Video: Rebecca Watson on mask science (they work!)

Both Tegan and I decided to start masking early on in the pandemic, well before anyone was requiring it. Sometimes, it was something close to useless like a bandanna, but since Tegan had a customer service job in Glasgow, she made herself a couple multi-layer masks, and I eventually bought a neck gaiter with disposable filter inserts. I’ve always viewed the mask question from something of a gamer’s perspective on odds. Back when I was an avid World of Warcraft player, I had to pay close attention to cumulative percentages. Any one piece of gear, while helpful, wasn’t as useful as all of it together, whether it came to your chance of landing a critical strike, or your chance of blocking or dodging an enemy’s attack.

I don’t expect the vaccine to protect me entirely, just to improve my odds. Masks are the same – they might only stop a small percent of particles I’d otherwise inhale, but that still improves my odds of staying healthy. I wouldn’t expect my masks to do anything to stop the fine particulate air pollution I’ve mentioned in the past, but yeah – they provide one very imperfect physical barrier between myself in the world. How could it not be better than nothing? After the last couple years, it just feels like common courtesy to mask.

Still, some people adamantly oppose masking, and will insist that the science shows no clear benefit. Obviously I disagree, but I think it’s fair to be doubtful, especially with so many contradictory messages out there. Rebecca Watson takes on that uncertainty, and a recent report on the efficacy of masks. The TL:DR is that masks do help with COVID, at least a little, but also that the people who put the report together did so in such a way as to give the impression that they don’t.

As always, you can find the video’s transcript and sources on Skepchick, but I just wanted to highlight one thing:

“But wait,” you may be saying, “my MAGA uncle says that Cochrane Review says masks don’t work. What’s going on?”

[..]

The review is titled “Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses,” and it is available in full online and as always I link to all my sources in the transcript which you can find linked below or at patreon.com/rebecca. This review did conclude that “Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to the outcome of influenza-like illness/COVID-19 like illness compared to not wearing masks.”

Immediately, you might note that this is about “respiratory viruses,” and not specifically COVID-19. That’s important, because they lumped in a few studies on the effectiveness of masks versus COVID along with a whole bunch of studies on non-epidemic influenza, which is way less contagious and rarer to contract, meaning that of course you’re going to need way more data to show any result, compared to looking at masks in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In fact, epidemiologist Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz decided to remove the data for influenza to see what would happen, and sure enough, the random controlled trials for masking DURING A PANDEMIC showed a clear, modest benefit. He points out that the review is perfectly fine otherwise, but personally I think it’s a pretty big deal that Cochrane released this during a pandemic, knowing that people would assume that the conclusion would be applied during a pandemic. It’s like releasing a review concluding there’s no benefit to wearing a seat belt, without mentioning that most of the data I examined was from a survey of people sitting in parked cars in the grocery store parking lot. It turns out that context is very important!

This frustrates me. Scientists ought to know how important context is, and I find it hard to believe that they don’t know how much confusion there is on this particular topic. I suppose I’ll never know for sure whether the way they structured their report was deliberate, but I feel like the responsible thing to do would have been to write a paper that wouldn’t create this kind of confusion. Still, it’s nice to have a bit more support for my position. As I said before, I think masking in indoor public spaces is just a matter of courtesy.

Now, I’m not always the most courteous guy – sometimes I forget a mask when I go out, or I don’t have one that’s clean. I also eat at restaurants on rare occasions, and if you’re in some form of eatery, wearing a mask seems a bit like spitting in the wind. I’m also aware that my opinion on “common” courtesy isn’t particularly common – the vast majority of folks in Dublin don’t wear masks anymore, and based on the consistently low COVID numbers, that doesn’t seem to be doing a whole lot of harm. It helps that we’ve got a pretty high vaccination rate. The Kraken may have originated here, but it didn’t turn out to be much of a monster.

Masks work, in that they improve your odds. That’s a limited and uncertain benefit, but the reality is that we are beset by uncertainties at every moment in our lives. Accepting that is – or ought to be – a natural process of growing up and maturing, but obviously it’s not a comfortable process, and most people are trained, to some degree, to reject uncertainty. The distressing truth is that this world is messy and complicated, and sometimes when you’re dealing with a mess, it’s better to just wear a mask.

Good news from Spain!

I cover a lot of fairly grim topics on this blog, not least of which is a rise in fascism that seems to be happening all over the globe sometimes. I believe it’s important to talk about problems, as one part of trying to fix them, but that can get a bit grim from time to time. The good news is that the aforementioned fascism is, in many ways, part of a reactionary backlash against real progress that has been made in the area of civil rights. Even as some people are trying to roll back advances, others are pushing ahead, fighting for more advances, and winning.

In particular, Spain has just passed a couple laws that I think are worth celebrating. First, they’ve made it radically easier for people to change their gender on their national identity card:

The law, which passed by 191 votes in favour, 60 against with 91 abstentions, makes Spain one of the few nations to allow people to change their gender on their national identity card with a simple declaration.

In Europe, Denmark was the first country to grant such a right in 2014.

Thursday’s vote was the last hurdle for legislation that has caused a major rift within Spain’s fractious left-wing coalition, as the country gears up for a general election later this year.

The legislation is a flagship project of the equality ministry, which is held by Podemos, the radical left-wing junior partner in the Socialist-led coalition.

“This is one of the most important laws of this legislature… we have taken a giant step forward,” Equality Minister Irene Montero told lawmakers ahead of the vote.

“This law recognises the right of trans people to self-determine their gender identity, it depathologises trans people. Trans people are not sick people, they are just people.”

Until now, adults in Spain could only request the change with a medical report attesting to gender dysphoria and proof of hormone treatment for two years. Minors needed judicial authorisation.

The new law drops all such requirements, with those aged 14 and 15 allowed to apply if their parents or legal guardians agree.

Those aged 12 and 13 will also require a judge’s permission to make the move.

‘We are not ill’

The vote was hailed by campaigners who said Spain was setting an example that would encourage others to follow suit.

“We’re celebrating the fact this law has passed after eight years of tireless work to obtain rights for the trans community,” Uge Sangil, head of FELGBTI+, Spain’s largest LGBTQ organisation, told AFP outside parliament.

“We’re winning human rights with the free determination of gender… From today, our lives will change because we are not ill.”

This is a clear win. The article notes, as I’ve done in the past, the ways in which trans rights are under assault, as well as the way England’s right-wing government overrode Scotland’s decision to enact a similar law. I’ve honestly not paid much attention Spain, but this is not the first time I’ve felt I should change that.

The other change that I think is worth celebrating is the decision to provide paid menstrual leave, with a doctor’s note, covered by the public healthcare system. Periods can be debilitating. For some people they’re not much of a problem, but at the other end of the spectrum you get cramps, migraines, vomiting, stiffness, and probably other problems I’m forgetting. It is not reasonable to demand that people just work through that, especially since, as I keep saying, there’s no actual scarcity to justify depriving people. As a USian, the requirement of a doctor’s note gave me pause, but in a good public healthcare system, that’s far less of a burden than it would be in the States.

The bill approved by Parliament on Thursday is part of a broader package on sexual and reproductive rights that includes allowing anyone 16 and over to get an abortion or freely change the gender on their ID card.

The law gives the right to a three-day “menstrual” leave of absence – with the possibility of extending it to five days – for those with disabling periods, which can cause severe cramps, nausea, dizziness and even vomiting.

The leave requires a doctor’s note, and the public social security system will foot the bill.

The law states that the new policy will help combat the stereotypes and myths that still surround periods and hinder women’s lives.

Equality Minister Irene Montero, an outspoken feminist in the leftwing government, hailed “a historic day of progress for feminist rights”.

“There will be resistance to its application, just as there has been and there will be resistance to the application of all feminist laws,” she told parliament.

“So we have to work (…) to guarantee that when this law enters into force, it will be enforced”.

“The days of (women) going to work in pain are over,” Montero said last year when she unveiled her government’s proposal.

But the road to Spain’s menstrual leave has been rocky. Politicians – including those within the ruling coalition – and trade unions have been divided over the policy, which some fear could backfire and stigmatise women in the workplace.

Worldwide, menstrual leave is currently offered only in a small number of countries including Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia, South Korea and Zambia.

I get why there’s a fear of stigma there, but I think that’s a problem with a capitalist society that demands work (for the interests of capital) to justify dignity or survival. I prefer a societal norm that accepts humans as we are, and doesn’t make unreasonable demands of people, especially for them to have basic rights. This kind of law is only really a problem when you’re forcing people to compete with each other for a “good” life.

I’m hopeful that this will be a step not only towards a more just world, but also towards destigmatizing disability in general, whatever the cause. We’ve got a long way to go, still, but we have made progress, as a species, and that’s worth celebrating. The activists who made these laws a reality have my full respect and appreciation, and I look forward to other countries following this example.

Video: Daily life in a Swedish moose park

I’ve always had a fondness for moose. I saw them on rare occasions growing up, and it was always a cool experience. They’re very much a relic of the age of megafauna, and I like having creatures like that around. I also find them to be more than a little terrifying, on account of being huge, so I have to say that I wasn’t expecting to see a video of cuddly moose!

Important breakthrough in our understanding of bat whiskers

Every now and then, I’ll hear about someone who not only writes daily, but finds it easy to do so 99% of the time. I won’t say that I think such people are fantastical, but it’s an alien concept to me. I’m till quite proud of the daily posting I’ve achieved over the last year, and of advances I’ve made in my rate of fiction writing, but some days, well. Some days it don’t come at all, and these are the days that never end. So here I am, compelled by unholy pacts to post before I can sleep, and just… nothing appeals.

There’s plenty of stuff that I find interesting, but to write about? Less so. I thought about Democracy Now’s report on the Ohio train disaster (which you should check out), but I’ve posted about that two days in a row now, and this sentence makes a third. There are always little bits of research about how long coral can survive warming temperatures, or an advance in electrolysis efficiency, but on posts like that it keeps coming back to the same basic thing, we need to build the collective political power to enact real change. Some days, I just… can’t.

I’ll get back to that soon, I suppose, but right now it just feels a bit draining. Instead, let’s learn about bat whiskers!

The researchers worked at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute recording Pallas’s long-tongued bats—a South and Central American bat that has the fastest metabolism of any mammal—as they drank from hand-blown glass flowers designed for the study to replicate the plants the animals feed from. High-speed infrared cameras captured photos and video of the bats as they descended upon the glass flowers and navigated their muzzles and tongues into the “bloom” to eat the nectar. Feedings typically lasted between a half- to one second.

The researchers found that bats with clipped whiskers were less agile and accurate during feeding and flight than animals with untouched whiskers. The animals with clipped whiskers were held for a few days until the hairs regrew, then released back into the jungle. “Clipping the whiskers doesn’t reduce the bats’ ability to feed, they just do it a little less gracefully,” Amichai said. “If it were gymnastics, they’d get an 8.5 instead of a 9.8.”

See, this is the kind of animal research that has always appealed to me. Clipping whiskers is, I’m sure, deeply offensive to the bats, but it’s certainly not going to cause lasting harm, especially with the researchers ensuring their subjects have plenty of food available. It reminds me of when I helped make blindfolds for flying geckos so a fellow student could study their steering ability.

I have to admit, I never really gave much thought to bat whiskers, but for a creature that zips around shoving its head in floral tubes, it makes sense to have a facial perimeter alert system.

The role of long whiskers in nectar-feeding bats’ flight control provides new insight into the co-evolution of the bats with the flowers they feed on, Amichai said.

The majority of bats possess short whiskers not arranged in any particular pattern or direction. But the researchers found that whisker length in nectar-eating bats evolved at least twice, along with the evolution of their long tongues and faces, to help them better navigate the deep chambers of the flowers they prefer. In turn, the long reach these flowers require results in more pollen sticking to their pollinators and thus the broader proliferation of their kind.

The researchers plan to continue their work using higher-resolution images, flowers that move, interactions with predators and other expansions on the experimental model, Amichai said.

In the meantime, the latest study offers a fascinating glimpse into how nectar-feeding bats combine various forms of sensory information to navigate the world around them, Amichai said. Their world is a combination of scent, echolocation, spatial memory, knowledge of the seasons, and the physical sensation and equilibrium provided by their whiskers.

“I find thinking in these terms of switching back and forth between completely different ways to perceive the world—and seamlessly integrating their input—to be a mind-blowing concept,” Amichai said. Understanding how animals perceive and interact with their surroundings helps scientists develop better conservation strategies, he said.

“We are strange animals—we rely almost solely on vision and, to a lesser extent, hearing to perceive the world. As a result, we interpret other animals’ behavior in similar terms and that often leads us to completely misinterpret what they’re doing and why,” Amichai said. “Understanding the sensory world of other animals helps us see the world through their eyes and understand their behavior, needs, and challenges better.”

In the recently made Battlestar Galactica reboot, one of the human-form cyclons laments the fact that even though he’s technically a robot, designed and built (or grown? I’m not clear on that), because he was made “in the image of” humanity, his eyes can only perceive as much as a human might. Instead of being able to see the full grandeur of the universe, he’s limited by the imperfect meat of his body.

I sympathize with that. I don’t feel a particular need to examine the world around me with my beard, but I’d like to be able to get more information out of smells, or to be able to hear with more clarity or accuracy. Since I doubt I’ll be getting my dreamed-of cyborg replacement parts in this lifetime, so instead I’ll just have to muse on what might have been, down another evolutionary timeline.

Oh, to be a bat, flitting from flower to flower.

Researchers see good results from lower mowing intensity, and fewer pesticides

My posts about agriculture tend to lean one of two ways. The first is to advocate for a dramatic, rapid increase in indoor food production. That includes the various forms of indoor farming, as well as efforts to cultivate edible bacteria and microalgae. The second is that for the land that’s currently being used for farm, we shift to a form of ecosystem management much closer to what Native Americans did prior to the European invasion. Land Back should be part of that, of course, but the basic idea is to cultivate an ecosystem that’s full of useful and edible organisms, and to treat it as a community resource, owned in common by everyone, for everyone’s benefit. As always, the exact specifics of this approach will vary depending on regional and local conditions.

I get that just swapping over would feel like a big change to most people. We’re very used to what “farming” looks like, and it can be hard to trust that something like bacterial flour or rows of plants under LEDs would be able to feed humanity in our billions. Fortunately, while I’m more interested rapid, radical change, my philosophy for making the world better is one where every step along the way should come with its own improvements. My favorite example is probably the use of plant life to mitigate air pollution. There’s ample evidence that being around greenery improves both our mental and our physical health (not that those are really separate things). We’d get pretty immediate benefits from adding plants to the urban landscape. Those improvements to our health and wellbeing give us more power, through better health and saved money, to fight for the next step up.

That’s why, while the vision in my head may be some sort of solarpunk permaculture utopia, there are actually much smaller steps that we could take, which would have measurable benefits, both in terms of dealing with climate change directly, and in terms of improving ecosystem health. For example, this study lays out what seems to be a sort of intermediary step, designed to capture carbon, improve ecosystem health, and reduce dependence on pesticides and herbicides, with relatively little effort:

The researchers conducted two independent experiments at the University’s research facilities at the Ruissalo Botanical Gardens in Turku. In the greenhouse and common garden studies, the research team showed that the intensity of mowing has a great impact on pastures. By reducing the intensity of the mowing and cutting the plant higher, the overall yield of the pasture increased and the plants developed bigger roots. This indicates a higher atmospheric carbon sequestration into belowground storage.

What was surprising, Fuchs emphasises, is that the researchers found a detrimental effect of herbicide residues in soil on root growth regardless of the intensity of the yield harvest.

“This demonstrates a tremendous limitation to the potential carbon binding and storage belowground when soils are polluted by pesticide. Considering the vast amount of pesticides applied to agricultural fields yearly, we can conclude that the impact on soil quality is a major driver of limited root growth, carbon sequestration, and consequently plant resilience and productivity,” Dr Fuchs says.

The authors propose additional field studies to extrapolate their findings onto a field scale. Both studies conclude that climate change mitigation via optimising carbon sequestration and storage in soil can be achieved by reducing pesticides, which will facilitate root growth and improve plant resilience.

All over the world, cultivated grasslands are used as grazing pasture as well as for growing fodder that is turned into hay and silage. They cover large parts of the world’s agricultural land and have a tremendous potential for climate change mitigation through carbon storage. The plants use carbon dioxide as they grow, and some of this atmospheric carbon becomes bound in the soils.

“Consequently, understanding how pesticide pollution in soil and intensive management limit plant productivity is the key to optimising intensive grassland-based agriculture in a sustainable and climate-friendly way,” Fuchs concludes.

Oh yeah, it means better crops, too. Did I bury the lede? Maybe a little. They don’t really talk about ecosystem health, but I think it’s pretty easy to see how less intensive mowing, and less pesticide use would both have a “side effect” of improving the general health of the area.

I think we should be ending most of our animal agriculture, which would eliminate much of the need for grasslands as fodder, but we’re not going to get there overnight, and anything we can do to improve things now will make our lives just a little bit easier down the line. Of course, that only matters if this research actually leads to a change in practice. It always comes back to that, doesn’t it? There’s something we could try to make the world better, but nobody in the aristocracy seems to feel like investing in it. That’s why I keep coming back to collective power and political change.

As I said at the beginning, the steps we take now can be both immediately beneficial to us, and beneficial to our ability to get bigger changes down the road. We’re not capitalists here at Oceanoxia, so don’t think in terms of “political capital”. The kind of power we on the left want to build isn’t something that’s lost when used. Each victory brings more people and power to the cause, and sets us up for an even bigger victory.

I think many of us are accustomed to witnessing a political and economic “ratchet” effect, in which Republicans use their power to damage things like the social safety net, and Democrats stabilize things, but don’t actually reverse the damage, or guard against further damage. I mean, the Dems do plenty of damage themselves, but we’re talking generalities. While we’ve made great advances in terms of civil rights (hence the current reactionary backlash), 9/11 ushered in a new era of authoritarian government power in the United States, coupled with a dramatic increase in the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the ruling class. It’s discouraging, and often horrifying to watch.

The one bit of hope I’m offering today is that we can, by working together, create our own ratchet effect, whereby we can increase our own power and happiness, and lay the foundations of a much better future than what currently looms on the horizon.

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Household Chores and Sam Vimes’ Boots

As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’m reasonably certain that I have inattentive type ADHD. One of the ways in which it has affected my life, is that I have a hard time with housekeeping. I don’t feel like going into much detail on that, but one of the effects is that my kitchen knives have not been treated well, and need a great deal of care. Fortunately, I currently have the time to work on that, which is a luxury I do not take for granted. In fact, it relates to the expensiveness of poverty that we discussed the other day. Having a sharp knife is nice, and not everyone has the time to maintain them. Those with money can outsource that chore, but a lot of other folks just have to deal with dull knives, especially if they forget that there’s one sitting in water sometimes.

I also have another edged instrument that really needs some work, though I’ve kept it in much better condition. you see, while you were wasting your time with Gillette and other such disposable grooming instruments, I was studying the blade. Specifically I decided to buy a straight razor, over a decade ago, and learn how to use it.

The image is of a Dovo straight razor on a whetstone. It has a silver-steel blade (high carbon, no actual silver) and a little bit of gold plating ornamentation. The scales (the two pieces of wood forming the handle) are ebony. A little tarnish is visible in the hollow of the blade.

I’m not sure how much money I’ve saved, but given the price of Gillette blades when I stopped using them, I think it’s been at least a couple hundred dollars. This razor, if I take care of it, will keep working for the rest of my life, or close to it, but I had to have a couple hundred dollars to invest in a good razor and a good strop, and I also went for a nice brush. It’s the Sam Vimes Boots Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness in action. I had the money and the time to buy this, and to learn how to use it.

I decided to work on it now, because after all this time, I also decided to buy another one, for a couple reasons. The first is just that alternating will make the edge last longer on both of them, and make both razors last longer. Hopefully I’ll get to will them to someone some day. The other reason is that it’s a bit hard to tell exactly how sharp my razor is. It works well enough, but I can feel that it’s dull, for a razor. The question is, how sharp is sharp enough?

There are tests, of course. The popular one is pulling out a beard hair, holding it by the base, and seeing if you can cut it just by applying pressure. If the razor’s too dull, it’ll just bend the hair over. But it’s also been a decade since I’ve shaved with a really sharp razor, and I’d really like something to compare to.

There’s also a luxury in having the time to rely on a razor like this. I’ve absolutely cut myself, especially when shaving around the ears, and rushing is generally not a good idea. It’s part of why I didn’t exactly fight to keep shaving my face when Tegan said she preferred a full beard – I had committed to something that was cheaper and more environmentally friendly in the long run, but a great deal more work.

I’m looking forward to the new razor – I don’t indulge in new stuff very often – and I very much want a world where everyone has the resources to save money like this if they want to.

I saved for a bit to buy the new razor, so I feel like I can afford it, but if you want me to feel even better about it, you can join my small but wonderful group of patrons. I don’t have a lot of benefits right at this moment, but I’m working on changing that.

Ben Shapiro doesn’t care about anti-Semitism.

Ben Shapiro doesn’t care about anti-Semitism

I know. Shocking. Who would have thought it?

Ben Shapiro has a history of performative outrage over “anti-Semitic” ideas like disagreeing with the far-right, genocidal policies of the Israeli government, or acknowledging that Israel has a big lobbying presence in the United States. He also has a history of ignoring or excusing actual anti-Semitism, like Trump’s conflation of all Jewish people and the nation of Israel or, more recently Joe Rogan’s claim that, and I quote, “”The idea that Jewish people aren’t into money is ridiculous. It’s like saying Italians aren’t into pizza!”

I hope nobody reading these needs this explanation, but the idea that Jews are greedy is a very old stereotype that has been used for literal centuries to encourage hatred and distrust of Jewish people. Claiming that money is a part of Jewish culture the way Pizza is a part of Italian culture? Fucking hell, that’s like Ye West saying he thinks learning about Hannukah comes with “financial engineering”. In case it wasn’t clear, money is a part of most cultures I’ve heard of, and comments about Jews being “into money” are a bit rich, coming from a guy who got paid $200 million for his bigoted, reactionary podcast. Still, at least Shapiro condemned Ye’s antisemitism, and scolded Candace Owens for defending him. I know Rogan didn’t say that he loves Hitler, but surely Ben Shapiro would be upset by this, right?

Well, sort of.

See, Shapiro was bothered by it. If he wasn’t, why would have have had a private conversation with Rogan about it? But while Ilhan Omar, who did not say the same thing Rogan did, was worthy of condemnation even after she clarified her meaning and publicly apologized, Rogan was just misunderstood, and he gets a pass.

So, I think jokes are different than than, you know, actual honest observations. I did talk with Joe a little bit about this yesterday, and he was saying what I sort of suggested he was saying yesterday, which is everybody likes money and Jews are good with it. And, you know, again, that is a very different thing than, I think, how it came out on the air when Joe was talking about it.

I will say that there is a difference between making stereotypical comments and having a stereotypical worldview. When you talk about full damaging racism or antisemitism, it is actions that are tied to a full scale worldview that are truly damaging. Now, there can be prominent people who say things that then tie into that worldview or give credence to that worldview unintentionally by saying things. And that’s a problem. But the bigger problem is the worldview itself.

So, to take an example, if you make a stereotypical comment about Black people in a joke to a friend, is that good? No, it’s not good. It’s ugly and it’s bad and shouldn’t do it. Does that make you a racist for the rest of your life? No. It means you did a bad thing. It means you said a bad, racist thing. Does it mean that you even buy into a full scale racist world? No. And I think we’ve lost all nuance in this discussion. It’s true with antisemitism too. If somebody makes a Jewish joke, is that the same thing as somebody buying into a broad scale program with regard to Jewish conspiracy theory?

The reason why people’s radar went up when Joe said that is because when you say Jews love money, this does tie into a broader actual worldview about Jews, which is Jews are greedy and Jews are terrible, and they use their greed and horror in order to control world finance. And because they use their greed and horror to control world finance, they’re victimizing surrounding groups. This is, sort of, left-wing view of what Jews are – Jews are evil capitalist, predatory threats who are disproportionately successful because Jews are bad. Right, so, when you say things like Jews love money, it ties into that in one area. It can also tie into old-style religious antisemitism – the whole idea that Jews would sell out Jesus for 30 pieces of silver or stuff like that. You can see how it would tie into broader antisemitic worldviews. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that your comment was meant that way or that it does tie into that.

And I don’t think that the best way to fight racism or antisemitism is to fight these specific comments all the time. Or – you can mention them, you can point out that they’re bad and wrong. But to waste all of your ammo on that, as opposed to the broader worldview I think is a serious problem. It’s the broader worldview that needs to tumble down because that broader worldview sometimes allies itself with fellow travelers who believe things like capitalism is indeed bad, disproportionately successful people are bad and greedy, and that crosses streams of the antisemitic conspiracy theory that I suggested before. And now you have a real antisemitic movement. That’s really dangerous.

He didn’t mean it like that, guys. He just meant to say that Jews are good with money. Nothing wrong with that, right?

So yeah. Ben Shapiro doesn’t actually care about anti-Semitism. Huge, I know. Talking about conservative hypocrisy feels like beating a dead horse, but unfortunately this particular horse won’t stay dead. Hell, Shapiro even coined the term “JINO” – Jew In Name Only – to apparently distinguish between “good” Jews and “bad” Jews. It seems that how strongly he objects to anti-Semitic remarks depends on how friendly the person in question is to his cause (Rogan is pretty conservative on a lot of stuff), and how powerful the person is (Rogan is the biggest podcast host in the world, whereas Candace Owens works for Shapiro). The only principle to which he holds true, is his love of the hierarchy maintained by capitalism.

Biodiversity assessment shows 40% of U.S. ecosystems in danger of collapse.

I’ve mentioned in the past that I spent a couple years working as a field ecologist for the Wisconsin DNR. Most of what I did was catch snakes all over the southern half of the state (as part of a team), measure them, take metadata, and release them. For the garter snakes, we took DNA samples, and noted which subspecies they were. The purpose of this research wasn’t to discover anything new, so much as to assess the status of the garter snake population in that state. It was a fun job, I got to see a lot of the Wisconsin landscape, and it was neat to know that we were part of a larger effort. Not just in every state, but in pretty much every country, there are people doing the slow, daily work of counting organisms.

This is how the scientific community builds a picture, in data, of what’s happening in the world around us. It’s basically an ongoing physical check-up for the biosphere as a whole. Instead of checking temperature, heart rate, blood pressure, and all that jazz, we check snake levels, and tree count, and do bug inventories. I’ve taken part in a few studies like this on different reptile species, and been peripheral to similar work on plants, birds, and insects. I sometimes run into people who’re incredulous that scientists can claim to know that a species is in decline, or that an ecosystem is falling apart, and I think it’s because they don’t realize that we really do have people whose job it is to go out into the middle of nowhere and just… count everything.

I think it’s rare that a study will literally count every tree in a forest, but they absolutely will get a representative sample. Designate strips of forest a couple meters wide and a few dozen meters long, and count every plant in that strip. Do it a hundred more times in different parts of the forest, and you get data that lets you form a sort of impressionist image of the forest’s health. Do it year after year, at consistent times of year, and you can see how things are changing. Unfortunately, the result of all that work is that we know that 40% of ecosystems in the United States are in danger of collapse.

“This grim assessment adds to the mountain of science showing that we’re creating an extinction crisis,” said Tierra Curry, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity. “It’s suicidal of us to pretend that business as usual is more important than safeguarding the natural world we all depend on.”

The study is the most comprehensive to date on the status of U.S. ecosystems. It found that 51% of grasslands and 40% of forests and wetlands are at risk of range-wide collapse. Only 12% of U.S. lands are currently protected.

“Grassland loss is the biggest U.S. environmental disaster that gets the least attention,” said Curry. “Conversion of grasslands to suburban sprawl and pesticide-intensive agriculture is a primary reason we’ve lost 3 billion birds and why we could lose monarch butterflies and vital pollinators.”

Among animals, the evaluation found that freshwater species such as mollusks, crayfish and amphibians are the most threatened groups because of water pollution and dams. Insects like butterflies, bees and dragonflies are also highly imperiled, with 37% of U.S. bee species facing extinction.

For plants, nearly half of cactus species are vulnerable, making them the most jeopardized plant group. Around 30% of ferns and orchids are at risk, as are 20% of tree species.

“By taking nature for granted we’ve pushed natural systems to the brink of collapse,” said Curry. “We’ve been so neglectful for so long, but we can create a different world that doesn’t exploit nature and vulnerable human communities for never-ending sprawl and consumption.”

It’s not fair to say that nothing is being done, but as with climate change, if enough was being done, then we wouldn’t be at this point.

I think it’s worth discussing what “collapse” means, when it comes to ecosystems. It doesn’t mean that a blight falls upon the land, and everything dies, leaving only withered desert behind. I mean, that can happen, but even when it does, it’s not “the end”, but rather a shift to a new kind of ecosystem. The report itself describes collapse as involving

[…]a transformation of identity, loss of defining features, and/or replacement by a novel ecosystem. It occurs when all ecosystem occurrences lose defining biotic or abiotic features, and when when native biota are no longer sustained.

It might well be the end of the world for species dependent on the old ecosystem, but it’s both more complicated, and less final than what you might see in fiction. The problem is that a change like that can absolutely devastate connected human populations.

We’re worried about ecosystem collapse not just because we mourn the species lost, though I think we should do that, but also because we depend on those ecosystems, often in ways that most of us don’t even notice. I’ve talked before about ecosystem services – the myriad of ways in which natural ecosystems support all of humanity – and while the shift to a different ecosystem won’t necessarily remove all of those benefits, the loss in biodiversity will reduce them. During COVID, we’ve seen how our just-in-time supply chain fails in a crisis, and there’s no reason to think that that weakness is limited to our medical and medical supply systems.

As Dr. Curry says, trying to continue business as usual would be suicide for humanity. Well, most of it would be murder, since most of humanity has had little to no say in the course of events over the last couple centuries. The upside of this report is that “in danger” does not mean “doomed”. We’re on course to “doomed”, but we have the means and understanding to change course, if only we can disempower those working to prevent us from doing so.

If you want to get involved in this kind of work, look for “community science” or “citizen science” happening near you. Local nature centers or university biology departments are likely to have information. If you want to get involved in counteracting this, then look into stuff like pollinator gardens, seed bombing, and community groups that do trash pickup and tree planting and the like. The unfortunate reality is that our institutions have failed us, and are continuing to fail us. It may be that through organizing and hard work we can gain control of those institutions, but until then, doing what we can, where we can, with whom we can, can only lead us in the right direction.

 

Advocacy Groups Present Path to End Prison Profiteering

The law enforcement system of the United State is breathtakingly corrupt, cruel, and unjust. This is not a new claim, either in general, or on this blog. I personally want to work towards prison and police abolition. Many “offenses”, like drug use, don’t need to be offenses, and simply decriminalizing them would go a long way to reduce the “need” for a lot of our policing and prisons. Likewise, guaranteeing food, shelter, and health care would remove most crimes of necessity. Someone’s not going to steal coats or televisions to re-sell to avoid eviction if there’s no danger of being evicted. Someone’s not going to start making meth to pay for cancer treatment if there’s no requirement to pay. Sadly, while I’m sure many would say “that sounds nice in theory”, fewer are willing to actually work towards that, particularly within the halls of power. The enraging reality is that locking up and enslaving people makes a number of capitalists very wealthy at taxpayer expense, and at the cost of immeasurable suffering.

That’s why, while I support the effort to remove the profit motive from the USian so-called Justice System, I’m worried that those with the power to change things actively oppose that change. I know that Biden has made some noise about it, but he also played a major role in creating this problem in the first place, so forgive me if I doubt his intentions. Whether or not I turn out to be right, it’s important to make the case that doing it is possible. It can build the case for change, and if that change doesn’t happen, it can support the case for more radical action, in the face of a corrupt government that doesn’t represent the will of the people. All that being said, I’m glad to hear that a couple advocacy groups have released a “blueprint” for ending the use of private prisons in the United States:

To end the era in which prisons have become what Worth Rises executive director Bianca Tylek called “a business—one that is threatening our families, communities, and public safety,” the Biden administration must dismantle an industry that “has worked itself into every corner of the carceral system as incarceration has exploded over the past 40 years,” said the group.

“This is a pathway forward to a more just criminal legal system that does NOT put profits over people,” tweeted Color of Change.

The recommendations in the groups’ policy blueprint, Bearing the Cost, include:

  • Prohibiting for-profit healthcare in prisons, providing medications and hygiene products at no cost, and requiring better reporting on medical care;
  • Setting basic standards for food and commissary goods and preventing bundling of the services;
  • Making communication free and accessible and strengthening antitrust oversight;
  • Eliminating fees for money transfers and debit release cards and directing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to strengthen regulations for financial services for incarcerated people;
  • Conducting a comprehensive review of electronic monitoring of incarcerated people nationwide; and
  • Supporting the Abolition Amendment to end the use of unpaid labor in prisons.

“Over the last 40 years, the carceral system has grown into a vast network of corporations that use public-private partnerships to profit from the incarceration of our grandparents, parents, siblings, children, and other loved ones,” said Tylek. “They have created a carceral crisis and collected the windfalls on the taxpayers’ dime while the rest of us suffered. This policy blueprint provides the clearest roadmap for fulfilling the promise of justice that the Biden-Harris administration made and many expect it to meet.”

The blueprint was released a month after Biden signed the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act of 2022 to empower federal regulators to ensure that charges for calls from correctional and detention facilities are “just and reasonable.” Currently, incarcerated people are charged as much as $9.99 for a cellphone call and $5.70 for a 15-minute landline call.

See, that last bit worries me – I don’t think there should be any charges for prisoners to talk to their families. Locking someone up, and then charging them for contact with the outside world is neither just nor reasonable. It feels more like an effort to force them into debt, in a society that seems to make it harder to get out of debt every year. Aside from the fact that constant debt payments and extortionate interest rates funnel a lot of money upward from the working class, debt also acts as an additional burden on people, making them more desperate for any income they can get, and therefor more likely to accept low pay and bad conditions.

I’ll just have to hope that my cynicism is unwarranted. It sounds like the communications act mentioned above is a step in the right direction, even if it’s not a big one, so I’ll absolutely take that as a win. Dismantling an entrenched industry is another matter entirely, but I’d love to see the Democrats prove me wrong about them by taking on that fight.

Video: Ze Frank takes on slime molds

It feels like the more I work on this story, the more I realize that focusing on keeping the number of books down will make it worse overall. So I guess I’m gonna be another white dude with a very long fantasy series. Anyway, here’s Ze Frank with some True Facts about the slime mold: