The Weird Times
Inner Monologues and Desultory Reporting from Outer Spaces
The Weird Times: Issue 41, February 21, 2021
Nothing is always Something that’s been left as Nothing, whether in an abandoned space or a photograph, on a historical maker, or in memory — Susan Crane, from Nothing Happened: A History
I used to be a discipline problem, which caused me embarrassment until I realized that being a discipline problem in a racist society is sometimes an honor — Ishmael Reed
Like running trying to live a good life has to hurt a little bit, or we're not running hard enough, not really trying― June Jordan, from Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays
I live like a man who is dead already — Malcolm X, May 19, 1925—February 21, 1965
See the first images from NASA’s rover Perseverance, direct from Mars, Sarah Kaplan, Washington Post, 2/19/21
Study: How Online Propagandists Targeted The 2020 Election, Stephen Rosenfeld, The NationalMemo, 2/14/21
(This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.)
Partisan disinformation to undermine 2020's presidential election shadowed every step of the voting process last year but took an unprecedented turn when the earliest false claims morphed into intricate conspiracies as Election Day passed and President Trump worked to subvert the results, according to two of the nation's top experts tracking the election propaganda.
At the general election's outset, as states wrapped up their primaries and urged voters to use mailed-out ballots in response to the pandemic, false claims began surfacing online—in tweets, social media posts, text messages, reports on websites, videos and memes—targeting the stage in the electoral process that was before voters. These attacks on the nuts and bolts of voting, from registration to the steps to obtain and cast a ballot, began as "claims of hacking and voter fraud… [that] honed [in] on specific events," said Matt Masterson, who helped lead the Department of Homeland Security's election security team.
"This is a lot of what we talked about with you at CISA [the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency] in the lead-up [to Election Day], anticipating that were there were problems experienced, and then in the contested elections, those would be used to blow out of proportion or lie about what was actually taking place," Masterson said, speaking to the nation's state election directors in early February at a winter 2021 conference.
But as November 3's Election Day approached and the vote-counting continued afterward in presidential battleground states, Masterson and a handful of teams working inside and outside of government to trace and track disinformation, and to urge online platforms and sources to curb their false content, saw an unexpected development. The narrowly focused threads that attacked earlier steps in the process of running elections swapped out purported villains and protagonists and became a full-blown conspiratorial tapestry attacking the results.
Why the cold weather caused huge Texas blackouts – a visual explainer, Alvin Chang, The Guardian, 2/20/21
The Texas power outage, which has left millions without power, happened for a multitude of reasons. But it’s important to understand how those causes are connected, because they’ll continue to be relevant as the state experiences more extreme weather events.
Trump’s Defense Was an Insult to the Impeachment Proceedings and an Assault on Reason, Masha Gessen, The New Yorker, 2/14/21
Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial was an artifact of his Presidency. It was a battle of meaning against noise, against nothing-means-anything-and-everything-is-the-same nihilism—and nihilism won.
We’ll Have Herd Immunity by April: Covid cases have dropped 77% in six weeks. Experts should level with the public about the good news, Martin Makary, Wall Street Journal, 2/18/21
Amid the dire Covid warnings, one crucial fact has been largely ignored: Cases are down 77% over the past six weeks. If a medication slashed cases by 77%, we’d call it a miracle pill. Why is the number of cases plummeting much faster than experts predicted?
In large part because natural immunity from prior infection is far more common than can be measured by testing. Testing has been capturing only from 10% to 25% of infections, depending on when during the pandemic someone got the virus. Applying a time-weighted case capture average of 1 in 6.5 to the cumulative 28 million confirmed cases would mean about 55% of Americans have natural immunity.
Now add people getting vaccinated. As of this week, 15% of Americans have received the vaccine, and the figure is rising fast. Former Food and Drug Commissioner Scott Gottlieb estimates 250 million doses will have been delivered to some 150 million people by the end of March.
There is reason to think the country is racing toward an extremely low level of infection. As more people have been infected, most of whom have mild or no symptoms, there are fewer Americans left to be infected. At the current trajectory, I expect Covid will be mostly gone by April, allowing Americans to resume normal life.
'Piecing together a broken heart': Native Americans rebuild territories they lost: Tribes across the US are buying back land lost during and after the colonization period on the open market, Hallie Golden, The Guardian, 2/20/21
More than six decades after a 1,705-acre patchwork of meadows, wetlands and timberland in southern Oregon was taken from the Klamath Tribes, the Native American community has found its way back to the territory – by way of the real estate market.
Over the summer, the tribes discovered the land was up for sale, so as part of their large-scale effort to reacquire territory that was historically theirs, they prepared an offer. Although another buyer nearly swooped in, the tribes’ purchase more than doubles their current holdings, and extends their territory to the base of Yamsay Mountain, an important site for prayer and spiritual journeys for the community.
Willa Powless, Klamath Tribes’ council member at large, said it was major step toward piecing together a “broken heart”.
“Our people are born with a spiritual connection to the land that we all feel and we all know and our elders teach us about,” she said. Getting back that “big of a piece of land, especially undeveloped land, is really powerful. And it’s probably one of the most healing processes we’ve gone through in a long time.”
The Klamath purchase is just the latest example of tribes across the US buying back land lost during and after the colonization period on the open market.
Why Drilling the Arctic Refuge Will Release a Double Dose of Carbon: In the renewed debate over drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, one troubling impact of oil development has been overlooked: Disrupting the annual caribou migration will have, Oswald Schmitz, Yale Environment 360, 2/18/21
In the absence of bidding by oil companies, Alaska’s state-owned economic development corporation moved in to fill the void. The state’s action was spurred by the U.S. Geological Service’s cost-benefit analyses that oil extraction in Area 1002 could be a profitable venture, bringing benefits through job creation and tax revenues. The State of Alaska intends now to undertake seismic exploration throughout Area 1002 to pinpoint locations where drilling could be profitable, with the intent of laying the groundwork for attracting industry at a future date.
But the benefit-cost analysis that informed Alaska’s decision failed to consider the social cost of carbon — usually measured as the dollar value of harm caused by emitting a fixed amount of CO2 into the atmosphere. That cost may be exacerbated if seismic activities risk the release of permafrost-carbon as methane by altering caribou movement and grazing. Accounting for the cost in terms of methane released could significantly tip the economic balance. In the worst case, the additional social cost of methane-caused global warming could, over the expected 30-year lifespan of oil extraction in Area 1002, wipe out most if not all of the expected tax revenue from oil activity going to the state.
Currently, the exact social cost of carbon taking into account the potency and lifespan of methane released to the atmosphere remains uncertain. That is because environmental risk assessments have not evaluated how widespread the thawing of permafrost in Area 1002 will be as a consequence of shifting caribou movement, nor have they determined the rate at which the thawing top 10-foot-layer of permafrost will be decomposed. Still, decades-old preliminary exploration activity in Area 1002 would suggest, at the very least, that the spectacular wilderness vista will be altered for generations to come.
Beyond the analyses, the ultimate question remains: Will this economically questionable 30-year venture be worth the lasting environmental consequences to a wilderness that took tens to hundreds of thousands of years to develop, for the sake of extracting what amounts to meeting one year’s worth of the nation’s oil demand?
Swamp Sentinels: Buried in mud for millennia, some of New Zealand's ancient kauri trees are revealing surprising clues about Earth's climate—past, present, and future, Kate Evans, BioGraphic, 2/18/21
“There’s no other wood resource like it for this part of Earth’s history, full stop.”— Andrew Lorrey, climate scientist
When the thing lay uncovered, complete with a medusa-like rootball, it measured 65 feet long and 8 feet across, and weighed 65 tons.
It was a kauri tree, a copper-skinned conifer endemic to New Zealand. The indigenous Māori hold the species sacred, and use its honey-colored softwood for traditional carvings and ocean-going canoes. Though this kauri tree had clearly been buried for thousands of years, Magee was astonished to see leaves and cones stuck to its underside that were still green.
The power company, Top Energy, called in a local sawmiller named Nelson Parker to examine Magee’s find. Parker, a champion woodchopper with powerful shoulders and a missing finger, had been digging up, processing, and selling kauri logs like this one since the early 1990s. As soon as his chainsaw bit into the bark, he knew from the color of the sawdust (dark yellow) and from the smell (subtle, resiny) that this tree was very old, and worth a lot of money.
Parker also knew that swamp kauri, as the buried trees are known, are worth a lot to science. One this large would be of special interest to a group of scientists who study the information that the ancient trees have coded into their rings. After removing the roots, he cut a four-inch-thick slice from the base of the trunk and sent it to them for analysis.
What he couldn’t know then was that this particular tree held the key to understanding an ancient global catastrophe, and how it may have shaped our collective past….
The kauri tree, or Agathis australis, is one of the largest and longest-lived tree species in the world. An individual kauri can live for more than two millennia, reaching 200 feet tall and more than 16 feet in diameter. Today, the living trees grow only in remnant pockets in northern New Zealand, where the national Department of Conservation lists them as threatened, due to a century of heavy logging, forest clearing for agriculture, and, more recently, the onslaught of a deadly fungus-like pathogen.
Yet for tens of thousands of years, kauri forests dominated a vast swath of the upper North Island. As the trees grew, they recorded information in their annual rings about the climate and makeup of the atmosphere. When they fell, some of the heaviest plunged deep into nearby peat bogs, where they stayed mostly unchanged for millennia.
Bendable concrete and other C0-2 infused cement mixes could dramatically cut global emissions, Lucca Henrion, Duo Zhang, Victor C. Li, Volcker Sick, The Conversation, 2/14/21
At the University of Michigan, we are working on composites that produce a bendable concrete material that allows thinner, less brittle structures that require less steel reinforcement, further reducing related carbon emissions. The material can be engineered to maximize the amount of CO2 it can store by using smaller particles that readily react with CO2, turning it to mineral.
(ED: This story is incredibly cool – concrete is ubiquitous in modern life, and is a huge contributor to emissions, and therefore to climate change.)
The Clubhouse App and the Rise of Oral Psychodynamics: It's written/print culture that's the recent historical anomaly, and still a minority of the world, Zeynep, Insight, 2/17/21
There has been a lot of brouhaha about “Clubhouse” lately—a drop-in audio chat app that’s exactly what it sounds like. Right now, it’s invite only, so it’s not very large. Basically, there are rooms where “speakers” chat, and listeners can raise their hand to participate. Depending on the size of the room and the organization of it, it can feel like watching a conference from the bleacher seats, or just a large coffee house group chatting.
But there’s something important going on here, besides the latest app. It’s the latest encroachment of oral culture back into the public sphere. And it’s not just because it’s spoken, rather than written. For example Twitter, despite being written, has been primarily dominated by oral psychodynamics, especially early on. (More on what that means in just a minute). Clubhouse opens the door to a lot more oral culture by its design, though it easily veers into the podcast model (two speakers/large audience) that is, despite being spoken, is actually written or print culture.
Not so coincidentally, I wouldn’t be surprised if Clubhouse is also dominated in its early days by the tech crowd (new app, so it will be them) and also disproportionately African-American communities—similar to the way they were disproportionately among Twitter’s early users exactly because it’s one community in the United States that has remained close/closer to oral culture because of its particular historic experience).
Protein linked to Alzheimer's, strokes cleared from brain blood vessels: In mice, antibody removes amyloid, improves vessel function without raising risk of brain bleeds, Science Daily, 2/17/21
"Some people get cerebral amyloid angiopathy and never get Alzheimer's dementia, but they may have strokes instead," Holtzman said. "A buildup of amyloid in brain blood vessels can be managed by controlling blood pressure and other things, but there isn't a specific treatment for it. This study is exciting because it not only shows that we can treat the condition in an animal model, but we may be able to do it without the side effects that undermine the effectiveness of other anti-amyloid therapeutics."
Experts identify 'super-plant' that absorbs roadside air pollution: Bushy variety of cotoneaster works best in areas of heavy traffic, say researchers, while other plants can cool buildings or reduce flooding, PA Media, The Guardian, 2/18/21
On roads with heavy traffic, the denser, hairy-leaved Cotoneaster franchetii was at least 20% more effective at soaking up pollution compared with other shrubs, the researchers said, though it did not make a difference on quieter streets.
Debunking the Myth of Legislative Gridlock, Jeb Barnes, The Conversation, 2/18/21
The fact is that gridlock has always been a myth, resting on half-truths about the legislative process and a basic misunderstanding of how contemporary policymaking works.
The point is that policy can change in many ways, like a house. Most visibly, you can demolish a house and rebuild it. Often this is impractical, and it’s easier to add a new room. Less visibly, you can remodel, converting a basement or garage without changing the house from the outside. Most subtly, changing circumstances can diminish a house’s usefulness, as when when a starter home fails to keep pace with the needs of a growing family.
Given these dynamics, myopically focusing on Congress and its purported gridlock mischaracterizes the real risk of legislative stalemate, which is not policy paralysis. It is shifting power to bureaucrats and judges, who are less publicly accountable and engage in more obscure and technical forms of policymaking.
After decades of financial decline, the media has fewer reporters who can untangle policy intricacies. It often exacerbates the problem by covering the conflict of the day rather than detailing the less provocative-looking silent progress of behind-the-scenes policy change.
Tracking the often subterranean ways that policy is actually made is admittedly difficult, but it is essential for both holding policymakers accountable and appreciating the political system’s true capacity for change.
Fighting the plastics plague, one canoe-full at a time, Ad Crable, BayJournal, 2/16/21
John Naylor eased his 16-foot fiberglass canoe into the Susquehanna River near a small archipelago of forested and ever-changing mudflat islands known as the Conejohela Flats, once the domain of Native Americans and still a vital stop for migrating shorebirds.
It’s a placid and beautiful spot on the lower Susquehanna between Lancaster and York counties, PA. But the York city resident was there this day to nibble at a growing sheen of ugliness — namely, single-use plastic containers, especially discarded water bottles.
The plastic comes down one of the world’s oldest major river systems in alarming volumes and relentless waves after each high-water event. But that doesn’t discourage the 57-year-old Naylor, who for the last four years has filled his canoe once or twice a week with plastics retrieved from the shallows, banks and shores.
To date, he has plucked more than 15,000 pieces of single-use plastics, as well as tons of other litter such as tires, barrels, foam, plastic chairs, flip-flops and more. He doesn’t find many plastic bags, but that’s because they sink in the water, becoming a different kind of menace, if not an eyesore.
Canons don’t only belong to dead white Englishmen. We have a Māori canon too, Alice Te Punga Somerville, The Guardian, 2/3/21
Literary canons have real-world effects – they steal limelight from everyone else. We can challenge them by drawing attention to how they work
There’s a way that English has of presenting this lineup of writers and texts as if the canon is based on an objective measure of literary merit; as if people raising questions about race or imperialism or gender or sexuality or class are somehow trying to add something that wasn’t already there all along, or trying to make arguments for texts that might have political merit but dubious literary “quality”. Canons make certain texts and writers feel familiar to people – ah yes, I know that’s an important text/writer – even if they have never read any of them. Probably most people reading this read the third sentence in the previous paragraph and nodded with recognition at these writers and literary periods regardless of whether they have read (let alone enjoyed) any of their literary works.
Canons – the idea that there are “greats” and “the rest” – don’t only belong to English or to dead white men. We have a Māori canon too: Ihimaera, Grace, Hulme, Tuwhare. Maybe Duff. These are the Māori writers most people have heard of and that most teachers teach. The books most likely to be in your bookshop, your pub quiz, your kid’s reading list at school. In 2012, the year my own literary studies book Once Were Pacific: Māori connections to Oceania came out, three other books about Māori literature were published by non-Māori literary scholars based overseas, and they all focused on Grace and/or Ihimaera.
The Portioning
Children, now we’re under one roof,
by chance, gathered at home,
draw near. I’ll unlayer
the story of my life.
In the center of this room
I’ll dig a trench; you’ll smell
the clear ambiguous freshness
of turned earth: compost, moisture,
roots. From the shored walls
we’ll excavate bits of pottery,
a bone, a broken tooth. See,
here’s the bowl of a horn spoon, and, in that crevice,
like a small, archaic eye,
glares a lopsided, hand-turned bead:
these treasures are for you.
Don’t laugh. After we’ve graphed
and measured them, and carefully
with camel’s-hair brushes cleaned
each crusted surface, uncovering
strange, crude markings, ridges,
signs of use, we’ll spread them
on the table. You say this childish,
bizarre collection is the hoard
of a savage? You despise these trinkets?
Children, they’re your birthright, all you get.
Pick up a piece, hold it,
rub your thumb
across the rough edges, hacked out
with more strength than skill:
feel need’s rude will.
Each of you must choose what’s yours.
Then bring it away from the harsh
light of the lamp, to the window
where unfiltered sun can strike.
You may detect
a scratch the chisel made,
a thumb-print on clay; or,
see where the awl slipped
and cut my hand, swirled
in the bead’s cloudy gaze,
blood’s pattern.
Palm the bead, child, and exit
casually but fast, hands
deep in your pockets like a thief.
Let your fingers roll
the sharp, dark glass. Feel it
pierce your skin, and feel,
in the raw sting of the cut,
your own blood surge, and burn.
—Beth Bentley, 1922-2021
You can amaze your friends by learning all the presidents of the United States mnemonically in almost no time at all, by reading Yo, Millard Fillmore! 2021 Edition: (and All Those Other Presidents You Don't Know) by Will Cleveland and Mark Alvarez, with illustrations by Tate Nation.
It’s perfect for every nine-year-old in your life, but anyone, truly anyone, can enjoy learning from this book, and now that we have 46 presidents, I bet most of us could use the help this book joyfully provides. It is my pleasure and honor to be the publisher of this amazing and entertaining book by three of the best people I know.
RATATATAT: Quick Hits
Is This High-Speed Train the First Megaproject of the Biden Era? The president promised to go big on infrastructure. The $105 billion North Atlantic Rail plan between Boston and New York City definitely fits the bill, Anthony Flint, Bloomberg, 2/17/21
Jaguar going all electric, Land Rover going majority electric: Jaguar will go fully electric by 2025, Joseph Guzman, The Hill, 2/17/21
Peak oil demand is coming – but first brace for an almighty supply crunch - The pandemic has distorted the immediate picture but not the underlying dynamics of the global crude market, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Telegraph, 2/17/21
Quantum network is step towards ultrasecure internet: Experiment connects three devices with entangled photons, demonstrating a key technique that could enable a future quantum internet, Davide Castelvecchi, Nature, 2/17/21
TEXAS REPUBLICANS RAN A 20-YEAR EXPERIMENT. THE RESULTS ARE IN: The state’s energy crisis didn’t come out of nowhere: It took decades of deregulation to make it happen, Deconstructed, The Intercept, 2/19/21
A Different Kind of Land Management: Let the Cows Stomp: Regenerative grazing can store more carbon in soils in the form of roots and other plant tissues. But how much can it really help the fight against climate change? Henry Fountain, NY Times, 2/17/21
Trump Inaugural Donor Gets 12 Years Over Illegal Contribution, Joe Schneider, Bloomberg, 2/18/21
Exclusive: Two variants have merged into heavily mutated coronavirus: The UK and California variants of coronavirus appear to have combined into a heavily mutated hybrid, sparking concern that we may be entering a new phase of the covid-19 pandemic, Graham Lawton, New Scientist, 2/16/21
Sustainable farmer ditches herbicides, uses goats to eradicate noxious weeds, Keely Johnson, ABC News (Australia), 2/10/21
Wales’s “One Planet” Policy is Transforming Rural Life: By allocating residents their “global fair share” of resources, the government is making development in pristine environments sustainable, Oliver Gordon, Reasons to be Cheerful, 2/12/21
The land-healing work of George Washington Carver: The iconic scientist was way more than just the "Peanut Man,” Brianna Baker, Grist, 2/12/21
It’s good enough for me
Without yer new affliction
Don’t need yer new restrictions
Gimme that old time religion
It’s good enough for me
Moonlight on Vermont
—Moonlight on Vermont, Don van Vliet (Captain Beefheart)
The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X, Les Payne and Tamara Payne
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles…”
On February 21, 1848, Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (Manifesto of the Communist Party) written by Karl Marx with the assistance of Friedrich Engels, was published in London by a group known as the Communist League.
Wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology toward the organic, the gentle, the elegant and beautiful. — E.F. Schumacher
Spring Equinox 2021 in the Northern Hemisphere will be at 5:37 AM, Saturday, March 20
30 days and counting!
Be well all, stay safe, spring is coming….