The Weird Times
Inner Monologues and Desultory Reporting from Outer Spaces
The Weird Times: Issue 44, March 14, 2021
The best way to predict the future is to make it. —Scott Galloway
Technology is stuff that doesn’t work yet. —Bran Ferren
“I am begging America and the media to pay attention to this. Right now we are facing an avalanche of voter suppression that we have not seen before, at least not since Jim Crow. In state after state—it’s not just Iowa; it’s not just Georgia; it’s not just Arizona… It’s also Montana. It’s also Missouri. It’s also Florida. It’s also Texas. The list goes on and on. Donald Trump told a Big Lie that led to an assault on democracy in the Capitol on January 6. The assaults we’re seeing going on now in state capitols with the legislatures may be less deadly, and be less violent, but they are every bit as damaging to our democracy.” —Voting rights attorney Marc Elias on the Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC, 3/9/21
Can the red wolves come back from the brink of extinction again: Once a US conservation success story, numbers in the wild have plummeted. Now a court has given hope for their survival, Lucy Sherriff, The Guardian, 3/10/21
There are perhaps no more than 10 red wolves left in the wild, and they are all in just one place: North Carolina.
It is an astonishing statistic for a species once hailed as undergoing the most successful reintroduction programme in the US, providing the blueprint for Yellowstone national park’s much-lauded grey wolf rewilding project.
“The [red wolf] programme has almost entirely crumbled since I’ve been working here,” says Heather Clarkson, who works with the environmental charity Defenders of Wildlife. “It took about 20 years to get the programme to a strong place, that’s the really sad part. Because now it’s crashed. Disappointed barely scratches the surface.”
A Year After Breonna Taylor's Killing, Family Says There's 'No Accountability,’ Brakkton Booker and Rachel Treisman, NPR.org, 3/13/21
"Justice has not been served," (Rep. Attica) Scott said. "Folks on the front line have been very clear that they're continuing to call for all of the officers involved in Breonna Taylor's murder to be fired, arrested and charged for her murder. They have not wavered from those demands."
She said she will be attending the gathering on Saturday, describing it as one of "love, community and solidarity." Local activists have characterized it similarly.
"To the LMPD and the mayor and everyone involved, we're still going to keep applying pressure," protest leader Rosie Henderson told WFPL. "But as a whole in the movement, we want to unify. That's a day that we're going to come together and unify as one."
A year later, the pain is still fresh for Taylor's loved ones.
Billions of cicadas may be coming soon to trees near you, John Cooley and Chris Simon, The Conversation, 3/12/21
A big event in the insect world is approaching. Starting sometime in April or May, depending on latitude, one of the largest broods of 17-year cicadas will emerge from underground in a dozen states, from New York west to Illinois and south into northern Georgia. This group is known as Brood X, as in the Roman numeral for 10.
For about four weeks, wooded and suburban areas will ring with cicadas’ whistling and buzzing mating calls. After mating, each female will lay hundreds of eggs in pencil-sized tree branches.
Then the adult cicadas will die. Once the eggs hatch, new cicada nymphs fall from the trees and burrow back underground, starting the cycle again.
There are perhaps 3,000 to 4,000 species of cicadas around the world, but the 13- and 17-year periodical cicadas of the eastern U.S. appear to be unique in combining long juvenile development times with synchronized, mass adult emergences.
These events raise many questions for entomologists and the public alike. What do cicadas do underground for 13 or 17 years? What do they eat? Why are their life cycles so long? Why are they synchronized? And is climate change affecting this wonder of the insect world?
How the Trillion-Dollar Processed Food Industry Manipulates Our Instinctual Desires: Michael Moss Connects Our Prehistoric Ancestors to Our Love of Aldi, Michael Moss, Lithub, 3/5/21
One of the most basic and strongest instincts that drives our eating habits and addiction to processed food relates to the price. Evolutionary biologists frame our development as humans in terms of energy—in terms of both how we spend the energy we derive from food and how much energy we have to expend to obtain that food. For the latter, it only made sense that our forebears learned to take the easiest path in eating. Walking upright meant less effort in foraging; using fire to cook increased the efficiency of our digestion; in eating fresh meat, we chased down the sloth, not the springbok. Today, there seems to be some of this ancient behavior at play in the choices we make in food. Cheaper food means having to work less in order to pay for that food, and thus we are drawn by instinct to grocery receipts and restaurant bills that are smaller.
Can we really thank our forebears for this? Not with certainty; evolutionary biology involves a fair bit of conjecture. And none of this is meant to slight the circumstance of those many among us who are so financially pressed that cheap food is the only option. They have no real choice when deciding whether to buy a $2.78 pepperoni pizza that can feed the whole family, or a $5 pint of blueberries.
Yet how else but through the nature of our evolution to explain the BMWs and Mercedes and Jaguars that fill the parking lots of the latest food phenomenon to sweep the country. The owners of these luxury cars are patronizing a supermarket where they have to deposit a quarter to use a grocery cart, where 90 percent of the items are of an unfamiliar brand, and where the cashiers shoo them along to bag their own groceries away from the cash register so the lines can move faster.
The store is called Aldi, a fast-growing German-based discount chain with 1,900 stores in the United States and a cult-like following that is willing to tolerate any inconvenience for one reason: Its prices are half those of traditional supermarkets, and 15 percent below even those of Walmart, the heretofore champion of discount groceries. — from Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions
PFAS in pesticides, a “problem of epic proportions,” E.A. Crunden and Arial Wittenberg, E&E News, 3/5/21
"Forever chemicals" are present in multiple common pesticides, according to new testing conducted by an environmental watchdog group and released exclusively to E&E News.
The findings, described as "deeply concerning," raise a host of public health concerns — including implications for food safety — and could trigger pressure on EPA to address the issue. The agency has faced repeated scrutiny over pesticides in the past, with the latest findings already adding fuel to the fire.
The testing done by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) found per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) — a class of chemicals tied to a wide range of health concerns, including cancer — in a handful of publicly available herbicides and insecticides.
Inhaled CRISPR Treatment Targets Influenza and SARS-CoV-2 Infections, Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News, 3/5/21
If you think breathing in gene editing enzymes to treat infectious diseases, such as the flu or COVID-19, is a technology that is far-fetched or a long way off, think again. A team of investigators from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University has developed a CRISPR-based treatment to stop the replication of both the flu virus and the virus that causes COVID-19 in mice. Moreover, the new treatment is delivered to the lungs via a nebulizer, which could make it simple for patients to administer themselves at home. Findings from the new study were published recently in Nature Biotechnology through an article titled, “Treatment of influenza and SARS-CoV-2 infections via mRNA-encoded Cas13a in rodents.”
Interestingly, the researchers used mRNA technology to code for Cas13a, which destroys parts of the RNA genetic code that viruses use to replicate in cells in the lungs. Using a guide strand, researchers can provide a map that basically tells the Cas13a protein where to attach to the viruses’ RNA and begin to destroy it.
“In our drug, the only thing you have to change to go from one virus to another is the guide strand—we only have to change one sequence of RNA. That’s it,” explained senior study investigator Phillip Santangelo, PhD, a professor in the Wallace H. Coulter department of biomedical engineering at Emory University. “We went from flu to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. They’re incredibly different viruses. And we were able to do that very, very rapidly by just changing a guide.”
Enter electrofuels or eFuels as Porsche calls it — synthetic methanol gasoline that will be produced using green hydrogen, made with renewable energy. The fuel will burn the same as gasoline made from crude oil but without the huge greenhouse gas emissions. It can be sold at the existing network of filling stations globally and Porsche owners won't need to get their engines modified.
Porsche spokesman Peter Gräve told DW its eFuels will "permit the almost climate-neutral operation of combustion-engine vehicles." The carmaker recently said its electrofuels could cut CO2 emissions by more than 85% and is cleaner than an electric vehicle when factoring in the environmental impact of battery production.
Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox, Lina M. Khan, The Yale Law Journal, January 2017
This Note argues that the current framework in antitrust—specifically its pegging competition to “consumer welfare,” defined as short-term price effects—is unequipped to capture the architecture of market power in the modern economy. We cannot cognize the potential harms to competition posed by Amazon’s dominance if we measure competition primarily through price and output. Specifically, current doctrine underappreciates the risk of predatory pricing and how integration across distinct business lines may prove anticompetitive. These concerns are heightened in the context of online platforms for two reasons. First, the economics of platform markets create incentives for a company to pursue growth over profits, a strategy that investors have rewarded. Under these conditions, predatory pricing becomes highly rational—even as existing doctrine treats it as irrational and therefore implausible. Second, because online platforms serve as critical intermediaries, integrating across business lines positions these platforms to control the essential infrastructure on which their rivals depend. This dual role also enables a platform to exploit information collected on companies using its services to undermine them as competitors.
This Note maps out facets of Amazon’s dominance. Doing so enables us to make sense of its business strategy, illuminates anticompetitive aspects of Amazon’s structure and conduct, and underscores deficiencies in current doctrine. The Note closes by considering two potential regimes for addressing Amazon’s power: restoring traditional antitrust and competition policy principles or applying common carrier obligations and duties.
How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation:The company’s AI algorithms gave it an insatiable habit for lies and hate speech. Now the man who built them can't fix the problem, Karen Hao, MIT Technology Review, 3/11/21
By the time thousands of rioters stormed the US Capitol in January, organized in part on Facebook and fueled by the lies about a stolen election that had fanned out across the platform, it was clear from my conversations that the Responsible AI team had failed to make headway against misinformation and hate speech because it had never made those problems its main focus. More important, I realized, if it tried to, it would be set up for failure.
The reason is simple. Everything the company does and chooses not to do flows from a single motivation: Zuckerberg’s relentless desire for growth.
Scales of Reference: Collected at the tail end of British Columbia's "silver fever," hundred-year-old salmon scales are now helping Indigenous and federal researchers reconstruct and better manage the populations of one of Canada's most important fish, Lesley Evans Ogden, bioGraphic, 3/11/21
Sockeye are smaller than the mighty Chinook and larger than the diminutive pinks, but they are commercially prized above all other salmon species for their fat-rich, flavorful orange flesh. For at least 5,000 years before the first cannery opened on the Skeena in 1877, the Tsimshian, Gitxsan, and Wet’suwet’en First Nations harvested salmon here—especially sockeye—for food, trade, and ceremonial purposes. So important were salmon to Indigenous cultures and economies in the Pacific Northwest that a trading language called Chinook evolved to allow communication among diverse groups.
(Ed Note: This is from a beautiful, evocative multimedia piece that documents both past and present of this story—it’s almost impossible to excerpt. The visuals are an integral element of the storytelling and should be experienced on a big screen for best effect. bioGraphic is a nonprofit offering a free multimedia magazine experience.)
INSIDE THE OIL INDUSTRY’S FIGHT TO ROLL BACK TRIBAL SOVEREIGNTY AFTER SUPREME COURT DECISION, Gov. Kevin Stitt’s commission to sort out Oklahoma’s future is stacked with oil and gas insiders — and has no Indigenous voices, Alleen Brown, The Intercept, 3/10/21
“I think what industry doesn’t want to do is actually engage with Indian Country,” said Alex Pearl, a professor at the University of Oklahoma College of Law and an enrolled member of the Chickasaw Nation. “They don’t treat tribes like nations.”
The hydrogen revolution is real and it will change the world: The Paris Agreement forced countries to get creative with their energy sources and methods, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Telegraph, 3/11/21
Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states are also reinventing themselves, aiming to become mass global exporters of zero-carbon fuels for ships, aircraft, or Asian power plants. Abu Dhabi is already developing desert solar power for $1.35 per kWh, tantamount to free energy. This will be converted into hydrogen by Siemens through electrolysis to make clean synthetic jet fuel. Carbon-free air travel is in sight.
Terry Tempest Williams, Eve Ensler, Valarie Kaur & Nina Simons: Grief, Sacred Rage, Reckoning, and Revolutionary Love, Bioneers.org
For too long women in general and women of color even more pointedly have been told to suppress their grief and rage in the name of love and forgiveness. No more. How do we reclaim our emotions in the labor of loving others? What might authentic reckoning, apology, and transformation look like, personally and politically, and where would they ultimately lead us?
With three of the most extraordinary writers, activists and thought leaders of our era: Terry Tempest Williams, V (formerly known as Eve Ensler), and Valarie Kaur.
Read an edited transcript of this discussion here.
How the quest for significance and respect underlies the white supremacist movement, conspiracy theories and a range of other problems, Arie Kruglanski, The Conversation, 3/11/21
I am a psychologist who studies the human quest for significance and respect. My research reveals that this basic motivation is a major force in human affairs. It shapes the course of world history and determines the destiny of nations. It underlies some of the chief challenges society is facing. Among others, these are:
The suicides – known as “deaths of despair” – of working-class Americans
White supremacist movements
Systemic racism
Islamist terrorism
The proliferation of conspiracy theories
The growing rift in the Republican Party between moderates and extremists
In all these cases, people’s actions, opinions and attitudes aim, often unconsciously, to satisfy their fundamental need to count, to be recognized and respected.
Q&A: Senior Fellow Justin Grimmer on Allegations Of Election Fraud In 2020 Presidential Election, Jonathan Mavroydis, Hoover.org, 3/1/21
(Ed: the quote below is from the end of a long piece that thoroughly debunks every single Republican-conspiracy-theory claim of voter fraud in the 2020 election:)
Does the whole controversy suggest that because so many Republicans lack confidence in the election procedures there should be some type of electoral reform in the United States?
That’s a great question, and it’s really at the heart of the research that we’re conducting in my lab group. I think both Democrats and Republicans would agree that they would like to see changes made to the administration of US elections. In my heart of hearts, I’d like to believe that there’s room for compromise. I think it would be a shame to take steps to address concerns about voter fraud when those concerns emerge from what looks like a rather intentional effort to sow distrust in the elections. For example, policy makers can make a number of these changes, then the next election a candidate could allege that the election was still unfairly administered.
I believe there are a number of ways that we can make elections more transparent. In Ohio and Texas, for example, election officials enabled mail-in ballots to be counted before election day. In those states, the vote count wasn’t delayed until late in the night on election day nor did it drag on for weeks. Simple reforms such as this, I believe, can increase voter trust in election administration.
I also believe it would be helpful for skeptical citizens to better understand how elections are administered. I would encourage them to volunteer as poll workers and see how the process works at their local polling station. I think people would come to the realization that elections are much more secure than they originally believed.
The World as a Neural Network, Vitaly Vanchurin, Arxiv.org
We discuss a possibility that the entire universe on its most fundamental level is a neural network. We identify two different types of dynamical degrees of freedom: “trainable” variables (e.g. bias vector or weight matrix) and “hidden” variables (e.g. state vector of neurons). We first consider stochastic evolution of the trainable variables to argue that near equilibrium their dynamics is well approximated by Madelung equations (with free energy representing the phase) and further away from the equilibrium by Hamilton-Jacobi equations (with free energy representing the Hamilton’s principal function). This shows that the trainable variables can indeed exhibit classical and quantum behaviors with the state vector of neurons representing the hidden variables.
RATATATAT: Quick Hits
Did time flow in two directions from the big bang, making two futures? Why time only flows forwards is one of the great mysteries of physics. A new idea suggests that it actually went in two ways from the big bang – and, even more radically, that time emerges not from entropy, but from the growth of structure, Julian Barbour, New Scientist, 3/3/21
Southwest's prolonged drought stressing New Mexico trees, Scott Wyland, Santa Fe New Mexican, 3/7/21
Trump Emboldened Extremists. They Could Spell Trouble For Biden’s Interior Department: Experts worry it’s only a matter of time before Biden’s environmental agenda collides with anti-government militias, Chris D’Angelo, Huffpost, 3/7/21
In 2018, Diplomats Warned of Risky Coronavirus Experiments in a Wuhan Lab. No One Listened: After seeing a risky lab, they wrote a cable warning to Washington. But it was ignored, Josh Rogin, Politico, 3/8/21
Industrial Facilities Released Millions of Pounds of Illegal Pollution During the Winter Storm: Many of them won’t face any consequences for the excess emissions that they pumped into the air, endangering the lives of communities downwind, Amal Ahmed, Texas Observer, 3/9/21
12 Charts That Show How Tech Took Off During a Year of Shutdowns: A forced experiment in moving nearly all personal and professional life online proved a windfall for much of the tech industry, Laura Mandaro, The Information, 3/10/21
A Single Chemical Plant in Louisville Emits a Super-Pollutant That Does More Climate Damage Than Every Car in the City: Executives at Chemours promised at the White House in 2015 to try to abate the emissions. Now, they say it will take two more years, Phil McKenna and James Bruggers, Inside Climate News, 3/9/21
Cameras inside edible pills will photograph early signs of cancer, Kat Lay, The Times, 3/11/21
Poland to resume some logging in ancient Bialowieza forest, Reuters staff, Reuters, 3/9/21
Deep-sea ‘Roombas’ will comb ocean floor for DDT waste barrels near Catalina, Rosanna Xia, LA Times, 3/10/21
10 Books on Capitalism to Help You Understand the World: Love it or hate it, capitalism is an inescapable part of all of our lives, Orrin Grey, Earlybirdbooks.com, 3/10/21
“Our identity is non negotiable” says Gwich’in leader Bernadette Demientieff, Rhett A. Butler, MongaBay, 3/8/21
Anna's Hummingbird Identification, All About Birds, Cornell Lab.
The
Adoration
The next
Messenger
will be
She who
is born
on this
day
near an
apartment
street
after someone
closes their
eyes below
the awning
of a corner
grocery store
on a summer
sidewalk
thousands
of miles away
The flat
city surfaces
of our
kitchen
tables
accommodate
the fields
of hallways
and the
children
who
all cry
in the
same
language
The Angels
line up
their shoes
at the
door
They have
come
a great
distance
to hear
the newborn
sing for
Her supper
—Beau Beausoleil
March 14 birthdays: Albert Einstein, Billy Crystal, Simone Biles, Johann Strauss, Sylvia Beach, Quincy Jones, Jerry Greenfield (Ben & Jerry’s), Steph Curry
In view of the fact that in any future world war nuclear weapons will certainly be employed, and that such weapons threaten the continued existence of mankind, we urge the Governments of the world to realize, and to acknowledge publicly, that their purpose cannot be furthered by a world war, and we urge them, consequently, to find peaceful means for the settlement of all matters of dispute between them. —Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, The Russell-Einstein Manifesto, 1955
I think it's like a relay race. You run, and you hand over the baton, and your kids pick it up. They take the stuff they want, throw the rest away, and keep running. That's what life is about. —Billy Crystal
Sunday morning, brings the dawn in
It's just a restless feeling by my side
Early dawning, Sunday morning
It's just the wasted years so close behind
Watch out, the world's behind you
There's always someone around you who will call
It's nothing at all
Sunday Morning, Velvet Underground, written by John Cale/Lou Reed
Time is an anomaly. Today we decided to purposely “lose” an hour. I have no idea why. No matter what happens, these are still the weird times, but we are all in this together, there is much to fear, yet much more to celebrate. Enjoy it all. Be well, stay healthy, please keep in touch until we meet again in person.
