The Weird Times
Inner Monologues and Desultory Reporting from Outer Spaces
The Weird Times: Issue 66, August 15, 2021 (V2 #14)
Arizona Diamondbacks rookie left-hander Tyler Gilbert no-hit the San Diego Padres on Saturday night, making big-league history on an individual and league-wide basis as part of a 7-0 blowout victory. Gilbert, 27, was making his first career start and just his fourth career appearance in the majors.
"When people don't want to go to the ballpark, you can't stop them!"—Yogi Berra
"In every well-ordered society charged with the duty of conserving the safety of its members, the rights of the individual in respect of his liberty may at times, under the pressure of great dangers, be subjected to such restraint, to be enforced by reasonable regulations, as the safety of the general public may demand."—Justice John Marshall Harlan, Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905)
“Borders will not keep out climate collapse or Covid variants.” —Amanda Palmer
“The idea that race is paramount is, of course, the theory that the right wing would like Americans to believe, and the idea that white Americans are being “replaced” by people of color and Black Americans falls right into the right-wing argument that minorities are “replacing” white Americans.
For a century now, the machinery of redistricting has favored rural whites. With the 2020 census information reinforcing the idea that white, rural Americans are under siege, it seems unlikely that lawmakers in Republican states will want to rebalance the system.
But it seems equally unlikely that an increasingly urbanizing, multicultural nation will continue to accept being governed by an ever-smaller white, rural minority.” —Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, 8/13/21
“I didn’t think it was possible, but the degeneracy of the conservative mind in America just got worse. They are now openly longing for an overthrow of liberal democracy in favor of an illiberal state they can deploy to fight their enemies. It beggars belief what they might defend in the future,” Andrew Sullivan, The Price Of Tucker Carlson's Soul: Going cheap for a corrupt, flashy kleptocrat in Central Europe, The Weekly Dish, 8/13/21
(Ed. Note: The piece I have linked below about the Delta variant’s conquest of America reads like an article about the Taliban’s conquest of Afghanistan, an eerie parallel that ought to make us think about where we are in the arc of history right now.)
‘Goldilocks virus’: Delta vanquishes all variant rivals as scientists race to understand its tricks, Joel Achenbach, Carolyn Y. Johnson, Lena H. Sun, Brittany Shammas, Washington Post, 8/8/21
“Today, it has nearly wiped out all of its rivals. The coronavirus pandemic in America has become a delta pandemic. By the end of July, it accounted for 93.4 percent of new infections, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The speed with which it dominated the pandemic has left scientists nervous about what the virus will do next. The variant battles of 2021 are part of a longer war, one that is far from over.”
The Messengers
The spirit wolves
travel great distances
over empty roads
and unseen mountains
to carry tragic news
Sudden grief
is always
accompanied
by disbelief
and confusion
there is no room
for understanding
The long guttural
sounds that leave
our broken bodies
are formed when
these messengers
depart this place
to find another
Beau Beausoleil
(Ed. note: With so much focus on climate and pandemic, it’s all too easy to neglect to think about everything else. Economics, domestic terrorism, the census, Afghanistan, structural racism. Why does everything seem to be happening all at once? Maybe this:)
Robert Kelly: “We are living in the darkest West, in the dark that does not precede the dawn but the birth of a radically different order of things.”
How Has the Terrorism Threat Changed Twenty Years After 9/11? The U.S. counterterrorism response to the September 11, 2001, attacks yielded some remarkable successes and disastrous failures in hunting al-Qaeda. The top terrorist threat today, though, is domestic rather than foreign, Joe Hoffman, Council on Foreign Relations, 8/12/21
Don't rely on supply-side policy to fight inflation: It's fine to make stuff cheaper. But that isn't really what inflation is about, Noah Smith, Noahpinion, 8/14/21
“A little bit of tough talk on inflation now could avoid a lot of pain two years or five years down the line. An ounce of prevention, etc. etc.”
Build Hope
Enough for Everyone: Given the current climate emergency and the broader ecological breakdown that looms, there are few issues more pressing than that expressed by the single word: enough. Yet, it is possible to satisfy humanity’s universal needs fairly—and keep the world livable, Stan Cox, Yes Magazine, 8/10/21
“Three decades ago, the late Chilean economist and Right Livelihood Award-winner Manfred Max-Neef argued that the basic needs of human beings go deeper than the list of goods and services that usually comes to mind. He identified nine underlying universal needs, among them subsistence, protection, participation, creation, and freedom. Our need for subsistence, the means of sustaining life, must of course be satisfied before the other needs can be met. That’s why lists of basic requirements always include food, shelter, health care, etc.—what Max-Neef termed “satisfiers” of needs. The needs are the same among humans everywhere. The satisfiers vary and shift over time and from place to place, but each society’s goal, he wrote, must be universal satisfaction of our fundamental needs. Based on what we now know in 2021, we should add that those needs must be satisfied without violating the Earth’s ecological limits.”
Broadway superstar Laura Osnes fired from show for not being vaccinated, Ian Mohr and Oli Coleman, Page Six, 8/12/21
Hugely Popular Anti-Vaxx Misinformation Website Is Just Some Lady in Piedmont, Vaccine misinformation hotbed OpenVAERS is one of the leading sources of bad info about COVID vaccines on the internet, and an investigation finds that it’s run by some woman in the Oakland-surrounded suburb of Piedmont with too much time on her hands, Joe Kukura, SFist, 8/12/21
Larry Brilliant, eradicator of smallpox, proposes ‘ring vaccination’ to combat coronavirus, says herd immunity is not achievable, Hari Khumar, Post Magazine, 8/11/21
Leading epidemiologist Larry Brilliant calls mass vaccination to achieve herd immunity ‘just a dream’, saying it didn’t work against smallpox, Ebola or polio
The former Google vice-president says technology is key, with various means of surveillance the most effective way to identify and isolate asymptomatic cases
The IPCC’s latest climate report is dire. But it also included some prospects for hope: The striking thing is not the bad news, which is not really news for those who have followed the science closely. It’s the report’s insights on possibilities for cautious optimism, Rebecca Solnit, The Guardian, 8/13/21
“as the report itself put it, on p. 120 of the fifth section:
Deliberate removal of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere could reverse … some aspects of climate change. However, this will only happen … if deliberate removals are larger than emissions. Some climate change trends, such as the increase in global surface temperature, would start to reverse within a few years. Other aspects … would take decades (e.g., permafrost thawing) or centuries (e.g., acidification of the deep ocean) to reverse, and some, such as sea level rise, would take centuries to millennia to change direction.
In other words, it’s a long shot. It will take heroic effort, unprecedented cooperation, and visionary commitment. It would mean making profound changes in our societies, economies, our ways of doing things. But it is possible to do. And we know how to do it.
I wrote to Forster, who wrote back to me that the good news for him began with the advances in scientific understanding and their precision. He wrote:
There is also good news from the new science. We find that the risk of seeing abrupt changes or tipping points in our climate such as the Gulf stream stopping, Antarctic ice sheet sudden collapse, or Amazon forest dieback are low and will be very unlikely indeed if we can hold temperature rise close to 1.5C. Through improved climate projections we know exactly the emission path the planet needs to take to hold temperatures to close to 1.5C of warming; we need to at least halve global emissions by 2034 and reach net zero CO2 emissions by mid-century.”
If You Want to Tackle Climate Change, Start With Methane: The landmark assessment was dire. But it shows that by slashing methane emissions, humanity can make rapid progress in fighting climate change, Matt Simon, Wired, 8/11/21
“Cutting methane emissions is the single fastest, most effective way there is to slow the rate of warming right now,” agreed Ilissa Ocko, senior climate scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund.
After 100 years, black-and-gold bumblebee reemerges in Connecticut, Tara O’Neill, CT Post, 8/4/21
Bushwick Dentist Opens Vegan Fast Food Joint As "A Form Of Activism,” Scott Lynch, Gothamist, 8/9/21
Tech Tech Tech
He predicted the dark side of the Internet 30 years ago. Why did no one listen? Philip Agre, a computer scientist turned humanities professor, was prescient about many of the ways technology would impact the world, Reed Albergotti, Washington Post, 8/12/21
“In 1994 — before most Americans had an email address or Internet access or even a personal computer — Philip Agre foresaw that computers would one day facilitate the mass collection of data on everything in society.
That process would change and simplify human behavior, wrote the then-UCLA humanities professor. And because that data would be collected not by a single, powerful “big brother” government but by lots of entities for lots of different purposes, he predicted that people would willingly part with massive amounts of information about their most personal fears and desires.”
Massachusetts Start-Up Hopes to Move a Step Closer to Commercial Fusion: The company, founded by scientists at M.I.T., has been testing an extremely powerful magnet necessary to generate immense heat, John Markoff, NY Times, 8/11/21
“Researchers at M.I.T.’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center and engineers at the company, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, have begun testing an extremely powerful magnet that is needed to generate immense heat that can then be converted to electricity. It would open the gates toward what they believe could eventually be a fusion reactor.
Fusion energy has long been held out as one of the most significant technologies needed to combat the effects of climate change because it could generate an abundance of inexpensive clean energy.”
New device can diagnose Covid-19 from saliva samples: The tabletop diagnostic yields results in an hour and can be programmed to detect variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, Anne Trafton, MIT News, 8/6/21
“Engineers at MIT and Harvard University have designed a small tabletop device that can detect SARS-CoV-2 from a saliva sample in about an hour. In a new study, they showed that the diagnostic is just as accurate as the PCR tests now used.”
This Device Helps Paralyzed People Breathe—and Sing: Called the Exo-Abs, the robotic device uses artificial intelligence to gauge how much pressure to put on a person’s midsection, Khari Johnson, Wired, 8/12/21
“Creators of the device, which began as a class project, hope to someday make it a commercial product. Researchers at the robotics lab first began work on the prototype device after popular singer Kim Hyuk-gun was hit by a car and paralyzed in 2012. Kim was lead vocalist for the Cross, a band whose songs are still a popular choice in South Korean karaoke bars. He’s known for a style of singing that can sound more like shouting, and two years after his injury he began to work with the biorobotics lab on a device that allows him to sing with similar volume. It wasn’t until later that the researchers learned that spinal cord injury patients often need help not just to move their limbs again but with respiratory therapy.
“When you breathe out, you're basically pushing the belly and narrowing down the volume of the lungs, so we’re trying to mimic that process,” says Seoul National University professor Cho Kyu-jin.”
Artificial Intelligence may diagnose dementia in a day: Scientists are testing an artificial-intelligence system thought to be capable of diagnosing dementia after a single brain scan, Pallab Ghosh, BBC, 8/9/21
“Prof Kourtzi's system compares brain scans of those worried they might have dementia with those of thousands of dementia patients and their relevant medical records.
The algorithm can identify patterns in the scans even expert neurologists cannot see and match them to patient outcomes in its database.”
The 18th-Century Quaker Farmboy Who Laid the Groundwork for Atomic Theory, Harry Cliff, Lithub, 8/20/21
“Dalton’s stroke of brilliance was to take his theory of mixed gases—that atoms only repel other atoms of their own kind—and extrapolate it to figure out how many atoms of different chemical elements bind together to make molecules. His reasoning went something like this: imagine that two atoms of two different chemical elements, let’s call them atom A and atom B, bind together to make a molecule A-B. Now, imagine that another atom of A comes along and wants to join the party. Since atoms of A repel each other it will naturally want to get as far away from the other A-atom as possible and so attach to the opposite side of the B-atom to make a larger molecule A-B-A. Then if a third atom of A comes along this time it will arrange itself at 120 degrees from the other two atoms of A to form a triangular shape with B at the centre, and so on.” (From the book How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch: In Search of the Recipe for Our Universe, from the Origins of Atoms to the Big Bang )
Birds Birds Birds
Research shows flocking birds, schooling fish, other collective movements can stabilize ecosystems, Steve Lundeberg, Phys.org, 8/12/21
“Dalziel and colleagues found that there was an emergent social-ecological feedback between the size and structure of the collective groups and the level of resources in an ecosystem, and that this feedback buffered the system against crashing. The feedback dampened fluctuations in resource abundance and allowed more consumer species to persist using the same resource, instead of the stronger competitor pushing the weaker one to extinction.”
Animals Count and Use Zero. How Far Does Their Number Sense Go?Crows recently demonstrated an understanding of the concept of zero. It’s only the latest evidence of animals’ talents for numerical abstraction — which may still differ from our own grasp of numbers, Jordana Cepelewicz, Quanta Magazine, 8/9/21
“The crows mixed up a blank screen more often with images of a single dot than they did with images of two, three or four dots. Recordings of the crows’ brain activity during these tasks revealed that neurons in a region of their brain called the pallium represent zero as a quantity alongside other numerosities, just as is found in the primate prefrontal cortex. “From a physiological point of view, this fits in beautifully,” Nieder said. “We see exactly the same responses, the same type of code, represented in the crow brain as in the monkey brain.””
Nashville’s Massive Roost Of Purple Martins Is Inspiring New Research This Year,Tony Gonzalez, WPLN, 8/12/21
New Zealand's Sigh of Relief As Iconic Kiwi Bird Bounces Back: The bird announced its return to former stomping grounds through a piercing cry, Kate Nicholson, Huffington Post UK, 8/12/21
“Twelve million kiwi birds once occupied New Zealand but their numbers have rapidly declined in recent years, especially outside of managed sanctuaries.”
Hundreds step up for program to rescue stranded puffins and petrels: Nighttime patrol rescues birds stranded due to light pollution, CBC News, 8/10/21
“The Puffin & Petrel Patrol is back for its 17th year rescuing birds in the Witless Bay Ecological Reserve and the surrounding communities. Although tourism has not yet reached pre-pandemic levels, organizer Suzanne Dooley said as of Saturday, 850 volunteers had already registered to help out.”
In northern Maine, forestry practices create shifting habitat for migrating songbirds: Nearly 30 years ago, a team of bird researchers came to conduct the first large-scale study of the impact of commercial forestry on bird populations. Now they're back, Tux Turkel, Press Herald, 8/8/21
“A systematic survey of bird populations across 1 million acres of working forest led researchers to what was then a surprising conclusion: Cutting down trees isn’t necessarily bad for birds – as long as the harvesting was taking place across a larger landscape where the types of tree and age class were constantly changing over time.
That concept came to be known as a “shifting mosaic.” It highlighted the role of commercial forestry practices in conserving biodiversity, because healthy bird populations are an indicator of a larger, healthy environment for wildlife.”
Threave ospreys film documents year in the life of bird of prey, Caroline Wilson, The Herald, 8/12/21
“John Wallace, video artist spent a year studying ospreys and the fragile ecosystem they inhabit for a fascinating new documentary that tells how one of the rarest birds of prey was re-introduced to an area in the Scottish borders after being wiped out 100 years ago.”
Indigenous Peoples
Canada gets serious about water woes. Will Indigenous voices be heard? Sara Miller Llana, Christian Science Monitor, 8/12/21
“For Canada, our multigenerational challenge is understanding the new relationship that we’re trying to create with our Indigenous people,” says Rob de Loë, an expert on water and global environmental governance at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. “There’s no discussion of the future of water in Canada without really clarifying that relationship.”
‘Salmon is Life’: For Native Alaskans, Salmon Declines Pose Existential Crisis: Climate change and other factors are disparately impacting Indigenous subsistence fishermen, for whom salmon is the center of their culture, Meg Wilcox, Civil Eats, 8/12/21
“In St. Mary’s, Alaska, the people of the Yupiit of Andreafski look to the south wind, the budding tree leaves, and even the formations of migrating birds to discern whether the pulse of salmon returning upriver to spawn will be strong. Serena Fitka grew up in this tiny Yukon River village, and though she now lives in Valdez, she returns home every summer with her family, to partake in the traditional salmon harvest that is both the community’s main source of sustenance and the fabric of its culture.
This year, however, abysmally low salmon runs in the Yukon River have led Alaska’s Department of Fish and Game (ADFG) to impose a moratorium on fishing for Chinook (or King) and Chum salmon in the mighty river, which runs for 2,000 miles from the Bering Sea to Canada’s Yukon Territory. While Yukon run sizes for both salmon species numbered about 1.9 million in the past, this year they’re projected to be less than 430,000. The moratorium impacts 40 villages and roughly 11,000 people, 90 percent of whom are Indigenous Alaskans. And many have no access to grocery stores or any other source of food besides what they can hunt or harvest.”
How Listening to Birds Can Protect the Seal River Watershed: Audubon and the Seal River Watershed Alliance, an Indigenous non-profit coalition, have worked together to record the sounds of a critical bird breeding area, Jeff Wells, Stephanie Thorassie, Audubon, 8/9/21
“An exciting new collaboration was started this spring between the Seal River Watershed Alliance, an Indigenous non-profit coalition of four First Nations and one Inuit organization, and Audubon’s Boreal Conservation program. The Seal River Watershed Alliance (SRWA) was started in 2019 by the Sayisi Dene First Nation, Northlands Dene First Nation, Barren Lands First Nation, and O-Pipon-Na-Piwin Cree Nation and with support of the Arviat Hunters and Trappers Association. Together they are moving forward a proposal for the establishment of an Indigenous Protected Area for the incredibly vast and important 12-million-acre (50,000 km2) Seal River Watershed of northern Manitoba.”
A New Indigenous-led Student Movement Is Protecting Sacred Waters: In the midst of the state’s water crisis, Native-led school curricula in Northern California are empowering youth to fight for the future of their waterways, Libby Leonard, Civil Eats, 8/9/21
“This is our world,” Danielle Rey Frank says. “We’ve already lost so much [oral history] with our parents and grandparents. If we lose our river, we don’t know who we are. We don’t know what will happen then.”
“It is sometimes said that ‘fish discover water last.’ And I think that applies to us. We’ve been colonized. We’re a colonized people. We’ve lived in a corporate culture for the last hundred years. We’re surrounded by the icons, and images and propaganda, and how many hundreds of millions of dollars of constant advertising. It’s affected our ability to think. We censor ourselves all the time. We censor our goals. We censor our tactics and strategies. We don’t demand what we know we want and what we need. And that’s what we need to begin changing.” — Richard Grossman, February 1997
Buy this book! Fish Discover Water Last: Richard L. Grossman on corporations, democracy and us. Richard was a brilliant and prescient writer and thinker, and a good friend. For orders and info paul@humanerrorpublishing.com
On August 14, 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law, thanks to a great extent to the work of FDR’s Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins – the first woman to hold a cabinet level post (1933-1945).
Oh, yes when I get myself together
Yeah, you can find me in that sunny southern weather, yeah
I'm goin' to find a space inside a laugh, yes
Separate the wheat from some chaff
Oh, and I feel ...
Like I owe it, yeah ... to someone
—from Almost Cut My Hair, by David Crosby, 1970
Happy birthday, Edna Ferber, author So Big (Pulitzer Prize, 1925).
Tony Bennett, 95, retires from live shows on doctors’ orders: The crooner’s son says there will be no more concerts – though his career is far from over, Tim Jonze, The Guardian, 8/13/21
Keep singing, Tony.
This week’s events in Afghanistan, the endless revelations of right wing coup plans, our summer of Delta, and the stark reality of how far climate change has already gone combine to remind us how fallible we humans are, how planning for the future is beyond our abilities, how difficult it is for us to collaborate, how close we are to extinction, and yet, there is always hope, there is always something we can do, and there is always a mystery ahead to be discovered. Tony Bennett does keep singing at 95, poets sing their songs, parents rebel against the stupidity of politicians, and if birds can adapt to climate change, so can we. Wishing you all the best, and much hope, as we will find a way to get through this. Stay strong, stay safe, and keep in touch.
Tyler Gilbert is a local hero here in N. California. He grew up in tiny Felton, in the giant Redwood hills above Santa Cruz, and went to high school there. What a performance-- a no-hitter his first-game out. Nice lead off to another great issue, David. I scroll through slowly, hoping it won't end. Michael Wolfe
Thanks Michael - it is always great to hear from you. It is always cool when someone you know or know of makes it to the majors, isn't it?