GET VACCINATED OR NOT? HERE ARE SOME ACTUAL STATISTICS.

 Just a quick note to any vaccine doubters who might still be amenable to facts:

Contra Costa County, in northern California, has begun publishing separate covid case statistics for vaccinated and un-vaccinated people.

The most recent 7-day average shows that among the 72 percent of adults who are vaccinated, the rate of new covid cases was 0.4 per 100,000--i.e. just one vaccinated person out of 250,000 got covid.

Credit: Manit Chaidee

In contrast, among the 28 percent of the county's population who are not vaccinated, the rate was 7.0 per 100,000. That's 17.5 times higher.

I don't know about you, but any time I can cut my risk of getting a potentially life-threatening disease by a factor of 17, I'm going for it.

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REA

WERE PEOPLE OCCUPYING A CAVE IN MEXICO 30,000 YEARS AGO?

There are few scientific questions as controversial as when humans first entered the Americas. For decades widely-spread groups using the distinctive Clovis toolkit held that title with a date of first entry around 13,000 years ago. In recent years a few hotly contested findings have pushed that date back by a few thousand years--for example there's now generally accepted evidence of humans living at Monte Verde, Chile, near the tip of South America, 14,800 years ago. 

Now, new evidence from the depths of a cave near Puebla, Mexico may double the length of human occupation of the Americas--to 30,000 years or more. If these new dates and the signs of human activity associated with them hold up to the intense scrutiny they are sure to provoke, it will place humans in North America before rather than after the most recent glacial maximum, dramatically re-writing the prehistory of the Americas.

Coxcatlan Cave and its location--Credit Andrew Somerville/ISU/Latin American Antiquity

Paleoecologist Andrew Somerville, at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, did not set out to make a potentially paradigm-breaking discovery. He and his colleagues, Isabel Casar (UNAM*) and Joaquin Arroyo-Cabrales (INAH**) just wanted to clarify the dating of the previously excavated and studied Coxcatlan Cave in the Tehuacan Valley of Mexico, with a focus on the development of agriculture.

Earlier researchers had excavated and described 28 distinct levels of deposits in the cave extending over thousands of years, most of which included signs of human habitation. The strata revealed a progression of material culture starting with slightly worked stone blades, scrapers and choppers through the development of carefully crafted stone tools, ceramics, woven materials, grinding stones, and early signs of agriculture.

Somerville and his colleagues used accelerator mass spectrometry (ACM) to perform precision carbon-14 dating on deer, hare and rabbit bones from various levels of the cave. While their findings corroborated the dating of the site's more recent levels, they were surprised when bones from the deepest deposits consistently dated to between 33,448 and 28,279 years before the present. 

Since respected previous researchers had found that those deep levels showed signs of human habitation--for example slightly worked stone tools including flint that had to be imported to the cave, and bones showing signs of heating and butchering, Somerville and his colleagues realized that they had stumbled upon a potentially revolutionary find.

"We weren't trying to weigh in on this debate, or even find really old samples," Somerville says. "We were surprised to find these really old dates at the bottom of the cave, and it means we need to take a closer look at the artifacts recovered from those levels."

Somerville is teaming up with Matthew Hill, also at Iowa State, to re-examine the stones and bones  from the deepest levels of the cave to see if they can prove or disprove that they were worked or modified by humans. "Determining whether the stone artifacts were products of human manufacture or it they were just naturally chipped stones would be one way to get to the bottom of this," Somerville says. Similarly, microscopic examination of the bone fragments may reveal proof of heating, or cut marks that could only come from stone tools wielded by human hands. 

Unfortunately, the Covid-19 pandemic has so far prevented Somerville and his colleagues from re-examining the bones. They think they will be able to access them during the summer of 2022. While the bones were carefully identified and categorized in the 1960s by Kent Flannery, a highly respected archaeologist, he did not study them at the level of detail Somerville plans. 

"Documenting and quantifying modifications to the bones, such as the patterns of breakage, the presence of cut marks, and thermal alterations to the bones were not part of the original study," Somerville explains. "Our plan is to return to the collection with a digital microscope and to systematically analyze each specimen to document this information. The goal is to ascertain whether or not humans had actually hunted and consumed these animals."

Somerville is also working with the Peabody Museum, in Andover, Massachusetts, to locate and re-study the possible stone tools from the deepest levels of the Coxcatlan Cave.

According to Somerville, Flannery and his colleague, the equally highly respected archaeologist Richard S. MacNeish, were fairly sure that the bones and stones from the deepest levels of the cave were left there by humans. As a result, Somerville thinks that its likely that further study with current techniques will confirm that. "It wouldn't surprise me if they were right all along," he writes. "However the possibility remains that these levels were natural accumulations of bones and stones, so I'm remaining skeptical but with an open mind until we have more data."

Somerville and his colleagues are thoroughly aware of how contentious a finding of a 30,000 year old human presence in the Americas would be, and accordingly have presented their current research very cautiously. "Because we very intentionally tried not to oversell our results, I think we have been able to avoid any serious criticism or backlash so far," he writes.

"So far" are the key words. American archaeology is notorious for the large number of sites at which researchers have found what they thought was evidence of human habitation dating back 20,000 years or more, only to find their work dissected, discounted and eventually dismissed by other researchers. 

While we eagerly await the next round of findings from professors Somerville and Hill, it's clear from the history of the field that they will have to produce extremely convincing proof before the needle marking when people first occupied the New World budges from its current position. But if it does swing from after to before the last glacial maximum, it would mean a revolution in our understanding of the peopling of the Americas.

REA

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You can access the original, open-source Latin American Antiquity article reporting these findings here

*Institute of Physics, National Autonomous University of Mexico

**Subdirectory of Laboratories and Academic Support, National Institute of of Anthropology and History

THE FUSE IS LIT FOR A POTENTIAL AI EXPLOSION

On the short list of potential existential threats to humanity is an explosive increase in the power of artificial intelligence (AI). 

The people warning us about this argue that the first AI to reach a superhuman level of general intelligence--often referred to as artifical general intelligence or AGI--could rapidly create an even smarter AI, which in turn could create a still smarter AI, etc. This exponential, chain-reaction increase in machine intelligence could quickly leave humanity in the dust, with unpredictable but quite possibly devastating consequences. 

Image credit: TOPBOTS

Skeptics  say that super-smart AGI still lies far in the future, if it will ever be achieved. They also assert that human-positive values could be built into any such system, or that just as we're able to tell current computers and AI systems what to do, we will be able to set goals for and control any artificial general intelligence.

We can reserve a discussion of those issues for a different post.** Today's note is stimulated by the achievement of one of the steps often cited as a lynchpin of a potential artificial intelligence explosion--an AI system designing even smarter "offspring."

James Vincent, writing in The Verge, reports that Google is now using AI to create the "floor plans" for next-generation tensor processing units, or TPUs, chips that Google builds to, among other things, power its most powerful AI systems. 

Reportedly, a new and more potent TPU architecture that would have taken a team of human designers months of intense work to design can now be generated in as many hours by an AI trained to view chip creation as a kind of game. 

Vincent optimistically writes, "The virtuous cycle of AI designing chips for AI looks like it's only just getting started. 

A pessimist might point out that what we've just seen is a speed-up of an important part of AI progress--by an AI--by a factor of more than 700. That's precisely why those pesky AI worry-warts foresee us ever-so-slow humans sooner or later being left wondering what just happened.

REA

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** You can view some related posts via these links:

zerospinzone: Advanced Artificial Intelligence--Friend or Foe

Article: Google's AlphaZero is now scary smart | OpEdNews

Article: Self-aware artificial intelligence? Coming soon to a robot near you | OpEdNews

zerospinzone: FORGET MOORE'S LAW -- NEVEN'S LAW RULES NOW

BLOWIN' IN THE WIND--A WHIFF OF GOOD CLIMATE NEWS

Good news is scarce these days, so I'm thrilled to get to report that in the first three months of this year, nearly all--99.7 percent--of new electricity generating capacity in the US came from solar and wind. Once-and-hopefully-never-again King Coal accounted for a measly 0.2 percent of new capacity. 

                                        Wind Farm--Credit USFWS/Joshua Winchell

That brings renewable's percentage of US power generation capacity up to 24.7 percent of the total.

Actual power generation for the first quarter was comparable--21.6 percent of all power generated. March was even better--25.5 percent of the electricity that went into the US grid came from renewables.

Needless to say, the US and the rest of the world need to phase out climate destabilizing energy sources and replace them with renewables as quickly as possible.

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These data come from FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

REA/6/14/21, 6/16/21

SO CLOSE TO THE ERADICATION OF POLIO...

 We're nearly half way through 2021. So far this year, there have been just two cases of polio caused by the wild polio virus, one in Afghanistan and one in Pakistan. The decades-long international effort to eradicate this crippling and deadly disease is tantalizingly close to success. The wild polio virus, once endemic globally, now hangs on in just those two conflict-ridden countries.

The oral polio vaccine--

inexpensive, effective

but can revert to a virulent form

Credit: Michael Tsegaye/Flickr

Unfortunately, there have been substantially more--nearly 100--polio cases caused when the oral polio vaccine mutates back to a virulent form.

The polio end game will require the gradualy replacement of the oral polio vaccine with the inactivated polio vaccine, which is incapable of causing poliomyelitis. 

Polio will officially be declared eradicated when three years have passed without any documented polio cases caused by the wild polio virus. That will mark just the second human disease that we have been able to eradicate, the first being smallpox, declared eradicated in 1980.

ATTACK OF THE KILLER ROBOTS

 Killer robots have been a staple of science fiction and dystopian writing for decades. A new UN report suggests that reality has now caught up with what has been mere fantasy until now, in the form of lethal autonomous drones unleashed in Libya last March.

Striking video of a swarm of Kargu drones in action

Credit: STM/YouTube

As reported in New Scientist, a just-published UN report details an attack on retreating partisan forces in a Libyan civil war by autonomous Kargu-2 quadcopters programmed to identify their targets, including humans, home in on them and explode. The 7 kg (15 lb) Kargu drones are designed to fly in swarms too numerous to be defended against. According to the anonymous source for the UN report, these kamikaze drones were "highly effective" in hunting down and killing retreating soldiers.

The New Scientist story about this apparent first actual use of fully autonomous weapons in warfare underlines the urgency of forging an international agreement concerning (and hopefully outlawing) their use.

Unfortunately, in advance of any such agreement, yet another malevolent genie has been unchained.

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REA 5-28-21

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Predictably, the use of a drone swarm in warfare described above was not a one-off. In it's 30 June, 2021 edition, New Scientist reports that Israel used an AI-guided drone swarm to target Hamas militants in Gaza. Given that both China and the US are reportedly developing drone swarm technology, we're almost sure to see more use of these autonomous or semi-autonomous killer swarms in the near future. New Scientist quotes Zak Kallenborn, a terrorism and counter-terrorism expert as pointing out that larger and larger swarms can be expected. “A handful of swarming drones is probably not a big risk, but what about 10,000? We may be looking at the emergence of a new weapon of mass destruction”

You can read more at: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2282656-israel-used-worlds-first-ai-guided-combat-drone-swarm-in-gaza-attacks/#ixzz6zQILCcZr

BEWARE OF SYMPTOMLESS SUPERSPREADERS

A just-published research article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) reveals some striking new information about how the coronavirus spreads. A study testing thousands of people at the University of Colorado, Boulder, found that the distribution of virus particles among symptomless individuals matched the distribution among people hospitalized for Covid-19, with a few individuals in both groups carrying enormous numbers of virus particles and so having the potential to act as COVID-19 superspreaders. In other words, some people with no COVID-19 symptoms at all can spread the disease as easily as the most contagious hospitalized patients.

Virus loads in asymptomatic people matched those in hospitalized patients

Credit: Yang et al., University of Colorado, Boulder

The researchers found that, regardless of symptoms, just two percent of people who test positive for the coronavirus carry 90 percent of the virus particles circulating in a given population. "The highest observed viral load was over 6 trillion virions [complete, infective virus particles] per Ml, which was only observed in one individual," they write. "It is remarkable to consider that this individual was on campus and reported no symptoms . . .." 

They add that just 10 percent of symptom-free people who test positive for the virus, plus 14 percent of hospitalized Covid-19 patients account for 99 percent of circulating, active virus particles. 

In addition to such potential super-carriers, the researchers estimate that 50 percent of symptomless individuals who test positive for the coronavirus carry enough virus particles in their saliva to spread COVID-19 to to others.

These finding have several important implications. One is that being symptom free does not guarantee that someone isn't a COVID spreader or super-spreader. As more people get vaccinated and people become more relaxed about mask-wearing social distancing and avoiding groups and crowds indoors, it's very likely that we'll see continuing outbursts of Covid cases seeded by such symptomless but highy contagious non-vaccinated individuals. 

Anyone concerned for their own safety or that of their family, friends or contacts should probably not be in a hurry to stop wearing a face mask to minimize their own risk and the risk they potentially pose to others.

A second, public-health implication is the importance of continued, widespread screening, including of people without any COVID symptoms. ". . . it is imperative that we find virus supercarriers, and inform them of their infection status in a way that is fast, easy, and accessible," the researchers write. "Finding viral supercarriers will have a disproportionately large impact on curbing new COVID-19 infections."

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REA/5-10-21

POLIO ERADICATION UPDATE 4-30-21

 As Zerospinzone followers know, I'm fascinated by the quest not just to control or cure deadly diseases, but to eradicate them completely. The scourge of smallpox was defeated in 1980, and we've been closing in on polio since the deployment of the first (Salk, inactivated virus) vaccine in 1954, country by country, continent by continent.

Polio has been with us for thousands of years

This depiction is from Egypt's 18th Dynasty--1403 to 1365 BC

Credit: Deutsches Grünes Kreuz

Today, the wild polio virus hangs on in just two countries, Pakistan and Afghanistan, with just one case reported in each of those countries so far this year. We may really be on the verge of totally eliminating the wild polio virus from Planet Earth.

Even when that remarkable feat has been accomplished, the battle won't be over. The oral polio vaccines that have been so incredibly successful have one flaw--the attenuated viruses they use very occasionally mutate back into disease-causing variants. So far this year there have been 73 cases in 10 countries, fewer than last year at this time, but still a serious problem. 

The Global Polio Eradication Initiative has developed and initiated a strategy or endgame to deal with this issue. They plan to gradually phase out the massive provision of attenuated oral vaccines, phase in the use of an inactivated-virus vaccine as needed, and, hopefully, bring the millennial reign of polio to an end.

I'll continue to report on their progress towards this grand goal.

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REA 4-30-21 

How hot will it get later this century? So hot that we'll need new terms.

 A new study paints a grim climate picture for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). 

As reported in the prestigious, peer-reviewed journal NPJ/Climate and Atmospheric Science, first-of-their-kind regional climate models project prolonged, life-threatening heat waves impacting up to 600 million people in the MENA region if global warming is not brought under control. In a "business-as-usual" scenario, temperatures are projected to soar to 56 degrees Celsius (133 degrees Fahrenheit) and remain at such intolerable levels for days or weeks at a time in the second half of this century. 

We need new terms to categorize such intense, extended and deadly heat events. "Our results for a business-as-usual pathway indicate that especially in the second half of this century unprecedented super- and ultra-extreme heatwaves will emerge," says George Zittis, first author of the new study.

The authors point out that by mid-century, 90 percent of the population of the MENA region are expected to be living in cities. Cities act as "heat islands" that intensify and prolong extreme heat events. That means that a high percentage of the regions projected population of one billion will face such life-threatening conditions almost every year towards the end of the century.

"For the following decades and towards the end of the 21st century, thermal conditions in the region are projected to become particularly harsh as the so-far-unobserved and thus unprecedented "super-extreme" and "ultra-extreme" events are projected to become commonplace," the authors write.

Daily heat wave magnitude averages from 1980s projected through 2100

Credit: Zittis et al./NPJ/Climate and Atmospheric Science

If the world continues on its current business-as-usual path, the Middle East and North Africa will clearly be at risk, not just of increased human mortality, but of disruption of work, agriculture and daily life. Since the most extreme conditions this study foresees have not yet been experienced, how much personal, social, economic and political disruption they will cause remains to be seen. However, like the heat projections, those disruptions are likely to be extreme, super-extreme or ultra-extreme. And, as we know, problems that start in the Middle East do not stay in the Middle East.

If world leaders needed any more motivation to turn the looming climate catastrophe around now, here it is.

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REA/4-29-21

HOW SMART IS GOOGLE ASSISTANT?

I've pretty much given up trying to keep track of all the areas where artificial intelligence--AI--has surpassed human capabilities. AI systems now routinely beat even the most expert humans in many once-strictly human skills, from complex games such as chess and Go to more serious capabilities such as reading x-rays. 

Experts keep reassuring us that although AI can beat us at more and more specific tasks or skills, it will be a while, maybe a long while, before an AI system achieves fully human or super-human general intelligence--Artificial General Intelligence or AGI. We'll see.

Hal, what's this piece of music?

Credit: Mixcloud

 

Recently, however, I stumbled on an AI ability that amazes me.

I like classical music and have been listening to it most of my life. Over the years I've made a game of challenging myself to identify whatever piece I happen to hear. I can usually get a piece that I've heard many times, for example one of Beethoven's symphonies or Rachmaninoff's piano concertos. Even if I don't recognize the specific piece, I can usually identify the composer, for example Scarlatti or Stravinsky. And if I can't ID the composer, I can usually glean something about a piece, for example that it's from the Baroque. the Romantic period or the 20th Century.

I'm sure there are many people who can do much better. I remember that my brother's piano teacher claimed he could recognize almost any classical piece from the first few notes. But I doubt that he or any other mere human can do what Google Assistant now does thousands or millions of times per day:

If you hear a classical piece being played, and if you have an Android smartphone, ask your Google Assistant, "What piece of music is this?" Usually within a few seconds, he/she/it/they will tell you the specific piece, the composer, AND THE GROUP, ORCHESTRA OR PERFORMER PLAYING IT.

So not just Vivaldi's Violin Concerto in B-flat, but that it's being played by the Venice Baroque Orchestra, and that the soloist is Giuliano Carmignola.

In order to be able to do this, this system must have "listened to" and "memorized" just about every recording of every piece of classical music (and other musical genres as well), and be able to home in on the specific piece and the specific recording from a few-second-long snippet from anywhere in the piece, all within a few seconds.* As the Google team who developed this system write, ". . . we didn't want people to wait 10+ seconds for a result."

You can read about how Google Assistant pulls off this superhuman feat at this Google Blog post. The gist is that it maps the few seconds of music that it samples through your smartphone  into a series of overlapping 128-dimensional "fingerprints," which are then matched through a two-step process with the most similar fingerprints in the Assistant's constantly updated database of tens of millions of pieces. 

Smart as it is, the system isn't perfect. I ran an experiment asking it to identify 100 classical pieces played on the radio. It correctly identified 97 of them, but it "only" got the group or soloist right on 74 of those. When the Assistant gets something wrong, you can ask it to try again. That brought its piece recognition up to 98 percent, and its ID of the group, orchestra or soloist up to 78 percent. Interestingly, most of its mistakes on orchestras, groups or soloists were on extremely well known pieces, popular workhorses that have been recorded dozens or hundreds of times. 

As is true throughout the AI world, the Google music recognition team is constantly working to make their system even smarter. "We still think there's room for improvement though," they blog, "we don't always match when music is very quiet or in very noisy environments, and we believe we can make the system even faster."

Right now I'm listening to a very familiar piece, The Sorcerer's Apprentice by Paul Dukas. I recognized it right away, and of course so did Google Assistant. But it really pisses me off that the Assistant didn't just identify the piece, but could tell that it was the version recorded by the Montreal Symphony Orchestra led by Kent Nagano. Damned showoff.

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*To be fair, it appears that the Shazam app, now owned by Apple, has pretty much the same capabilities, although it seems a tad slower to me.

VOTING FOR COVID

If we needed any proof that people's political beliefs shape their reality, this graph from the New York Times provides it:

Credit: NYT, 4/18/21

On the left, appropriately, are the states in which more people voted for Biden in 2020, and on the right, states with more Trump voters. Vaccine hesitancy rates range from less than 10% in true-blue Vermont and Massachusetts to over 30% in true-to-Trump Wyoming. The Times didn't provide a regression line or a correlation coefficient, but having dealt with lots of graphs of this kind, I can say that it's the kind of distribution any researcher would be thrilled to see. 

We're now seeing real-world data showing that fully vaccinated Americans have about one chance in 10,000 of contracting COVID-19, while their un-vaccinated fellow citizens have close to one chance in 10 of catching the virus, and among those who do, close to two percent will die. If the political beliefs reflected in this chart continue to determine vaccination rates, we're going to see two Americas. One that's highly vaccinated, where there's low risk of catching COVID, and where people can return to their normal personal, social and economic activities.  In the other, poorly vaccinated America, people may also be returning to their normal activities, but they'll be doing so with a continued high risk of illness and death from COVID.

Will that contrast wake people up or change many minds.? I doubt it.  As evidence, check this story of death-by-denial, although it's from Norway, not North Dakota.

COVID-19 UPDATE FROM JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY--4/16/21

"Even though we feel we've moved on, the pandemic hasn't."

Credit: CDC

I just tuned into the latest Covid-19 update from experts at Johns Hopkins University. Epidemiologist William Moss and Professor of Public Health Jennifer Nuzzo brought us up to date on the vaccine rollout, vaccine safety--especially the Johnson & Johnson blood-clot issue, and the current rates of infection across the US.

They point out that the CDC is evaluating the J&J problem and will meet and make recommendations a week from today. The blood clots that have been reported are very serious but extremely rare--about one per million, so the risks of the J&J vaccine are far less than the benefits. Still, Moss and Nuzzo are concerned that this will be a major setback for vaccine acceptance in the US and worldwide. "The next big problem will be addressing vaccine hesitancy," Nuzzo says.

Concerning the pandemic their bottom line was clear: we need to continue to be very careful.

Some quotes:

Moss:

     "Daily case numbers are still dangerously high."

     "We have to maintain our vigilance and hold the line a while longer."

Nuzzo:

     Even though we feel we've moved on, the pandemic hasn't.

WHOSE REALITY WINS?

 With 20,000 troops protecting the District of Columbia and Congress and all 50 states deploying whatever security they can muster to defend their capitols, those of us waiting eagerly for Trump to leave office and for Joe Biden to become President might be able to breathe at least a bit easier in the expectation that the transfer of power will actually take place, although, tragically, far from peacefully.

Whose reality wins?

However, even with Trump out and Biden in the Oval Office, we can by no means relax. Despite the horrendous attack on Congress and democracy--and five dead--followed by what is being characterized as a bi-partisan impeachment, many members of Congress, other influential Republicans throughout the country and right-wing religious leaders continue to inject the Big Lie that Trump won the 2020 election into the supercharged echo chamber of right wing media, where it continues to resonate and radicalize.

It's hard to know how many of those influencers and opinion makers truly believe The Lie and all the evil collusion it implies, nor how many of the 74,000,000 who voted for Trump are fully committed True Believers. One clue is that after all that's happened somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of Americans still approve of Trump as President. Another is that fewer than 10 percent of Republicans think he should be impeached.

What is crystal clear is that being on the Trump team demands total loyalty, certainly not to facts or reason, nor even to a conservative ideology, but to whatever Trump, the only source of Truth--says. It makes little difference what mix of his supporters are passively going along with the mob, play acting, or acting out his revealed Truth; the real-world results are much the same. As DC Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone said about those rioters who intervened to try to keep him from being shot with his own gun, "Thank you, but f___ you for being there."

Right now the Big Lie still demands believing that the election was stolen through vast fraud, that Trump won by a landslide, and that democrats, progressives, RINOs, Vice President Pence and anyone who is not willing to eagerly follow Trump through every twist and turn of his quest for ultimate victory is evil, devoted to the destruction of the United States, and as such, an enemy of the people. That lie is likely to persist and fester for years. But even if it fades, we can be sure a new one will appear.

It's crazy, right? How could anyone believe such nonsense, not even counting the even more bizarre black hole of Q-Anon, nor whatever twisted beliefs about race, religion and White nationhood drive Trump's most militant and violent followers?

Yet crazy or not, whether we choose to recognize it or not, we are now in a war between our reality and theirs. It's beyond the point where patience, logic, facts, science, reality-based media or prestigious influencers can be counted on to win the day. Shots have been fired and blood spilled. The advance guard of an alternate reality has stalked the Capitol hunting traitors and carrying flex cuffs. The Trump flag has flown over Congress. The first gallows has been erected. 

We don't need a Churchill or Roosevelt to tell us that war has been declared. A war not just between progressive and conservative policies, between the talking points of left and right, between the "standard hyperbole" of politicians charging up their bases, or between competing narratives, but between a world that makes sense to most of us and a world that makes sense only within the armed perimeter of what has become a 70-million-strong cult.

Within that cult is a world defined by doublethink, where a fair election must be undone to protect the integrity of elections, where Patriotism requires an attack on the nation's Capitol, where tyranny is defined as unity and resistance to mob rule is divisive. Like the most dangerous cults, it promises power, prestige and salvation for the Righteous and death to feared and hated non-believers and apostates. Be on Team Trump or be damned.

There is a time for patience, empathy and understanding, but not when someone is battering your head in with his flagpole. There are periods during which one can hope that the simple passage of time will soften divisions and heal differences, but not when a crazed mob is crashing through your door. Whether we asked to be or not, chose to be or not, we've all been drafted into a battle not between right and left, nor right and wrong, but between two realities that cannot co-exist. Either Biden won in a fair election or Trump was robbed of the presidency in a treasonous nationwide coup. Either Q is right and the deep-state elite are an international cabal of satanic pedophiles--"baby-killing socialists"--as Pastor Robert Henderson preaches, or not.

Clearly our political, corporate, religious and civic leaders need to make it absolutely clear in speech and action that Biden won and is the legitimate President, and that white nationalism, racism and bigotry are not acceptable. The legal system from the Supreme Court down to police on the street needs to recognize the clear and present danger of domestic terrorism from the right and use all the tools at their disposal to contain and reduce it. The media need to look this threat in the eye and implement ways to limit the ability of hate-driven individuals and groups to organize and radicalize.

Unfortunately, even if all our leaders and institutions step up to their responsibilities, that will not be enough. This battle involves us all. I don't know just where or when you or I will be called to the front, but it will happen. Will it be with a friend, a family member or a stranger trying to get you to drink his or her tainted Kool-Aid? Or with a religious leader, school-board member or local politician arrogantly advancing The Cause? The time to speak up and step up is now, before their reality infects yet more hearts and minds. If not, there will come a tipping point after which you and I will find ourselves living in--or perhaps dying from--their toxic reality.

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REA

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This article first appeared on OpEdNews, 1/19/21.

THE FIRE THIS TIME

January 6, 2021 now joins December 7, 1941 and 9/11/2001 in the dark and ignoble gallery of days of infamy in American history.

Not this time because of a surprise attack by an external enemy raining death from above, but even more dangerously as a foreseeable and virtually predictable uprising from fractures deep within the body politic itself, manipulated by a disturbed leader and tolerated and even encouraged by the political enablers in his own Party.

US Capitol under attack 1/6/21

Credit: Deusche Welle

Donald Trump's insurrection against his own government failed, but what he succeeded in doing in his final days in office was to drag the nation with him down the rabbit-hole of his own troubled psyche, leaving a country shaken to the core and even more deeply confused and divided.

“Madness in great ones must not go unwatched,” Shakespeare warns in Hamlet, knowing well the corrupting influence of power and the frailties of human nature. And despite repeated warnings and unmistakable signs of Trump’s instability, narcissism, sociopathic tendencies and increasingly authoritarian behavior over the past four years, and particularly during the past months, governmental guardians willfully denied the reality of what they were seeing. A reality culminating in the President’s unbalanced and increasingly anti-democratic rhetoric and actions; most recently his absolute refusal to accept or admit an electoral reality verified by governments and courts across the land.

Even now, there are Senators like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, along with craven Congressmen such as Kevin McCarthy, Devin Nunes and more than 100 other Republicans who continue to parrot President Trump’s lies about election-rigging and fraud, defending the indefensible and feeding the miasma of untruth that carried thousands of true-believers, conspiracy theorists, neo-Nazis, Proud Boys, and misguided and blind followers to attack the National Capitol, bringing death and destruction, in an ultimately futile effort to stop the democratic process of ratifying the election.

Unlike “Coxey’s Army” of unemployed workers in 1894 protesting economic inequality or the “Bonus Marchers” of 1932 petitioning for cash payment for their World War I service during the depth of the Great Depression, “Trump’s Army” was no spontaneous movement of desperate citizens for equality or justice. Instead, it was the deliberate creation of a disturbed and amoral President obsessively focused on mobilizing his “base” to pressure Congress by any means necessary to force lawmakers to overturn a democratic election. In short, an undemocratic power-play sustained and enabled by multiple purveyors of his self-serving delusions and unremitting lies: essentially an attempted coup to keep Trump in power and assuage his deeply wounded ego.

“Reality is that which, when you don’t believe in it, doesn’t go away,” the Conservative thinker Peter Viereck once wrote, a statement of particular significance today when denial of the reality of a pandemic has already cost hundreds of thousands of lives, when denial of climate change threatens the future well-being of millions, and when the blindness, incompetence and furious denial of reality by a ‘mad’ king threatens to further undermine both the nation’s political and psychological stability.

Recovery from the trauma of this tragic descent into madness may be possible, but not before an effective truth serum has been developed capable of providing “herd immunity” against the highly-infectious virus of untruth and denial of reality that has characterized Trump and his Era.

Les Adler

January 9, 2021

THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST

Some events cry out for a Biblical context.

A tragic case in point:

A headline from November 9: Lawyers Can't Reunite 666 Seized Migrant Children With Parents . . .

New Testament, Book of Revelation, Chapter 13, Verse 18: Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.

Stephen Miller, architect of Trump's Zero Tolerance program

Credit: Southern Poverty Law Program

A lot of despicable things have happened in the past four years, but one of the most bestial was the heartless separation of children--many under the age of five, some of them infants--from their parents, a pogrom, excuse me, program reportedly pushed by Stephen Miller and implemented by Trump through much of 2017 and 2018. 

Not only were thousands of children and parents torn apart, in many cases this was done without even a paper trail that would allow them ever to be reunited. 

Hence these 666 children orphaned in our name by our government.

This may fit the definition of a crime against humanity. It certainly should earn its perpetrators a punishment of Biblical proportion.

REA

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12/3/20: To add to the cold-blooded malevolence of the separations themselves, it now appears that the Trump administration deliberately withheld crucial information that may let at least some of these families reunite. You can see the details here and here.

HOW MUCH IS A FACE MASK WORTH? TRY $3000.

 Every face mask worn consistently in public in the US is worth at least $3000 to society, a new study shows. Or, to put that differently, every American who chooses not to wear a mask is costing the rest of us at least that much.

Every face mask saves society $3000-$6000 / Every refusal to wear one costs society $3000-$6000

Photo Credit: Chad Davis

This eye-opening calculation comes to us from a team of medical, public health and economic experts at Yale University. You can find a preprint of their paper here.

The researchers cite several lines of evidence to arrive at their economic estimate:

--As of the date of their study, countries with pre-existing norms for mask-wearing by sick people experienced a 44 percent slower growth rate in Covid-19 cases and a 48 percent slower growth in the number of deaths than countries without such norms. These effects remained significant even when other possible factors were controlled for statistically.

Although the above statistics indicate that universal mask-wearing would reduce the rate of viral transmission by much more than 10 percent, the authors decided to use a 10 percent reduction as an extremely conservative estimate.

When they plugged that relatively minimal reduction into a widely used model for the progress of the pandemic along with commonly used estimates of the costs to society of premature or excess deaths, the result was a conservative estimate of $3000 to $6000 of benefit to society for every person who wears a mask consistently.

They add that this estimate is extra-conservative since it only looks at excess deaths and doesn't include the costs to society of hundreds of thousands or millions of sick people. ". . . our estimates . . . suggest that the effect of masks could be 5-6 times as large," they write.

The authors provide a separate analysis for the benefit of highly effective N95 masks for front-line health care providers, who, as we've learned, are at particularly high risk of contracting the SARS-NCoV-2 virus and passing it on. In addition, they are absolutely necessary to treat the sick and save lives. "Multiplying these factors together," they write, "the social value of each N95 mask for a healthcare worker could easily be more than a million dollars per mask."

The researchers conclude by pointing out that the availability of this simple, cheap and effective intervention is a rarity. "Outside of crises, policies do not exist where a few dollars of expenditure per person can produce thousands of dollars in benefit. We are in a rare moment when such benefits are achievable--this is an urgent crisis and action is necessary."

As we know, there is still no universal mask-wearing mandate from the federal government, nor is there likely to be one as long as Trump remains in office. However, according to a National Geographic assessment, 44 states have mandated mask-wearing under at least some conditions, and 74 percent of Americans polled say they "always" wear a mask when out. Unfortunately, many Republicans continue to receive the opposite message from the President and from conservative media. As a result, while 84 percent of self-identified Democrats say they always wear a mask, just 66 percent of Republicans say they do. 

The largest gap--a 22 percent difference--is between Democratic and Republican women, reporting 89 and 67 percent mask wearing respectively.

Once again, if every missing mask is costing the rest of us $3000 to $6000, not to mention needless illness and, tragically many lives lost, those differences in willingness to wear face masks in public are costly indeed.

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REA

FROM HATEFUL WORDS TO HATE CRIMES--NEW RESEARCH SHOWS A CLEAR LINK

As children most of us learned some version of the phrase "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." That old saw may help some of us shake off unkind words in some circumstances, but new research underlines just the opposite--hateful words on social media can lead to actual hate crimes.

Trump at CPAC, 2013

Credit: Gage Skidmore/Flickr

Writing in the Journal of the European Economic Association, co-authors Karsten Müller, at Princeton University, and Carlo Schwarz, at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy, detail links between anti-immigrant and anti-refugee posts on Facebook and violent crimes against those targets, based on events in Germany between January, 2015 and February, 2017.

You can read the details behind their findings in the open-access paper, "Fanning the Flames of Hate: Social Media and Hate Crime."

As presented in the paper, the authors found a significant, nearly linear correlation between the incidence of hate speech on Facebook and actual hate crimes. This was especially clear for municipalities with above average numbers of Facebook followers of Germany's leading anti-immigrant, anti-refugee political party, Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, or AfD. (For a striking graph, see page 17 of the paper). 

The authors write, ". . . we find that--during periods of high salience of refugees on right-wing social media--anti-refugee hate crimes increase . . . This correlation is especially pronounced for violent incidents such as assault."

Müller and Schwarz did something very clever in order to go beyond mere correlation and get closer to testing for a causal relationship between hate-filled content on social media and hate crimes. They took advantage of hundreds of local or regional internet outages that took place during the years of the study, outages which temporarily blocked a given area's exposure to hate speech on Facebook. 

It turned out that a local internet outage acted much like turning down a dimmer switch or letting up on the gas pedal of your car--the internet outages cut down the number of hate crimes in the affected areas. The cause-and-effect relationship was made even clearer by the fact that even during periods when anti-immigrant and anti-refugee sentiment and hate crimes were surging throughout the country, those crimes did not increase in regions temporarily without internet access. "Quantitatively, a typical internet disruption fully mediates [breaks] the link between social media and hate crime," the researchers write.

They still caution that the "natural experiment" provided by localized internet outages wasn't quite enough to prove causation. Their interpretation is that the flow of hate speech through media such as Facebook encourages and enables hate crimes and makes them more likely, but is just one of many causes. ". . . we do not claim that social media itself causes crimes against refugees out of thin air. Rather, our argument is that social media can act as a propagating mechanism for hateful sentiments that likely have many fundamental sources." 

Similarly, one could say that stomping on the gas pedal doesn't cause your car to speed up, it just adds fuel to an already-running engine.

Interestingly, the researchers found that the enabling link between hate speech and violent assaults was particularly strong for attacks involving groups of perpetrators. We may have seen just such a link between President Trump's support of or refusal to condemn armed, right-wing and often violent groups and the 13 white nationalists now under indictment for plotting to kidnap and try Governor Whitmer of Michigan. It would be incredibly naive to believe that Trump's words don't encourage such violent groups to act, as testified to by their own comments.

So it looks as though hateful words can and do "propagate" or fuel actual attacks with "sticks and stones," or worse, especially when those words are amplified and echoed on social media and heard again and again by aggrieved individuals brought together by the same media.

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REA

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HOW IS THE US DOING VS COVID-19 COMPARED TO THE REST OF THE WORLD?

 Just a quick note as of Sunday, October 11, 2020.

Credit: geralt/pixabay

The US has 4.25% of the world's population.

To date we've suffered 21.17% of the total recorded cases of Covid-19. That's 7,958,612 documented cases in the US.

But we have a great medical system, so our death rate is much lower, right?

Sorry, but our death rate is almost identical, 20.03% of the total deaths. That's 219,343 Americans who have died from the coronavirus in the nine months since the first documented case, January 20, 2020. That represents an average of 828 covid-19 deaths per day, or almost 5800 per week.

For another comparison, so far documented cases for the whole world equal 4,833 cases per million people. In the US we've chalked up 24,005 cases per million. We've had just under 5 times as many cases per million.

The world as a whole has incurred 139 documented covid-19 deaths per million. The US 662. The US has suffered 4.76 times as many deaths per million.

You can draw your own conclusions as to how we're doing and who's responsible.

Here's my nominee:

THE CORONAVIRUS AS A REALITY CHECK

To paraphrase a quote usually attributed to Abraham Lincoln:

You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool a virus.

                                                     The coronavirus--"It is what it is."

                        Credit: NIAID

As historian Yuval Noah Harari brilliantly explains in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, it's our uniquely human capacity to believe in shared fictions such as the value of money or the necessity for daily prayers that sets humans apart, allows millions of strangers to cooperate, but that also divides us into adversarial and sometimes murderous tribes. 

As symbol-using animals, we are able to convince ourselves of all kinds of ideas, from bible stories to trickle-down economics and act by the millions or hundreds of millions as if they were real, sometimes defending them with our lives (or all too frequently the lives of others). 

It's belief in a shared narrative that lets you go to an ATM anywhere in the world and retrieve a handful of paper for which a merchant will hand you actual food or clothing. But that same propensity to accept and believe in pervasive, communal myths also means you may not be able to share a Thanksgiving meal with friends or relatives on the other side of a political or ideological fence. 

We humans swim in a sea of memes, concepts, ideas and narratives, and we're usually as unaware of it as fish are of the ocean. 

In stark contrast, the coronavirus is completely immune to the web of narratives that we clever, cognitive, symbol-using humans weave within and around and ourselves. It has no ears so it doesn't hear that it will surely be defeated next week, month or year.  It has no eyes so it isn't deflected or deterred by what we see on our screens or read on the signs so proudly displayed at political rallies. It can't be seduced, bribed, bullied, browbeaten, bargained with or bought off. 

All the virus has is a genetic code that equips it to infect one person, multiply, turn that victim into a vector, sicken or kill, and spread. To the coronavirus we are not republicans or democrats, billionaires or beggars, sentient, sophisticated, symbol-using beings; we're just meat. That's the truth, and as Ghandi said, " . . . truth overrides all our plans."

As President Trump so succinctly pointed out, the coronavirus is what it is. Precisely because of that it has the potential to serve as a painful and costly yet vital teacher to us. It can be the "whack on the side of the head" that awakens us to reality, to the ground truth behind the crazy-making swarm of buzzwords, memes, slogans and contradictory narratives that befuddles us. 

I doubt that Trump, now personally suffering from the virus, will get the message. More than anyone else I know of, he seems to believe that he can impose his will on reality. He's spent his life mastering an armamentarium of manipulations that have worked to get him what he wants and where he wants to be.  My guess is that he has travelled too far down the ever-narrowing tunnel of narcissism to turn back. If he survives his bout with Covid-19, my guess is that he will brag about his superior genes and tell us how his resilience and toughness let him beat the virus.

However, that doesn't mean that the rest of us can't benefit from the raw reality that the virus makes us face. Beyond taking the by-now-well-known steps to protect ourselves and others from the virus, it can and should prod us to question our assumptions and preconceptions, to search for and be open to facts, to remember that there's an actual reality that we can strive to know and have to respect. 

It's worth noting that we have access to a highly developed methodology for doing that. It's called science. Scientists have spent centuries honing tools to track fact to its lair by stripping away as many as possible of the myths, wishes and cognitive biases we project onto it. They too spin their theories, but they constantly check them against reality. We need to listen to them, not just about the coronavirus, but about the increasingly urgent threats of climate destabilization and ecological collapse.

Rather than groping and wandering in a fog of myths and memes or choking on the smog of outright lies, let's use this implacable virus to spur us to at least start the hard climb to where we can breathe the cold but bracing air of truth.

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REA

UPON WHAT MEAT DOTH THIS OUR CEASAR FEED . . .

 "Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed...?

The corrupting effect of power has been recognized for centuries:

Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" metaphorically (and perhaps presciently) posed the question in terms of a tyrant's diet; with Lord Acton's famous aphorism adding the further warning that "absolute power corrupts absolutely."

                                                                   Julius Ceasar

Credit: Vatican Museum

Rarely, if ever, in the American experience have the consequences of unbridled power in the hands of an ego-driven, would-be tyrant, been as readily apparent as in the unhinged actions of Donald Trump in Tuesday night's very un-Presidential debate.

While the President's tendency toward personally denigrating opponents, demeaning rivals, dismissing critics, denying inconvenient facts and demanding 'absolute loyalty' from traditionally independent agencies and individuals has been well known, and even celebrated by his loyal followers, his behavior in the so-called debate reached a new and threatening pitch in Cleveland. It was as though any limits observed by normal individuals do not and should not be applied to President Trump. Bullying both his opponent and the moderator, Chris Wallace, and refusing to respect even the most minimal rules of courtesy or timekeeping, Trump verbally 'invaded' Mr. Biden's space, finding a way to loom over the proceedings much as he physically loomed over Hillary Clinton in their 2016 debate.

                                                     Donald Trump--official portrait

Credit: Gage Skidmore

Nearly four years into his presidency, having again and again been enabled in his assaults on accepted democratic norms by his political protectors in Congress, and following his success in avoiding any consequences from either the Special Counsel's investigation or his impeachment, Mr. Trump has clearly concluded that he really can say or do whatever he wants.

A somewhat shocking rhetorical assertion by a flamboyant candidate about being able to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue without losing political support has by now become a terrifying reality in the position of the most powerful and dangerous individual in the country, and possibly the world. Refusing to repudiate white supremacists while signaling a right-wing militia group to 'stand down and stand by' activates his rhetoric in real life and death terms.

Coupled with his repeated and direct assaults on the integrity of the upcoming election, while refusing to agree in advance to a peaceful transition of power should he lose, he is further raising doubts and stoking fears about the reliability of the most fundamental processes of democratic governance. Protected by enablers like Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell and increasingly by enforcers such as Bill Barr, the President's sense of invulnerability, omniscience and entitlement has only magnified.

Trump's willingness to use any and every resource, foreign and domestic, to gain power has never been in question from birtherism to the dark arts of social media manipulation at home to the use of American foreign policy to seek-out 'dirt' on his opponents abroad.

As President, with the enormous resources of the federal government at his disposal, he has shown he will fight to remain in office, seemingly without concern about any potential cost to the country.

What was most nakedly displayed on Tuesday's debate stage was, to borrow Shakespeare's terms, Trump's 'diet'. It was as disturbing an exposure as most Americans have ever experienced to the very consequences a ruthless drive for power can bring. It was exactly what our founders, political philosophers (as well as psychiatrists) have warned against over the years.

Power does corrupt, and a stark vision of its workings was delivered to all of us, isolated in our homes, without commercials.

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Les Adler