Stromata Blog

When Big Brother Drives Your Car

Transportation is much on the minds of the Davos dystopians. Their yearning to replace private automobiles with mass transit is well known. A talk at this year’s World Economic Forum (a/k/a “Rent Girls’ Paradise”) offers a new twist and leads me to think that monorails may soon be yesteryear’s fad.

The era of cars as the ultimate tool for personal freedom and mobility will, if the future the World Economic Forum (WEF) envisions comes to pass, soon be over. Cars will be something you ask to borrow and the cloud will be taking the wheel.

Speaking in Davos, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said, “the car is becoming a connected computer on wheels.” Like cell phones, he said, “everything around us is becoming connected intelligence.” . . .

Tech visionaries say that computerized cars will be integrated into the cloud, where they can be monitored and controlled by a centralized network that can prevent collisions, alert you about road conditions and manage traffic.

While much of this technology already exists via cell phones, and some cars already track your gaze to alert you when your eyes stray from the road, the next step is linking the car’s systems together with manufacturers and other vehicles, and allowing for continuous third party tracking. . . .

An October McKinsey study identified four trends in automotive tech, which they call ACES: autonomous driving, connectivity, electrification, and shared mobility. Regarding connectivity, the report states: “Intelligent communication within and outside of the car is a key enabler for autonomous technologies.”

“Shared mobility”, i. e., borrowing rather than owning your car, is, a WEF report suggests, a prerequisite to eliminating the internal combustion engine.

However, among the realities that undermine the “green” EV narrative is that the minerals required to make batteries are mined under highly pollutive and environmentally devastating conditions, then refined and manufactured primarily in China, often using coal power. In addition to the environmental impact of producing EVs, some industry experts also question whether enough minerals can be mined and processed to meet the expected demand.

The solution is to reduce the number of automobiles drastically by ending individual private ownership: “the WEF report states that the average car in the U.K. is driven only 4 percent of a given day, and therefore consumers should not buy cars but rather borrow them.”

Thus we have a vision of a future in which everyone’s use of automobiles is tracked and recorded. How long before the Davoisie decide that buses and subways and light rail make it too easy for their inferiors to go to the wrong places? Well, after the buses stop running, one can still walk – at least until there is a camera at every street corner. Or, more subtly, the elites may decide that “fat acceptance” is the right policy for hoi polloi. There’s no need to discourage twenty stone deplorables from going walkabout.

Impossible Things Before Breakfast

A few days ago, Gail Heriot at Instapundit linked to a paper intriguingly titled “Artificially Selecting for Intelligence in Dogs to Produce Human-level IQ Within 100 Generations”. The author’s thesis was that sedulously mating the most intelligent male and female dogs would eventually lead to canines with human-level IQ’s. A pleasant idea to dream about, reminiscent of Clifford Simak’s City (a novel that I read in grade school; somewhere, I still have the 25 cent paperback that I bought from the Scholastic Book Club), though it’s hard not to share Miss Heriot's sentiment : “I think I like dogs just the way they are.”

Whatever one thinks of the idea of Fido Einsteins, bringing them into existence would require more than selective breeding. To see why, consider a parallel project.

The human world record for running a mile is a bit under four minutes (3:43.13, to be exact). The equine record for the same distance is over two minutes faster (1:31:23). Still, human times have improved. The record in 1865 was almost a minute slower (4:36.5) than the current mark. Suppose that some track-obsessed tyrant bred the fastest male and female runners in each generation. Is it conceivable that a human would eventually race on equal footing with a horse?

No. Not unless human muscles and limbs were reshaped more dramatically than natural selection will allow. Mutations would be needed, and they can hardly be counted on.

That is obvious for running. We can see the intimate linkage between velocity and physique. It isn’t so instantly evident with IQ, because the purely physical side of intelligence is obscure.

What brings all this to mind is the news this week from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which succeeded in igniting a fusion reaction that produced more energy than was put into it. That is a genuine engineering breakthrough, inspiring visions of making energy scarcity a relic of the past. The fuel for the Livermore experiment consisted of two isotopes of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium, which, while much rarer than ordinary hydrogen, are abundant enough to (hypothetically) power the Earth for eons.

Does it follow, then, that refining the fusion process is simply an engineering problem that we can expect to solve in time, just as primitive semiconductors gave birth to modern electronics in less than a century? Eli Dourado, a senior research fellow at Utah State University’s Center for Growth and Opportunity, who isn’t a nuclear scientist but seems well-informed, points to reasons for “Fusion Wariness”:

Fusion suffers from a sequencing problem. The easiest kind of fusion to get going is called D-T fusion, which fuses atoms of deuterium and tritium, two heavy isotopes of hydrogen. The reaction yields helium, a free neutron, and a bunch of energy that keeps the reactions going. The free neutron, which can’t be contained in the plasma, veers out of it in a random direction. It slams into either the reactor itself or into a barrier designed to capture the neutron, producing heat. This heat is then used to boil water and produce steam, which is used to drive a turbine and produce electricity.

If you think this sounds like a complicated and expensive way to boil water, you’re right. In fact, this issue may make D-T fusion permanently uneconomical. After all, the steam turbines used in D-T fusion are basically identical to those used in coal, nuclear fission, and geothermal plants. The only way that D-T fusion can compete with these other modes of electricity production is if it can produce steam more cheaply.

Those other modes are, however, relatively simple.

In contrast, burning plasma at millions of degrees while confining it with one of the most complicated and costly machines ever built – that is an expensive way to produce steam. Worse, neutrons from the fusion reaction will occasionally bombard the machine itself, slowly destroying it and making its parts radioactive. Maintenance of the D-T reactors will be frequent and expensive; robots may be needed to avoid human exposure to radioactive parts. In addition, confinement failures, while not as catastrophic as fission meltdowns, are likely to be more common and will require costly cleanup efforts.

In short, D-T reactors are as likely to compete successfully with coal, oil, fission or geothermal power as human limbs are to outpace a horse.

As the author observes, the D-T reaction isn’t the only route to fusion. Maybe one of the others will someday prove to be commercially viable. Unfortunately, we aren’t at the point of being able even to test the concepts. Still less do we have a glimmer of how they might be applied in practice. And – perhaps the most immovable obstacle – we can’t be confident that, if ever fusion becomes a practicable energy source, environmentalists won’t find a way to stymie it.

Abundant, almost free fusion power may be impossible, but one is allowed to believe impossible things before breakfast.

The Country That Got Covid Right

Something to take my mind off what looks like a middling mid-term election.

During the Covid panicdemic, Sweden was the outlier among developed countries. It didn’t ignore the disease completely, but it kept society and the economy going to a far greater extent that anyone else. For that, it was vilified.

Now enough time has passed and enough data have been gathered to make it possible to evaluate how well different countries did in limiting excess mortality. Lots of attention has been paid to deaths from (or with or adjacent to) Covid, but policies that reduce deaths from one cause and increase them even more from others are failures. The best measure of success is how deaths compared to what would have been anticipated in the absence of Covid. On that point, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development has assembled the evidence. The chart below, derived from OECD data, tells the story:

As the chart shows, Sweden didn’t do all that badly in Covid mortality, although conclusions are muddled by the varying ways that countries attribute deaths to Covid. In excess mortality, however, the Swedes were the champions. Perhaps geography played some unidentifiable role. Norway, Denmark, Iceland and Finland all did very well, too. But the Swedish lead is well outside any conceivable margin of error. The cumulative excess death percentage over the three-year period was one-eighth that of the United States.

Let’s remember this the next time an epidemic comes along.

But Why Would Democrats Want to Have Fun?

In its “Notable and Quotable” sidebar yesterday, the Wall Street Journal excerpted an essay from The New Republic that took note of “Trump party boats”, which the writer wokely described as “jubilant white Americans . . . partying on boats festooned with banners supporting the former president”. She then conceded “something painfully true: Democrats just aren’t about having fun.”

Sadly, I get what she means. I was out on Long Island this summer, and it was clear that the people on the party boats with the Trump 2024 banners were having a blast. A lot of Democrats lack this spirit, and that’s a problem. The left needs more party boats and relatedly, a sense that, as Ronald Reagan famously exhorted, “it’s morning in America.” We need to make more space for joy in our understanding of the world, as Marjorie Taylor Greene is doing in her twisted and misleading way.

This call for “joy in our understanding of the world” clashes remarkably with the thesis of the essay: that it’s a very bad thing that climate optimists – people who think that a changing climate may improve life on Earth and certainly isn’t a catastrophic threat – may derail the transition to the austere future advocated by the Davos Dystopians. A measure of how much the writer fears optimism is that she links it to the most toxic exponent she can find.

She does try to put an optimistic spin on the “Green New Deal”:

By addressing the climate crisis, we are making the world better. With every policy step we take away from fossil fuels, we are cleaning up the air and water, creating new clean industries in which humans can thrive, making our cities greener, more beautiful, cooler, and full of life. People will live longer lives, evading heat waves and devastating storms. Indeed, our children could well have a future that is more pregnant with exciting possibility than the world we live in now.

In other words, after the inevitable blackouts, surging energy prices and multi-trillion dollar transition costs, we will emerge into a Brave New World. That message demands that we endure hardship now, not indulge in joy. The fun will arrive after the eggs have been broken – provided that we actually get an omelet.

The fact that many Democrats’ view of the current state of the world is ineluctably depressing and pessimistic doesn’t prove that it is wrong. Winston Churchill wasn’t wrong when he promised only “blood, toil, tears and sweat”. “Churchill party boats” would have been jarringly out of place during the Blitz. Those who believe in a “climate crisis” on a par with, or worse than, World War II have a duty to denounce frivolity and proclaim “sunset in America”.

Meanwhile, the rest of us will go out and have fun.

Here and There Around the Web

* Is Vladimir Putin, as is often alleged, no more than a revenant of the Soviet Union? Ilan Berman of the American Foreign Policy Council argues that the Russian strongman’s world view owes more to the tsars than the commissars: a melding of “persistent imperial nostalgia, internal demographic pressures, and an appealing ideology of expansionist destiny”.

While at least some hope in the West remains that, post Putin, Russia will trend in a more pluralistic and open direction, such a future is far from assured. In fact, in historical terms, it is far more likely that Russia undergoes what political scientists Barbara Geddes, Joseph Wright and Erica Frantz have described as an “autocratic to autocratic” transition, in which Putin is replaced by another strongman or analogous illiberal figure. Once he is, the same strategic factors that have preoccupied Putin to date can be expected to weigh upon his successor as well, irrespective of the way in which they ascend to power in Russia’s fractious domestic political scene. [footnotes omitted]

* Theodore Kupfer asks, “Where Did Wokeness Come From?” and reviews the leading theories: idealist (“the offspring of long-gestating intellectual trends”), psychological (either a quasi-religion “filling a spiritual vacuum in American life” or “a byproduct of the infantilization of young Americans”), materialist (“woke capital” finding money making opportunities in fads like ESG or “woke labor”, “a glut of well-educated but insecure white-collar workers use their control over corporate resources to push a political agenda that they not only agree with but also depend upon for job security”) and legalist (the metastasis of civil rights laws intended to combat discrimination into a set of legal doctrines that actively promote it). Mr. Kupfer doesn’t think that any of these has sufficient explanatory power by itself.

Left with a set of theories that don’t seem to work on their own but complement each other well, one could embrace a synthesis: a perfect-storm view, in which all these different phenomena happen at once. Thus, a certain brand of overprotective parent raised a generation of kids susceptible, in an era of declining religiosity, to morally urgent ideologies. The theory-suffused academy was happy to supply such an ideology, which these kids took up with gusto upon arriving on campus, despite its evident shortcomings. When they graduated and started entering the white-collar work force, litigation-averse corporations – already seasoned in adjusting their behavior to comply with civil rights laws – happily indulged the political demands of this socially engaged class of workers. And, thanks to the immense cultural power of well-educated Americans and the economic power of large companies, that ideology became increasingly visible, and eventually all but inescapable.

Well, maybe. My theory is that progressives become Woke by taking ergot supplements.

* James Carroll, a veteran anti-Christian polemicist, offers a screed in The New Yorker fulminating against the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade. Ho, hum, you say. What makes it noteworthy is this bit of lunacy:

The elevation of the issue of abortion as the be-all and end-all of Catholic orthodoxy echoes the anti-modern battles that the nineteenth-century Church fought. A pair of dates tells the story. In 1859, Charles Darwin published “On the Origin of Species,” and the idea of biological evolution began to grip the Western imagination. In 1869, Pope Pius IX, in his pronouncement “Apostolicae Sedis,” forbade the abortion of a pregnancy from the moment of conception forward – an effective locating of human “ensoulment” at the joining of the ovum and sperm, an all but explicit rejection of evolutionary theory. [emphasis added]

So the Pope’s recognition of biological reality – that conception brings into being a new, unique organism of the human species – was a rejection of science? A couple of paragraphs later, Mr. Carroll endorses “the idea that ensoulment unfolds during the process of fetal development, at some indeterminate point weeks or months after conception”, an idea with no scientific grounding at all. Next to this nincompoop, Pio Nono was Charles Darwin’s blood brother.

* The invaluable Steven Hayward calls attention to a draft report by a committee of Yale University faculty on “Size and Growth of Administration and Bureaucracy at Yale”. It’s a draft report, because, although it was completed last January, Yale administrators have fought vigorously to suppress it, after a determined effort to deny the committee access to pertinent data. Professor Hayward’s source is an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, a publication whose outlook is far from conservative or anti-bureaucratic. You can read the article here if you don’t mind signing up to get e-mail traffic from the Chronicle.

* And, in conclusion, this is the most appalling thing you will read today. Theodore Bilbo has soul siblings in the Minnesota Federation of Teachers.

The Last War’s Failed Weapons

The French generals who made plans for fighting the war that came after the Great War are routinely mocked for having assumed that what worked in 1918 would lead to success in the next conflict. In that belief, they endorsed devoting vast resources to the construction of the Maginot Line and downplayed the usefulness of tanks.

That is one of the many instances of “preparing to fight the last war”, a phenomenon hardly confined to French military men of the 1930’s. But what would one say if, instead of trusting to concrete-reinforced trenches, the generals had put their faith in massed cavalry charges? To think that static fortifications could stop whatever attack Germany might launch wasn’t delusional. If armor and air forces hadn’t advanced as far as they did between 1918 and 1939, the Maginot Line would very likely have been a shining success, an impenetrable shield that would have allowed the French army to concentrate forces on its left flank and repel any German repetition of the 1914 offensive.

Cavalry charges, on the other hand, had been almost uniformly disastrous. Even soldiers who very much liked horses and felt nostalgia for their military role, figured out as much (one such was George S. Patton) and turned to other means of waging war.

Imagining Anthony Fauxi and Rochelle Walensky in 1938, you can hear their ringing endorsements of the war horse and the winged hussar. As John Tierney relates in the Wall Street Journal (behind a pay wall, but you can read generous excerpts from it and other pertinent commentary here) –

Lockdowns and mask mandates were the most radical experiment in the history of public health, but Dr. Walensky isn’t alone in thinking they failed because they didn’t go far enough. Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to the president, recently said there should have been “much, much more stringent restrictions” early in the pandemic. The World Health Organization is revising its official guidance to call for stricter lockdown measures in the next pandemic, and it is even seeking a new treaty that would compel nations to adopt them. The World Economic Forum hails the Covid lockdowns as the model for a “Great Reset” empowering technocrats to dictate policies world-wide.

There is certainly room for debate about whether shutting down much of the world’s economy, keeping children out of school and turning masks into a symbol of civic virtue did more good than harm. What is beyond rational dispute is that, if the balance favored the good, it was a very small increment of good, even if one takes no account of the health effects of lowered standards of living, interruptions of children’s education, postponement of non-Covid medical care and drastic disruptions of daily life.

U.S. states with more-restrictive policies fared no better, on average, than states with less-restrictive policies. There’s still no convincing evidence that masks provided any significant benefits. When case rates throughout the pandemic are plotted on a graph, the trajectory in states with mask mandates is virtually identical to the trajectory in states without mandates. (The states without mandates actually had slightly fewer Covid deaths per capita.) International comparisons yield similar results. A Johns Hopkins University meta-analysis of studies around the world concluded that lockdown and mask restrictions have had “little to no effect on COVID-19 mortality.”

Florida and Sweden were accused of deadly folly for keeping schools and businesses open without masks, but their policies have been vindicated. In Florida the cumulative age-adjusted rate of Covid mortality is below the national average, and the rate of excess mortality is lower than in California, which endured one of the nation’s strictest lockdowns and worst spikes in unemployment. Sweden’s cumulative rate of excess mortality is one of the lowest in the world, and there’s one particularly dismal difference between it and the rest of Europe as well as America: the number of younger adults who died not from Covid but from the effects of lockdowns.

So the positive effects of the Covid mitigation strategy are hard to discern. The negative effects are starkly visible:

Even in 2020, Sweden’s worst year of the pandemic, the mortality rate remained normal among Swedes under 70. Meanwhile, the death rate surged among younger adults in the U.S., and a majority of them died from causes other than Covid. In Sweden, there have been no excess deaths from non-Covid causes during the pandemic, but in the U.S. there have been more than 170,000 of these excess deaths.

No one knows exactly how many of those deaths were caused by lockdowns, but the social disruptions, isolation, inactivity and economic havoc clearly exacted a toll. Medical treatments and screenings were delayed, and there were sharp increases in the rates of depression, anxiety, obesity, diabetes, fatal strokes and heart disease, and fatal abuse of alcohol and drugs.

As Mr. Tierney also recounts, the futility of the Fauxi-Walensky strategy was foreseen. A pre-Covid study by one of the world’s premier epidemiologists and his colleagues “considered an array of proposed measures to deal with a virus as deadly as the 1918 Spanish flu” and concluded “that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted”.

This advice was subsequently heeded in the pre-Covid pandemic plans prepared by the CDC and other public-health agencies. The WHO’s review of the scientific literature concluded that there was “no evidence” that universal masking “is effective in reducing transmission.” The CDC’s pre-2020 planning scenarios didn’t recommend universal masking or extended school and business closures even during a pandemic as severe as the 1918 Spanish flu. Neither did the U.K.’s 2011 plan, which urged “those who are well to carry on with their normal daily lives” and flatly declared, “It will not be possible to halt the spread of a new pandemic influenza virus, and it would be a waste of public health resources and capacity to attempt to do so.”

But when the moment of decision came in March 2020, the plans were thrown out the window. Panicked by computer models “that proved to be absurdly wrong”, the “experts” chose the tactics that had failed before. Deployed against Covid, they failed again. And therefore the experts look forward to giving them another try the next time that a virus races out of control.

“When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?”

Addendum: Belatedly, I see that Mr. Tierney has covered much of this ground in a non-paywalled City Journal essay. 

Sri Lanka: The Times Keeps Its Eye Off the Ball

Today’s “Morning” newsletter from the New York Times talks about one of the greatest, least noticed disasters unfolding around us: the destruction of economy of Sri Lanka (Ceylon). Two weeks ago, on July 9th, mobs seized the offices of the country’s president and prime minister and burned down the prime minister’s home. Both men resigned their posts. The president fled into exile. The Times tells us this about “What led to the recent protests”:

Sri Lanka’s recent upheaval offers an extreme example of the world’s recent problems. Covid disrupted the country’s major industries, particularly tourism, and then leaders failed to adapt – setting off a chain of economic calamities, including food and fuel shortages. The crisis prompted protests, culminating in the president’s resignation and the installation of a new president on Wednesday.

So the “shortages” – “It’s not just that [fuel] was expensive; it was impossible to find” – were another Covid side effect, aggravated, we’re later informed, by the wishful thinking of a government controlled by a single family.

Until several months in, there was really no government recognition of the crisis. The dynast Gotabaya Rajapaksa was leading the administration at the time, and he had appointed his brothers and his nephew to his cabinet. He didn’t take a lot of counsel from outside his family.

There was a lot of denialism among them. They were told repeatedly that the economy was deteriorating. But they were certain tourism would continue to increase after Covid and that would be enough to shore up finances. But that didn’t happen; tourism was starting to come back, but it wasn’t enough.

But in the end, so the Times assures us, things aren’t so bad. “Gleefulness” was the hallmark of the protests (no mention of the accompanying arson). Admittedly, the erstwhile protesters “are not happy” that the deposed PM managed to get himself elected president. Still and all –

In the short term, we probably will see continued turmoil. But people are invested in ensuring Sri Lanka doesn’t fall again into this situation where it’s teetering on autocracy, where there’s little transparency and where the will of the people is ignored. So it’s mostly a positive story.

That “positive story” leaves out just a few bits of information.

The immediate cause of the country’s food shortage was the government’s enactment of a ban on chemical fertilizers. President Gotabaya Rajapaksa had become a convert to organic farming and a “Green Sri Lanka”.

Milton Friedman said that if you put the government in charge of the Sahara Desert, there would be a sand shortage. What the Sri Lankan government has done is almost as unbelievable. There are few better places in the world for agriculture. Sri Lanka is a warm, tropical island with plenty of annual rainfall, perfect for growing rice, tea, cocoa, and spices, and located along numerous ocean-trade routes for easy market access.

With the addition of modern fertilizers and farming techniques, the country went from subsistence farming to commercial farming. Sri Lanka had been self-sufficient in rice production since 2005. A 20-year-old Sri Lankan has seen the country’s GDP per capita roughly double over his lifetime. In 1990, Sri Lanka’s GDP per capita was about $2,000 greater than in nearby India. By 2020, it was more than $6,000 greater.

But after the fertilizer ban went into effect, rice production fell by 20 percent in only six months. The country had to import $450 million worth of rice to make up the difference, and rice prices still went up by 50 percent. Tea exports plummeted, costing the economy $425 million. The government reversed parts of the policy in November 2021, but the damage was already done.

The fertilizer ban was only the latest marcher in a parade of economic follies. Here is a summary written last April:

This slow-motion train wreck first began in November 2019 when Gotabaya Rajapaksa won a decisive victory in the country’s presidential elections. He immediately placed family members into key government positions and suspended Parliament. Then in August 2020, his Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna party – the Sri Lanka People’s Front – posted a landslide victory. The win gave Rajapaksa the ability to amend the country’s constitution, which he quickly availed himself of. In total control, President Rajapaksa and his brother Mahinda, the prime minister [whom protests forced to resign in May], went on a spending spree that was financed in part by Sri Lanka’s central bank. The results have been economic devastation. The rupee has lost 44 percent of its value since President Rajapaksa took the reins, and inflation, according to my measure, is running at a stunning 74.5 percent per year. Last week, Sri Lanka announced that it was unilaterally suspending payments on its external debt. These economic developments have led to Sri Lankans protesting in the streets and a government in disarray.

The “spending spree” included “an international airport, a seaport, numerous unnecessary roads and bridges, and a cricket stadium”, in other words, “infrastructure”, in other other words, “jobs for the boys and shovel-ready graft”.

Covid certainly didn’t help Sri Lanka, but it’s doubtful that conditions there would be a lot better today even if Dr. Fauxi’s Chicom friends had maintained proper safety measures at their Wuhan biological laboratory. I wonder why the Times leaves out so much of the story.

No, actually I don’t wonder.

It’s Torrid in Tulsa, and Should We Care?

In yesterday’s “Morning” newsletter (non-paywalled here), the New York Times strove to stoke readers’ fear of the “mounting signs and costs of climate change”. One supporting factoid was, “Already, the city of Tulsa has experienced more days above 100 degrees this summer than it historically has in an entire summer on average.”

That is, as they say, “truthy”. According to the National Weather Service, Tulsa’s average number of 100+ degree days per year from 1905 through 2021 was 10.8, and it has experienced 15 so far this year, but the average means little if one is talking about “mounting signs and costs of climate change”.

There were 15 years between 1905 and 2021 in which Tulsa had at least 30 days with high temperatures of 100F or more. The record was 1936 (65 days) followed closely by 1934 (59). 1911 and 1912 each had 31. Only two of the hottest years (2011 and 2012) were in the 21st Century.

The same period saw 17 years with no 100+ days and 60 with fewer than ten. In this century, the numbers are –

2001 (23), 2002 (2), 2003 (18), 2004 (0), 2005 (6), 2006 (13), 2007 (6), 2008 (6), 2009 (14), 2010 (14), 2011 (44), 2012 (38), 2013 (7), 2014 (7), 2015 (3), 2016 (7), 2017 (3), 2018 (4), 2019 (2), 2020 (0), 2021 (6)

The only evident generalization to be drawn is that weather varies a lot. The mild stretch from 2017 through 2020 (nine 100+ days) wasn’t the harbinger of an ice age. This year gives us no more information about climate change than did the torrid 1934 through 1937 (172 100+ days).

Whenever a blizzard strikes, somebody takes the occasion to scoff at Global Warming. Deployment of weather anecdotes as a climate argument isn’t confined to one end of the spectrum. But it’s a bad argument either way. If “climate change” (as we have been instructed to call it) is cause for alarm, we need to keep in mind, first, that its predicted effects are decades in the future, second, that our knowledge of climate science is primitive and, third, that the measures most favored by the Davos dystopians entail heavy costs. Those costs will be paid in the immediate future, while the corresponding benefits are speculative and will arrive much later, if at all.

Maybe, on balance, the wisest course of action is a drastic reduction in the standard of living of much of the world, but let’s not immiserate ourselves before we have better evidence than one year of scorching temperatures in Oklahoma.

Further Reading: Noah Rothman, “The ‘Climate Emergency’ Tops Democracy”
David Harsanyi, “Biden Has No Right To Declare A ‘National Climate Emergency’” (subhead: “The real emergency is that we have a lawless party in power.”)

Demasking the Gray Lady

Yesterday the New York Times posted a non-paywalled column admitting that “mask mandates have not done much to reduce Covid caseloads over the past two years” and conceding, albeit reluctantly, that there are far more effective ways to reduce the residual risks posed by the disease.

The writer finds it paradoxical that “masks work and mask mandates do not work”. By “masks work”, he means –

Masks reduce the spread of the Covid virus by preventing virus particles from traveling from one person’s nose or mouth into the air and infecting another person. Laboratory studies have repeatedly demonstrated the effect.

In fact, as others have pointed out, real-world studies, including many that were available when Covid broke out, have demonstrated that the sort of masks that people actually wear are marginally effective at best.

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) on mask use, generally more reliable than observational studies, though not infallible, typically show that cloth and surgical masks offer little protection. A few RCTs suggest that perfect adherence to an exacting mask protocol may guard against influenza, but meta-analyses find little on the whole to suggest that masks offer meaningful protection. WHO guidelines from 2019 on influenza say that despite “mechanistic plausibility for the potential effectiveness” of masks, studies showed a benefit too small to be established with any certainty. Another literature review by researchers from the University of Hong Kong agrees. Its best estimate for the protective effect of surgical masks against influenza, based on ten RCTs published through 2018, was just 22 percent, and it could not rule out zero effect.

For a more comprehensive summary of the evidence, see Jeffrey H. Anderson, “Do Masks Work?: A Review of the Evidence”.

In the early days of the epidemic, medical authorities like Anthony Fauxi discouraged the public from buying and wearing protective masks. Dr. Fauxi now insists that he was lying. It seems to me more plausible that he was “following the science” back then, only to dismiss it later, when mask wearing became an emblem of good citizenship. Mask mandates weren’t based on any scientific consensus but on the old, familiar syllogism:

Something must be done!
This is something.
Therefore. . . .

Fighting an epidemic with masks is like fighting flood waters with a levee that has gaps. The masking gaps are glaringly obvious:

Airplane passengers remove their masks to have a drink. Restaurant patrons go maskless as soon as they walk in the door. Schoolchildren let their masks slide down their faces. So do adults: Research by the University of Minnesota suggests that between 25 percent and 30 percent of Americans consistently wear their masks below their nose.

And the outcome is just what one would predict – and that many troglodytes did predict:

In U.S. cities where mask use has been more common, Covid has spread at a similar rate as in mask-resistant cities. Mask mandates in schools also seem to have done little to reduce the spread. Hong Kong, despite almost universal mask-wearing, recently endured one of the world’s worst Covid outbreaks.

Advocates of mandates sometimes argue that they do have a big effect even if it is not evident in population-wide data, because of how many other factors are at play. But this argument seems unpersuasive.

After all, the effect of vaccines on severe illness is blazingly obvious in the geographic data: Places with higher vaccination rates have suffered many fewer Covid deaths. The patterns are clear even though the world is a messy place, with many factors other than vaccines influencing Covid death rates.

Yet when you look at the data on mask-wearing – both before vaccines were available and after, as well as both in the U.S. and abroad – you struggle to see any patterns.

And so the writer gives in.

If the mandate has even a modest benefit, it can be worth it.

But this approach is not sustainable for years on end. Masks hinder communication, fog glasses and can be uncomfortable. There is a reason that children and airline passengers have broken out in applause when told they can take off their masks.

In the current stage of the pandemic, there are less divisive measures that are more effective than mask mandates. Booster shots are widely available. A drug that can further protect the immunocompromised, known as Evusheld, is increasingly available. So are post-infection treatments, like Paxlovid, that make Covid less severe.

Will any of this commentary persuade hard core, progressive Times readers? Not immediately, I’m sure, but perhaps, as evidence and experience peck away at their preconceptions, Mad Mask Mountain will be worn down.

Further reading: Not long after I posted this entry, I saw the Foundation for Economic Education’s reaction to the same Times column: “The New York Times Explains Why Mask Mandates Don’t Work”.

Also worth your notice is a paper published in The Lancet under the formidable title, “Revisiting Pediatric COVID-19 Cases in Counties With and Without School Mask Requirements – United States, July 1-October 20 2021” (caveat: not yet peer-reviewed). It revisits and enlarges a study of school mask mandates that the Centers for Disease Control has cited in support of swaddling schoolchildren. The new study reaches the opposite conclusion. Those who don’t want to read the whole thing will find a summary here.

Covid and Punishment

Until a few days ago, when I began making plans for a trip to Europe, I was blissfully unaware that anyone who boards an airline flight from a foreign country to the United States is required to present a negative Covid-19 test “conducted on a specimen collected no more than 1 day before the flight’s departure” or proof of having recovered from the disease within the past 90 days. So the Centers for Disease Control decreed in a 30-page ukase issued on December 2, 2021.

The December order superseded an earlier one that required tests but allowed a three-day window for performing them. The rationale for shortening the period was the appearance of the omigod omicron variant, which at that time was brand new and a topic of much fearful speculation, notwithstanding that all indications were that it was milder than earlier Covid strains. Nearly six months have passed since then. Omicron hasn’t proven to be an omega, and it now accounts for almost all cases in the U.S. The incremental risk posed by returning travelers is indistinguishable from nil.

Yet the CDC order remains in place, inconveniencing Americans on their way home and worse than inconveniencing the small number who test positive and are then trapped abroad until they recover. Even though the government is purportedly preventing their return “for the public good”, it will do nothing to ease their burden. The Administration that sends crack pipes “safe smoking kits” to drug addicts free of charge has no sympathy for citizens who may run up thousands of dollars of costs while mandatorily stranded in other countries.

What is the motive for this measure? It does nothing to protect public health, and the high priests of CDC can’t reasonably believe that it does. It would have had little chance of keeping omicron out of the U.S. if it had been issued while the strain was confined to South Africa. It is now as pointless as plugging a leak in the dike after the water has overflowed it. No other country, so far as I can tell, imposes a reciprocal requirement on travelers entering from the U.S. Does the virus act differently in Europe than in North America?

Is the CDC indifferent to the hardships that its policies entail? Or does it see Covid sufferers as sinners who deserve punishment? Or do its leaders just enjoy the exercise of arbitrary power? Whatever the answer, this episode is enough to demonstrate that the organization needs a thorough top-to-bottom overhaul, lest in the future it inflict yet graver damage on the health, safety and prosperity of the Republic.

Update (June 11, 2022): With obvious reluctance, the CDC has rescinded the Covid test requirement for entering the United States by air, effective at a minute after midnight Eastern Daylight Time on June 12th. The order rescinding the previous ukase concedes, perhaps with regret, “that the now-dominant Omicron variant, though more transmissible than prior variants, has generally caused less severe disease among those who are infected”. There’s no admission that it was irrational to try to keep out of the country a virus that is already freely circulating within it.

The Davos Dystopians

Hidden, alas, behind National Review’s paywall is an essay by Michael Brendan Dougherty titled, “Supervillains Gather in Davos”. It’s not about how the Global Elite are conspiring to take over the world but, rather, about their dreary vision of what a better world would be like. Let me quote a few choice bits:

Why can’t our leaders imagine anything other than a future of privation and control? . . .

One would think that a technology-powered future with 3D printing would finally increase the productivity of great artisans and craftsmen, which has remained stagnant for centuries and become so prohibitive that these arts and trades are being lost to the prefab altogether. Such a breakthrough would allow the physical environment to be rebuilt in the most glorious Georgian, Tudor, or Spanish Colonial styles, but available to the masses. Farms and pastures could practically run themselves, making food better, making it cheaply, and delivering it fresh. The greatest educators would run classes for all those who wanted to take them. And new technological breakthroughs would clean up the atmosphere.

But that’s not what they imagine at all. For the Davoisie, the future is your guts wirelessly reporting you truant and then a text message buzzing on every device in the house, warning your pets to exit the room while it is flooded with gas to sedate you into compliance with Pfizer. Afterwards a Chinese multinational informs you that the gas-flooding and Pfizer SWAT-team incident have brought about serious penalties to your carbon score, thereby deferring your long-awaited meat ration by several more years. As a help in the future, Microsoft’s cognitive copilot will be taking over even more duties and tasks previously assigned to you.

It is actually a crisis for our global elites that every idea they have for solving problems involves subtracting more of our humanity and freedom from human civilization. The only vision they have of the future is of a population drugged, fed on fake food, entertained by phones strapped to their faces, and controlled by machines. They see our unhappy reaction to this, and their imagination only comes up with more elaborate gags for us, and dreams of unsolvable mazes to drop us in.

Wanting a freer and more civilized world doesn’t guarantee either freedom or civilization, but not wanting them, enthusing instead over a future in which all men live in an inescapable panopticon, is the sure path to tyranny and barbaric ennui.

A Progressive Path to Madness

A brand new Substack blog, Ringside at the Reckoning (very much worth your time), calls attention to a paper by a progressive law professor who unapologetically espouses the idea that moral responsibility doesn’t exist, from which he concludes that although “society must obviously protect itself from dangerous people”, it ought not to punish them for their misdeeds. I quote the abstract, which, as the saying goes, must be seen to be disbelieved:

Modern criminal justice presupposes that persons are not morally equal. On the contrary, those who do wrong are viewed by the law as less worthy of respect, concern and decent treatment: Offenders, it is said, “deserve” to suffer for their misdeeds. Yet, there is scant logical or empirical basis for the law’s supposition that offenders are morally inferior. The usual reasoning is that persons who intentionally or knowingly do wrong are the authors and initiators of their acts and, as such, are morally responsible for them. But this reasoning rests on the assumption that a person’s mental states, such as intentions, can cause physical effects (bodily movements) – a factual assumption that is at odds with the evidence of neuroscience and whose only empirical support rests on a fallacious logical inference (post hoc ergo propter hoc). There is, in fact, no evidence that mental states like intentions have anything to do with causing the bodily movements that constitute behavior. Nonetheless, the mental-cause basis for moral responsibility, though it rests on a false factual inference, has enormous implications for criminal justice policy.

While society must obviously protect itself from dangerous people, it does not have to torment them. The imperative to punish, a dominant theme of criminal justice policy, is not supported by evidence or logic, and it violates basic moral equality.

So what does cause our actions? Some force, evidently, external to ourselves of which we are unaware. If that is so, someone who inflicts punishment is no more responsible for his actions than is the criminal being punished. Therefore, it is absurd to chastise him for violating “basic moral equality”.

The author is, in fact, aware of this objection and addresses it briefly at the end of his paper. He offers two arguments: first, that acts can be moral or immoral even if the actors have no responsibility for them; second, that humans “are conscious beings that have rich phenomenological lives” and therefore are different from puppets.

Neither of those points impresses me as pertinent.

No one attaches moral significance to events, such as hurricanes, volcanic eruptions and meteor strikes, that have no morally responsible agent as their cause. If a thunderstorm isn’t blameworthy, because no conscious agent caused it (unless you believe in Zeus or Thor), and if crime and punishment are likewise without conscious cause, what sense does it make to assign moral categories to them?

The second argument is simply beside the point. If a man’s mental states don’t cause his acts, what difference, from a moral point of view, does the quality of those mental states make? Suppose that a human being with a rich phenomenological life, one immersed in complex thoughts and feelings, murders a child or executes a murderer. Suppose that a lion kills and devours a gazelle. If the human’s thoughts and feelings did not cause his acts, can he or they be judged differently from the lion and what it did?

Moreover, we have no evidence of the nature of mental states other than our own. How do you know that you are not the only conscious, self-aware being in the universe? The others may be robots with no inner feelings at all. In any case, their putative mental states, rich or impoverished, do not, on the author’s view, cause anything and can give no moral color to any act.

While I won’t claim that the author doesn’t believe his own argument – men believe all manner of bizarre notions – I am very confident that he doesn’t live his life as if it were true. No one could. If we do not believe that we are the makers of our own deeds, we have no reason to care what we do, for all of our acts are merely things that happen to us, over which we have no control. It is impossible even to imagine believing that; indeed, the belief would be indistinguishable from madness.

The Times Takes a Baby Step Toward Covid Sanity

The New York Times daily newsletter “The Morning” (distributed to a list that includes a seemingly random collection of non-subscribers like me) has long been a haven for Covid panicdemic thinking, albeit not as strident in tone as some of its ideological colleagues. For instance, it regularly highlights data that supposedly show that radical right “Red States” have higher incidences of the disease than virtuously progressive “Blue States”, a comparison that seems to me of no value even if accurate. (The same is true of mirror-image conservative cherry picking. Not only are the data fuzzy and full of confounding factors, but absolute proof that states of one color had lower rates of infection and death than those of the other would prove only that one side’s political instincts led to a better response to this particular idiosyncratic emergency. Generalizing from that is audacious if not preposterous.)

Last Friday’s “The Morning” carried the subheading, “What might a more effective mask mandate look like?” It was prompted, naturally, by the federal court decision invalidating the ukase ordering all peasants who venture onto airplanes, trains and public transit to cover their noses and mouths with symbols of their inferior status. I anticipated a rousing defense of that decree and of the decision of the Centers for Disease Control to issue it. Instead came what reads like a tiny, reluctant step in the direction of the uncomfortable (to the Times) realization that, whatever masking’s theoretical merits as a coronavirus preventative (arguable, if dubious), mask mandates are about as effective in practice as commanding people to exercise and eat healthier diets.

The newsletter writer has discovered a nugget of common sense that he seems to think is an insight derived from advanced expertise:

A central lesson of public health is that people have a limited capacity to change their routine. They’re not machines. For that reason, the best responses to health crises depend on triage, with political leaders prioritizing the most valuable steps that people can take.

Gee, you coulda fooled me. I note that when the Great Barrington Declaration proposed exactly that, “Focused Protection”, the Centers for Disease Control launched a smear campaign against its authors. I don’t expect the Times to ask why Dr. Fauxi was oblivious to that “central lesson of public health”.

Anyway, while staunchly insisting that “Rigorous laboratory tests show that masks reduce Covid transmission”, the newsletter concedes that “supporting real-world evidence tends to be much weaker” and attributes the disconnect to the mandate’s concessions to the inability of peons to obey orders:

The transportation mandate had so many exceptions that many Americans understandably questioned its worth. Travelers took off their masks to eat and drink. Some flight attendants removed their masks to make announcements. Some passengers wore their masks on their chins. The mandate also did not require N95 and KN95 masks, which are more effective against the virus than cloth masks or standard medical masks.

The writer then inches further in the direction of declaring mandated masks to be a useless encumbrance:

The reality is that masks are less valuable today than they were a year or two ago. Covid vaccines are universally available in the U.S. for adults and teenagers, and the virus is overwhelmingly mild in children. Treatments for vulnerable people are increasingly available.

And consider this: About half of Americans have recently had the Omicron variant of Covid. They currently have little reason to wear a mask, for anybody’s sake.

Together, vaccines and treatments mean that the risks of severe Covid for boosted people – including the vulnerable – seem to be similar to the risks of severe influenza. The U.S., of course, does not mandate mask wearing every winter to reduce flu cases. No country does.

Another relevant factor is that one-way masking reduces Covid transmission. People who want to wear a mask because of an underlying health condition, a fear of long Covid or any other reason can do so.

If Scott Atlas had written that, the Times would denounce his heresy. The only rational corollary to such reasoning is that the CDC ought to have repealed the mask mandate voluntarily rather than waiting for a judge to declare that it had overstepped its authority.

But, no, a Times writer can’t retreat that far. Instead, he concludes:

Still, if Covid illness begins surging again at some point, there may be situations in which mandates make sense. To be effective, any mandates probably need to be strict, realistic and enforced. Imagine, for example, that a subway system mandated KN95 or N95 masks inside train cars – but not on platforms, which tend to be airy.

Or imagine that the C.D.C. required high-quality masks in the airport and aboard a plane on the runway – but not in flight when people will inevitably eat and when a plane’s air-filtration system is on.

All that this solution (one that awaits a (perhaps hoped-for) hypothetical Covid resurgence) demands is that air travelers and subway riders keep a stock of non-reusable, relatively expensive masks on hand and learn to fit them properly onto their faces and get used to breathing through them and, if they are facially hirsute, trim or shave off their moustaches and beards. They will still, of course, take their masks off to eat or drink at airports (what else is there to do when you have a two-hour layover at O’Hare?), and snacking on subway platforms (not to mention disobedience to regulations) is hardly unknown. The writer has “strict” down pat. “Realistic”? Doubtful. “Enforced”? How many mask police will O’Hare Airport or the Chicago Transit Authority hire?

All in all, I see grounds for hope. If the Times wavers, is there a chance that the CDC will embrace science over “The Science”?

Do Vaccines Cause Covid-19? Not Likely

The estimable John Hinderaker calls attention to an ominous looking chart. It shows the results of Covid-19 tests at Walgreen’s pharmacies. As he notes, “Walgreen’s must run an enormous number of covid tests, nationwide. So their data should be a pretty good sample.”

Your immediate reaction is probably like his: “There are several possible explanations here. The obvious one is that vaccination makes you more likely to catch covid.” But, on further reflection, that isn’t quite so obvious. For that explanation to be correct, Covid, or the vaccines against it, would have to be far different from all other infectious diseases or vaccines. Medical science isn’t infallible, but it has progressed somewhat beyond leeches and the four humours, so we ought to give the data more thought before adopting a theory that assumes medical ignorance. The superficial analysis doesn’t take into account two key points.

First, the results shown on the chart are for last week, over two years after Covid-19 appeared in the United States. The disease is highly infectious, but a large proportion of cases show no or very mild symptoms. Therefore, many people have suffered Covid without knowing it.

Contracting Covid reduces the likelihood of getting it again; it’s a natural vaccine. Walgreen’s isn’t testing two groups, vaccinated and unvaccinated, but three: vaccinated, unvaccinated who have already had Covid, and unvaccinated who haven’t. (Many vaccinated have also had Covid, but they don’t enter into this particular discussion.) Walgreen’s doesn’t report, and surely doesn’t know, the relative proportions of the last two groups. Since Covid is easy to contract, it seems likely that, after the causative virus has been in circulation for at least 25 months, a very high percentage of the unvaccinated have, knowingly or not, been infected and have “natural immunity”. What the Walgreen’s chart suggests, then, is that Covid is the best vaccine against itself. Of course, a symptomatic case is rather less pleasant than a jab in the arm.

Second, Walgreen’s isn’t testing a random sample of the public. There are two principal motives for being tested: Covid-like symptoms and compliance with demands to show a negative test as a condition for coming into the office, traveling or other activities. The unvaccinated are required to present test results more often than anyone else. It follows that they are less likely than the vaccinated to be symptomatic at the time of their tests. Someone with symptoms is, in any conceivable set of circumstances, more likely to have Covid than someone without.

The Walgreen’s data indeed show that the unvaccinated account for a considerably larger percentage of tests than their percentage of the whole population. For instance, according to CDC data, 95 percent of persons age 65 and older have been vaccinated, but 13.4 percent of Walgreen’s test takers in that age group haven’t been. In the 45 to 64 age group, the vaccination rate is around 90 percent and the Walgreen’s test percentage 24 percent.

The combination of these factors makes the chart explicable. Many, plausibly a great majority, of the unvaccinated group are naturally immune, and a significant proportion have no symptoms. The vaccinated group is mostly symptomatic, and it is reasonable to think that the more vaccine doses they’ve had, the less likely they are to be tested in the absence of overt symptoms.

In summary, the strongest inference from the Walgreen’s data is that natural immunity to Covid is widespread and effective. Once one takes into account who are being tested and why, the alternative hypothesis, that Covid vaccines cause the illness through some unknown mechanism, is supported only weakly, if at all.

Backward, Turn Backward, O Time, in Your Flight

Whenever this blog has been active, I have posted semiannual denunciations of DST (“Deranged System of Timekeeping”), marking both its imposition and its (alas, temporary) end. I suppose that everything that can be said on the topic has been repeated ad infinitum. The arguments for DST were already past their sell-by date when I first heard them over sixty years ago, when my then and future home state of Washington put the question to a popular vote. TV commercials promised that a “yes” would give voters “an extra hour of daylight”, suggesting that jumping clocks ahead would slow the Earth’s rotation on its axis. The vote was very close – 51.71% to 48.29% – so the fools had only a slim majority. (In the same year, the similarly specious JFK lost the state.)

This year I’ll pursue the soul of wit by limiting myself to a paragraph from Scott Johnson’s Powerline post:

Redistributing daylight is the kind of zero-sum game that underlies the liberals’ vision of the world. The hour of daylight in the evening comes at the expense of the morning. At least it is in fact only a zero-sum game. [emphasis added]

If DST affected nature the same way that progressive policies affect the economy, “springing forward” would take an hour away from morning and add only about fifty minutes to the afternoon.

Russia Retaliates in Space

Roscosmos, the Russian Federation’s space agency, has struck back at the United Kingdom in retaliation for the U.K.’s support of Ukraine. Its director-general has announced that a Soyuz launch scheduled for Friday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, which is to carry 36 OneWeb communications satellites into orbit, will be scrubbed unless OneWeb guarantees that they won’t be used for military purposes and the British government agrees to sell its stake in the company. Britain has turned down the demands.

Separately, Roscosmos denied reports that the hacker group Anonymous has infiltrated and shut down its computer network and declared that interference with its satellites would be a casus belli.

Russia’s leverage is feeble, but these rumblings show that war no longer stays earthbound.

Update (March 22, 2022): Elon Musk soars to the rescue. SpaceX will launch the stranded satellites.

Take Not Counsel of Your Fears

John Tierney has just posted an article on “Understanding the Covid Odds” describing research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC’s director has been a consistent Covid alarmist, so this study doesn’t emanate from Covid pacifist quarters.

The researchers’ conclusion, based on data from 465 health care facilities around the country:

Among 1,228,664 persons who completed primary vaccination during December 2020–October 2021, severe COVID-19–associated outcomes (0.015%) or death (0.0033%) were rare. Risk factors for severe outcomes included age ≥65 years, immunosuppressed, and six other underlying conditions. All persons with severe outcomes had at least one risk factor; 78% of persons who died had at least four.

Of these 1.2 million vaccinated people, 2,246 (one in 547) contracted Covid and 189 (one in 6,501) had “severe” outcomes (“diagnosis of acute respiratory failure, need for NIV [noninvasive ventilation], ICU [intensive care unit] admission, or death”). Of those, 36 died; 24 survived but needed ICU care. The number of deaths and ICU admissions among those under age 65 with no additional risk factors was zero. The number of deaths among those with fewer than four risk factors (97 percent of the sample, that is, about 1.9 million people) totaled eight.

As Mr. Tierney observes, these numbers demonstrate that Covid is very low on the list of threats to life and health:

Those are roughly the same odds that in the course of a year you will die in a fire, or that you’ll perish by falling down stairs. Going anywhere near automobiles is a bigger risk: you’re three times more likely during a given year to be killed while riding in a car, and also three times more likely to be a pedestrian casualty. The 150,000-to-1 odds of a Covid death are even longer than the odds over your lifetime of dying in an earthquake or being killed by lightning.

The study covered the period before the Omicron variant monopolized Covid infections. That Omicron causes a milder disease than its predecessor isn’t seriously disputed. (The CDC says as much, though it tries hard to keep the panicdemic alive.) Hence, the minuscule risk described by the researchers has declined since they completed their work.

These numbers expose the irrationality of continued vaccine mandates, masking and other extraordinary precautions inspired by Covid phobia. Whatever may have been the right policy one or two years ago, there’s no justification for pretending that Covid is today anything worse than the multitude of other minor risks that we confront in the course of being alive. Vaccination is readily available for everyone who, unvaccinated, would face more than a trivial prospect of a bad Covid outcome. Those who choose to forgo vaccination pose a threat only to themselves and to others who make the same choice, and the prevalence of Omicron, along with the rising number of persons who, vaccinated or not, have immunity stemming from asymptomatic or mild cases, is reducing their risk, too.

At this point, Covid hawks are either ignorant or malicious. For ordinary people, ignorance is the obvious explanation. For political, cultural and social elites, one can’t help suspecting that ignorance is willful and impelled by motives that are far from benign.

Thanksgiving Vacation

For Thanksgiving weekend, my wife and I drove to Los Angeles to attend Loscon, a regional SF convention to which we’ve become attached. On Thanksgiving Day itself, we visited Disneyland’s new “Avengers Campus” (ma femme is an enthusiast for Marvel movies), and I was reminded of Yogi Berra’s famous apothegm: “Nobody goes there; it’s too crowded.”

My attention has therefore been rather distracted for the past several days, but a few items leaked through.

• The weekend’s big topic, I gather, was the Nu Xi Omicron coronavirus variant, which inspired the stock market to fall out of fear that the panicdemic will intensify, even though the first reports suggest that it probably has less serious effects than previous variants. That is consistent with the commonsensical observation that viruses maximize their reproductive potential by becoming more infectious but less lethal. A virus doesn’t hate humanity. It just tries to survive long enough to spawn offspring, which it can’t do efficiently if it kills its host. There is strong reason to believe that the viruses behind past pandemics remain with us today as causes of the annoying but mostly harmless “common cold”.
• Egregious Xi-aspirant Jack Dorsey has resigned his positions with Twitter. I’m not such an optimist as to think that the platform will improve under his successor, who just last week gave an enlightening interview to Technology Review. What I infer is that Parag Agrawal sees Twitter as a conversational referee whose benign objective to ensure that discussion takes place solely within bounds determined by “credible sources”. Credibility will be determined, naturally, by the wise bureaucrats of Twitter Central.
• Dr. Fauxi leaped over the shark last Sunday. Did Aristotle or Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein ever proclaim, “I represent science”? Even Hyman Rickover had to be eased out eventually. Dr. Fauxi is no Rickover.
• By far the most ominous news report of the weekend was the Wall Street Journal’s “Taliban Covert Operatives Seized Kabul, Other Afghan Cities From Within”, an account of how the Haqqani Network established Fifth Columns throughout Afghanistan’s major metropolitan areas, activated them when Joe Biden announced that America was going to scuttle, and took control of the country with hardly a shot fired. That subversion could proceed undetected and unhindered for so many years is a blacker blot on the U.S. military and intelligence services than the botched withdrawal. If we don’t learn from this massive failure, it will inevitably recur.
• The Daily Telegraph hears “Whispers in Washington [that] suggest Joe Biden's camp has a plan to find a more popular replacement ahead of the 2024 White House battle”. The “plan” is supposedly to shuffle Cackling Kamala off to the Supreme Court when Justice Breyer retires. The whispers are, however, mere tintinnabulation. Should a Court vacancy occur before the 2022 elections, vacating the Vice Presidency would leave the Senate tied 50-50 with no tie breaker, which would spell the end of the Biden agenda. The chance that any Republican Senator will vote to confirm a replacement is about equal to the chance that Donald Trump will endorse Liz Cheney’s reelection bid. After 2022, unless the Democrats gain an actual Senate majority (a fading though not impossible prospect), Kamala will be unconfirmable as a Supreme Court nominee. Her qualifications for the bench aren’t just nil; they’re negative.
• A couple of noteworthy articles: In City Journal, Charles Fain Lehman explores “The Genealogy of Woke Capital”. National Review’s Kevin Williamson asks, “Enjoying Autarky?” and reminds readers of the vices of restrictive trade policies:

Some of you who went shopping on Black Friday may have noticed substantially higher prices, or found that certain products you were looking for were not to be had at any price. Some of you experienced the same thing when shopping for your Thanksgiving dinner. You have heard about “supply-chain disruptions,” which have made it difficult to get the world’s splendid produce to the United States with the ease and plenty to which we have become accustomed. Another way to think of that situation is that COVID-19 managed to do quickly what our anti-trade protectionists have tried to do slowly: deprive American consumers of inexpensive imports.

Finally, let me note that a small tax on unsolicited e-mails sent between the day before Thanksgiving and the following Tuesday would easily raise enough revenue to replace the income tax.

The Maskerade Continues

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control, garnered much attention a couple of weeks ago when she declared, “Masks can help reduce your chance of #COVID19 infection by more than 80%.” That would be remarkable, if true. As one commentator noted, Dr. Walensky evidently believes that wearing masks is more effective than Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine and not vastly less effective than Pfizer’s or Moderna’s. If that’s really the case, is it wise to spend billions of dollars on a mass vaccination program and to threaten those who aren’t vaccinated with the loss of their livelihood? No one has brought forward a scintilla of evidence supporting Dr. Walensky’s statement. She apparently just pulled it out of the air, knowing that the “fact checkers” would nod and go back to scrutinizing satires posted by the Babylon Bee.

Quite a few studies of the efficacy of face masks in protecting against Covid-19 have been published. You can find summaries of their results here and here. A news report summarizes the evidence thus:

Of 16 randomized controlled trials comparing mask effectiveness to controls with no masks, 14 failed to find a statistically significant benefit, the researchers said. And of 16 quantitative meta-analyses, half showed weak evidence of mask effectiveness, while the others “were equivocal or critical as to whether evidence supports a public recommendation of masks,” they said.

“The biggest takeaway is that more than 100 years of attempts to prove that masks are beneficial has produced a large volume of mostly low-quality evidence that has generally failed to demonstrate their value in most settings,” Dr. Jonathan Darrow, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and one of the researchers, told The Epoch Times in an email.

“Officials mulling mask recommendations should turn their attention to interventions with larger and more certain benefits, such as vaccines. Based on the evidence currently available, masks are mostly a distraction from the important work of promoting public health.”

Of particular significance is the absence of any support at all for the notion that cloth masks, overwhelmingly the most frequently seen have any beneficial effect at all:

One study (pdf) that’s widely cited by mask proponents, of rural villages in Bangladesh, found that surgical masks appeared to be marginally effective in reducing symptomatic COVID-19 but that cloth masks weren’t, Darrow and his colleagues noted.

But what most impresses me is that the Food and Drug Administration, which ought to know a bit about public health, disagrees, albeit quietly, with Dr. Walensky on the mask issue. The FDA divides face coverings into four classes in increasing order of protection: face masks, barrier face coverings, surgical masks and N95 respirators.

Face masks (“a product that covers the wearer’s nose and mouth”, without meeting any more rigorous standard) “are for use as source control”, that is, to limit the exhalation of disease-causing organisms by infected persons, not to prevent uninfected persons from breathing them in. That the typical cloth mask serves the latter purpose very poorly is obvious. Look closely at masked people near you (trying not to stare impolitely), and you’ll see that almost all cloth masks are worn in a way that leaves ample access to whatever may be circulating in the atmosphere. Then place your own mask tightly over your mouth and breath in and out. It is barely more difficult than ordinary breathing. Even a surgical mask “does not filter or block very small particles in the air that may be transmitted by coughs, sneezes, or certain medical procedures”. Only properly worn N95 respirators furnish that protection, which, as the FDA notes, comes with the drawback of obstructing normal breathing, thus posing a danger to sufferers from “chronic respiratory, cardiac, or other medical conditions that make breathing difficult”.

If someone has contracted Covid-19, it makes sense for him to wear a face mask in order to reduce the risk of passing the illness along to others. Since, however, only a minute percentage of the population is infected at any particular time, and those who are transmit it with far less than 100 percent efficiency, that isn’t much of an argument for universal masking. There are doubtless circumstances in which masks are a prudent precaution, but “authorities” like Dr. Walensky show no interest in distinguishing those cases from the rest of life. Someday, I suppose, they will propose to reduce falls by compelling everyone to walk with the aid of crutches.

The Concrete Begins to Crack

Perhaps the tiny crevices are appearing through which the grass of freedom can push through and ultimately demolish the concrete layer of panicdemic oppression. In Washington, D.C., whose local government is about as far from libertarian as one can find outside of the Chinese mainland –

Washington’s local mask mandate, one of the strictest in the nation since late July, will relax greatly beginning Monday, Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) announced Tuesday.

The District had required residents to wear masks in most indoor settings since the delta variant caused coronavirus case counts to rise over the summer. On Tuesday, though, Bowser said coronavirus vaccinations are working: While case rates remain far above the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommended target of 50 new cases per day for every 100,000 residents, Bowser noted that vaccines are preventing most people who catch the virus from needing hospitalization.

That means it’s time to let residents choose whether to wear masks in their office buildings, retail stores, gyms and many other settings, Bowser said. Businesses can still require masks, but it will not be legally mandated – and some hope the change will help retailers struggling in a downtown that still resembles a ghost town most days.

Perhaps indicative of the motivation for this liberalization is a bracketed note that the online version of this story inserts immediately after the preceding paragraphs: “[Bowser is running for a third term as D.C. mayor]”.

A more ambiguous sign, but I draw hope from it, is the latest pronunciamento by America’s most famous celebrity doctor. As reported in the zealously pro-panic Guardian –

Anthony Fauci, the top infectious diseases public official in the US, said on Tuesday that if America further ramps up vaccination rates and those already immunized take booster shots that it is feasible Covid-19 could be reduced from a pandemic emergency to endemic status next year.

More than 70% of adults in the US are fully vaccinated. Fauci said if a lot more Americans take the vaccines, and if the US makes boosters available for everyone, the country could get control of the virus by spring of 2022.

It sounds to me like Dr. Falsi perceives the unrest among hoi polloi and hopes to appease it by promising liberation – someday.

“To me, if you want to get to endemic, you have got to get the level of infection so low that it does not have an impact on society, on your life, on your economy,” Fauci said.

“People will still get infected. People might still get hospitalized, but the level would be so low that we don’t think about it all the time and it doesn’t influence what we do.”

But at this point most of the “impact on society, on your life, on the economy” stems not from the disease itself but from the restrictions placed on society, lives and the economy in the name of containing it.

Update (December 30, 2021): The concrete gets a new and thicker layer. Mayor Bowser has reverted to full panicdemic mode, complete with vaccine passports, an indoor mask mandate and a transition to “virtual” classrooms.

An Unexpected Call for Ending the Panicdemic

David Leonhardt writes a New York Times newsletter called “The Morning” that generally retails a conventional progressive line, yet he seems, judging by his column last Friday, to be weary of the way in which CCP Flu has come to dominate Americans’ lives. He asks, “Is it time to start moving back to normalcy?” and answers in pretty much the affirmative.

He reports the views of “one of the more cautious” of “the Covid experts I regularly talk with”, Dr. Robert Wachter, chairman of the medicine department at the University of California San Francisco. “He worries about ‘long Covid,’ and he believes that many people should receive booster shots. He says that he may wear a mask in supermarkets and on airplanes for the rest of his life.” Obviously not a right-wing Covid denier. Nonetheless, he –

also worries about the downsides of organizing our lives around Covid. In recent weeks, he has begun to think about when most of life’s rhythms should start returning to normal. Increasingly, he believes the answer is: Now.

This belief stems from the fact that the virus is unlikely to go away, ever. Like most viruses, it will probably keep circulating, with cases rising sometimes and falling other times. But we have the tools – vaccines, along with an emerging group of treatments – to turn it into a manageable virus, similar to the seasonal flu.

Given this reality, Wachter, who’s 64, has decided to resume more of his old activities and accept the additional risk that comes with them, much as we accept the risk of crashes when riding in vehicles.

After citing data indicating that “Covid now presents the sort of risk to most vaccinated people that we unthinkingly accept in other parts of life”, the author reaches a sane conclusion:

When The Washington Post recently asked Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, when the pandemic would end, she replied: “It doesn’t end. We just stop caring. Or we care a lot less.” She added, “I think for most people, it just fades into the background of their lives.”

I realize that answer may sound jarring, but the alternative – a society permanently dominated by Covid – is jarring, too. Eventually, the costs of organizing our lives around the virus will exceed the benefits. In some cases, we may have already reached that point.

The column links to an interesting page of graphs and tables, including a map showing, for every county in the United States, the average daily new CCP Flu cases per 100,000 people. The Centers for Disease Control has decided that a rate over 10 per 100,000 is dangerous enough to demand special precautions, and most of the country outside the Southeast is above that level. In my home county (Pierce County, Washington), it’s 30 per 100,000 as a I write. (The figures are moving seven-day averages and change daily.) If the disease were to move steadily through the county at that rate, each inhabitant could expect to fall ill at some point in the next nine years. That hardly conjures up images of the Black Death and makes one wonder why the CDC thinks the rate must be a third of that to be tolerable.

According to another of the site’s maps, one in nine people in Pierce County has so far suffered from CCP Flu; one in 988 has died of it. Bear in mind that the number of cases is most likely understated (because those who are infected by the virus but have no symptoms are counted only by happenstance) while the risk of death may be overstated. (As Mr. Leonhardt notes, “The aggregate statistics on Covid deaths and hospitalizations exaggerate the risk to most Americans, because a disproportionate share of severe illness occurs among people with specific medical vulnerabilities.” The Italian Institute of Health has found that only three percent of patients in that country who were suffering from CCP Flu at the time of death were free from other morbid conditions.)

Many Covidophobes have, I suspect, developed an addiction to the illusion of deadly peril. Just this weekend, I heard about a writer at a science fiction convention who complained vehemently to the organizers when a single unmasked individual appeared in the audience at one of her panels. The incremental risk that she faced as a result was undoubtedly too slight to be measured, yet it threw her into a simulacrum of fear.

I wish that everybody could remember that the world isn’t perfectly safe and never will be. It is much safer today than it was fifty, or even twenty, years ago. It is a minute fraction less safe than it was in December 2019. I’ll conclude with an observation by the author of an op-ed declaring that it is “Time to face hard truths and get on with life – virus and all”. In response to hostile comments, he wrote:

What really strikes me is how wedded many people are to having the epidemic and its restrictions last forever. What kind of mental illness is this? But I have made the point many times before that I have no intention of trying to change these people’s minds. This is belief and religion on their part, not data or science or logical analysis. I don’t even want to engage with these people. And they are a serious impediment to trying to get our society back to some kind of rational policy on the epidemic. Because they apparently have lots of time to spend writing idiotic and inane comments.

DST: Deranged System of Timekeeping

Herewith a condensed but adequate history of Daylight Saving Time:

Until the Nineteenth Century, time reckoning was a purely local matter. If the town clock was set accurately by the Sun, its hands would point straight up at noon. That clocks in the next county read 11:56 or 12:04 at the same instant mattered not a whit.

Then came the railroads, which had to adhere to timetables and couldn’t do so readily if the conductor reset his timepiece at every station. Hence came “railroad time”.

The next step was to synchronize the other clocks in town to the railroad station’s, aligning them with the motions of trains rather than of the Sun. Being a minute late for the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe was more consequential than clocks striking noon at 12:02 p.m. “Railroad time” became “standard time”.

Around the start of the Twentieth Century, People Who Know Better had a brainstorm: The world would be a happier place if everyone got up an hour earlier in the summer. Their bedtimes would then correspond more nearly to when the Sun went down, and they wouldn’t sit around in darkness between sunset and sleep. The obstacle was that governments back then didn’t have the inclination or means to order changes in sleeping habits. (Today they would have less hesitation. OSHA would issue a rule requiring businesses to open an hour earlier in summertime and fire workers who showed up late.)

The workaround was what is now called a “nudge”. The government didn’t ordain wake-up times. Instead, it changed the clocks. It decreed that, on a specified Sunday, 2:00 a.m. would become 3:00 a.m., skipping the hour in between. Alarm clocks would then sound at the same nominal time as yesterday, but it would be an hour earlier by the Sun. The expectation was that citizens would acquiesce in losing an hour of rest in preference to undergoing the inconvenience of changing personal and business schedules.

That expectation was fulfilled. People imagined that the Sun now stayed longer in the sky and that they had “saved” rather than lost an hour.

After the summer solstice, the days begin to shorten. “Daylight saving time” “saves” too little at the end of the day to matter and lengthens the darkness at its beginning. The decree then goes out that the clock tampering shall be reversed. The government returns the hour that it took by stealth. A friend once responded to my grumbling about having had an hour taken by saying that it had only been borrowed. “Yes,” I replied, “it’s a loan but at zero interest.” I might feel better about this manipulation if I could “fall back” an hour and two minutes.

Tomorrow the filched hour is given back. In 2008, when DST was extended by a month, I voiced my complaints, and I think they’re still valid:

The case for DST has always rested on more than its alleged economic benefits. I remember when, in my childhood, Washington State voted on adopting the gimmick. The “yes” campaign ads didn’t say a word about energy; their slogan was, “Enjoy an extra hour of daylight”. As a preteen, I could see that the “extra” hour was merely shifted from another part of the day. Older citizens were evidently more gullible, as the measure passed handily.

At what hour people wake up and go to bed ought to be outside the scope of the government’s interest, if anything is. Yet DST proponents presume to decide the preferred shape of everybody’s day and pass laws to promote that preference. This is nannyism on stilts. The health nazis at least have the excuse that most of what they wish to ban really is bad for your health. Trying to force people to change their sleep schedules twice a year lacks that justification (in fact, is unhealthy) and, once the diaphanous economic arguments are taken off the table, serves only a gauzy aesthetic purpose. The images of kids playing in the park and couples strolling in the sunset as twilight gently falls are poetic but ridiculously far outside the legitimate concerns of government. Here is another instance, to add to the many that Jonah [Goldberg] cites [in Liberal Fascism], of petty fascism creeping in.

Beyond the abuse of governmental power, DST abuses our bodies:

Research has shown that deliberately messing with our internal clock twice a year increases our risk of accident, illness and death.

That’s why the American Academy of [Sleep] Medicine has called for an end to daylight saving time, arguing that permanent adoption of standard time is best for improving people’s health.

“Over the last 20 to 30 years, there’s been increasing research which has demonstrated that one hour, in fact, appears to be very important,” said Dr. Muhammad Adeel Rishi, a pulmonology, medicine and critical care specialist at the Mayo Clinic in Eau Claire, Wis.

“This one hour of loss can have lasting effects on health and safety. Standard time provides the best possible solution year-round for the health and safety of society as a whole,” Rishi said.

Shifting from standard time to daylight saving time magnifies heart health issues, including an increase in risk of heart attack, stroke and a dangerously abnormal heart rhythm, the AASM argued in a position paper published last fall in the Journal of Clinical Medicine.

The AASM paper also cited increases in  automobile accidents, emergency room visits and physicians’ errors, as well as the adverse consequences of disrupting circadian rhythms, including heightened risk of “obesity, metabolic syndrome, depression and cancer”.

Alas, we probably won’t Follow the Science and abolish DST until somebody proves that it contributes to Climate Change.

Further Reading: Scott Lincicome, “#EndDST”
“Daylight saving time: an American Academy of Sleep Medicine position statement”

A “New UFO Paradigm”?

Two months ago, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, released its “Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena”, a report requested by Sen. Marco Rubio in 2020, when he was chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The report doesn’t reach any conclusion other than what one expects from a bureaucracy: “a more sophisticated analysis of UAP that is likely to deepen our understanding” will be “resource-intensive and would require additional investment”. Still, that’s a departure from the government’s habitual stance in the past, viz., “Nothing to see here. Move along.” The shift has led to what one observer terms “a new paradigm” for UFO’s. Maybe some terrestrial nation is experimenting with incomprehensibly advanced technology. Or maybe, as two in five Americans say they believe, alien spacecraft are the more probable explanation.

James Meigs, former editor of Popular Mechanics has a piece in the forthcoming issue of Commentary, “The UFO Report and What It Didn’t Find”, in which he concludes that “the more closely one reads the report, the less evidence one finds that American fliers are crossing paths with exotic technology, earthly or otherwise”.

Nothing I write here is intended to suggest that UFOs couldn’t possibly exist, or that extraterrestrial civilizations couldn’t conceivably visit our planet. Nor is it impossible that Russia or China might have leapfrogged all known aerospace technologies. Finally, I am not suggesting that the military fliers who have reported encounters with unexplained phenomena (often at the risk of being ostracized) are making things up. What I am suggesting is that ambiguous data can be…ambiguous. Doctors in training are often admonished, “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.” In other words, start with the most likely explanation for a symptom before assuming it must be caused by some exotic disease. That’s a good rule of thumb for UFO sightings, too.

For example, in a Navy video “a small white object appears to be racing across the wave tops as the aircrew of a F/A-18 Super Hornet tracks it with their weapons camera. It certainly looks convincing. But an analysis by visual-effects expert Mick West shows why such footage can be deceiving.”

Helpfully, the gun-camera footage includes readouts showing the jet fighter’s altitude and speed, as well as the orientation of the camera pod. These data reveal that, rather than being a fast-moving, low-flying aircraft, the white object is actually drifting slowly at a fairly high altitude – yes, it’s probably another balloon. The F/A-18 is flying higher still, so when its camera zooms in on the object, that little white dot is framed against the ocean – which the dot appears to be racing past not because it is moving but because the background is moving. After all, the jet is flying at nearly 300 miles per hour. Even to the experienced airmen watching, this illusion of movement is stunningly convincing.

West’s analyses of other Navy video clips reveal similar illusions, including common technical glitches in how video cameras operate. West’s work isn’t the last word. But it helps show the kinds of errors that can creep into human observations.

In summary:

The word “unexplained” comes up a lot in the DNI report. That word certainly doesn’t mean “debunked.” Nor does it mean “something mind-blowing that we haven’t quite proved yet.” But it’s worth noting that when the U.S. Navy conducts flight operations, it is also operating one of the world’s most sophisticated data-acquisition systems. And yet, with all that data, we still can’t always distinguish between super-advanced aerospace vehicles and stray balloons and birds. Which is more likely? It’s natural that people get excited about seeing zebras. And we shouldn’t prematurely rule out zebras. But when we hear hoofbeats, dull as it might sound, it’s probably horses.

My own view, for what little it’s worth, is that aliens who wanted to examine Earth wouldn’t zip around randomly. They would put satellites in orbit and listen to our communications. Still, my rationality may be different from a BEM’s, or UFO’s might just be teenaliens taking their parents’ saucers out for a joyride. Perhaps the first verifiable alien visitor will be a traffic cop issuing tickets.

A Parable About Safety

There never was a more careful man than Hamilcar Wilts. Although the only river in his vicinity was two feet wide and looked badly in need of water, Hamilcar kept a rowboat on his roof in case of a flood. In the rowboat there was a raft, in case the boat leaked, and the raft’s equipment included needles for sewing furs, in case Hamilcar was carried to the far north, and an augur for opening coconuts, in case he was carried to the tropics. There wasn’t much against which Hamilcar wasn’t prepared.

Hamilcar banished all poisonous or inflammable materials from his home, and stocked his medicine cabinet with every potion known to man, including an ointment to treat butter slicer’s squint, which is a form of eyestrain affecting the pygmies who cut butter pats for restaurants. He filled his home with fire extinguishers, lightning rods and an elephant gun, and sometimes relaxed by sipping a sterilized glass of boiled beer. Within his fortress, Hamilcar felt safe.

Eight miles away, however, lived a dolt named Boggle. Boggle blew up his house one day while trying to open a can of gasoline with a blowtorch. The explosion threw him seventy feet into a warehouse of pillows, where he landed so gently that it barely knocked the ashes off his cigarette.

When Hamilcar heard the explosion he thought something had damaged one of his trees, so he quickly donned a pair of lineman’s gloves (in case of live wires) and a bee veil, hurried out to the yard . . . and was promptly crushed by Boggle’s plummeting stove.

The moral: The chances of getting eaten by a leopard on Main Street are one in a million, but once is enough.

When I was a boy, I acquired a paperback volume entitled Your Own Book of Funny Stories. My copy disappeared long ago, but “How Hamilcar Wilts Prepared For Everything And Got It” impressed me so much that I copied out the text. The author was Robert M. Yoder (1907-1959), a humorist who once competed with Robert Benchley, Richard Armour, Ogden Nash, Will Cuppy, James Thurber and their ilk. He also was the first to record (or mayhap invent) Willie Sutton’s famous explanation of why he robbed banks. (“That’s where the money is.”) Sic transit gloria mundi. He now has not so much as a Wikipedia entry.

I hope that the Yoder heirs won’t object to my having resurrected his narrative of Hamilcar Wilts’s inordinate quest for safety. It speaks, I think, to our present condition. (If they do object, I’ll gladly disgorge 100 percent of my profit from this republication of their ancestor’s work.)

What brought Hamilcar to mind was a timely article by John Tierney, “Keeping Fear Alive”:

Throughout the pandemic, American political and public-health leaders have been following Rahm Emanuel’s classic dictum for power-seeking officials: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Now they’ve adopted a corollary: you never want a crisis to end.

So they are prolonging the national misery instead of easing it, which could be done with a few simple strategies. Explain to the public that the virus will never disappear but is no longer a mortal threat to the vast majority of Americans. Encourage the minority still at risk to get vaccinated by honestly discussing who is in jeopardy and what scientists have learned about infections. Promote treatments proven to prevent infection and speed recovery while avoiding unproven treatments and mandates that cause collateral damage and generate mistrust. Above all, make it clear to Americans that we finally have reason to celebrate: what once seemed an unprecedented danger is now just one of many pathogens that we know how to live with.

But in the Wiltsian world, one never is willing to “live with” any risk, however limited and no matter what the cost of an incremental degree of safety. New Zealand has adopted the strategy of trying to shield itself behind an anti-coronavirus moat while locking down its populace for months on end. That “worked” for a time, but it could continue working only if the country either became a hermit kingdom like pre-Meiji Japan or used its interval of isolation to vaccinate its entire population. It hasn’t done the latter. “Only about 23% of its 5 million people have been fully vaccinated, the lowest rate among the 38 members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).” But even 100 percent vaccination probably won’t satisfy Jacinth Ardern’s quest for perfect safety. In the absence of an unfailingly effective vaccine, Covid-19 won’t disappear, and New Zealand will never reopen.

The Arderns and Faucis of the world think that anyone who isn’t Wilts is Boggle. What they miss is that both extremes are dangerous, just in different ways.

Further reading: Andrew Stuttaford, “Sweden, Lockdowns, and New Zealand’s Maginot Medicine”

Stripping Off the Masks

As I observed a few days ago, masks have become a talisman against Covid-19. Millions believe in their efficacy, even when wearing them in ways that provide ample entry to all passing viruses. I’ve taken lately to looking more closely at other people’s masks. Hardly ever do I see one that fully covers the nose and fits snugly to the cheeks. Almost none have the recommended two layers of protection.

But my observations aren’t compelling evidence. In City Journal, statistician Jeffrey H. Anderson looks closely at randomized control trials that have tested whether mask wearing in fact reduces virus transmission. His bottom line:

In sum, of the 14 RCTs [randomized controlled trials] that have tested the effectiveness of masks in preventing the transmission of respiratory viruses, three suggest, but do not provide any statistically significant evidence in intention-to-treat analysis, that masks might be useful. The other eleven suggest that masks are either useless – whether compared with no masks or because they appear not to add to good hand hygiene alone – or actually counterproductive. Of the three studies that provided statistically significant evidence in intention-to-treat analysis that was not contradicted within the same study, one found that the combination of surgical masks and hand hygiene was less effective than hand hygiene alone, one found that the combination of surgical masks and hand hygiene was less effective than nothing, and one found that cloth masks were less effective than surgical masks.

In all but one of these studies, it should be noted, the masked participants wore surgical masks, not the cloth masks that are ubiquitous today.

One RCT tested these masks that so many high-profile public-health officials have touted. This “first RCT of cloth masks,” in the trial’s own words (it is apparently still the only one), was a 2015 study by MacIntyre, et al. in Hanoi, Vietnam. A relatively large study, with over 1,100 participants, it tested cloth masks against surgical masks and did not feature a no-mask control group. The trial tested the protection of health-care workers, instructing them to wear a two-layer cloth mask at all times on every shift (“except in the toilet or during tea or lunch breaks”) across four weeks.

The study found that those in the cloth-mask group were 13 times more likely (2.28 percent to 0.17 percent) to develop an influenza-like illness than those in the surgical-mask group – a statistically significant difference. The trial also lab-tested penetration rates and found that while surgical masks were “poor” at preventing the penetration of particles – letting 44 percent through – cloth masks were “extremely poor,” letting 97 percent through. (N95 hospital respirators let 0.1 percent through.)

Evidence from randomized trials has been pretty much ignored by the Centers for Disease Control. It instead touts observational studies, which lack controls, have difficulty filtering out confounding variables and generally “are not only of lower quality than RCTs but also are more likely to be politicized, as they can inject the researcher’s judgment more prominently into the inquiry and lend themselves, far more than RCTs, to finding what one wants to find”.

It’s striking how much the CDC, in marshalling evidence to justify its revised mask guidance, studiously avoids mentioning randomized controlled trials. RCTs are uniformly regarded as the gold standard in medical research, yet the CDC basically ignores them apart from disparaging certain ones that particularly contradict the agency’s position. In a “Science Brief” highlighting studies that “demonstrate that mask wearing reduces new infections” and serving as the main public justification for its mask guidance, the CDC provides a helpful matrix of 15 studies – none RCTs. The CDC instead focuses strictly on observational studies completed after Covid-19 began.

With one exception, the studies that Mr. Anderson cites were conducted before the Covid-19 epidemic began. That, of course, is no reason to reject them. It’s scarcely conceivable that the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 is repelled by masks that are ineffective against other viruses. Moreover, the one post-Covid study is consistent with the earlier ones:

The only RCT to test mask-wearing’s specific effectiveness against Covid-19 was a 2020 study by Bundgaard, et al. in Denmark. This large (4,862 participants) RCT divided people between a mask-wearing group (providing “high-quality” three-layer surgical masks) and a control group. It took place at a time (spring 2020) when Denmark was encouraging social distancing but not mask use, and 93 percent of those in the mask group wore the masks at least “predominately as recommended.” The study found that 1.8 percent of those in the mask group and 2.1 percent of those in the control group became infected with Covid-19 within a month, with this 0.3-point difference not being statistically significant.

It’s now easier to understand why, in the early days of the epidemic, the medical profession, including the Centers for Disease Control, discouraged masks.

“Seriously people – STOP BUYING MASKS!” So tweeted then-surgeon general Jerome Adams on February 29, 2020, adding, “They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus.” Two days later, Adams said, “Folks who don’t know how to wear them properly tend to touch their faces a lot and actually can increase the spread of coronavirus.” Less than a week earlier, on February 25, public-health authorities in the United Kingdom had published guidance that masks were unnecessary even for those providing community or residential care: “During normal day-to-day activities facemasks do not provide protection from respiratory viruses, such as COVID-19 and do not need to be worn by staff.” About a month later, on March 30, World Health Organization (WHO) Health Emergencies Program executive director Mike Ryan said that “there is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any particular benefit.” He added, “In fact there’s some evidence to suggest the opposite” because of the possibility of not “wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly” and of “taking it off and all the other risks that are otherwise associated with that.”

There’s no need to accuse doctors of telling “noble lies” about the proper precautions against Covid. They were following what “the science” said. I’m not even sure that Dr. Fauci is telling the truth when he confesses to having intentionally misled the public. My suspicion is that he said what he sincerely believed at the time and lied later to disguise how seriously his revised advice clashed with the available evidence.

Masks and Magic

In some parts of the world, many people believe that magical charms can stop bullets. In the United States, there is an analogous widespread confidence that cloth masks repel viruses, whence have arisen the “mask mandate wars”.

And not just any old mask will do. Here is National Public Radio’s “health correspondent” telling us what he learned after consulting an expert on the aerosol spread of viruses:

So it can’t fit loosely, you know, leaving gaps on your cheeks or under your chin where the virus could sneak in, and it should pinch tight over your nose. And if you’re wearing a cloth mask, it should have a layer made out of special filter material, not just regular cloth. If you’re not sure, you can hold your mask up to the light to see if you can see pinpricks of light through it. If you can, then it’s probably not good enough. Or, you know, another thing you can do is spray water through it in front of a mirror. If water gets through to the mirror, not good enough. Buy a better mask or buy filters to insert between the cloth layers. And if you really want to protect yourself, you could consider double masking.[emphasis added]

As you look at the mask wearers around you with noses uncovered by the thin strips of cloth that leave roomy entryways for microscopic particles, ask whether this is any more practical than the advice (which I really heard early in the panicdemic) to wash your hands immediately after touching anything.

The handful of people who can and will do as the experts say are already vaccinated. Many of them have probably sneaked in third doses. As for the rest of he population, they might as well be wearing amulets containing the blood of a bat slain at midnight under a New Moon.

An interesting study suggests that a belief in magic to ward off bullets isn’t entirely dysfunctional.

In particular, protection spells cause actors to undertake actions that are not optimal for them as individuals, but are optimal for the society as a whole. This occurs because beliefs in protection spells lower the perceived costs of contributing to a public good (i.e. defending the village from invaders). Decreasing the perceived costs of contributing to a public good is beneficial in settings where the contributions levels would (in equilibrium) otherwise be lower than optimal. Because such false beliefs make the group better off, this offers a plausible explanation for why they persist in environments where intergroup competition is strong, like areas with intense conflict.

I’m at a loss to see any similar virtue to wearing masks as a protection against coronavirus. Mask mandates and mask Karens have, at best, distracted people from the genuine protection afforded by vaccination. At worst, they engender social conflict whose ultimate costs are comparable to, or worse than, a disease that kills a minuscule fraction of its victims.

Further reading: John Tierney, “The Panic Pandemic”

Since We All Must Talk About Either Masks or Simone Biles Today. . .

And I know nothing about Simone Biles. . . .

Being one of the handful of Americans who isn’t an expert epidemiologist, I don’t have much to say about the merits of the Center for Disease Control’s recommendation that everyone, vaccinated or not, in most of the United States (63 percent of counties, including practically all of the most heavily populated) return to wearing masks (which magically ward off coronaviruses, even when worn loosely or without covering the nose). Instead, I leave the commentary to Rochelle Walensky, M.D., the CDC’s director:

Information from several states and other countries indicates that in rare occasions, some vaccinated people infected with the Delta variants after vaccination may be contagious and spread the virus to others. [emphasis added]

Does that sound like a really firm, much less urgent, reason why vaccinated individuals should go back to the uncomfortable, dubiously effective and sometimes unsanitary practice of covering their breathing apparatus with cloth?

Dr. Walensky would have made sense if she had continued, “These tentative findings are an additional reason why people who have put off being vaccinated should delay no longer, but they do not necessitate any change to the CDC’s guidance that those who have been vaccinated may resume their normal lives – unmasked.” It tells you much about our strange time that she didn’t.

Scheduling note: Owing to the press of other work and my aversion to letting chatter about current crises dominate my life, I anticipate posting to this blog on Wednesdays and Sundays. If the mood strikes me, I may say something on other days, but probably not very often.

The Doomsday Comet of 1883 (Well, Not Quite)

Reading this speculation about a cometary near-miss 128 years ago (via Instapundit), one breathes a sigh of relief while reflecting on how no planetary defensive measure would have much chance of staving off “3275 Tunguska events in two days”.

But then I thought, “Hold on. Wouldn’t a comet with 3,000 Tunguska-sized fragments be surrounded by billions of lesser particles? If it passed within 500 miles of the Earth, wouldn’t the meteor shower be remembered to this day?”

So I asked Dr. Bing about “meteor showers 1883” and promptly learned that, far beneath an alarmist headline – “Revealed: The massive comet that came within a few hundred miles of hitting the earth in 1883 - with enough force to destroy mankind” – even the scarcely reliable Daily Mail had noted,

The report’s claims have been questioned, though, as a comet breaking up so close to earth should have resulted in a meteor shower, and no astronomers detected one.

The regular Perseid meteor shower, which occurred shortly after Bonilla’s photograph, was described in reports as ‘not a fine one by any means.’

It was, admittedly, a spectacular year for the Leonid shower:

One of the most memorable Leonid meteor showers reported was the one that occurred in 1883. It was superlative in intensity that an estimated 100,000–200,000 meteors an hour were seen over North America. People who have observed it from the best locations actually thought that the world is ending. The 1883 event led to the first formulation of the origins of meteors.

But the Leonids are in November, three months after the supposed multi-Tunguska, and have been observed for centuries.

So the world didn’t almost end in August 1883, but, hey, maybe that was a fleet of alien starships cruising by.

Biological Warfare?

Am I growing too suspicious, too ready to see plots in life’s little accidents? The Daily Telegraph reports that customs authorities in Los Angeles “found live adult and larvae of khapra beetle in a shipment of Indian rice arriving in a shipment of personal effects from Saudi Arabia last week”. About this insect, understatedly headlined as “the world’s most dangerous pest”, we are told –

Jaime Ruiz, US Customs and Border Protection spokesman, said established infections of the insect were difficult to control because of its ability to live without food for long periods of time and relative tolerance to surface insecticides and fumigants.

Elsewhere, we learn that the khapras are –

[k]nown to infest warehouses and food processing plants and can infest any structure and prospers in pantries, closets, garages, laundry rooms, and basements where wheat, grain, cereal, barley and rice are stored. Khapra beetles thrive on pet food, grass seed, bird seed and in areas with large Pecan, Walnut, Acorn and other nut trees.

According to the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, the creature, “nominated as one of the 100 worst invasive species worldwide”, has been introduced into the United States several times and eradicated each time at considerable cost.

A trifle odd, isn’t it, that personal effects arriving from Saudi-controlled Arabia should include a sack of rice?

The Oceans of Luna

Well, ponds. The Wall Street Journal says that, based on new analyses of LCROSS results, the Moon has twice as much water as the Sahara Desert. That’s not waterworld, and the moisture will need much purifying to eliminate such unwanted residues as mercury, but it’s adequate for a substantial lunar base.

In fact, these findings make a permanent human presence on the Moon pretty much inevitable. It will, however, be a Chinese or Indian or Japanese presence. The U.S. is committed to no space goals at all, except perhaps for Not Being Like Bush and showing respect for the Moslem world.

When there’s a Sikh temple at Cabeus Crater, I wonder whether the President of the United States will visit it.

NASA’s “Perhaps Foremost” Mission – to Mecca?

If I were a Fourth of July orator, I’d be sure to work into my panegyrics several paragraphs in praise of America’s space program, one of the greatest scientific and technological feats of mankind’s history. Apparently, if NASA Administrator Charles Bolden is to be believed, President Obama holds a different view. From an interview with Al-Jazeera:

[B]efore I became the NASA Administrator [President Obama] charged me with three things: One was that he wanted me to re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, that he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with predominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.”

General Bolden’s honesty is beyond question, so there can’t be any doubt about the truth of this anecdote. It’s certainly not one that anybody with a lick of common sense would invent. Whatever the general’s private views, he offers us an insight into what his boss thinks about space exploration, namely, not much. The redefinition of NASA’s mission – from expanding to frontiers of knowledge to serving as a diplomatic tool and an inspiration for schoolchildren and Moslems – is astonishing.

To be fair to General Bolden, his answer to the interviewer’s next question softens the President’s vision to one of drawing on the best minds of all nations to contribute to space exploration, and he goes on to express his enthusiasm for manned missions to deep space. He even has kind words for the ideas underlying the Constellation program, lamenting that it was underfunded. (He isn’t asked, and doesn’t answer, why the proposed increases to NASA’s budget couldn’t have gone to putting Constellation right again.)

One other tidbit: While doubting that any nation can single-handedly develop a viable deep space program, General Bolden insists that the U.S. is the undisputed leader in this effort and that other spacefaring countries welcome our role. I hope that his optimism hasn’t skewed his judgement.

Unfortunately, the President will ultimately decide what objectives NASA will pursue. He seems more interested in Mecca than Mars.

How Did the Little Crocodile?

Far be it from me to quibble with a scientific “dream team”, which has converted into Settled Science the hypothesis that an asteroid strike 65 million years ago extinguished the dinosaurs. Certainly, the event that it describes would have wiped out a lot of things:

It would take a mighty rock to do in the mighty lizards known as dinosaurs, and on that count the Chicxulub asteroid fits the bill. It was big – more than seven miles across, three times the width of Manhattan – and it was moving fast – 20 times the speed of a rifle bullet. When it hit, the explosion unleashed a billion times more energy than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, says Gareth Collins of Imperial College London.

In a paper published last year, Collins found that the asteroid in 30 seconds drilled an initial crater 19 miles deep, nearly penetrating the Earth's crust. Earthquakes of up to magnitude 11 – 1,000 times more powerful than the recent Chilean earthquake – shook the area, and tsunamis more than 300 feet high inundated nearby coasts. . . .

The impact was so violent that it melted and vaporized both the asteroid itself and the spot the asteroid hit. Within an hour, melted rock had splattered as far as northern Canada, says David Kring of the Lunar and Planetary Institute. An immense plume of vaporized and melted material burst through the atmosphere and into outer space. Within a few hours, tiny drops from that plume began raining down through the atmosphere all across the Earth's surface.

As they fell, these drops grew hotter, literally broiling the planet for several minutes, according to another 2009 study. . . .

The combination of dust, soot and caustic chemicals filling the air blotted out the sun, Kring says. The sky close to the crater first glowed red then went pitch black. All over the globe, a biblical darkness fell, lasting perhaps a week, maybe nearly a year.

The darkness shut down photosynthesis, the process by which plants capture sunlight to grow. Huge swathes of forest died.

All very spectacular. My scintilla of a doubt is this: Crocodiles existed in the late Cretaceous and survived to the present day. They do not strike me as the creatures best suited to living through a succession of broiling rain and prolonged, presumably chilly darkness. Were they just lucky? Did a crocodilian Deukalion and Pyrrha somehow escape the cataclysm and repopulate the terrestrial marshlands?

Maybe. But I still like the theory that big game hunters from the stars took a fancy to dinosaur-hunting safaris, while overlooking less spectacular reptiles.

Is “Intelligent Design” Un-Christian?

Writing in First Things, Stephen M. Barr, a physicist and a Christian (not so rare a combination), contends that the “Intelligent Design” alternative to Darwinian evolution is not only bad science but worse theology. His principal point is that ID is radically unlike the Argument from Design that has long been a staple of theism in general and Christian apologetics in particular.

The ID claim is that certain biological phenomena lie outside the ordinary course of nature. Aside from the fact that such a claim is, in practice, impossible to substantiate, it has the effect of pitting natural theology against science by asserting an incompetence of science. To be sure, there are questions that natural science is not competent to address, and too many scientists have lost all sense of the limitations of their disciplines, not to mention their own limitations. But the ID arguments effectively declare natural science incompetent even in what most would regard as its own proper sphere. Nothing could be better calculated to provoke the antagonism of the scientific community. This throwing down of the gauntlet to science explains not a little of the fervor of the scientific backlash against ID.

The older (and wiser) form of the design argument for the existence of God—one found implicitly in Scripture and in many early Christian writings—did not point to the naturally inexplicable or to effects outside the course of nature, but to nature itself and its ordinary operations—operations whose “power and working” were seen as reflecting the power and wisdom of God. . . .

The emphasis in early Christian writings was not on complexity, irreducible or otherwise, but on the beauty, order, lawfulness, and harmony found in the world that God had made. As science advances, it brings this beautiful order ever more clearly into view. . . .

But whereas the advance of science continually strengthens the broader and more traditional version of the design argument, the ID movement’s version is hostage to every advance in biological science. Science must fail for ID to succeed.

The nub of the ID theory is that violations of natural law are crucial to evolution. From a Christian perspective, that is a troubling hypothesis.

In Darwin’s Black Box, the ground-breaking ID work, Michael Behe identified a number of key microbiological phenomena that, he argued, could not have evolved naturally. The reason was that they were “irreducibly complex”: Elements A, B and C were all necessary to D, but none could develop until the others were already in place.

If irreducible complexity is a reality, a portion of evolution is inexplicable in Darwinian (or any other natural) terms. (Dr. Behe doesn’t deny that most evolution proceeds naturally, nor does he doubt that life is a billion or so years old or that human beings descend ultimately from protozoa.) To get past the non-Darwinian roadblocks, one has little choice but to posit what we may as well call “miracles” (though Dr. Behe doesn’t use that term). And miracles imply an intelligent being to perform them.

Some biologists, and a great many amateur blowhards of the Little Green Footballs stripe, grow very angry on encountering such ideas. Professor Barr has a smidgeon of sympathy for their dudgeon:

The ID movement has also rubbed a very raw wound in the relation between science and religion. For decades scientists have had to fend off the attempts by Young Earth creationists to promote their ideas as a valid alternative science. The scientific world’s exasperation with creationists is understandable. Imagine yourself a serious historian in a country where half the population believed in Afrocentric history, say, or a serious political scientist in a country where half the people believed that the world is run by the Bilderberg Group or the Rockefellers. It would get to you after a while, especially if there were constant attempts to insert these alternative theories into textbooks. So, when the ID movement came along and suggested that its ideas be taught in science classrooms, it touched a nerve. This is one reason that the New Atheists attracted such a huge audience.

For those who start by assuming the truth of atheism, irreducible complexity is of course nonsense. If some step in the evolution of sapient beings were naturally impossible, we simply wouldn’t be here. For Christians, the question is not so easy. Natural law cannot produce every imaginable creation. There are no 20 foot tall insects or thousand pound birds or fire-breathing dragons – not because they just happen not to have evolved but because the laws of nature render them impossible. On the other hand, God could make a dragon, just as He turned water into wine and revivified Lazarus.

Conceivably, then, there are points at which the continuance of evolution was impossible by natural means, and God miraculously kept it going. What I find less conceivable is that these miracles were needed again and again. Darwin’s Black Box discusses five biochemical systems that Dr. Behe regards as instances of irreducible complexity, and he presumably didn’t have the time or resources to explore the full sweep of microbiology. If there are five miracles among the phenomena he is familiar with, one would reasonably assume that further research would uncover many more.

Such a proliferation of miracles scarcely comports with the Christian view that God created a universe that operates lawfully, in whose workings He seldom intervenes. How much “beauty, order, lawfulness, and harmony” are to be found in an edifice that needs to be shored up at such frequent intervals? As theology, Intelligent Design veers toward “occasionalism”, the belief, widespread in Islamic philosophy, that the laws of nature are an illusion and that God’s continuous remaking of the universe is beyond the grasp of what humans call “reason”.

The ID approach also, oddly enough, accepts a fundamental tenet of the New Atheists: that the regularity of natural law disproves the existence of God. Because Richard Dawkins fills his books with accounts of non-miraculous biological transformations, the Discovery Institute strives to refute him by finding ones that can’t be explained.

Whether or not that effort succeeds as science, it has no bearing on Christianity. The only miracle that is essential to the Christian faith is the Resurrection. That God has performed other miracles is, Christians believe, a fact of history, not a necessary condition for bringing about the present order of the world. The line of descent from the first organism to the manifold life around us is astonishingly beautiful, orderly, lawful and harmonious, the more so if there are no gaps that must be bridged by ad hoc divine interventions.

The Wrong Arguments for NASA

Last week Charles Krauthammer strongly criticized the Obama Administration’s new direction for the space program. Today the Administration responded in a surprisingly high-profile fashion, with a letter to the Washington Post co-signed by the President’s science advisor and the administrator of NASA. Maybe this is part of the White House’s recently disclosed “more and faster cowbell” PR strategy. In any event, the rebuttal was pathetic.

Mr. Krauthammer proffered two objections to the Obama plan. The first and narrower was to the axing of the next generation of launch vehicles. From now on, NASA will hire rockets, from Russia for now, later (we hope) from the private sector:

Our absence from low-Earth orbit was meant to last a few years, the interval between the retirement of the fatally fragile space shuttle and its replacement with the Constellation program (Ares booster, Orion capsule, Altair lunar lander) to take astronauts more cheaply and safely back to space.

But the Obama 2011 budget kills Constellation. Instead, we shall have nothing. For the first time since John Glenn flew in 1962, the United States will have no access of its own for humans into space – and no prospect of getting there in the foreseeable future. . . .

It would be swell for private companies to take over launching astronauts. But they cannot do it. It’s too expensive. It’s too experimental. And the safety standards for getting people up and down reliably are just unreachably high.

Sure, decades from now there will be a robust private space-travel industry. But that is a long time. In the interim, space will be owned by Russia and then China. The president waxes seriously nationalist at the thought of China or India surpassing us in speculative “clean energy.” Yet he is quite prepared to gratuitously give up our spectacular lead in human space exploration.

The broader concern is that the Administration has shown no genuine interest in a space program that looks beyond the Earth’s near environs:

When John F. Kennedy pledged to go to the moon, he meant it. He had an intense personal commitment to the enterprise. He delivered speeches remembered to this day. He dedicated astronomical sums to make it happen. . . .

As for President Obama’s commitment to beyond-lunar space: Has he given a single speech, devoted an iota of political capital to it?

Obama’s NASA budget perfectly captures the difference in spirit between Kennedy’s liberalism and Obama’s. Kennedy’s was an expansive, bold, outward-looking summons. Obama’s is a constricted, inward-looking call to retreat.

Fifty years ago, Kennedy opened the New Frontier. Obama has just shut it.

Though Mr. Krauthammer doesn’t make it explicit, his points are closely connected. Without an ambitious vision, space exploration and exploitation will stagnate at its present level. There will never be a privately built equivalent of Constellation – not because private enterprise can’t do the job better than a government agency, but because there will be precious little demand for boosters, and that demand can be met by Russia’s subsidized products. When something more is needed, does anyone imagine that Red China’s lunar program will look to Boeing or Lockheed or Space-X for transport?

So how does the Administration respond? By denouncing George W. Bush! The first two paragraphs declare that “the Bush plan, not the Obama plan, would have left the United States a loser in space” and “President George W. Bush’s Constellation program would not have been able to send astronauts to the international space station until two years after the station had crashed into the ocean” and “the last administration’s target of [returning to the Moon] by 2020 [is] by now unachievable under any budget”.

The Krauthammer column never mentioned George W. Bush. Its gravamen was that Barack Obama is too little like liberal hero John F. Kennedy.

Okay, so the Obama space policy is Not Bush. What is it? The balance of the Administration’s letter consists of rah-rah boilerplate, the only specific point being that $6 billion has been added to NASA’s five-year projected budget, which thus will average about $18 billion a year rather than $17 billion. In constant dollars, NASA spending was almost twice that high in the mid-1960’s. In saying that a return to the Moon is “unachievable under any budget”, the Administration apparently means “unachievable with half the budget of the Apollo program”.

The letter’s conspicuous silence is its non-response to Mr. Krauthammer’s major argument: that the President has put forth “a constricted, inward-looking call to retreat”. While we are promised “R&D for game-changing technologies to take Americans to deep-space destinations faster”, there is no hint at what those destinations might be or what the time frame might be for going there. The idea sounds very much like “fly before you can walk”. “Game-changing technologies” are more likely, I expect, to emerge from an active lunar program than a bye-and-bye mission to somewhere to be named later.

The government working as it does, we can be sure that John Holdren and Charles Bolden didn’t write, or perhaps even read, what appears over their names. The probable author is some hack in Robert Gibbs’ shop who based his screed on a five-minute briefing. I imagine that General Bolden, at least, has interesting and worthwhile ideas about what games technology can and should change. They can’t, unfortunately, be heard over the clanging of the cowbell.

Hebdomas Mirabilis

Any political analyst who had known a week ago that the Massachusetts Senate election would draw 75 percent of the ballot total of the 2008 Presidential election would also have known that Martha Coakley was going to win by at least ten points. On the other hand, one who had heard from an angel that Republican Scott Brown would get half the union vote – well, he would have converted to atheism.

Winning an election in Massachusetts would have delighted folks like me even if Boston had been shut down by blizzards, turnout had been the lowest in history, the entire Republican vote had come from suburban businessmen, and candidate Brown had campaigned as a RINO. What actually happened is beyond delightful.

What’s more, the surprising voters of Massachusetts threw the Democratic Party’s plans for the nationalization of health care into a tailspin. It wasn’t just that Harry Reid lost his sixtieth vote for cloture. All of a sudden, quite a few of his Senate and House colleagues noticed that Obamacare isn’t a popular cause. They now wish that it would go away. Yet the President has bound himself to this stake and cannot flee. Thus his party finds itself in a dilemma: Pressing ahead risks driving moderates into their opponents’ arms; giving up risks demoralizing liberals and miring themselves in impotence.

Then, the day after the “Massachusetts miracle”, the Supreme Court held that a movie denouncing Hillary Clinton has as much First Amendment protection as Debbie Does Dallas. A few liberals agreed; the ACLU had filed an amicus brief supporting the film makers. Most were appalled. The President issued a statement that sounded not unlike a Southern governor in 1954 calling for massive resistance to Brown v. Board of Education.

Whatever happened to maximalist interpretations of Constitutional rights? Where are the liberals who have instructed us that the Bill of Rights is more important than public safety, even if terrorists must go free and Americans’ lives be placed in jeopardy? One might almost suspect that their devotion to liberty stops the instant that liberty interferes with the forward march of progressivism.

Also this week, the UN’s Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change, the Nobel Prize winning outfit that lobbies relentlessly for the economic strangulation of the Western world, confessed that one of the alarming predictions in its latest report – that the Himalayas are warming so fast that their glaciers will be melted within 25 years – was nothing but junk science. True, it was just one error, but falsus in uno, falsus in multis. Why shouldn’t we wonder whether the IPCC’s “science” is similarly slipshod elsewhere?

Just coincidentally, the United Nations waived the first “deadline” set by the Copenhagen climate change conference, the one that President Obama dropped in on so that he could enjoy a second great triumph in that fine city. In the words of the pertinent UNocrat, “You could describe it as a soft deadline.” Sort of like the ones that the Administration periodically issues to Iran.

Which reminds me that today, January 22, 2010, is another “soft deadline”. By no later than today, the Guantanamo Bay terrorist prison was supposed to be shuttered. Happily, keeping that commitment proved beyond a former community organizer’s executive abilities.

One final bit of good news for the Right cheers me less: Air America has run out of money and fallen silent. I’ll hold my applause for two reasons. First, its financial backers may now channel their money in ways that will do more harm. (Washington Post, “Since last summer, Air America has been heard in the Washington area on WZAA (1050 AM). Its audience has been so small that Arbitron, which compiles radio ratings, was unable to detect any listeners for WZAA during several weeks in December.”)

Second, “Freedom of speech makes it much easier to spot the idiots”, and Air America was a water cooler around which the idiots gathered. Life will now be harder for snarky conservatives in search of left-wing imbecilities to lampoon.

Yet, despite that, it was a pretty good week.

Purgatory on Earth

In 1983 Rom Houben, a 20-year-old Belgian, was left unconscious by an automobile accident. Doctors concluded, after extensive testing, that, like Terri Schiavo, he was as good as dead. For undisclosed reasons, though, nobody made the “rational, humane” decision to terminate his intravenous feeding and let him die.

Yet he was, year after year, fully conscious, according to this report from the Daily Mail:

Rom Houben, trapped in his paralysed body after a car crash, described his real-life nightmare as he screamed to doctors that he could hear them – but could make no sound.

‘I screamed, but there was nothing to hear,’ said Mr Houben, now 46, who doctors thought was in a persistent vegetative state.

‘I dreamed myself away,’ he added, tapping his tale out with the aid of a computer. . . .

‘All that time I just literally dreamed of a better life. Frustration is too small a word to describe what I felt.’

Three years ago, a brain scans conducted at the University of Liege –

showed his brain was still functioning almost completely normally. Mr Houben described the moment as ‘my second birth’. Therapy has since allowed him to tap out messages on a computer screen. . . . He is never likely to leave hospital, but as well as his computer he now has a special device above his bed which lets him read books while lying down.

Steven Laureys, the doctor who saved Mr. Houben, believes that his condition is far from rare. A recent study that he co-authored found that 40 percent of a group of coma patients diagnosed as “vegetative” in fact were conscious to a greater or lesser degree.

A frequent argument against capital punishment is the risk of executing an innocent man. Shouldn’t we also think about that risk before starving and dehydrating the allegedly vegetative? The Daily Mail’s article concludes with a chilling anecdote:

Twenty years ago, Carrie Coons, an 86-year-old from New York, regained consciousness after a year, took small amounts of food by mouth and engaged in conversation.

Only days before her recovery, a judge had granted her family’s request for the removal of the feeding tube which had been keeping her alive.

I hope that Mrs. Coons had the opportunity after regaining consciousness to rewrite her will.

Quote of the Day

On the day after the Moon Landing anniversary, Steve Hayward quotes pertinently from his excellent book, The Age of Reagan:

The reaction to the moon landing in 1969 is a good example of national exhaustion and liberal guilt at work. The moon landing had been set out as a lofty goal by the liberals’ hero, John F. Kennedy, and the moon landing was an occasion of national pride and celebration for most Americans. Here, amidst the rubble and gloom of the 1960s, was something that had gone splendidly right. Many leading liberals, however, could only sniff that while the moon landing was undeniably impressive, the money for the moon landing would have been better spent on social problems on Earth. The popular cliché of the time went: “Any nation that can land a man on the moon can [fill in the blank].” (The total cost of the decade-long moon landing project was less than three months’ worth of federal spending for social programs in 1969.) A 25 person delegation from the Poor People’s Campaign, led by Rev. Ralph Abernathy (Martin Luther King’s successor), came to the Apollo 11 launch at Cape Canaveral “to protest America’s inability to choose human priorities,” while Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield said that “The needs of the people on earth, and especially in this country, should have priority. When we solve these problems, we can consider space efforts.” Even the brother of the man who issued the call to go to the moon, Sen. Ted Kennedy, expressed weariness with the space program: “I think after [the moon landing] the space program ought to fit into our other national priorities.”

Is it a surprise that, when President Obama received the Apollo 11 astronauts at the White House, he had much to say about the space program’s glorious past and not a word about its future?

Forty Years of Treading Moondust

Eventually, men will return to the Moon, then proceed to the rest of the Solar System and however much of the universe can be attained within the cold equations of astrophysics. When they do, and when historians record those pioneering ventures, one can’t help but anticipate that Neil Armstrong’s first step from the Apollo capsule will be noted not as the beginning but as a scene from a disconnected prologue – like the Norse settlement in America or Hero of Alexandria’s steam engine or Charles Babbage’s proto-computer.

We sometimes ponder why those precursors led nowhere, and we have inklings of answers. Vinland was thwarted by climate change. The Hellenistic world had such a plethora of slaves that mechanical labor saving devices were economically pointless. The Babbage “difference engine” demanded not-yet-existing technical skills. What will the future see as the reason for our failure to leave Earth’s cradle after so briefly stepping out of it?

It is hardly a matter of money. For the amount spent on the useless Obama Stimulus, spread over ten or twenty years, the United States could not just establish a base on Mars but begin settling the asteroids. Nor is our society’s excessive risk aversion entirely to blame. By any reasonable measure, space travel has been quite safe. It’s true that every accident sets the program back disproportionately, but isn’t that because there is no strong desire to continue under even the best conditions? Is it really likely that we’d be a lot further along, had Challenger made its final flight safely?

It’s true that nobody has a good plan for making lots of money from space travel. That’s why private enterprise hasn’t taken over – not why the government steadily cuts NASA’s budget. Our future space historian will sniff that bureaucrats ought to have taken to heart Benjamin Franklin’s (or Michael Faraday’s) question, “What use is a newborn baby?”

It’s fatuous, too, to put great weight on choices of launch vehicles, the details of mission plans, and the like. If people wanted a thriving space program, the problems of the space shuttle would merely be an obstacle to be swept aside, not a motive for retreat.

To anyone who remembers July 20, 1969, the ensuing four decades of sloth are inexplicable, as if the sequel to Pearl Harbor had been the triumph of American pacifism. Back then, astronauts were heroes; lunar colonies were on the horizon; our children would be able to vacation on Mars.

As Jerry Pournelle put it, “I always expected to see the first man on the Moon. I never thought I’d see the last.”

The Year’s Reading: Non-Fiction, Part Two

Now comes the second part of my 2008 reading list, which turns from current affairs to unalloyed history. In an effort to be orderly, I’ll keep to approximately chronological order.

God and the Megaverse

In the July/August issue of Analog [sorry, I don’t have a link], physicist Carl Frederick writes,

In the early 1990s, a creeping realization swept [or did a sweeping realization creep? – sorry, couldn’t resist] through the theoretical physics community that the probability for the universe to even exist was vanishingly small. Indeed, the only “theory” around that seemed able to explain the universe’s existence was Intelligent Design. This was not something physicists and cosmologists liked to talk about.

The improbability of the universe is a seeming corollary of the Standard Model of particle physics, which –

has about twenty-five free parameters (constants) specifying the masses of the particles and coupling constants, i.e. the strengths of the forces between them. These twenty-five or so constants are (as best we know) independent of each other; the value of one of the constants doesn’t depend on the values of the others. These constants, for example, determine the likelihood of atoms, the stability of atomic orbits and nuclei. From the values, one can determine, among other things, the amount of hydrogen available after the Big Bang to form stars, the masses and lifetimes of those stars, the ability of galaxies to form, and even the size of the universe.

Many of these constants seem “tuned.” If their numerical values were different by a very small amount, we wouldn’t exist. . . .

The theoretical physicist and cosmologist, Lee Smolin, looking at the individual tunings of the constants, has estimated that the probability of a universe that can support life to be at best one chance in 10229.

If the natural order is highly unlikely to exist “on its own”, an obvious hypothesis is that it is the product of a rational, super-natural order. Calling that creator “God” is rushing ahead, and identifying it with the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is a headlong plunge. Nonetheless, the hypothesis is at least consistent with theism and radically incompatible with the belief that reason is a mere by-product of an irrational universe.

There are, however, alternatives. Dr. Frederick, borrowing from Dr. Smolin, offers this array of possibilities:

1) God tuned the parameters for our benefit. This isn’t [Smolin’s] preferred answer (or mine either).

2) There is a very large number of universes, in each of which the parameters are chosen randomly. The number of universes is so large that some of the universes would have the “right” values of the parameters—and we are in one of those universes. . . .

3) There is a “unique mathematically consistent theory of the whole universe.” . . .

4) The parameters evolve in time—in the Darwinian sense. This is Smolin’s belief.

Let’s look at these in reverse order:

The parameters evolve in time—in the Darwinian sense.

Not being familiar with Dr. Smolin’s work (and I probably wouldn’t be able to understand it if I were), I’ll pass over this idea quickly. The concept, I take it, is that the basic cosmic parameters are not fixed. As time goes by, they “mutate”. Thus, from a starting point where stable atomic orbits were impossible, a process analogous to organic evolution brought about our present universe of matter and chemistry and life.

How natural selection can occur on a cosmic scale is, I’ll confess, a mystery to me. Can the universe become more fit for its niche than it already is? I presume that the proponents of this view have something coherent in mind. Dr. Frederick, while calling it “appealing”, states, “the idea hasn’t, in my opinion, risen to the point of being a theory.” Until it becomes one, let us put it on the shelf.

There is a “unique mathematically consistent theory of the whole universe.”

In other words, the 25 or so parameters of the Standard Model cannot have any values other than those we observe. If that is so, the fact that the universe is a place where life and intelligence are possible implies a designer no more than does the fact that the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter equals that extraordinary number 3.14159265....

This theory is the view of the “common sense” scientist. As Dr. Frederick says, “it is in the tradition of physics to look along these lines”. All that is lacking is the “unique mathematically consistent theory” or, at least, a proof that such a theory must exist. At the moment, its proponents have more a hope than an hypothesis.

There is a very large number of universes, in each of which the parameters are chosen randomly.

This solution, Dr. Frederick’s favorite, he calls the “megaverse”. It resembles the refutation of an old, second rate theistic argument: God must have made the Earth, because it is improbably placed at just the right distance from the Sun, with just the right mixture of elements, to support life. The counterargument is that there are trillions of planets. Even if the probability of an Earth is minuscule, one was bound to turn up in that profusion. Similarly, if a vast number of universes spring into existence, it is no great miracle that ours is one of them.

Of the theories under discussion, the megaverse is on its face the best alternative to the super-natural. Is there any way to choose between them?

Accompanying Dr. Frederick’s article is a novelette, “The Exoanthropic Principle”, that imagines how evidence might be found: A scientific team succeeds in communcating, “using focused, coherent gravitons”, with an alien civilization that turns out to dwell in a space with four physical dimensions. From this, the characters (and the author) conclude that a “landscape” of universes exists.

The conclusion doesn’t really follow. It is like finding both a watch and an oboe on the beach and inferring that neither could have a maker. In any event, we haven’t yet heard from four-dimensional interlocutors – or observed anything else that might serve as evidence of the megaverse.

So far as I can see, in our present state of knowledge, to deny that the universe is a rational creation requires just as much of a leap of faith as to believe it. In either case, the manner in which existence began is beyond the grasp of our logical faculties. We don’t comprehend super-nature, but at this level we don’t comprehend nature either. We have no ability to envision, or to say much that makes sense about, either a rationality that transcends time and space or a nonrational process that brought time and space into being.

The difference is that the theistic supposition is simpler. We know that rational beings exist and create things. We have never observed anything, much less a multitude of anythings operating by different natural laws, arise out of nothing. This may be, it is true, one of those instances where Ockham’s Razor slices the wrong way, but, given the utter absence of data, shouldn’t the scientifically minded make use of it and not relegate the hypothesis it favors to the dustbin of ideas we don’t like to talk about?

Wind Power or Hot Air?

Which state gets the largest percentage of its electricity from wind power, the latest green fave? Vermont? Oregon? Taxachusetts? Maine? It must be some environmentally hyper-conscious place, right?

The answer is George W. Bush’s home state, Republican-dominated Texas. Today’s Wall Street Journal explains why:

In this year’s great energy debate, Democrats describe a future when the U.S. finally embraces the anything-but-carbon avant-garde. It turns out, however, that when wind and solar power do start to come on line, they face a familiar obstacle: environmentalists and many Democrats.

To wit, the greens are blocking the very transmission network needed for renewable electricity to move throughout the economy. . . . In addition to other technical problems, the transmission gap is a big reason wind only provides two-thirds of 1% of electricity generated in the U.S., and solar one-tenth of 1%. . . .

In California, hundreds turned out at the end of July to protest a connection between the solar and geothermal fields of the Imperial Valley to Los Angeles and Orange County. The environmental class is likewise lobbying state commissioners to kill a 150-mile link between San Diego and solar panels because it would entail a 20-mile jaunt through Anza-Borrego state park. “It’s kind of schizophrenic behavior,” Arnold Schwarzenegger said recently. “They say that we want renewable energy, but we don’t want you to put it anywhere.”

Texas is the notable exception. It –

is now the wind capital of America (though wind still generates only 3% of state electricity) because it streamlined the regulatory and legal snarls that block transmission in other states. By contrast, though Pennsylvania’s Democratic Governor Ed Rendell adopted wind power as a main political plank, he and Senator Bob Casey are leading a charge to repeal a 2005 law that makes transmission lines slightly easier to build.

Similar environmentalist obstacles have been thrown up, the Journal reports, in Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, the Dakotas, the Carolinas, Tennessee, West Virginia, Maine and New York.

Should we be surprised? It’s been obvious for a long time that liberals’ preferred approach to energy issues is lowering the country’s standard of living. Their bêtes noires aren’t only coal and oil but any source of power that isn’t utterly impracticable. If somebody devised a way to generate electricity by magic, you can bet that the greenies would rush to revive laws against witchcraft.

The Path to the Green Sun

Solar power satellites aren’t a novel idea. About 30 years ago, one of my father’s friends was involved (along with, of all people, Daniel Patrick Moynihan) in a company that hoped to make the concept commercially feasible. They were ahead of their time, but only, as this op-ed from last fortnight’s suggests, by decades rather than centuries. There are no serious theoretical obstacles at this point, only a lot of engineering issues. We need cheaper rockets, more efficient solar batteries and huge receiving antennas, none of which are unattainable. Once they exist, the world will have access to a supply of cheap energy that, while not infinite, will certainly be very, very large and considerably more convenient and reliable that ground-based solar power.

So, does this mean that the Goracle’s notion of dispensing with coal, oil and uranium isn’t hare-brained? Not really. Overcoming the engineering challenges and constructing the necessary infrastructure will require the investment of hundreds of billions of dollars. Only a wealthy society can afford that cost. A wealthy society is, almost by definition, one that disposes of a great deal of energy. Hence, in what ought not to be a paradox but evidently is too hard for much of our political class to comprehend, the path to a future of “desirable” energy sources must run through a present of energy generated by the means we have at hand, principally fossil fuels and uranium.

Let’s suppose that Global Warming is as dire a threat as Al Gore and Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama proclaim. Their remedy is to use less of what we now have; bluntly, to accept eternal poverty as the price of “saving the planet”. (Some greenies are candid about this trade-off.) A world that reduces its carbon dioxide emissions by 50 or 80 percent will, given the current state of technology, be one that can't pay for solar power satellites or for spectacular advances in any other “green” technology.

It will also be a world less able to cope with whatever non-warming adversities nature may send our way. Over the past few hundred thousand years, the Earth has endured ice ages, meteor impacts, and devastating earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes. We can expect more in the future. Cutting back greenhouse gases won't prevent any of these catastrophes but will limit the resources available to ameliorate or recover from them. For that matter, it's entirely possible for Global Warming to occur without being spurred by human activity. That, too, has happened in the past. We could get all of the (allegedly) intolerable consequences of higher temperatures along with self-induced economic decline. The worst of both worlds, and not an implausible one if the Left has its way.

Our Future First Couple

Barack:

Osama bin Laden and his top leadership — the people who murdered 3,000 Americans — have a safe-haven in northwest Pakistan, where they operate with such freedom of action that they can still put out hate-filled audiotapes to the outside world. That’s the result of the Bush-McCain approach to the war on terrorism.

I begin to understand: We should have invaded Pakistan instead of Iraq!

That would certainly have been a more interesting conflict. Pakistan’s army and air force are larger, better equipped and more professional than Saddam Hussein’s ever were, and we would have to reach the country either through amphibious assault or by making a deal for bases in India. Also, war with Pakistan would have satisfied the First Liberal Principle of War-making: minimal relationship to American national interests. We’ll leave to one side the question of how easy it would be to locate Osama in the mountains of the Northwest Frontier and serve an arrest warrant.

Michelle:

When the human papillomavirus vaccine, which can prevent cervical cancer, became available, researchers proposed approaching local school principals about enlisting black teenage girls as research subjects.

Mrs. Obama stopped that. The prospect of white doctors performing a trial with black teenage girls summoned the specter of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment of the mid-20th century, when white doctors let hundreds of black men go untreated to study the disease.

So the callousness of bigoted doctors in the pre-civil rights South (who in any case had no effective means of treating syphilis) is a reason to prohibit life-saving medical research today? I’d like to say something humorously dismissive, but, frankly, I’m appalled. Can we at least extract a promise from Senator Obama that, should he be elected President, this woman will be required to remain strictly silent about all matters of public policy for the next four (or eight) years?

Cleanliness Is Next to Ungodliness

Washington State, a center of Gaia worship and the Cult of the Goracle, has banned dishwashing detergents that contain more than 0.5 percent phosphorous. Rather, it has banned their use by individual households. Restaurants and other institutions can still suds up with whatever brand they like. Ordinary housewives are stuck with low phosphorous products that won’t get dishes clean without the assistance of vigorous washing by hand (and are more expensive, too).

The excuse is saving lakes from eutrophication. The reason is the enforcement of Green Shari’ah, as this excerpt makes clear:

At a June 9 Bellingham City Council meeting, council member Terry Bornemann took issue with the idea that the water output of places such as Western Washington University and St. Joseph Hospital probably equal that of the city, yet they are not affected by the ban. [Okay, the reporter should be arrested for cold, bloody murder of the English tongue, but you get the drift.]

[State Department of Ecology spokesminion Katie] Skipper said this ban is about individual responsibility, reducing phosphorus on a house-by-house level. She did not know if the ban would ever be directed toward commercial or industrial use.

The Law must be obeyed for the sake of The Law. Whether the obedience does any good is a question only the godless would ask.

For the time being, only two unlucky counties are affected. The rest of the state gets hit in two years. I imagine that smuggling rings are already laying plans to smuggle Cascade and Electrosol across the border from Idaho.

Quote of the Day

Roy Spencer, “More Carbon Dioxide, Please”:

It is quite possible that the biosphere (vegetation, sea life, etc.) has been starved for atmospheric CO2. Before humans started burning fossil fuels, vegetation and ocean plankton had been gobbling up as much CO2 out of the atmosphere as they could, but it was like a vacuum cleaner trying to suck through a stopped-up hose.

Now, no matter how much CO2 we pump into the atmosphere each year, the biosphere takes out an average of 50 percent of that extra amount. Even after we triple the amount of CO2 we produce, nature still takes out 50 percent of the extra amount.

I think it is time for scientists to consider the possibility that more CO2 in the atmosphere might, on the whole, be good for life on Earth. Oh, I’m sure there will be some species which are hurt more than helped, but this is true of any change in nature. . . .

The view that nature was in some sort of preferred, yet fragile, state of balance before humans came along is arbitrary and philosophical — even religious. It is entirely possible that there are other, more preferable states of balance in nature which are more robust and less fragile than whatever the state of nature was before we came along.

You would think that science is the last place you would find such religious opinions, yet they dominate the worldview of scientists. Natural scientists tend to worship nature, and they then teach others to worship nature, too . . . all under the guise of “science.” . . .

The automatic assumption that mankind’s production of CO2 by burning of fossil fuels is bad for the environment needs to be critically examined. Unfortunately, scientists who question that point of view are immediately branded as shills for Big Oil.

DST: More Than Ever and No Better for It

This year, we get an additional month of Daylight Saving Time, so tomorrow will see a national case of jet lag, with the accompanying rise in fatal accidents. The tradeoff is supposedly a minute decrease in energy consumption. Where are the chants of “No Blood for Oil!” when we need them?

This year, inspired by Jonah Goldberg’s fine book on Liberal Fascism, I have a new thought on the evils of this semiannual resetting of the clock.

The case for DST has always rested on more than its alleged economic benefits. I remember when, in my childhood, Washington State voted on adopting the gimmick. The “yes” campaign ads didn’t say a word about energy; their slogan was, “Enjoy an extra hour of daylight”. As a preteen, I could see that the “extra” hour was merely shifted from another part of the day. Older citizens were evidently more gullible, as the measure passed handily.

At what hour people wake up and go to bed ought to be outside the scope of the government’s interest, if anything is. Yet DST proponents presume to decide the preferred shape of everybody’s day and pass laws to promote that preference. This is nannyism on stilts. The health nazis at least have the excuse that most of what they wish to ban really is bad for your health. Trying to force people to change their sleep schedules twice a year lacks that justification (in fact, is unhealthy) and, once the diaphanous economic arguments are taken off the table, serves only a gauzy aesthetic purpose. The images of kids playing in the park and couples strolling in the sunset as twilight gently falls are poetic but ridiculously far outside the legitimate concerns of government. Here is another instance, to add to the many that Jonah cites, of petty fascism creeping in.

Random Reading: Saxons, Vikings, Celts – And Ice Cream Parlors

[First of an occasional series]

The wanderings of primitive peoples are one of the great romances of history, made more romantic and mysterious by the shortage of direct evidence. Somehow, somewhen the Indo-European languages reached points as far separated as the Ganges River valley and the British Isles, and the cultivation of plants spread from a handful of locations to the entire world. Other languages and technologies, too, wandered far from their birth places. No one recorded the ways and means. We do not know what to attribute to mass migrations, what to the travels of a few artisans, what to the adoption of techniques from neighbors, what to independent invention. Did agriculturalists and metal workers colonize new territories, driving out or exterminating the aboriginal inhabitants, or did such advances spread through peaceable interchange? Can we trace mass migrations in the prehistory of language, or only the success of an elite dialect or commercial lingua franca? Parallels in recorded history show that many causes can produce identical effects. English prevailed in North America and Australia, because the indigenes were overwhelmed by migrants, Latin in Western Europe because it was the language of the Roman conquerors, Swahili in sub-Saharan Africa because it was useful for trade.

Lately the ambiguous evidence of archeology and linguistics has been supplemented by DNA analysis, which offers insights into the direct ancestry of living humans. Geneticists can establish, for instance, that everyone alive today is descended from a woman who probably lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago. (Those facts don’t, incidentally, prove that the human race originated at that time and place. Logically, we all must have a common ancestress. She might lived before homo sapiens existed as a distinguishable species or long after. There are, however, other reasons, notably the lack of diversity in the human genome when compared to other species, that lead to the conclusion that we are a very recent arrival in the biosphere.) Similarly, seven maternal and five paternal ancestors have been identified for the vast majority of Europeans. They are dated and placed variously, from 45,000 years ago in Greece to 8,000 B.C. in Syria, using methods that rely on an heroic assumptions, e. g., that the rate of mutation of mitochondrial DNA was constant over the pertinent time periods. Still, despite all uncertainties, it is suggestive that one ancestress apparently dwelled in an early center of agriculture and that her descendants seem to have arrived in the various regions of Europe pari passu with neolithic farming.

Bryan Sykes, an Oxford professor and the founder of Oxford Ancestors, which ingeniously combines fund raising and research by selling individuals the results obtained by examining samples of their DNA, is one of the pioneers in this field. He has also written three books to explain it to the layman, the most recent of which is titled Saxons, Vikings, and Celts in America or, much more colorfully, Blood of the Isles in Britain.

Unhappily for such a promising topic, either Professor Sykes or his publisher has evidently decided that people who buy books about the scientific exploration of human ancestry know no history and want to know no science. Or it could be that the author has taken the human genome as a model: Most of the material in our chromosomes is “junk DNA”, serving no purpose but padding. Saxons, Vikings, and Celts is padded like an insecure debutante: sales pitches for Oxford Ancestors, descriptions of the scenery of the Scottish isles, praise for the fine organization of British blood drives, reminiscences of professional colleagues, accounts of local folklore, even a recommendation for a particularly fine ice cream parlor in Lampeter, Wales.

The on-topic padding consists of potted history, mostly very elementary with little focus on population movements. In places, it is absurd. Do you think there is a direct intellectual line from Polydore Vergil’s denial of the historicity of King Arthur to the Nazi death camps? Professor Sykes does. He is also under the impression that the Arthurian romances were ecclesiastical propaganda that became outmoded after the Reformation, leading to Arthur’s eclipse as a British hero in favor of King Alfred. As a quick check on that thesis, compare the number of poems, novels, plays, paintings and motion pictures featuring each of those figures over the past few centuries. For everyone who can recount the legend of Alfred’s cakes circumstantially, a hundred can tell you about the Table Round, Merlin, Lancelot, Guinevere, Gaiwan, Mordred, the Sword in the Stone, and other tales of Camelot.

The second rate fustian squeezes out what is interesting in Saxons, Vikings, and Celts, namely, the evidence concerning the ancestry of the English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish people. That is covered in a few bland pages, so devoid of details that it’s hard to figure out what the author has concluded or why. The scantiness of the presentation also makes it hard to judge whether he has taken all of the known historical facts into account. For instance, has he made allowances for the huge Irish immigration into England in the 19th Century? If not, his reconstruction is tainted by a very recent Celtic incursion and isn’t of much use in answering the vexed question of whether the Anglo-Saxons literally drove the Celts out of England or were, like their Roman predecessors, a relatively small ruling clique.

Historical genetics looks like a highly promising tool, but how are we to know if its practitioners are more interested in rating ice cream parlors than revealing the secrets of their art?

Time Travel! In Chicago!!

The Sun-Times, not at all the same paper since Conrad Black departed, buries the greatest scientific achievement of all time in its police blotter:

A man in his 40s who inhaled a powder that helps extinguish fires was hospitalized after a fire that police said was burning in an empty baby stroller in the vestibule of a North Side building early Wednesday.

The fire started about 1:20 a.m. in an empty baby stroller in the vestibule of a building in the 5000 block of North Western Avenue, according to a Lincoln District police sergeant.

Fire crews responded about 1:15 a.m. to a fire at 5037 N. Western Ave. where a man in his 40s inhaled a power substance that helps extinguish fires, according to Fire Media Affairs spokesman Richard Rosado. The man was taken in an unidentified condition to Weiss Memorial Hospital, according to Rosado. The man may have been trying to put the blaze out when he was injured, Rosado said.

Police Bomb & Arson Section Sgt. Joe Poland said the fire was under investigation.

A time the fire was extinguished was not known at 7:45 a.m. Wednesday.

I also wonder about the “powder” or “power substance” that extinguishes fires and leaves people “in an unidentified condition”. That could be an intrusion from the future – or just the latest street high. The authorities’ ignorance of when the fire was extinguished is presumably because it took (is taking? will take? will have taken?) place within a closed timelike loop.

(Thanx to Best of the Web Today (last item).)

More Global Warming “Anecdotes”

So why wasn’t Al Gore Time’s Man Person of the Year? It’s not that the mag has swung suddenly to the Right: A couple of days ago, it dropped its only two conservative columnists, Charles Krauthammer and William Kristol. (Of course, a publication with any attachment to reality would have followed Kristol in giving the annual accolade to General David Petraeus.) I also dismiss out of hand any insinuation that Europe’s richest man offered incentives to secure the honor for himself.

No, my theory is that someone among the editors felt a chill of fear: Mr. Gore’s claim to eminence is his role as a prophet. What if his prophecies turn out to be false? Won’t Time look quite ridiculous if, a decade from now, the Goracle is remembered chiefly as a mountebank who almost persuaded world leaders to shut down half the global economy? It would be as if Major C. H. Douglas had been picked in the 1920’s.

What could have given rise to doubt? The U.N.’s recent Bali conference on climate change made it clear that debate on anthropogenic Global Warming is beyond the pale. Oddly, though, according to David Whitehouse, writing in the left-of-center New Statesman,

With only few days remaining in 2007, the indications are the global temperature for this year is the same as that for 2006 — there has been no warming over the 12 months.

But is this just a blip in the ever upward trend you may ask? No.

The fact is that the global temperature of 2007 is statistically the same as 2006 as well as every year since 2001. Global warming has, temporarily or permanently, ceased. Temperatures across the world are not increasing as they should according to the fundamental theory behind global warming — the greenhouse effect. Something else is happening and it is vital that we find out what or else we may spend hundreds of billions of pounds needlessly. . . .

Looking at the global temperatures as used by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the UK’s Met Office and the IPCC (and indeed Al Gore) it’s apparent that there has been a sharp rise since about 1980.

The period 1980-98 was one of rapid warming – a temperature increase of about 0.5 degrees C (CO2 rose from 340ppm to 370ppm). But since then the global temperature has been flat (whilst the CO2 has relentlessly risen from 370ppm to 380ppm). This means that the global temperature today is about 0.3 deg less than it would have been had the rapid increase continued.

For the past decade the world has not warmed. Global warming has stopped. It’s not a viewpoint or a sceptic’s inaccuracy. It’s an observational fact. Clearly the world of the past 30 years is warmer than the previous decades and there is abundant evidence (in the northern hemisphere at least) that the world is responding to those elevated temperatures. But the evidence shows that global warming as such has ceased.

Seven years of fairly stable temperatures is, needless to say, just another anecdote (as several of Mr. Whitehouse’s commenters stridently point out), not real evidence. Here are more anecdotes, courtesy of geophysicist David Deming:

South America this year experienced one of its coldest winters in decades. In Buenos Aires, snow fell for the first time since the year 1918. Dozens of homeless people died from exposure. In Peru, 200 people died from the cold and thousands more became infected with respiratory diseases. Crops failed, livestock perished, and the Peruvian government declared a state of emergency. . . .

Johannesburg, South Africa, had the first significant snowfall in 26 years. Australia experienced the coldest June ever. In northeastern Australia, the city of Townsville underwent the longest period of continuously cold weather since 1941. In New Zealand, the weather turned so cold that vineyards were endangered. . . .

In April, a killing freeze destroyed 95 percent of South Carolina’s peach crop, and 90 percent of North Carolina’s apple harvest. At Charlotte, N.C., a record low temperature of 21 degrees Fahrenheit on April 8 was the coldest ever recorded for April, breaking a record set in 1923. On June 8, Denver recorded a new low of 31 degrees Fahrenheit. . . .

But –

If you think any of the preceding facts can falsify global warming, you’re hopelessly naive. Nothing creates cognitive dissonance in the mind of a true believer. In 2005, a Canadian Greenpeace representative explained “global warming can mean colder, it can mean drier, it can mean wetter.” In other words, all weather variations are evidence for global warming.

Just as facts are allowed to point only one way, so are scientists. Here is a story carried by Fox News and, so far as I can tell from a Nexis search, by practically nobody else. (It was distributed on the UPI wire but apparently picked up by not a single newspaper in the Nexis database.)

Part of the scientific consensus on global warming may be flawed, a new study asserts.

The researchers compared predictions of 22 widely used climate “models” — elaborate schematics that try to forecast how the global weather system will behave — with actual readings gathered by surface stations, weather balloons and orbiting satellites over the past three decades.

The study, published online this week in the International Journal of Climatology, found that while most of the models predicted that the middle and upper parts of the troposphere —1 to 6 miles above the Earth’s surface — would have warmed drastically over the past 30 years, actual observations showed only a little warming, especially over tropical regions.

“Can the models accurately explain the climate from the recent past? It seems that the answer is no,” said lead study author David H. Douglass, a physicist specializing in climate at the University of Rochester. [The on-line Science Daily has a somewhat more detailed report.]

The models questioned by Prof. Douglass and his colleagues are the basis for alarmism about the Earth’s climatic future. If they are wrong, that doesn’t mean that the climate won’t change — it assuredly will, just as it has been changing ever since life began — but it does mean that the Warmenists’ policy prescriptions may be based on faulty premises. Given how drastic their prescriptions are, it would be a real pity to adopt them, suffer the consequent worldwide impoverishment, and still be whacked by Gaia.

As Fox also reports, the Douglass study’s co-authors “are noted global-warming skeptics”, which may explain why their paper aroused no interest. It is taken for granted among the bien-pensants that skepticism about Global Warming can derive only from sinister motives, not from fidelity to the observed data.

Is it possible, nonetheless, that Time got unwarm feet?

Trees with Maps, and Other Frivolities

“Ancient Trees Found Using 200 Year Old Maps”, says yesterday’s Daily Telegraph. Okay, it figures that elderly trees might not have replaced the maps they used in their younger days, but what I don’t understand is, Why does a tree need a map? It isn’t going anywhere.

Or is this evidence that Ents still lurk in the English forests? I rather hope so.

Also in the Telegraph is a report on a scientific inquiry, published in the British Medical Journal, into the genetic basis of wizardry.

Based on an analysis of the Harry Potter novels, Sreeram Ramagopalan, Dr Marian Knight, Prof George Ebers, and Dr Julian Knight of Oxford’s Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, conclude that “magic shows strong evidence of heritability.”

“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows provides a lot of valuable information about magical families that strongly suggests a role for genetic factors,” says Dr Knight, a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow.

“For example, magic exists in at least seven generations of the Black family and at least three generations in others. We also see twins – the Patil and Weasley twins – with the same magical abilities.”

The new analysis is considerably more sophisticated than a predecessor’s simplistic model:

[I]n the journal Nature, Dr Jeffrey Craig, Dr Renee Dow and Dr MaryAnne Aitken claimed magical abilities depend on a recessive version of a gene: all wizards and witches thus have two copies of the wizard “W” gene, distinguishing it from the ordinary M, or Muggle, version.

Ron Weasley, Neville Longbottom and Draco Malfoy are pure-blood wizards - with WW ancestors over many generations. Hermione Granger is a muggle-born witch (WW, with WM parents). . . .

But the team shocked Potter lovers by claiming it had uncovered evidence of “questionable paternity” in the case of Filch the caretaker, who is a “squib”, someone who has been born into a wizarding family but lacks full blooded magical powers.

If Filch had been the offspring of a witch and a wizard, he would have had to be a wizard himself, for the same reason that two blue-eyed parents can’t produce a brown-eyed child. Only lack of marital fidelity can explain his lack of magical talent.

An unpleasant corollary of this theory is that wizardly bigots are not irrational to stress purity of blood as a desideratum. Widespread intermarriage with muggles would lead to a steady diminution of the wizard population and ultimately make a separate wizard society impossible to maintain, thus leaving mankind open to the depredations of dementors, basilisks and other malign magical creatures.

Data from the latest Rowling opus convinced the Oxford scientists that the single-gene hypothesis was “simplistic”.

Rather than being all down to one gene, they believe enchanted skills can vary across a spectrum of strength, depending on the combined influence of a dominant gene for magic, which is turned on or off depending on epigenetic effects, and modified by the influence of a number of genes, along with the environment.

There appear to be three magical skills that are conferred by specific genes. “One of these is the capability to speak to snakes (parseltongue), known to be only a feature of those who are direct descendants of Slytherin.

Another is to be a seer; Sybill Trelawney, although not perfect, has this ability, and her great-great-grandmother was also extremely gifted in this respect.

Lastly, being a metamorphmagus (the ability to change one’s physical appearance) is an ability that Nymphadora Tonks passed on to her son,” says the BMJ paper.

There are even some candidate genes: given their reported association with speech and language, further mutations at the FOXP2 gene, already linked with Muggle language skills, could account for the rare magical ability to speak parseltongue while variants in a gene linked with hair colour, the MC1R gene, may explain Tonks’ hair-changing abilities.

All of these conclusions are necessarily tentative. If only England had the U.S. Congress, an earmark might even now be embedded in the budget bill to support further research.

Finally among these lighter items, I must call your attention to the best parody ad of the campaign season. The really amusing part is that Bill Clinton’s life-partner doesn’t realize it’s a parody.