters. Even so, in practice 80% of them opted for girls. If that imbalance endures even as such methods spread, America’s sex ratios will soon start to skew.”

The article also provided this interesting perspective on the factors that enter into child gender preference.

“Competitive parents may see girls as more likely to reflect well on them than boys. After all, boys develop fine motor skills later than girls. They are also worse at sitting still. Those are drawbacks in a world of toddlers’ music lessons and art classes. ‘We no longer have trophy wives,’ says Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, which seeks to remedy male social problems. ‘We have trophy kids’.”

If you are someone who sees your child as an indicator of your status as a human being and as a parent, you are more likely to look good if you choose a girl baby.

Police, Protestors, Violence, and Tear Gas (Tear Gas Is Illegal in Warfare, but Legal on Protestors)

2025-06-11T11:02:00.000-07:00

As this note is being written, organized protests have broken out in Los Angeles against Trump’s immigrant deportation activities. These protests are far from being the biggest and the most contentious that that the LAPD has ever had to deal with. No request for assistance was made, yet Trump decided to inflate the affair by sending in federal National Guard troops. In addition, several hundred marines were ordered to go to LA and assist the National Guard troops. Whatever one might think about the legality or intention of what Trump is doing, one should be questioning the wisdom of sending in people trained to use lethal force against enemies of the state to do duty controlling fellow citizens staging a protest. The LAPD knows it will face these situations and has plans for how to deal with them. Marines and National Guard soldiers do not.

Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer have produced an interesting collection of essays by noted historians in the book Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past. One is titled Police Violence, by Elizabeth Hinton, a Yale professor of history. According to her, the myth that police are merely doing their duty when using force against protestors produces a dangerous misunderstanding of our history.

“…officials and much of the American public have widely assumed that police violence primarily occurs as a reaction to community provocation. The myth holds that the fires and the looting of the immediate post-civil rights period, and in our own time, began with disaffected groups themselves; the police were ‘merely doing their jobs’ in reacting to a dangerous situation with force.”

“Contrary to the fearmongering rhetoric of politicians, history reveals that police violence very often inflamed community violence, not the other way around. Although protestors are often blamed for creating violent situations where the police are forced to respond in kind, from Miami in 1967 to the George Floyd uprisings in 2020, law enforcement officials were the instigators. Indeed, protests have grown more peaceful since the fiery post-civil rights era, but the police response to them has escalated in its violence. Dominant narratives have confused where the responsibility lies, in part because of the police’s increased reliance on tear gas and other chemical weapons that tend to be regarded as relatively benign riot-control tactics.”

Tear gas is not the only “benign” crowd control weapon available to the police, rubber bullets, bean bag rounds, and stun grenades are also available.

That premature violence was counterproductive in crowd control, was well known back in the 1960s.

“The widely distributed 1967 FBI manual called Prevention and Control of Mobs and Riots recognized that the application of force was a delicate matter, for its premature use ‘would only contribute to the danger, aggravate the mob, and instill in the individual a deep-rooted hatred of the police.’ Likewise, in it 1969 report the National commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence concluded that ‘excessive force is an unwise tactic for handling disorder’ that ‘often has the effect of magnifying turmoil not diminishing it’.”

Tear gas was invented during World War I for use in rendering an enemy incapable of fighting back and requiring him to retreat, but to not kill him. In 1925, the international community banned its use in warfare, but for reasons of convenience nations decided it was okay to use it against their own misbehaving citizens.

“Tear gas had been intended for the battlefield, to harm enemy forces for a brief period of time without leaving a trail of blood. The chemical weapon produced immediate effects, attacking the senses of its intended targets, leaving them incapacitated anywhere from ten seconds to ten minutes and causing, as the army manual Military Chemistry and Chemical Agents described it…’extreme burning of the eyes accompanied by copious flow of tears, coughing, difficulty in breathing, and chest tightness, involuntary closing of the eyes, stinging sensations of moist skin, running nose, and dizziness or swimming of the head’.”

“The 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention upheld the international prohibition of tear gas and other chemical weapons in warfare, but they are still regarded as humane alternatives to violently arresting or shooting into crowds of people, and law enforcement officials around the world are still permitted to apply the devices at their discretion.”

The summer of 2020 with its numerous protests following George Floyd’s murder gave Donald Trump opportunities to demonstrate his feelings for his fellow citizens.

“One of the most egregious incidents of that summer involved US Park Police and Secret Service agents who used tear gas, riot batons, and other weapons against nonviolent protestors in Lafayette Square near the White House to make way for a photo opportunity for Trump in front of the nearby St. John’s Church.”

Let us hope that the people in charge of dealing with the current protests, and the many future protests, against the current immigrant deportation activities realize that tormenting people who attended peacefully with chemical weapons because a few troublemakers angered you is not a good strategy. The anger, as well as the number of troublemakers, will only increase.

Trump may or may not understand this dynamic. He probably doesn’t care. He is acting as though he sees a benefit from inducing violence. Yes, things can get much worse.

Ukraine, Russia, and Fighting the Next War: Fighter Jets

2025-06-02T11:31:00.000-07:00

Technological developments have made it difficult and expensive to prepare for the next military conflict. The mindsets of the military leaders and defense contractors call for weapons of greater lethality and greater survivability. These goals, of course, lead to greater expense that results in the ability to pay for ever smaller numbers of weapons, which in turn leads to even greater emphasis on lethality and survivability, and even greater costs. This military, technological, political dance came face to face with an example of how the next war might be fought. When Russia invaded Ukraine some three years ago, it was interesting to note that a vast superiority in manpower, tanks, and other mechanized vehicles was of little value to the Russians. They were prepared for an easy victory, while the Ukrainians viewed the invasion as a more severe version of the war they had been fighting since 2014. Russia was forced to surrender many of its initial gains but were able to retreat to lines they could hold, and the battle became essentially a stalemate.

Then things got really interesting. Ukraine, at a material disadvantage in almost all areas, began to look into strategies that could be effective, but at little cost. Thus begins the battlefield use of surveillance and attack drones. It was discovered that a few small weaponized attack drones could be used to destroy tanks and other armored vehicles, and that those expensive beasts had little opportunity to go unobserved while in motion. Russia was forced to duplicate such tactics. Both sides compete for the slightest advantage with new systems being introduced in weeks or months. The battle line now comes with a kill zone where no one can be safe that extends for about ten miles. If the Russians wish to attack, they must span that space as quickly as possible without any vulnerable troop concentrations. Traditional military vehicles are too dangerous. Russia seems to have decided that individual motorcycles are the best bet for an attacking force.

Ukraine has also used relatively cheap marine drones to drive Russian warships away from its shores, another example of inexpensive technology putting at risk tremendously expensive assets.

One has to wonder what NATO forces think about these developments. Are the weapons in their warehouses rapidly becoming obsolete? Will NATO generals have to be taught how to wage war by the Ukrainians? Are defense contractors trying to figure out how to make billions of dollars manufacturing motorcycles?

Another area in which tactics have moved in an unexpected direction is air warfare. There are no tales of dogfights between jet pilots because neither side can afford to let its expensive jets cross into enemy territory because air defenses have become so effective. Fighter pilots launch missiles at the enemy from afar or they help provide defense against missiles and drones. Thus far there does not appear to be any cheap technology that could change this picture. The enemy’s planes are most at risk when they are on the ground. Both sides try to use missiles and drones, whatever is available, to take out planes they can reach. The Russians have had to move their planes further back into Russia or keep them in armored bunkers to protect them. As this article was being written, Ukraine demonstrated an audacious way to use inexpensive drones to destroy Russia’s advanced planes. More on that below.

The F-16s that took so long to migrate to Ukraine for use are considered fourth-generation planes. The US has already developed a fifth-generation plane, the F-35. That plane is a Lockheed Martin product whose development began in 1996. The contract for the company to produce the F-35 was signed in 2001. Full-rate production did not begin until 2021. It took over twenty years to go from concept to mass production. The world’s militaries seem poised to commit to producing sixth-generation fighters.

The Economist summarizes what is known of plans in the article The race to build the fighter planes of the future. The need for more advanced models is influenced by a number of factors, including fear of the performance of current air defense systems as experienced in the Ukraine-Russia conflict.

“One shift they all predict is more, and better, surface-to-air missile systems, a lesson reinforced by the strong performance of air defences in Ukraine. That requires more stealth to keep planes hidden from enemy radar. Stealth, in turn, requires smooth surfaces—bombs and missiles cannot hang off the wing, but must be tucked away inside a larger body.”

There are a number of developments underway, all indicating much larger structures to hold interior weapons, more fuel for longer range, and more complex electronics. The US entry is suspiciously named the F-47. More troubling is the award of the development contract to Boeing, which, of late, seems to have problems doing anything. Little is known of the F-47 except that it is expected to be much larger than either the F-35 or F-22.

“In December China showed off what was believed to be a prototype of the J-36, an imposing plane with stealthy features and a large flying-wing design. Britain, Italy and Japan are co-developing their own plane, in Britain provisionally called the Tempest, which is due to enter service in 2035. France, Germany and Spain hope that their Future Combat Air System (FCAS) will be ready by 2040. Together, these represent the future of aerial warfare.”

One reason why longer range is required is security for the planes when not in use.

“Finally, planes are especially vulnerable to long-range missiles when they are on the ground. That means they need to fly from more distant airfields, requiring larger fuel tanks and less drag for more efficient flight. The huge wings seen on the Tempest and the J-36 allow for both those things…Range is a particular concern for America. Its airbases in Japan are within reach of vast numbers of Chinese ballistic missiles. It plans to disperse its planes more widely in wartime and to fly them from more distant runways, such as those in Australia and on Pacific islands.”

Any strategy for development of expensive future aircraft must consider Ukraine’s most recent use of cheap drones. The Economist provides comments in the article An astonishing raid deep inside Russia rewrites the rules of war. The following lede is provided.

“Ukraine’s high-risk strikes damage over 40 top-secret strategic bombers”

Ukraine managed to get numerous small weaponized drones stationed near multiple Russian air bases on trucks. A mechanism could be activated to release the drones at the appropriate time and as first-person-view drones they could be controlled by operators in Ukraine. They were too small and too close in to be defended against. And it doesn’t take much to destroy an expensive plane.

“Today’s operation is likely to be ranked among the most important raiding actions in modern warfare. According to sources, the mission was 18 months in the making. Russia had been expecting attacks by larger fixed-wing drones at night and closer to the border with Ukraine. The Ukrainians reversed all three variables, launching small drones during the day, and doing so far from the front lines.”

“Commentators close to the Ukrainian security services suggest that as many as 150 drones and 300 bombs had been smuggled into Russia for the operations. The quadcopters were apparently built into wooden cabins, loaded onto lorries and then released after the roofs of the cabins were remotely retracted. The drones used Russian mobile-telephone networks to relay their footage back to Ukraine, much of which was released by the gleeful Ukrainians.”

So, Ukraine did figure out a way to take out troublesome enemy planes and it really did not cost much, and did not require any exotic technologies either. There is a lesson in this event for all those who wish to build ever more expensive aircraft.

“Western armed forces are watching closely. For many years they have concentrated their own aircraft at an ever smaller number of air bases, to save money, and have failed to invest in hardened hangars or shelters that could protect against drones and missiles. America’s own strategic bombers are visible in public satellite imagery, sitting in the open. ‘Imagine, on game-day,’ writes Tom Shugart of CNAS, a think-tank in Washington, ‘containers at railyards, on Chinese-owned container ships in port or offshore, on trucks parked at random properties…spewing forth thousands of drones that sally forth and at least mission-kill the crown jewels of the [US Air Force].’ That, he warns, would be ‘entirely feasible’.”

Perhaps people should learn how to protect the assets they already have before spending a fortune and a decade or two on new assets.

Famine and Migration: The Luck of the Irish

2025-04-08T11:19:00.000-07:00

Most people with a minimal education have heard of Ireland’s Great Famine or recognize it by the labels “Irish Potato Famine” or “The Great Hunger.” It is known as a terrible event in which a large fraction of the population either died or left Ireland. We in the United States recognize the surge of Irish immigrants as a significant event in our own history. But do we ever stop and ask ourselves how it was possible in the nineteenth century for a country just a few miles from England and Europe to suffer mass starvation over a period of several years because potato crops failed? Does this imply that the Irish only had one crop? Does this suggest the Irish could raise only one crop? Not at all. The real cause of the tragedy was British denigration of the Irish as a people, and absurd British belief in economic principles.

Fintan O’Toole provides a wide-ranging description of the famine era in a New Yorker article titled What Made the Irish Famine So Deadly. O’Toole’s work was prompted by a book on the famine, “Rot,” by Padraic X. Scanlan.

“There have been, in absolute terms, many deadlier famines, but as Amartya Sen, the eminent Indian scholar of the subject, concluded, in “no other famine in the world [was] the proportion of people killed . . . as large as in the Irish famines in the 1840s.” The pathogen that caused it was a fungus-like water mold called Phytophthora infestans. Its effect on the potato gives ‘Rot,’a vigorous and engaging new study of the Irish famine by the historian Padraic X. Scanlan, its title. The blight began to infect the crop across much of western and northern Europe in the summer of 1845. In the Netherlands, about sixty thousand people died in the consequent famine—a terrible loss, but a fraction of the mortality rate in Ireland.”

“Only about one in three people born in Ireland in the early eighteen-thirties would die at home of old age. The other two either were consumed by the famine or joined the exodus in which, between 1845 and 1855, almost 1.5 million sailed to North America and hundreds of thousands to Britain and Australia, making the Irish famine a central episode in the history of those countries, too.”

No one now has any memory of a famine in the Netherlands. What was it about Ireland that produced such a terrible disaster?

The first thing to realize is Ireland produced a lot of food, but the British did not allow the Irish to possess much of it.

“The problem was not that the land was barren: Scanlan records that, “in 1846, 3.3 million acres were planted with grain, and Irish farms raised more than 2.5 million cattle, 2.2 million sheep and 600,000 pigs.” But almost none of this food was available for consumption by the people who produced it. It was intended primarily for export to the burgeoning industrial cities of England. Thus, even Irish farmers who held ten or more acres and who would therefore have been regarded as well off, ate meat only at Christmas.”

From 1801, Ireland was considered part of the United Kingdom, but for practical purposes it was a colony inhabited by people of a lower rank than that of the British.

“In the mid-nineteenth century, Scanlan notes, fewer than four thousand people owned nearly eighty per cent of Irish land. Most of them were Protestant descendants of the English and Scottish settlers who benefitted from the wholesale expropriation of land from Catholic owners in the seventeenth century. Many lived part or all of the year in England. They rented their lands to farmers, a large majority of whom were Catholics. Scanlan points out that, whereas in England a tenant farmer might pay between a sixth and a quarter of the value of his crops in rent, in Ireland ‘rent often equalled the entire value of a farm’s saleable produce’.”

The Irish had no particular affinity for potatoes, but it was an easy crop to grow, and it was nourishing. It would be the colonial extraction of the fruit of their agricultural labor that would drive the dependance on the potato.

“Their historically varied diet, based on oats, milk, and butter, had been reduced by economic oppression to one tuber. Nor were they reluctant to work for wages. Many travelled long distances to earn money as seasonal migrant laborers on farms in England and Scotland, and Irish immigrants were integrating themselves into the capitalist money economy in the mills of Massachusetts and the factories of New York.”

The lack of the ability of a farmer to survive the large rents charged by the landowners left them no choice but to sublet parcels of land to others who were required to grow enough food on that land to survive on. Ultimately, with a growing population, these parcels shrank to the point that the only product that could provide hope of survival was the potato.

“Landlords could extract these high rents because their tenants, in turn, made money by subletting little parcels of land, often as small as a quarter of an acre, to laborers who had none of their own. The whole system was possible only because of the potato. Most years, those micro farms could produce enough of this wonder crop to keep a family alive. It provided enough calories to sustain hardworking people and also delivered the necessary minerals and vitamins. By the eighteen-forties, as many as 2.7 million people (more than a quarter of the entire population) were surviving on potatoes they grew in tiny fields that encroached on ever more marginal land, clinging to bogs and the sides of stony mountains.”

The potato blight began in 1845. It continued to grow in 1846 making it clear that something must be done, but it must be done with the realization that providing unearned aid to people so backward that they were willing to live on something as primitive as a potato crop would obviously encourage even greater laziness and lack of responsibility.

“In a neatly circular argument, the conditions that had been forced on the laboring class became proof of its moral backwardness. It was relatively easy to plant and harvest potatoes—therefore, those who did so had clearly chosen the easy life. ‘Ireland, through this lens,’ Scanlan writes, ‘was a kind of living fossil within the United Kingdom, a country where the majority of the poor were inert and indolent, unwilling and unable to exert themselves for wages and content to rely on potatoes for subsistence.”

One might have thought a solution might have been to allow the Irish to share in the agricultural rents they were paying the British, but that would have stolen the property of the deserving British landowners and given it to undeserving Irish workers. The solution chosen was to import food from America and make it available to the starving Irish. But the food could not be a grant. To avoid the moral hazard of encouraging bad behavior by the poorly performing Irish, the food would only be available to those who were industrious enough to be able to pay for it.

“The idea of Irish indolence fused with a quasi-religious faith in the laws of the market to shape the British response to the famine. In its first full year, 1846, Robert Peel’s Conservative government imported huge quantities of corn, known in Europe as maize, from America to feed the starving. The government insisted that the corn be sold rather than given away (free food would merely reinforce Irish indolence), and those who received it had little idea at first how to cook it. Nonetheless, the plan was reasonably effective in keeping people alive.”

“At the end of July, 1846, it became crushingly obvious that the blight had spread even wider, wiping out more than ninety per cent of the new crop. By then, most of the poor tenants had sold whatever goods they had, leaving nothing with which to stave off starvation. Fishermen on the coasts had pawned their nets for money to buy maize. The terrible year that followed is still remembered in Ireland as Black ’47, though the famine would, in fact, last until 1852.”

A new British government would take control and provide a second absurd approach to dealing with the starving Irish: they would enjoy employment in public works projects, allowing them to learn the benefits of hard work.

“The Liberals, under Lord John Russell, were determined that what they saw as an illegitimate intervention in the free market should not be repeated. They moved away from importing corn and created instead an immense program of public works to employ starving people—for them, as for the Conservatives, it was axiomatic that the moral fibre of the Irish could not be improved by giving them something for nothing. Wages were designed to be lower than the already meagre earnings of manual workers so that the labor market would not be upset.”

“The result was the grotesque spectacle of people increasingly debilitated by starvation and disease doing hard physical labor for wages that were not sufficient to keep their families alive. Meanwhile, many of the same people were evicted from their houses as landowners used the crisis to clear off these human encumbrances and free their fields for more profitable pasturage. Exposure joined hunger and sickness to complete the task of mass killing.”

O’Toole believes the story of this tragic abuse of the Irish is important to those living in the current era. The economic/religious beliefs that drove the British of that period are still alive in the current era.

“Above all, ‘Rot’ reminds us that the Great Hunger was a very modern event, and one shaped by a mind-set that is now again in the ascendant. The poor are the authors of their own misery. The warning signs of impending environmental disaster can be ignored. Gross inequalities are natural, and God-given. The market must be obeyed at all costs.”

There is one aspect of this tale in which the poor Irish were allowed a bit of “luck.” In that era, migration was possible. Otherwise, many more would have died.

“There is only one thing about the Irish famine that now seems truly anachronistic—millions of refugees were saved because other countries took them in. That, at least, would not happen now.”

Alzheimer’s Disease Research Goes Viral

2025-03-29T11:30:00.000-07:00

When the brains of people who have been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease are examined, clusters and tangles of two proteins, amyloid and tau, are observed. It has long been assumed by most experts that the disease is caused by these protein clusters interfering with neural function. Research on this path focused on decreasing the accumulation of these proteins in the brain. However, progress has been small, and it has not yet determined whether amyloid and tau are a cause or an effect of the disease. An article in The Economist, Do viruses trigger Alzheimer’s?, summarizes some recent discoveries that support the possibility the disease could be activated by viruses.

“In the summer of 2024 several groups of scientists published a curious finding: people vaccinated against shingles were less likely to develop dementia than their unvaccinated peers. Two of the papers came from the lab of Pascal Geldsetzer at Stanford University. Analysing medical records from Britain and Australia, the researchers concluded that around a fifth of dementia diagnoses could be averted through the original shingles vaccine, which contains live varicella-zoster virus. Two other studies, one by GSK, a pharmaceutical company, and another by a group of academics in Britain, also reported that a newer ‘recombinant’ vaccine, which is more effective at preventing shingles than the live version, appeared to confer even greater protection against dementia.”

Kudos go to Professor Ruth Itzhaki who long ago detected a potential correlation between a common virus that infects much of the population, but rarely infects the brain, and Alzheimer’s. She observed that when the virus does manage to infect the brain it can cause severe inflammation in regions that are sites for Alzheimer’s disease damage.

“Ruth Itzhaki, formerly of Manchester University and now a visiting professor at the University of Oxford, has championed this idea for almost 40 years. The bulk of her work has focused on herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV1), best known for giving people cold sores, which infects around 70% of people, most without symptoms. The virus normally lives outside the brain, where it can lie dormant for years. It is flare-ups that can lead to cold sores.”

“In rare cases, the virus can also lead to massive inflammation in the same brain areas that are most affected by Alzheimer’s. In experiments conducted in the early 2000s, Professor Itzhaki found that if she infected lab-grown human brain cells with HSV1, amyloid levels inside the cells increased dramatically. That led her to suspect a causal connection.”

“What’s more, in 1997 Professor Itzhaki found that people with a genetic variant known to increase Alzheimer’s risk, ApoE4, were only more likely to get the disease if they also had HSV1 in their brain. In 2020 a group of French scientists showed that repeated activations of the virus, seemingly harmless in people without ApoE4, more than tripled the chance of developing Alzheimer’s in those with it.”

One would have hoped that Itzhaki’s research would have generated interest much earlier. Now the medical researchers are struggling to catch up.

“In a bid to push forward Professor Itzhaki’s theory, a group of 25 scientists and entrepreneurs from around the world have assembled themselves into the Alzheimer’s Pathobiome Initiative (AlzPI). Their mission is to provide formal proof that infection plays a central role in triggering the disease. In recent years their work detailing how viruses trigger the build up of proteins linked to Alzheimer’s has been published in top scientific journals.”

Evidence of a tie between the shingles virus and the HSV1 virus has now been observed.

“Researchers at Tufts University, working with Professor Itzhaki, have probed why such reactivation occurs. In 2022 they found that infection with a second pathogen, the shingles virus, could awaken the dormant HSV1 and trigger the accumulation of plaques and tangles. This may explain why shingles vaccination appears to be protective against dementia. In another study published in January, the Tufts researchers also showed that a traumatic brain injury—a known risk factor for Alzheimer’s—could also rouse HSV1 and start the aggregation of proteins in brain cells grown in a dish.”

If this viral hypothesis proves valid, it is fantastic news for those who fear a long decline into dementia, and those who are already experiencing that decline. Viruses can be controlled by vaccinations and by antiviral drugs, potentially eliminating future disease and limiting current disease.

“The viral theory has promising implications for treatment. Current therapies for Alzheimer’s, which attempt to reduce levels of amyloid in brain cells, merely work to slow the progression of the disease. If viruses are a trigger, though, then vaccination or antiviral drugs could prevent future cases. Such treatments could also slow or halt the progression of Alzheimer’s in those who already have the disease. None of this requires major breakthroughs. Antivirals for the cold-sore pathogen already exist and are off-patent. And the shingles vaccine is now routinely offered to elderly people in many countries.”

“Around 32m people around the world are living with Alzheimer’s disease. If antiviral treatments can indeed slow, delay or prevent even a small subset of these cases, the impact could be tremendous.”

Plastic Particles in the Brain: The Amount Just Keeps Growing

2025-03-23T11:46:00.000-07:00

We are living in the age of plastics. They are fantastically useful. Their properties can be tailored by tuning the chemical content to provide desired attributes. They are generally inexpensive to produce. Some products can be recycled, but the process is more expensive than producing fresh material, so the only economic benefit is derived from public relations gestures. They have become ubiquitous. Initially, we worried that they were such long-lasting products that they would be permanent eyesores as they collected on roadsides and beaches. We now know that they are far from robust materials. They contain dangerous chemicals that can leach from their surfaces. Particles can cleave from their surfaces as they interact with the environment. These particles can then fragment into even smaller particles producing more surface area from which chemicals can leach. If the particles become small enough, they can enter our blood stream via our lungs or our intestines. At that point, they can find a home for themselves and the chemicals they bear in all of our organs and body parts.

There is no place on earth that has been found safe from plastic pollution. It has only been a few years since scientists began to realize these tiny plastic particles can be a threat to human health. The article, Study Finds Hundreds of Thousands of Plastic Particles in Bottled Water, provides a perspective on current findings with a focus on the common plastic water bottle.

“Plastic water bottles, a long-known enemy of our Earth, are finding their way into human bodies in huge quantities—well, pieces of them are. A study published this week shows just how much plastic we drink with bottled water: Researchers from Columbia University and Rutgers have found at least 240,000 plastic particles in the average liter of bottled water, a major health concern.”

“Most of the plastic particles found by the researchers were extremely small nanoplastics, which have a diameter of less than one micrometer—making them invisible to the naked eye. Nanoplastics have been historically challenging to study due to their extremely small size, but as technology has improved, scientists are now finding them almost everywhere—including in the environment, plants, animals, beverages, foods, and our human bodies.”

“While the full range of health effects of nanoplastics and microplastics in our bodies is not yet fully understood, what experts do know is already very concerning. Like all plastics, microplastics and nanoplastics are known to contain any mix of additive chemicals. More than 16,000 such chemicals have been counted in plastics, and none have been classified as ‘safe.’ At least 25% are already officially classified as hazardous. A few concerning plastic chemicals include hormone-disrupting and cancer-causing phthalates, PFAS, and bisphenols; asbestos and toxic heavy metals such as lead and arsenic; and much more. Additionally, microplastics can absorb and accumulate toxic chemicals in the environment, which leach into living bodies, waters, soils, and plants.”

“Most plastic water bottles are made of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic. At least 150 chemicals are known to leach from PET plastic beverage bottles into the liquid inside, including heavy metals like antimony and lead, and hormone-disruptors like BPA. Plastic PET bottles are even more likely to leach toxic chemicals if they are recycled, or are kept in warm environments, are exposed to sunlight, or are reused. Single-use plastic bottles also contain PFAS, a class of chemicals that are particularly dangerous to human and environmental health.”

A recent article (March,2025), Human microplastic removal: what does the evidence tell us?, provides a glimpse at what might be happening when these tiny particles accumulate in our bodies. The focus is on our plastic-laden brains as determined by measurements taken from deceased subjects.

“A recent paper in Nature Medicine by Nihart et al. found that the human brain contains approximately a spoon's worth of microplastics and nanoplastics (MNPs), with levels 3–5 times higher in those with a cohort of decedent brains with a documented dementia diagnosis (with notable deposition in cerebrovascular walls and immune cells). Particularly, brain tissues were found to have 7–30 times higher amounts of MNPs than other organs such as the liver or kidney. Also of note, the microplastics in the brain were of a smaller size (<200 nm) and most often polyethylene.”

“This aligns with the observed exponential increase in MNP environmental concentrations over the past half-century. Particularly, 10 to 40 million tonnes of emissions of microplastics to the environment are estimated per year, with this figure expected to double by 2040.”

Little is known about what all this means.

“The current evidence base (largely based upon animal and cell culture studies) suggests that MNP exposure can lead to adverse health impacts via oxidative stress, inflammation, immune dysfunction, altered biochemical/energy metabolism, impaired cell proliferation, abnormal organ development, disrupted metabolic pathways, and carcinogenicity. These can lead to direct or indirect consequences to various organ systems, including respiratory, gastrointestinal, cardiovascular, hepatic, renal, nervous, reproductive, immune, endocrine, and muscular.”

And don’t forget, people diagnosed with dementia tend to have 3-5 times the plastic particle concentrations in their brains when they die. That has to mean something, but it is not yet known whether plastic concentration is a cause or an effect.

The most interesting findings presented in the article are summarized here.

“Although MNP [microplastic and nanoplastic] concentration was not influenced by factors such as age, sex, race, or cause of death, there was a worrisome 50% increase in MNP concentration based on the time of death (2016 versus 2024).”

If plastic particles were simply accumulating in our bodies, one would expect older persons to have accumulated higher concentrations. This suggests that the body has some mechanism by which it can excrete plastics, either as particles or by first breaking them down into component chemicals. There is little to no evidence yet for any such process in humans, but the authors do make the following observation.

“In fish models, it takes approximately 70 days to clear 75% of accumulated brain microplastics, suggesting that decreased inputs and increased outputs must both be maintained for long enough durations to see measurable changes.”

The authors also state that plastic particle concentrations increased by 50% between the years 2016 and 2024, an eight-year period. They also predict an increase in the rate of plastic loading of the environment of about 100% over the period 2024 to 2040, a sixteen-year period. Does that mean we will likely have three spoonful of tiny plastic particles in our brains in 2040, or could it be much higher?

The fact that plastic concentrations increased over the eight-year period means the plastic sources are exceeding any plastic sink mechanisms in the body. There should then have been some level of age effect. The sample of deceased may have been too similar in age to detect a difference, or the ratio of plastic particle source to sink may have only recently exceeded 1.0.

It is scary to combine how little we know of what is happening to us now with the knowledge that whatever it is, it will get much worse in the near future.

There are many ways in which small plastic particles enter the environment and proceed to enter our bodies. Limiting the use of plastics seems to be the only solution. It is probably too much right now to ask people to stop wearing and washing plastic clothing, but immediately stopping the use of those damn plastic bottles would be a good first step.

South Korea: Can a Falling Population Enter a Death Spiral

2025-03-15T10:22:00.000-07:00

It has been clear for many years that the earth’s population will soon peak and begin to decline. The number of countries with populations that are already decreasing is growing. The drop in birth rates seems to be universal, but not identical. Each national culture provides its unique fertility history, with all seeming to suggest that the decision to produce fewer infants is a voluntary choice, one that does not require economic, political, or environmental conditions to drive it. Gideon Lewis-Kraus provided a great survey of current thoughts on this phenomenon in a New Yorker article: The End of Children: Birth rates are crashing around the world. Should we be worried?

Lewis-Kraus provides perspective on current discussions and a quote from a well-regarded demographer.

“Anyone who offers a confident explanation of the situation is probably wrong. Fertility connects perhaps the most significant decision any individual might make with unanswerable questions about our collective fate, so a theory of fertility is necessarily a theory of everything—gender, money, politics, culture, evolution. Eberstadt told me, ‘The person who explains it deserves to get a Nobel, not in economics but in literature’.”

What was most interesting about the article was a description of the situation in South Korea, a country where the birth rate was not just decreasing, it was plummeting. Fertility is defined as the average number of children each woman produces. To maintain a stable population a fertility of about 2.1 is required. Currently, South Korean fertility is so low that any group of three women is likely to produce two children rather than the six required to maintain the population. That is demographic collapse at an incredible rate.

“South Korea has a fertility rate of 0.7. This is the lowest rate of any nation in the world. It may be the lowest in recorded history. If that trajectory holds, each successive generation will be a third the size of its predecessor. Every hundred contemporary Koreans of childbearing age will produce, in total, about twelve grandchildren. The country is an outlier, but it may not be one for long. As the Korean political analyst John Lee told me, ‘We are the canary in the coal mine’.”

Does the experience of the Korean population represent something unique to that nation, or is it perhaps something that could be inevitable for populations that willingly decline? Some South Korean history is necessary.

“A decade after the Korean War, the country’s per-capita G.D.P. was below a hundred dollars—less than that of Haiti. People ate tree bark or boiled grass, and children begged in the streets. After a military coup in 1961, the new authoritarian leadership tied its economic program to the cultivation of a citizenry that was smaller and better educated. It was an all-hands-on-deck approach to the labor force. Social workers fanned out to rural communities, where they encouraged women to have no more than three children. The government legalized contraceptives and pressed for the use of IUDs. These initiatives dovetailed with an emphasis on ethnic homogeneity and traditionalist values. Biracial children of American servicemen, along with the children of unwed mothers, were shipped abroad for adoption, and Korea became known as the world’s largest “exporter” of babies.”

“The program was regarded as a smashing success. In the span of twenty years, Korea’s fertility rate went from six to replacement, a feat described by Asian demographers as ‘one of the most spectacular and fastest declines ever recorded.’ A crucial part of this plan was the educational advancement of women, which the same demographers called ‘unprecedented in the recent history of the world.’ Far fewer Koreans came into existence, but those who did enjoyed a similarly improbable rise in their standard of living. Parents who remembered hunger produced children who could afford cosmetic surgery.”

The government took note of the “less is better” fertility results and seemed to conclude that even less would be even better.

“When Korea neared replacement, in 1983, its leadership might have reconsidered its policies. Instead, it doubled down with a new slogan: ‘Even two are too many.’ By 1986, the Korean fertility rate reached 1.6. This remained stable for about a decade, then fell off a cliff. The government has now devoted approximately two hundred and fifty billion dollars to various pro-natalist efforts, including cash transfers and parental-leave extensions, to no avail.”

What is it like to live in a country that knows its population is heading towards zero?

“Korea’s demographic collapse is mostly taken as a fait accompli. As John Lee, the political analyst, put it, ‘They say South Korea will be extinct in a hundred years. Who cares? We’ll all be dead by then.’ The causes routinely cited include the cost of housing and of child care—among the highest in the world. Very little in Korean society seems to give young people the impression that child rearing might be rewarding or delightful. I met a stylish twentysomething news reporter at an airy, silent café in Seoul’s lively Itaewon district. ‘People hate kids here,’ she told me. ‘They see kids and say, “Ugh”.’ This ambient resentment finds an outlet in disdain for mothers. She said, ‘People call moms “bugs” or “parasites.” If your kids make a little noise, someone will glare at you’.”

Lewis-Kraus tries a summary statement for the causes of population decline.

“For most of human history, having children was something the majority of people simply did without thinking too much about it. Now it is one competing alternative among many. The only overarching explanation for the global fertility decline is that once childbearing is no longer seen as something special—as an obligation to God, to one’s ancestors, or to the future—people will do less of it. It is misogynistic to equate reproductive autonomy with self-indulgence, and child-free people often devote themselves to loving, conscientious caretaking.”

But, developing disdain for children and mothers is too startling. One can’t help but feel that some fundamental change has occurred in South Korea, and we need to understand what it is.

Lewis-Kraus provided some intriguing references, with the first coming from the Norwegian demographer, Vegard Skirbekk.

“This eventuality had seemed remote. Then it more or less happened in Korea. When I asked Skirbekk if other countries might follow suit, he replied, ‘Quite a few, possibly’.”

A second insight was provided by a Finnish demographer.

Humans evolved over millions of years while living in groups. Success of these groups would require that members be capable of collective action and be able to provide resources and an environment in which newborns can become adults. Traits that would support group success can be expected to develop. Two that seem relevant here are the hormonal responses generating affection for infants, and peer pressure that encourages members to follow behaviors of the majority.

Humans became wired to appreciate and be pleased by human infants. Females are born with a consuming interest in babies and mothering. Men and women both experience hormonal surges in the presence of an infant. Females excrete more of the bonding hormone oxytocin than males, while males also experience a drop in testosterone level when near an infant. Evolution has provided these effects to ensure that enough infants will survive to further the species.

We evolved living in groups where babies and children would be as plentiful as resources would allow. It is easy to see how evolutionary physical responses could develop. We now live in small family groups. If, as in South Korea, the most probable outcome is one-child and no-child families, children could easily live most of their lives, or at least their formative years, without ever physically encountering an infant. Could these hormonal responses to infants fade over time if they have never been activated?

We, of a certain age, grew up in societies where families with children were the norm. A crying child on an airplane invites feelings of sympathy, initially, at least. But if the norm has flipped and the majority has no experience with raising children, and no understanding of why a child might be crying are how difficult it is to control the crying, then disdain for the poor parent might be the first response. It is never easy to be a disruptive minority in any society. Disgust and intolerance can soon follow.

Have we created societies where the economic and social interests in having children are disappearing, and we are now relying on subtle hormonal surges that may also be disappearing to get us interested in parenting?

Have we stumbled upon yet another existential threat to human civilization? If Koreans seem unconcerned by the fact that their population will essentially disappear in a few generations, is it surprising that people seem to prefer to live in the moment and not worry about climate change which is coming upon us in a few generations as well, or that more and more plastic particles are entering our bodies?

Here’s a final thought. If we don’t have children, why worry about the future?

Immune Amnesia: Measles Is Much Worse Than We Thought

2025-03-06T08:59:00.000-08:00

It has long been recognized that the measles virus is about the most infectious agent that humans encounter. It has also long been recognized that vaccination against the virus is very effective. Consequently, the disease had been erased from our consciousness—until recently when we learned that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had impressed Trump with his knowledge of medical matters and was selected to be placed in charge of the agencies that treat infectious diseases. For many years Kennedy has been encouraging people to avoid vaccinations, including that for the measles virus. Kennedy’s wacky ideas play well with the anti-vaccination sentiments that arose from the politics of the covid pandemic. He will now have an opportunity to cause even more grief for our nation.

Consider this report: Measles Outbreak Continues to Spread in West Texas. It provides details on a growing outbreak.

“As a measles outbreak expands in West Texas, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health and human services secretary, on Tuesday cheered several unconventional treatments, including cod liver oil, but again did not urge Americans to get vaccinated.”

Kennedy seems to think treatment of measles infection is more important than avoiding infection.

“Texas doctors had seen ‘very, very good results,’ Mr. Kennedy claimed, by treating measles cases with a steroid, budesonide; an antibiotic called clarithromycin; and cod liver oil, which he said had high levels of vitamin A and vitamin D.”

“While physicians sometimes administer doses of vitamin A to treat children with severe measles cases, cod liver oil is ‘by no means’ an evidence-based treatment, said Dr. Sean O’Leary, chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Infectious Diseases.”

“Dr. O’Leary added that he had never heard of a physician using the supplement against measles.”

Experts say that measles is so infectious that a vaccination level of 95% is required to inhibit the spread of infections. Covid-related politics has had an effect on vaccination rates.

“Just 93 percent of kindergarten students nationwide had received the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella in the 2023-24 school year, down from 95 percent before the pandemic.”

The Texas measles outbreak has spread to nine counties, with the one in which the infection emerged having a school student vaccination rate of about 80%. Politics and conspiracies encouraged by Kennedy have multiplied the regions that have vaccination rates below 95% allowing infections to spread.

Only one child has died from infection thus far.

“About one in five people who catch measles will be hospitalized, according to the C.D.C.”

“While most measles cases resolve in a few weeks, in rare cases the virus can cause pneumonia, making it difficult for patients, especially children, to get oxygen into their lungs, or brain swelling, which can lead to blindness, deafness and intellectual disabilities.”

Measles is far from a negligible disease that might make vaccination optional. And it is far worse than the immediate response to infection suggests.

“The virus also weakens the immune system in the long term, making its host more susceptible to future infections. A 2015 study found that before the M.M.R. vaccine was widely available, measles may have been responsible for up to half of all infectious disease deaths in children.”

The weakened immune system is explained in the article Measles and Immune Amnesia.

“The risk associated with measles infection is much greater than the sum of its observable symptoms. The immune memories that you have acquired are priceless, built over many years and from countless exposures to a menagerie of germs. Measles virus is especially dangerous because it has the ability to destroy what’s been earned: immune memory from previous infections. Meanwhile, the process of fighting measles infection leaves patients especially vulnerable to secondary infection. The worldwide increase in measles prevalence is cause for concern because morbidity and mortality from the disease extends far beyond acute measles infection.”

“One of the most unique—and most dangerous—features of measles pathogenesis is its ability to reset the immune systems of infected patients. During the acute phase of infection, measles induces immune suppression through a process called immune amnesia. Studies in non-human primates revealed that MV (measles virus) actually replaces the old memory cells of its host with new, MV-specific lymphocytes. As a result, the patient emerges with both a strong MV-specific immunity and an increased vulnerability to all other pathogens.”

The process of containing the measles virus destroys many of the memory T-cells and B-cells that recall prior infections and provide the ability to fight reinfection.

“The number of T cells and B cells significantly decreases during the acute stage of measles infection, but there is a rapid return to normal WBC (white blood cell) levels after the virus is cleared from the system. This observation masked what was really going on until researchers were able to evaluate the qualitative composition of recovered lymphocyte populations. We now know that the memory T-cells and B-cells that are produced immediately following infection are dramatically different from those that existed before the measles infection. Not only have pre-existing immune memory cells been erased, but there has been a massive production of new lymphocytes. And these have only one memory. Measles. Thus, the host is left totally immune to MV and significantly vulnerable to all other secondary infections.”

It was possible to analyze mortality rates before and after the availability of the measles vaccine. The results were startling, indicating the effects of measles infection produced mortality from other viruses due to damaged immunity.

“Examination of child mortality rates in the U.S., U.K., and Denmark in the decades before and after the introduction of the measles vaccine revealed that nearly half of all childhood deaths from infectious disease could be related to MV infection when the disease was prevalent. That means infections other than measles resulted in death, due to the MV effect on the immune system.”

Fortunately, the depressed B-cells and T-cells slowly rebuild to levels that make them again effective against other diseases that had been encountered.

“Furthermore, it was determined that it takes approximately 2-3 years post-measles infection for protective immune memory to be restored. The average duration of measles-induced immune amnesia was 27 months in all 3 countries. Corresponding evidence indicates that it may take up to 5 years for children to develop healthy immune systems even in the absence of the immune suppressing effects of MV infection. If MV infection essentially resets a child’s developing immunity to that of a newborn, re-vaccination or exposure to all previously encountered microbes will be required in order to rebuild proper immune function.”

If you have read this far, congratulations are in order. You now know more about measles than Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The United States: The Destruction of the Regulatory State

2025-03-01T11:02:00.000-08:00

In short, a regulatory state is one in which private actors are allowed to pursue their goals until these actors cause pain and disruption to the state and its population. The state then moves in and regulates whatever activities caused the disruption so that it will not happen again. Legislation is often required to impose appropriate constraints on private activities. Consider a market failure that has led to a monopoly situation in which one provider of a service or product controls prices and service availability and is using its advantage to restrict competition and charge exorbitant prices for its contribution to the economy. The state will require a team of experts to understand how this situation developed and what type of legislation and regulation might be needed to correct the situation. Legislation tends to be general in an attempt to capture a range of possible threats to the state, regulation tends to be specific, making it difficult to incorporate all possible cases into the legislation. This team of state experts must remain available over time to evaluate other circumstances as they arrive from continued variations in activities presented by the private actors. Some team of experts within the state must judge whether the specific activities encountered fall under the purview of the legislation and if a regulatory response is necessary and legally appropriate.

One can produce a short version of the economic history of the United States. It would describe a series of events in which private actors discovered a means to make a lot of money in such a way that they benefited but society in general suffered. In other words, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. The state intervened to provide more balance and limit the power private entities could accrue, and society moved on. Inevitably, subsequent episodes would occur and the process was repeated.

Private actors have never liked being regulated and have long tried to weaken or eliminate this function of the state. This, in spite of wealth in millions transitioning to wealth in billions. The attack has followed two paths, one judicial and one political.

The judicial approach was to argue that if a given law contained ambiguities relative to a given case, the interpretation should be made by courts rather than the state agencies involved. In 1984, in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, the Supreme Court ruled that if the agency’s interpretation seemed reasonable it should be upheld. This became known as the “Chevron doctrine.” Last year, 2024, the Supreme Court voided the Chevron doctrine and placed responsibility for interpretations on the courts. The wealthy and the powerful took this as a win.

The political approach was to take control of the Presidency and Congress and make the agencies provide politically correct rulings. Until Trump and Musk, this approach had not been very successful. Civil Service rules made wholescale firings of federal employees difficult. Musk and Trump came along planning to do whatever they wanted and dare anyone to try and stop them.

Their approach has been to fire people who are easy to fire and terrorize the remainder hoping that they will resign and go away. This is not an approach designed to provide functional governmental agencies. It is an approach designed to eliminate such agencies and replace them with something. But what? Given that Musk is driving the process, it will have something to do with technology. Will each agency be replaced by an AIbot trained on libertarian principles?

Best bet: before the collapse of the federal workforce is complete, the public will notice that government agencies provide useful services and raise enough of a stink that even Republican politicians will fear for their careers and put a halt to it.

Covid and Society

2025-02-12T12:44:00.000-08:00

The dictionary definition of the term pathogenesis is “the origination and development of a disease. Jonathan Kennedy used the term to describe how infectious diseases and their consequences have altered our human civilization in his book Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues. Epidemics have occurred frequently throughout history, with the major ones having significant consequences. He provides this perspective.

“Outbreaks of infectious diseases have destroyed millions of lives and decimated whole civilizations, but the devastation has created opportunities for new societies and ideas to emerge and thrive. In this way, pathogens have been the protagonists in many of the most important social, political and economic transformations in history: the transition from a planet inhabited by multiple species of human to one in which Homo sapiens reigned supreme; the replacement of nomadic hunter-gatherer society with sedentary agriculture; the demise of the great empires of antiquity; the transformation of Christianity and Islam from small sects in Palestine and Hijaz to world religions; the shift from feudalism to capitalism; the devastation wrought by European colonialism; the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions; and the creation of the modern welfare state.”

Perhaps the most interesting sections of the book involved the role of the Black Death in causing the demise of feudalism and the rise of capitalism, and the depiction of industrialization as a form of plague in which crowded conditions led to massive deaths from infectious diseases.

Plagues tend to produce the most pain for those most vulnerable: the poor. The Black Death hit medieval societies repeatedly over a period of a few hundred years. Loss of life was so great, fifty percent or more, that the supply of serfs to produce the necessary food and other products that emanated from a feudal society disappeared. Feudalism was never a very efficient way to produce things. A transformation occurred, initiated either by former serfs or by landowners, that initiated the practice of leasing land to the agricultural laborers. This gave the former serfs the motivation to produce as much as possible. The laborers would perform better when they formed groups to negotiate and work together. Eventually the formed groups would compete with each other for land and workers and the equivalent of companies would be formed. This transformation took place over several centuries, beginning first in England and gradually spreading to other European countries.

Industrialization in England produced conditions where fewer agricultural workers were needed, and more were required in factories being built in towns and cities. This drove rural people to arrive in crowded living and working conditions where hygiene and diseases were poorly understood. Infections would propagate easily leading life expectancies to plummet.

“The new provincial towns and cities really dragged down the national life-expectancy figures. They were not only considerably lower than the figure for England and Wales, they also fell markedly in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. The numbers are skewed by very high infant mortality rates, with one in five babies dying before their first birthday. In the central areas of Manchester and Liverpool, you could expect to live about twenty-five years—a shorter lifespan than at any time since the Black Death. The figures are worse when we focus on just the poor. Life expectancy for factory laborers was seventeen in Manchester and fifteen in Liverpool. Death rates were so high among urban working classes that the population was only able to sustain itself because of the continual inflow of people from the surrounding countryside, and increasingly from Ireland.”

If the Industrial Revolution was to proceed, an interventionist government must arise and provide improved welfare for all the citizens. And that is what happened.

If one finds Kennedy’s picture compelling, it is inevitable to ponder what, if any, are the consequences for societies from the recent Covid pandemic. Clearly, there have been many changes, but only time will tell if they will be permanent. Children may have effectively lost about a year of education. The trend towards remote work has proved difficult for those providing office space and those supporting the office-space workers. Those with valuable assets thrived during the pandemic, those without suffered, increasing economic inequality.

Unfortunately, the pandemic seems to have generated responses that threaten the very nature of our society. Responses to Covid required governments to take actions. People were told to accept restrictions on their activities. In effect, they were expected to behave like members of a community, willing to try to protect each other from harm. In too many cases, people responded to such requests with not only a “no,” but rather a “hell no.” This attitude is one long popular with the political right, reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher’s dismissal of society.

“There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.”

This sort of thinking seems so unnatural. Humans evolved needing the society of a group to survive. Sharing resources was necessary for food, shelter, security, and the survival of infants. Evidence exists that even Neanderthals had acquired the tendency to protect and nurture the weak and disabled among the group. Our religions taught us to aid the unfortunate among us. Such instincts are likely millions of years old, permanently residing in our genes. They have been the basis for social democracies that formed after the last world war, including our own.

Thatcherism flows inevitably from the inequalities inherent in capitalism. The wealthy feel comfortable assuming that their wealth was the result of their hard work and intelligence, but the misleading corollary of that assumption is that the poor must not be working hard, or they are not very smart. A religious equivalent has arisen in which the fortunate are viewed as worthy of God’s grace, while the unfortunate are deemed unworthy. These attitudes appear to be dragging society back to a harsher, less stable—perhaps less survivable—era.

One could make the argument that we emerged from the Covid pandemic with Democrats being the conservative party representing traditional social values, while Republicans have become progressives, anxious to burn the house down so they can build a new one.

Covid did not create these trends, but it did accelerate them.

The Rival World Order: Autocracy Inc.

2025-01-15T10:26:00.000-08:00

US President Joe Biden has issued warnings that the world is moving towards a consequential conflict between democracies and autocracies. By democracies are meant the United States, European nations, Canada, South Korea, Australia, and Japan, nations with strong economic relationships and military ties such as NATO. The most aggressive autocracies include Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. This group of states has avowed geopolitical goals opposing those of the democracies, and are actively collaborating politically, economically, and militarily in “creating a new world order.” Anne Applebaum tells her readers that if this is all you recognize as the problem, you are missing half the conflict. She presents the argument in her book Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World.

Applebaum argues that the nature of autocracy has changed, and it is critical that we recognize the differences.

“Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy but by sophisticated networks relying on kleptocratic financial structures, a complex of security services—military, paramilitary, police—and technological experts who provide surveillance, propaganda and disinformation. The members of these networks are connected to not only one another within a given autocracy but also to networks in other autocratic countries, and sometimes in democracies too. Corrupt, state-controlled companies in one dictatorship do business with corrupt, state-controlled companies in another. The police in one country may arm, equip, and train the police in many others. The propagandists share resources—the troll farms and media networks that promote one dictator’s propaganda can also promote another’s—as well as themes: the degeneracy of democracy, the stability of autocracy, the evil of America.”

The author then makes statements that demand clarification.

“Unlike political or military alliances from other times and places, this group operates not like a bloc but rather like an agglomeration of companies, bound not by ideology but rather by a ruthless, single-minded determination to preserve their personal wealth and power: Autocracy, Inc.”

“Instead of ideas, the strongmen who lead Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Angola, Myanmar, Cuba, Syria, Zimbabwe, Mali, Belarus, Sudan, Azerbaijan, and perhaps three dozen others share a determination to deprive their citizens of any real influence or public voice, push back against all forms of transparency or accountability, and to repress anyone, at home or abroad, who challenges them.”

Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela provides a good example of a beneficiary of Autocracy Inc. Despite sanctions by the US and others, he thrives as he continues to extract wealth from his country.

“Yet President Nicolás Maduro’s regime receives loans from Russia, which also invests in Venezuela’s oil industry, as does Iran. A Belarussian company assembles tractors in Venezuela. Turkey facilitates illicit Venezuelan gold trade. Cuba has long provided security advisors and security technology to its counterparts in Caracas. Chinese-made water cannons, tear-gas cannisters, and shields were used to crush street protestors in Caracas in 2014 and again in 2017, leaving more than seventy dead, while Chinese-designed surveillance technology is used to monitor the public too. Meanwhile, the international narcotics trade keeps individual members of the regime, along with their entourages and families, well supplied with Versace and Chanel.”

Applebaum has stated that modern autocracies are not driven by ideas and ideology, but she then details how they are unified in participating in the destruction of democracy as a viable form of governance. Democratic nations, with their traditions of basic human rights, are viewed as an existential threat. Autocracies have tended to focus on the sovereignty of each nation, a concept that allows a regime to do whatever it wishes to its people, as a more convenient goal.

“Modern autocrats differ in many ways from their twentieth-century predecessors. But the heirs, successors, and imitators of these older leaders and thinkers, however varied their ideologies, do have a common enemy. That enemy is us.”

“To be more precise, that enemy is the democratic world, ‘the West,’ NATO, the European Union, their own internal democratic opponents, and the liberal ideas that inspire all of them.”

If the long list of autocracies view “us” as their enemy and wish to destroy our way of life it seems appropriate to consider our chances of winning this conflict. Applebaum provides numerous examples of how the institutions of democratic nations are being attacked by autocracies in an attempt to discredit democracy as a form of governance and promote autocracy as a more efficient option. Most of this international activity is situated in the big four: Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. Less emphasized is that these same four are also planning for possible future warfare by building up their military capabilities. Planes, ships, soldiers, and even missiles are fairly easy to track, but cyber weapons are often known only after they’ve been activated. It is abundantly clear that the four mentioned nations are working on cyber weapons that could severely damage the people and infrastructure of democratic nations, primarily the US. We will not know what they are capable of until they demonstrate their capabilities.

Applebaum sticks with her notion that our opponents are a loose agglomeration of criminal states intent on kleptocracy.

“…the democracies…should think about the struggle for freedom not as a competition between specific autocratic states, and certainly not as ‘war with China,’ but as a war against autocratic behaviors, wherever they are found: in Russia, in China, in Europe, in the United States…The autocracies want to create a global system that benefits thieves, criminals, dictators, and the perpetrators of mass murder. We can stop them.”

The author provides little to cheer about when it comes to countering kleptocrats, assuming that is our main issue. Criminals are active, law enforcement is reactive. And the history of international finance suggests there is way too much money to be made helping kleptocrats deal with their resources to ever be able to shut down the undesirable practices.

“…Delaware, Nevada, South Dakota, and Wyoming—nice, normal American states, full of nice, normal Americans—have created financial instruments that nameless investors can use to hide their money from the world.”

The terms “existential crisis” and “existential threat” appear in Applebaum’s analyses, yet she refuses to pose the democracy versus autocracy conflict in such terms. Her relevant situation from the twentieth century is the postwar conflict between the West and the Soviet Union known as the Cold War.

“In no sense is the modern competition between autocratic and democratic ideas and practices a direct replica of what we faced in the twentieth century. There are no ‘blocs’ to join and no Berlin Walls marking neat geographic divides. Many countries don’t fit comfortably into either category, democracy or autocracy. As I’ve written, some autocracies—the U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Vietnam—seek cooperation with the democratic world, don’t want to upend the UN Charter, and still see the advantages of international law. Some democracies—Turkey, Israel, Hungary, India, the Philippines—have elected leaders who are more inclined to break conventions on human rights than to uphold them. Because autocratic alliances are largely transactional, they can shift and change, and often do.”

What if Applebaum is wrong, and the proper twentieth century analogy is not postwar but prewar? Putin’s western yearnings are not very different from Hitler’s eastern yearnings. China’s world-dominance yearning exceeds Japan’s goals for Asian-Pacific dominance. In that earlier era, the democracies failed to realize the threats they faced until it was very late and nearly lost a world war. Could they be making the same mistake again?

Putin has made it clear that he intends to take control of not only Ukraine but also NATO countries that were once part of the Soviet Union, or even the Russian Empire. Yet, NATO is not preparing for war, it is half-heartedly assisting Ukraine in what it hopes will continue to be a proxy war. To survive, Ukraine must assemble at least the second most powerful army in the region, along with a defense industrial base that can produce a significant share of the armaments needed to contend with Russia. This is necessary because NATO, in spite of its avowed responsibilities, doesn’t seem to have the will to arm for war.

The democracies continue to treat China as if it is a nation that would be satisfied peacefully existing as a member of a family of advanced societies and economies. China has repeatedly proven such thinkers wrong, yet this optimism persists. Meanwhile, China openly pursues world economic, political, and military dominance.

The threat from autocracies is bigger than Applebaum’s Autocracy Inc. Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea have a mission: the discreditation of democracies. They are collaborating in Russia’s battle with Ukraine. If Ukraine should fall to Russia, they will have succeeded.

January 6, 2021: White Supremacy and Right-Wing Political Violence

2024-12-06T11:05:00.000-08:00

Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer are historians who are disturbed by our current era which they refer to as an “The Age of Disinformation.” They observe politicians and media sites purposely misleading voters about the reality of our present environment and the history of our past. Misinformation is being used to push people in directions that power groups find advantageous. To counter these practices, they have assembled a collection of essays by historians designed to enlighten readers with accurate descriptions of past and recent events. This information is collected in their book MythAmerica: Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past.

Perhaps the most disturbing chapter in the book is the essay by Kathleen Below, a professor of history at Northwestern University. Her specialties are the white power movement, vigilante violence, and political extremism. She titled her essay “Insurrection,” using the attack on Congress of January 6, 2021, and its aftermath, as the point of departure for a deep and dark analysis of US history.

The startling events of that day moved many commentators and others to make the observation: “This is not who we are.” According to Below, “this is exactly who we are.”

“As historians pointed out immediately, January 6 was American in the truest sense, its action harkening all the way back to the founding of the United States: a moment that both built upon and produced deep and enduring legacies of violence, racism and settler colonialism. Indeed, one can trace vigilante violence and lynching as foundational to American life and culture from the beginnings of the nation to the present. Such violence occurred not only in its most well-known incarnation, the spectacle lynching of Black men in the American South between 1890 and 1930, but in other places too. Mexicans and Mexican Americans faced vigilantes on the border in the early twentieth century in stunning numbers. Women who refused to marry faced the probability of lynching in the American West, as did union organizers in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. Violence to seize and shore up power—a claim to sovereignty through violence of the mob—is fundamentally American.”

Below claims the events of the day were certainly initiated by Trump and many participants clearly thought they were supporting Trump in his claims of a stolen election, but the numbers of people and the degree of violence was controlled by people with a much broader agenda. She refers to these people as the “white power movement.” At the end of her essay, the question to be answered by the reader is what is the greatest threat; is it Trump using these people to further his agenda, or is it these people using Trump to further their agenda?

“White power was bigger than simply another version of the Ku Klux Klan…By contrast, proponents of the white power movement were not really interested in seizing local power through mob violence. Instead, they advocated wholesale revolution through race war. By 2020, this organized groundswell represented the greatest domestic terrorism threat to the American homeland, according to both the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.”

“When it [the white power movement] formed in the late 1970s, it brought together several groups that had previously been at odds with one another, including Klan, neo-Nazi, radical tax resistor, Christian identity, white separatist, and later, skin heads and militia activists. These groups united with the explicit goal of waging war on the United States and its democratic institutions.”

One might wonder why we know so little about such a horrendous agenda? Below tells us that is by design.

“The most pervasive misunderstandings of the white power movement come from the early 1980s, when its activists declared open war on the federal government and adopted an organizational strategy called ‘Leaderless Resistance’ to achieve that goal. Simply put, this meant cell-style domestic terrorism in which white power activists could carry out individual or small-group acts of violence on an agreed upon set of targets with no demonstrable ties to other cells or group leadership. This strategy was designed to foil the government informants who had infiltrated the civil rights-era Ku Klux Klan and make it more difficult to prosecute white power groups in both criminal and civil cases.”

“After it declared war on the United States in 1983, the white power movement wasn’t looking for six thousand people to march down Main Street; it was looking for six people to detonate a bomb. To be sure, the movement still used public actions to recruit and to disperse its ideology, but the violent center of its activity was not interested in large numbers as much as it was interested in total dedication.”

White power violence is often masked from the public because the media has bought into the notion that any individual committing an act of violence is a “lone wolf.”

“Leaderless Resistance had a much more catastrophic outcome, however, one largely unanticipated even by white power adherents when it was implemented. It erased public understanding of white power activism as part of a movement, producing the most damaging myth about this history: that of the ‘lone wolf.’ Let me be perfectly clear: there are crimes carried out by individuals. There are some mass shootings that are not motivated by politics. But there is no such thing as a ‘lone wolf’ white power terrorist. The actions carried out by white power activists are part of a coordinated social movement, one that has united people in common purpose and around a coherent white supremacist ideology.”

Perhaps not every group listed above is interested in racial warfare, but each is definitely interested in seeing some components of the US government destroyed. The notion that they may be supporting each other is not far fetched since all groups seem to find a comfortable home in the Republican Party, where racial conflicts are frequent topics of discussion.

“These activists were motivated by a sense of urgency: they believed that immigration, feminism, abortion, interracial marriage and other social changes would lower the white birthrate and lead to the end of the white race. In other words, they saw not a soft demographic transformation—the much anticipated moment of transformation when a town, city, state, or nation would no longer be majority white—but an apocalyptic threat. Today the same constellation of ideas goes by the label ‘replacement theory’ or the ‘Great Replacement.’ And it has found purchase in mainstream politics and cable news commentary.”

It is not important that the casual reader might find dubious the notion that a relatively small number of violent activists could initiate a race war, win it, and manage to eliminate from Earth all non-whites and all traitorous whites. What is important is that these violent activists believe that it can be accomplished. They believe it because they have a “bible” that shows them the way. Their book is a work of fiction called The Turner Diaries. We receive some perspective from Wikipedia.

“The Turner Diaries is a 1978 novel by William Luther Pierce, the founder and chairman of National Alliance, a white nationalist group, published under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald. It depicts a violent revolution in the United States which leads to the overthrow of the federal government, a nuclear war, and ultimately a race war which leads to the systematic extermination of non-whites and Jews. All groups opposed by the novel’s protagonist, Earl Turner—including Jews, non-white people, ‘liberal actors,’ and politicians are murdered en masse.”

“The Turner Diaries…has been labeled ‘the bible of the racist right’ by the FBI.”

Below tells us it is necessary that we realize how important the goals and methods described in The Turner Diaries are to the white power movement. It is also necessary to realize that that book motivates white power groups around the world, not just in the US.

“It would be impossible to understand how a small number of activists thought they could wage revolution without The Turner Diaries, a novel that imagined the success of Leaderless Resistance. A central text and cultural lodestone for the movement, The Turner Diaries appeared at critical points and in the hands of important activists throughout its history. The White Patriot Party in North Carolina distributed it to new recruits in the mid-1980s. The Order, a white terrorist group in the Pacific Northwest, kept a stack of copies in the bunkhouse. Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, sold it on the gun-show circuit in the early 1990s.

“The Turner Diaries…was important not because of its quality but because it answered a critical question: how could a fringe movement possibly hope to overthrow the most militarized superstate in the history of the world? The novel answered this question by laying out a series of strategies, beginning with cell-style terror, infrastructure attacks, and targeted assassinations, and rising to the theft and deployment of nuclear weapons and other mass-casualty attacks. The Turner Diaries lays out the assassination of all ‘race traitors’ on the ‘Day of the Rope’ and then, after the white power activists win, explains in a postscript the annihilation of all people of color throughout the United States and the world. It also illustrates an important problem with the phrase white nationalism in describing the movement.”

“People may hear white nationalism and assume it to be adjacent with patriotism, or at the very least consider it as pro-American. But after 1983 the nation at the heart of white nationalism was not the United States but rather the Aryan nation, imagined as a transnational polity of white people who would need to be saved from extermination through race war and violence. This is a fundamentally more violent and radical position than that implied by ‘nationalism’.”

A notable scene from the January 6 insurrection was the gallows assembled outside the Capital building. The media seemed to think it had something to do with the “Hang Mike Pence” chants. Below suggests that interpretation is completely wrong. The Day of the Rope in The Turner Diaries was the day on which all the race traitors were hanged. That would make the gallows a message to all those either in the know or familiar with the tale stating that the day of the rope was coming.

“On January 6, 2021, the white power and militant Right actors were, among the larger crowd, the most organized and well armed, and they posed the greatest threat to the workings of democracy. So did January 6 follow The Turner Diaries, which features an attack on the Capital meant as a show of force. And again, while much ink has been spilled trying to differentiate among groups such as the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, The Base, Boogaloo Boys, and Atomwaffen Division, all should be understood as part of the same broad white power and militant Right groundswell, one with decades of organizing and resources and, today, with increasing momentum.”

“On January 6, when the insurrectionists constructed a gallows and noose outside of the Capital, they referred directly to a scene in The Turner Diaries; the entire action referenced a strike on the Capital in that novel. This indicates that January 6 was not meant as a mass-casualty event but a recruitment and radicalization exercise to draw others into the fold. Certainly this happened immediately after the rally, as white power activists and others on the militant Right reached into the Trump base and QAnon groups in intensified recruitment campaigns.”

There are certainly dangerous people out there and they have allied themselves with the Republican Party. They are committing acts of violence and what is the Republican response? They try to hide the fact that their allies are committing crimes.

“Even more concerning were deliberate attempts to distract from white power activism in the aftermath of mass attacks on American civilians, often with incontestable evidence about the motivation of the attackers. Several recent mass shootings carried out by white power attackers have been described in other ways. For this reason, we still hear stories of ‘lone wolf’ gunmen attacking Muslims in Christchurch New Zealand; Jewish people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburg; Black Bible-study worshippers in Pittsburg; Latinx people in El Paso. And these were acts of Islamophobic, anti-Semitic, racist, and anti-immigrant violence. But they were all carried out by white power activists, all of whom shared the same core motivating texts (including The Turner Diaries), ideology, concerns about white reproduction, and lists of targets. They are all part of the same movement.”

“But a GOP talking points memo after the 2019 El Paso shooting suggested steering ‘the conversation away from white nationalism to an argument that implies both sides are to blame.’ This stance not only ignored the threat of the most violent domestic-terrorist movement attempting to attack American civilians but deliberately tried to aid it in its work of disappearance.”

“Here we see the evolution of the myth of ‘this is not who we are’: the rising tide of white power activity and its overt violent racism, on the one hand, and the deepening disavowal and complicity of Republican elected officials and their media allies on the other.”

Is Trump using violent white power groups to support his agenda, or are violent white power groups using Trump to support their agenda—or do they have a shared agenda?

2024: Where Did All the Democrats Go?

2024-11-08T09:52:00.000-08:00

Plenty of pundits are issuing explanations why Harris performed so poorly against Trump in the presidential election. Establishing any credibility for these analyses must be judged with respect to a startling bit of data about the election. This source provided a tally of votes received by the candidates in the last three presidential elections.

“The dominant story of the election thus far is the turnout. Donald Trump collected 62 million votes in 2016, grew that to 74 million in 2020, and will check in at a bit less than 74 million this year. In other words, to the extent that he won new voters over this year, they were offset by voters who jumped ship. He really does have a pretty hard ceiling. On the other hand, Hillary Clinton collected 66 million votes in 2016, Joe Biden got 81 million in 2020, and this year, Kamala Harris is going to end up with about 68 million. "Where did all those Biden voters go?" is a question that will haunt Democratic operatives, not to mention political commentators, for months or years.”

Trump’s vote count was essentially equal to that of 2020. Any gains he made over the last four years were balanced by losses. An old white man running against Trump received 13 million more votes than a young black woman running against Trump.

Race and gender—some things never change.