Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.
I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here.
John Quiggin 
COVID-19 is just one of the many critical existential issues confronting us. “Existential”, in this context, means a matter of life or death to all humans alive today. I am tempted to do a post a day (or so) on this topic of existential threats.
The “Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists” puts the summed or multiplying (reinforcing) risks as higher than they have ever been. The Doomsday Clock is now set at 89 seconds to midnight. Personally, I think that’s very optimistic.
The top five risks vary according to source. I would go with:
I would add a special mention of a sixth risk, namely cultural and biological human “devolution”, under the pressures of the five above. Technically, there is no such thing as “biological devolution”. However, from a secular “quasi-teleological” view of, and belief in, human progress, what is very likely to happen soon will look like “devolution” to all with a strong optimism bias in expecting more or less inevitable and continuous human progress.
Notes as quotes from Wikipedia (W.):
“Devolution, de-evolution, or backward evolution (not to be confused with dysgenics) is the notion that species can revert to supposedly more primitive forms over time.” – W.
“Dollo’s law of irreversibility, first stated in 1893 by the palaeontologist Louis Dollo, denies the possibility of devolution. The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins explains Dollo’s law as being simply a statement about the (stupendous) improbability of evolution’s following precisely the same path twice.” – W.
This would be precisely the same path in reverse, in the case of devolution.
Wow, mentioning the existential issues which face us sure is a conversation killer, isn’t it? Or is this blog dead?
This blog is dead. No it’s not, it’s just sleeping! Actually, I think it IS deceased.
I think it is symptomatic. People are in denial. They will not face the big issues, the real dangers. Marching to doom with their heads in the sand. Quite a paradoxical feat.
MartinK
Re this blog is dead. I Think a lot of commenters have moved to substack. Well maybe.
As for Trump discussions, I don’t say much because I can’t keep up. I don’t post much but would like to post on Trump but its to much to work out where to start. Or more precisely what the most important things are. His government has the potential to genuinely terrible for millions of Americans, 3rd world terrible. I wouldn’t say that is definite yet but it a very a real possibility. And of course it has a very real potential to be extremely bad for the rest of the world too. Any more detailed than that and there is just too much to say.
China no update
I won’t be updating my solar and coal news from China this month. The Chinese National Statistics Bureau does not issue monthly series for January and February, but merges them into a single double month. I assume this is down to the Chinese New Year, the year’s most important public holiday, usually lasting five days. It is calculated like Easter on a lunar calendar plus mumbo-jumbo. Astarte malevolently ensures that the physics of the Moon make the lunar cycle a mismatch to the solar one, so both festivals hop around in the Gregorian calendar. The Chinese New Year begins as early as 23 January in the next Year of the Pig (2031) and as late as 19 February in the Year of the Tiger (2034). The statisticians seem to have concluded that there is no hope of journalists and other amateurs interpreting monthly data correctly in the ever-popular Months of the Dimwit, and have opted for the two-month kludge. So the next usable data on anything will only be available around 20 March.
We laugh, but the Easter mess is worse. Julius Caesar’s calendar reform was still inaccurate, and by 1500 AD was out by 10 days. This led Pope Gregory XIII (Ugo Boncompagni) to issue a major update. He got good astronomical advice and the resulting Gregorian calendar is highly accurate. Gregory was intelligent, but also a Counter-Reformation fanatic who tried to dethrone Elizabeth I of England by declaring her a bastard, so Protestants initially rejected the reform. For two centuries Europe had date zones as well as time ones. Most Orthodox churches but not the Ukrainian – still stick with Julius Caesar.
There’s a YouTube video published by Breakthrough Climate Centre on 12 Feb 2025 titled Collision Course: 3-degrees of warming & humanity’s future, duration 1:07:25.
Collision Course delves into the interconnected challenges of such a future and asks the pressing questions:
I think the biosphere earth system is going through a complete state change. I refer to the entire system and then to all the physical and biological sub-systems that make up the entire biosphere system. The overall system won’t find another stable state for tens of thousands of years or possibly much longer. All the physical and biological sub-systems that make up the biosphere system are also going through complete state changes.
As sub-systems of the entire system, all human sub-systems of the earth biosphere system (all biological and non-biological aspects, physical, social, cultural and economic) are also going through profound state changes. Nothing is ever again going to be like it was before the runaway in 2020 of the continuous and endless Covid-19 epidemic. Yet this epidemic was not a first or complete cause in any way of human system state changes, just a final precipitating factor in a multi-causational chain of factors.
Climate change, for example, is clearly a far more fundamental danger. Recent research shows it has a causative role to play in novel zoonotic pandemic disease emergence and also in the resurgence of known pandemic diseases. In the case of COVID-19 however, it was changes in human systems, in politics and socio-economic systems which precipitated its runaway behaviour after its lab creation and initial lab leak. Yes, in the case of COVID-19 disease, caused by the SARS-2 pathogen, I have come fully to the view that it was man made.
The real point of this post is to make the argument that human biological and political / socio-economics systems are right now going through a rapid and irreversible series of state changes. I am not here referring to nation states but to human biological states and to political and socioeconomic states. This is profound, epoch destroying and a process which will not lead to any new stable state or equilibrium for tens of thousands of years at least. All ways of life we know are over. Our societies and civilizations are over. We don’t see it yet, and many refuse to see it, because our systems and indeed our entire global civilization shamble on in zombie state.
John Quiggin’s zombie economics thesis has turned out to be remarkably prescient in a manner which perhaps even he did not envisage. Zombie economics creates zombie nation creates zombie global civilization. Our zombie global civilization shambles on but it is already completely doomed. Everything we do, every production and distribution decision we make under the aegis of neoliberal zombie economics not only fails to avert doom but acts to accelerate doom.
The USA is the first nation to turn fully zombie. Zombie economics creates zombie nation creates zombie global civilization. As I said. But zombies do not merely eat the brains of non-zombies. Zombies eat themselves. Zombies eat everything. Zombies catabolise the biosphere completely.
To get back to the “irreversible series of state changes” affecting our global civilization, these are nearly endless. Human biology is being degraded and broken down. From microplastics pollution (microplastics concentrations recently being discovered to be rising in human brains and linked to dementia), to endocrine disruptors, to brain destroying, immune system destroying and overall health destroying viruses like COVID-19, the human biomass as “human biome” is being degraded and broken down.
This process is extensive and indeed all-pervasive and is already showing up or very soon will show up, on a case by case basis as declining fertility (which has a biological component, surprise, surprise!), declining longevity and even declining intelligence. Yes, you read it right, declining human intelligence. Human intelligence is declining and will continue to decline because of the above-mentioned problems and other? What chance maintaining society and human civilization when the average human IQ is 75? Zero.
This is just one irreversible state change occurring to the human condition and to the environment which affects the human condition. These changes are so extensive, so egregious and so profound virtually nobody can understand, envisage or even give credence to the irrefutable complex facts that show it is happening, in process right now.
Have you not felt the world is going crazy? Your perception is correct. It is. A book I haven’t read yet but which I hope to get hold of for interest’s sake and before my own intelligence and sanity collapse is:
“Invisible Plague: The Rise of Mental Illness from 1750 to the Present”
The blurb says:
“The prevalence of insanity, which was once considerably less than one case per 1,000 total population, has risen beyond five cases in 1,000. Why has mental illness reached epidemic proportions? What are the causes of severe mental illness? Why do we continue to deny the rising numbers, and how does this denial affect our ability to help those who are afflicted?
In The Invisible Plague, E. Fuller Torrey and Judy Miller examine the records on insanity in England, Ireland, Canada, and the United States over a 250-year period, concluding, through both qualitative and quantitative evidence, that disorders like schizophrenia and bipolar illness are an unrecognized, modern-day plague. This book is a unique and major contribution to medical history. Until now, insanity, and its apparent rise over the centuries, has been interpreted as a socially and economically driven phenomenon. Torrey and Miller insist upon the biological reality of psychiatric disease and examine the reasons why its contemporary prevalence has been so profoundly misunderstood.”
I did hesitate to quote this before fully reading it. Who knows it could even have a final implicit eugenics thesis and thus be tackling the subject in the wrong way, morally and scientifically. However, it is clear (unless you are anti-science) that humans are wholly physical beings and physical causes, that are of genetic, neurological, pathological, abusive, deprivational, toxic or traumatic injury origin, can be the only primary in-the-brain (and in limbic system etc.) explanations of mental illness, through said physical abnormality, interference and damage.
I have just referred here (mainly) to the physical damage late stage civilization is doing to us through toxins, endocrine disruptors and cultural, denialist and anti-science propaganda encouraging all sorts of idiotic activities like playing brain-damaging sports, eating health-destroying diets and permitting the free spread of brain damaging, indeed all-organ damaging diseases like Covid-19. There are many more layers to this.
Humans are now going crazy (and ethics-free) en masse around the globe. That is my claim. Further, I claim there are both cultural and physical reasons for this. And it is all situated in a biosphere system which is in a continuous runaway process of profound state change with every sub-system in it also in a continuous runaway process of profound state. To be pedantic and reductionist, the cultural is also fundamentally physical, being as it is, wholly based on information, transmission and interpretation of information and finally encoding and decoding, programming (and sometimes de-programming) in the human brain. It is all physical. (However, pure reductionism loses the complete inter-connected nature of the sub-systems and system and cannot explain the complex interactions and emergent behaviours and thus lacks explanatory power.)
Anyway, to sum up, I expect increased craziness from everyone and continuing breakdown of all human systems and all systems that humans depend on. It’s only the timeline that is uncertain but these processes are accelerating rapidly.
Some quick links, for those incredulous about my essential thesis above.
The Rise of Mental Illness:
https://www.citizen.org/wp-content/uploads/hl_200209.pdf
The rise in dementia and the associated (and antecedent) rise of microplastics in the brain.
“A recent study has revealed a startling accumulation of microplastics in human brain tissue, raising concerns about the potential health implications.
The study, conducted by researchers at the University of New Mexico and published on Monday in the journal Nature Medicine, compared brain samples collected at autopsy in early 2024 with those from eight years prior. The findings were alarming: the amount of microplastic shards in the brain tissue had increased by 50 per cent. To put this into perspective, the concentration of microplastics was equivalent to an entire standard plastic spoon in the brain, or 0.48 per cent by weight.” – “YourLifeChoices”.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03453-1
And my essential thesis?
A rapid, sweeping, runaway and continuous state change process, likely running through many states if they could be demarcated epochally as they emerge, is in progress in the biosphere and in the global ecosystem. This essentially includes and extends through absolutely all inorganic and organic systems in the biosphere.
This state change will sweep away ways of life as humans / pre-humans have lived them and understood them at least since the beginning of civilization and probably from much earlier than that. It will sweep away civilization itself and what is left, if anything, will likely not even support recognizable human hunter / gatherer groups.
These processes will sweep away humans as such. Any descendants, will no longer be humans as we understand that term. The remaining descendants, if any, will be “devolved” from a teleological or civilized point of view and of far less capacity than modern humans and perhaps of even the early Australopithecus of about 4.5 million years ago in intelligence and in social and cultural organization. They may well have greater capacity, indeed will need greater capacity, in other arenas. like living off far worse and scarcer food than modern humans and in unrecognizably and unimaginably harsher conditions.
This long thread by Tern, from Threadreader, explains how arguments from authority, bolstered by obsolete or incomplete “knowledge” and implementation by managerialists, arose and then played the middleman role, essentially, in the denial of aerosol spread of (particularly) viral infectious diseases and in the de-railing and obstruction of easy and inexpensive methods to prevent this spread.
Tern does not here explain the higher, initiating role of the original concocters, suppliers, disseminators and enforcers of the disinformation about aerosolised infectious spread and the crowding out of newer scientific knowledge with said lies and disinformation. The concocters etc. were the oligarchic and corporate powers plus the highjacked powers of the state which then empowered the obsolete “authorities” and managerialists. These were wheeled out to spruik, implement, manage and enforce their obsolete and spurious, or at least woefully incomplete, infection control practices.
But Tern can cover only so much in one long Thread. Here it is as edited by me.
“I had been baffled for a while by this weird and inaccurate mono-obsession with droplet transmission only in healthcare. How could some people in healthcare be so obstinately obsessed with *droplet* transmission while ignoring *aerosol* transmission? And how could they be so fixated on denying aerosol transmission when we knew a hundred years ago or more that mitigation against airborne disease worked?
I started doing some reading and had a profound realisation. I would like to take you on a whistlestop tour of the last 150 or so years. We start at the time of Florence Nightingale in the 1850s. She had no idea how the science of it worked, but she knew that people in unventilated rooms were more likely to get ill with respiratory illness…
so she opened the windows.
She could see with her own eyes that closed windows meant increased risk of infection and open windows meant decreased risk. This wasn’t a modern nuanced understanding of ‘aerosol particles’, but the point was the empirical observation the fact that the *practical mitigation worked*. It especially helped with certain diseases like Flu and TB. If back then F.N. could understand this what went wrong? Hold that thought.
Meanwhile two scientists called Semmelweis and Lister were elsewhere concentrating on another type of transmission of pathogens by contact. Pathogens on our skin and on surfaces, This introduced an idea that was astonishing to doctors: that their own hands could be sources of infection.
They introduced a revolutionary idea to healthcare after much resistance from the old guard. Washing the hands with soap could remove or kill pathogens and this meant that operations, healthcare treatments would be less likely to cause new infections. Yet, despite the brilliant uptake of hand and surface hygiene in healthcare something further still went wrong further along the chain.
Healthcare scientists had been studying different diseases and how they transmitted. Before WW2, scientists had proven, by using clever tubes and chambers that prevented droplet transmission that a sick animal could infect a healthy animal with certain diseases, just by whatever was *floating* on its breath. But ‘droplets’ drop. Like a blob of spit that you can see arc through the air and fall. That’s a droplet.
Whereas some particles are so tiny that they can take advantage of the way air current forces apply differently to particles of different size… and some can float: aerosols. Like fog or a cloud or smoke. These particles can stay in the air for days. Scientists have tracked smog particles (the same size as viral aerosols) that have stayed in the air for **weeks** without falling to the ground.
So before WW2, scientists knew that diseases could spread on particles that floated.
Airborne particles. Aerosols. Again… what went wrong… One of the most famous of these scientists started to work on how exactly these pathogens were spreading. By droplets or aerosols? Some of these experiments used animals to try and figure out how the pathogens spread. But some of the other experiments started to look at the particles themselves.
We’re now in the post WW2 stage. The fifties and sixties. Pre-many vaccines, but mid-antibiotics. Here was this guy looking closely at the droplets and particles people produced. And using the best techniques of the time to do it. Looking at the droplets and aerosols themselves and figuring out what was in them. Looking at them in terms of the things they could detect at the time: bacteria.
At the time, you could have someone cough onto a petri dish, and you could watch the bacteria grow. But you couldn’t have someone cough onto a petri dish and watch viruses grow. So they did the experiments looking for bacteria. And what did they find?
That bacteria were mostly in the big droplet particles, but not in so much in the aerosol particles. At least, things like Scarlet Fever were mostly in the droplets. *TB* was in the aerosols. But they kind of put TB to one side… because TB infection is something that doesn’t come on instantly. You could be exposed to TB and not develop active TB. You could be exposed to TB and not develop active TB for several years. Besides, you could treat TB with antibiotics, so it kind of got put aside as something to come back to.
Those droplets were full of bacteria. When you combine this understanding with the now long-established idea of surface and body hygiene, the idea is simple:
Aa long as you sanitise surfaces and hands, and as long as you intercept those droplets that fly through the air on arcs… you’re safe. (Only partly correct of course.) Gradually, droplet theory started to dominate. The windows gradually shut. The fresh ventilation declined. The HEPA filters developed in WW2 were forgotten about.
When they developed the ability to check droplets for flu… they found them! But it was a lot longer before they checked the aerosols for flu… and that was where there was a big surprise waiting. In the meanwhile, there was this kind of understanding that most things were spread by droplets. They took what applied to bacteria that they could detect and applied it to viruses that they couldn’t detect or did not even know about.
Meanwhile vaccines started to become available for a wider and wider range of pathogens. It doesn’t matter whether something is droplet or aerosol borne if you have a reliable vaccine or treatment. So who cares about transmission? It’s the cures that are the priority, right?
But science continued advancing in the background, and the ability to intercept aerosols developed…. and the ability to detect viruses developed… And when someone put those two developments together, they made the astonishing discovery that viruses like flu (or Covid) are spread in a different way to bacteria like the S Pyogenes that was used in those bacterial droplet studies in the fifties.
*Droplets* are produced mainly in the *throat and mouth and upper airway*, not the lungs. *Aerosols* are produced mainly in the *deep lungs*. Bacteria like S Pyogenes reproduce mainly in the *upper airway*. Viruses replicate in a way that allows transmission mainly via the *deep lungs*. So droplets mainly contain bacteria from the upper airway and aerosols mainly contain viruses from the lower lungs.
The habitat in the upper and lower airways is different, different cell types with different defence mechanisms and different chemistry. Flu, Covid and TB particles get produced/released *down deep*. When the scientists checked the amount of the viruses in aerosols and droplets and compared them *there was more virus in the aerosols than the droplets*.
But hospitals since the 80s had been set up to deal with droplet spread as per droplet dogma, not aerosols. Even worse than that, healthcare professionals had had droplet theory (now proven to be dogma) drilled into them. The healthcare professionals that concentrated on infection control went along with or had to go along with all of that droplet theory or had to suffer career damaging setbacks.
Infection control became more and more and more saturated with people who had been educated in droplet theory and were obsessed with droplet theory. People who were stuck in outdated science. All these people misled by a simple fork in the path in the 50s when it was easier to detect bacteria than viruses.
Ppeople who were following science that was not yet developed enough to understand that aerosols and droplets are produced in different parts of the body. People who did not know that the science they followed was limited by a lack of understanding of where different pathogens liked to reproduce.
Then you get into an even more complicated problem… because the people who *implement* infection control aren’t the people who are curious. They’re managers.
They’re people who are settling into the mundane tasks of checklists and box ticking to ensure that everything is done according to the (outdate) rules. Semmelweiss, Wells, Lister, Nightingale: they were ground breakers, researchers, innovators. People who choose a career in management are dull journeymen, and women. The science develops, grows and changes. The dull managers remain the same.
They get tired and older and more stuck in their ways than ever and less able to understand change. They get out of their depth in a pandemic and are easily misled, duped an manipulated (by the oligarchs, corporations and captured governments mentioned above. They preach their old doctrine and when they get asked a question about aerosols in an inquiry they freeze and then blab the corporate line.
The scientists? They’re proving incredible stuff about transmission and still being sidelined and ignored by the powers that be and all their sycophants and puppets.
Go check out @ukhadds
Some of the science he shares about aerosol transmission is just light years beyond where the managers are. Meanwhile we are stuck in this strange limbo where people don’t understand that aerosol transmission is critically significant. We’ve also regressed to a position where people don’t seem to care about any mode of transmission. Because as the science was ignored about transmission, people learned, falsely, that they could ignore more and more science too: any science that made them feel uncomfortable or inconvenienced.
They could ignore the science showing how there aren’t really any vaccines that can fully stop coronaviruses without the assistance of other multiple layers of protection: masks, filters, testing, tracing, isolation, quarantine and yes even lockdowns if foolish permit a runaway pandemic to get up momentum. They could ignore the science about the risks posed by repeat infection. They could ignore anything they wanted to, especially if it was scary.
But the problem about reality is that you can ignore it temporarily but reality is way bigger than you. One day it will float by on an indoor air current and get you. Unless of course you understand airborne transmission and you’re wearing a mask that intercepts aerosols, are practicing full vaccination, distancing and opened all the windows wide like Florence Nightingale. Or put in Hepafilters, if open windows are not possible or practical.” – Tern.
How can I understand this and most people can’t? I am not unusually intelligent. It’s because I apply what intelligence I have. And I have a healthy sceptical streak, especially when it comes to pronouncements from motivated reasoning by self-interested and invested parties. It’s also because I have the strongest respect for empirical reality and for the hard sciences which study, especially impact science. I am unimpressed by and indeed I detest a lot of misused production science: the type that is wrecking the planet and its people.
The news feeds today and the associated comments (with the feeds) are a new low point for me. Very very sad and distressing. Appears as though there is something seriously wrong with western society today at least in the US and here to an extent.
I get it that things were pushed too far to the left in the US with things like diversity quotas and some taxes that pissed a lot of swinging voters off, but I’ve come to the realisation today there’s a deeper cultural sickness in play that’s poisoning society with hate.