Gardaí Look Away as Fascists Commit Arson

When the pandemic hit, there was a sort of pause on the independence marches and rallies that Tegan and I had joined in Glasgow. Through a combination of habit, introversion, ADHD, and some version of irritable bowel syndrome, I haven’t gone out a whole lot since then, and while I’ve been getting out a bit more in recent months, I’ve not gotten back into activism. I also haven’t put in the time and effort to learn about Irish politics. I was aware that there were fascists around, but it didn’t feel like the same kind of problem it was back in the US. In my first couple months here, I scraped off all the stickers they had put up on signposts around town, but they have yet to be replaced. I had also noticed the hashtag “Ireland is full” trending on Twitter pretty regularly, but I had also seen one guy claiming credit for that, and outlining how he went about using bots and the like. Add in my effort to make a living through writing (I’d love to see more small donations at my Patreon), and it was easy to become a bit complacent.

Well, now I’m paying attention. and working to catch up.

Last night, a bunch of right-wing extremists held a hate rally against maybe a couple dozen asylum seekers who, lacking real housing, had set up an encampment near the relevant government office. After counterprotesters left, the Gardaí, Ireland’s national police force, apparently wandered off while the encampment was set on fire. The residents had been evacuated earlier, because of the danger, so as far as I can find out, nobody was hurt in the fire.

There are a number of refugees in Dublin from Ukraine and elsewhere, waiting on their asylum applications, and while some are in hotels, a sizable number are not, and have joined the city’s population of unhoused people. They’re being used as scapegoats by the far right, as usual, who blame them for crime, and a shortage of homes and jobs in Ireland. These are all real problems, of course, but with a number of vacant buildings around Dublin, including apartments, it’s not the immigrants causing the problem – it’s a system that values profit over human life.

That perspective isn’t encouraged by capitalists, of course, and it’s downright repugnant to people on the far right, so they lie, preach hate, and attack those with the least power to fight back. From the day before yesterday:

Asylum seekers living in a makeshift Dublin city campsite are ‘afraid for their lives’ after several violent attacks.

Video footage emerged on social media this week showing a violent scuffle at a shanty town housing International Protection applicants, which has appeared in the capital in recent weeks.

And last night the Garda Public Order Unit, along with dozens of gardaí, attended the scene of another protest at the site.

They stood between a group of anti-refugee demonstrators and counter-protesters who chanted ‘refugees are welcome here’.

The stand-off continued for around 90 minutes before gardaí escorted one group away.

Despite the strong garda presence at Sandwith Street last night, a spokesman for the force said: ‘We have no reports of any incidents from this location.’

The incident comes after people living in the makeshift camp, and volunteers at the Sandwith Street site, were on high alert yesterday afternoon following a confrontation between the residents and anti-asylum protesters on Thursday.

One of the residents was struck in the face and sustained bodily injuries after being hit with part of a metal fence.

The camp has been targeted numerous times in recent days, and more protests are expected later today.

At around lunchtime yesterday afternoon, a small number of men and women confronted the inhabitants yet again.

One homeless man from Bolivia said that he arrived at the camp earlier on Friday.

However, the 31-year-old man, named Jhonnes Dante Valverde, admitted being very nervous about being targeted by protesters.

‘I don’t understand why so many people want to attack us,’ he said. ‘All we’re trying to do is build a community for protection because we have nowhere else to go. We’re not bothering anyone and yet there are people who want to force us out.

‘Yes we’re afraid for our safety and even our lives, but my only priority now is to take everything day by day.

‘It’s very hard because I’ve sent nearly 70 CVs all around the city and haven’t got any answer,’ he said.

One volunteer who did not want to be named believes the asylum seekers’ safety is at ‘a huge risk’.

‘They’ve already injured one man here, but if they stormed the place, no one would have a chance.

The image shows Bolivian asylum-seeker Jesus Benitez-Gamez, standing near one end of the encampment. It's a dead-end alley, lined with abandoned buildings. On each side, makeshift shelters have been set up, along with furniture. At the far end, there's a blue tend standing by a fence. From Extra.ie: Jesus Benitez Gamez, an asylum seeker also from Bolivia, said he's more concerned for his child's safety than his own. Pic: Michael Chester

The image shows Bolivian asylum-seeker Jesus Benitez-Gamez, standing near one end of the encampment. It’s a dead-end alley, lined with abandoned buildings. On each side, makeshift shelters have been set up, along with furniture. At the far end, there’s a blue tend standing by a fence. From Extra.ie: Jesus Benitez Gamez, an asylum seeker also from Bolivia, said he’s more concerned for his child’s safety than his own. Pic: Michael Chester

As you can see, it’s a pretty tidy setup, and very clearly out of the way, and not causing any problems. As quoted above, they’re forming a community for the same reason as most homeless people – they’re subject to violence and harassment, and there is safety in numbers. Hell, it’s the same reason all of us form communities – because life is better working together, than trying to go it alone.

None of that matters to fascists, of course, so last night, they held another rally. There were anti-fascist activists there, using their bodies as a barricade between the fascist mob and the asylum seekers, but they were severely outnumbered, and not being allowed to leave. It appears, based on tweets from one of the mob’s leaders, that the Gardaí may have agreed with the mob that if they let the antifascists (and presumably any refugees with them) leave, they’d look the other way while the fascists “removed the tents”

The image is a tweet by one Gavin Pep (@PepGavin) that reads, "Credit to the gaurds they asked us if we got the people to let the anbtifa crowd go home they would let the lads down the lane to remove the tents true to there word they do a good job in an awkward situation caused by the government #MakeIrelandSafeAgain #irelandisfull. Underneath is a reply from "Joanne/@summerblu" saying, "In reality the guards are sick of the illegals aswell" Spelling mistakes included for accuracy.

The image is a tweet by one Gavin Pepper (@PepGavin) that reads, “Credit to the gaurds they asked us if we got the people to let the anbtifa crowd go home they would let the lads down the lane to remove the tents true to there word they do a good job in an awkward situation caused by the government #MakeIrelandSafeAgain #irelandisfull. Underneath is a reply from “Joanne/@summerblu” saying, “In reality the guards are sick of the illegals aswell” Spelling mistakes included for accuracy.

I think it’s worth mentioning, for those who don’t know, that Ireland’s population hasn’t yet recovered from the Great Famine, so we know for a fact that there is room for more people than currently live here. There may well be a housing shortage, beyond the artificial one caused by greedy landlords, but there is zero question that the housing situation is solvable. I don’t know enough about recent Irish politics and history to say what’s going on for certain, but this problem certainly feels familiar to what I’ve written about back in the US.

So, the refugees and the counterprotesters left, and the cops apparently left as well. As a result, these peoples homes and belongings were burned by a fascist mob, apparently with permission from law enforcement:

For those who can’t see it, the tweet contains a video showing the same dead-end alley as in the picture above, with the tents and furniture all in flames.

From what I can tell, the Gardaí were there or nearby, when the fire was started, and multiple people reported the arson attack, and were apparently ignored. What’s more, the fascists held another march today, celebrating the attack from last night:

As I said before, there is a real problem here, and the one thing Gavin got right is that the government is to blame for its continued existence, as well as the larger problem of homelessness. Poverty is a policy choice, and in capitalist countries, it’s almost always maintained for the benefit of those who exploit others for profit. The fascists have no solutions, and at least for the leaders, they want no solutions. If every immigrant left Ireland tomorrow, they’d find new scapegoats, like non-white Irish citizens, or Travelers.

The reason the far right is able to gain so much ground, is that liberal governments also don’t have a solution to these problems, because they’re too wedded to capitalism to actually solve the problem, and so it continues, and other problems like fascism feed on it and grow.

Until June, I’m still primarily focused on the novel, but I’m paying more attention to what’s going on around me, now, and I’ll be writing more about this.

The Birds are Shrinking!

When I was getting my biology degree, I was very much focused on ecology. Life on this planet is a complex, shimmering web of interaction and interdependency; pluck one strand, and the whole world vibrates. As organisms, we all affect both each other, and also the abiotic world around us. Some species, like humans, have bigger effects than others, but the reality is that you cannot study one organism without, at least in part, accounting for the others that live around it.

Later, when I was working as a curriculum developer, I wrote climate science lessons that viewed the issue through an ecological lens. See, while there was still mainstream “debate” over whether the planet was warming, wildlife around the globe was already actively responding to changes that a lot of people either didn’t notice, or were able to dismiss in their own minds. By focusing on ecosystems, we were able to show, over a decade ago, that the planet was warming, and that the effects of that warming were already measurable in the wildlife around us. I still think it was a good project, but the US public education system has little room to try new things, and is utterly clogged with testing. Add to that the difficulty in getting funds for this sort of work, and it’s hard not to feel like we were doomed from the start. That perspective on climate change, however, is still useful.

At the time, a lot of the research we were looking at related to changes in migration timing, ecological mismatch, and species range shifts. More recently, scientists have been tracking changes in body size and shape, driven by the warming of our planet. The latest example is a study showing that birds, at least in the Americas, are getting smaller, with longer wings:

The study combines data from two previously published papers that measured body-size and wing-length changes in a total of more than 86,000 bird specimens over four decades in North and South America. One study examined migrating birds killed after colliding with buildings in Chicago; the other looked at nonmigrating birds netted in the Amazon.

Though the two datasets are nonoverlapping in both species composition and geography, and the data were collected independently using different methods, the birds in both studies displayed similarly widespread declines in body size with concurrent increases in wing length.

Now, a new analysis of the combined data has revealed an even more striking pattern: In both studies, smaller bird species declined proportionately faster in body size and increased proportionately faster in wing length.

“The relationships between body size and rates of change are remarkably consistent across both datasets. However, the biological mechanism underlying the observed link between body size and rates of morphological change requires further investigation,” said U-M ornithologist Benjamin Winger, one of the study’s two senior authors, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, and an assistant curator at the Museum of Zoology.

Both the Chicago and Amazonian studies attributed the reductions in species body size to increasing temperatures over the past 40 years, suggesting that body size may be an important determinant of species responses to climate change.

Birds hitting buildings is actually a serious problem, with around one billion killed every year in the US alone. It’s also helpful for science. I worked in a natural history museum in college, and part of my job was turning dead animals into study specimens. This was not taxidermy – that’s a whole art form in itself, and if I attempted it, my work would probably end up on Bad Taxidermy. No, what I did was skin them carefully (mostly birds), treat the skin, and stuff it with cotton wrapped around a wooden dowel, creating a sort of a preserved bird on a stick. These specimens are kept in drawers, so that they can be studied, and most of them came from people bringing in roadkill or window-killed birds. Natural history museums basically have libraries of dead plants and animals, along with data about them, that allow us to study the past, and compare it to what’s going on now. It’d be best if we could cut down on the death, but in the mean time, we might as well learn from it, right? I don’t miss the smells, though.

Getting back to the point of this post, the researchers also discussed the implications of the faster change in smaller birds:

It could be that smaller-bodied birds are adapting more quickly to evolutionary pressures. But the available data did not allow the U-M-led team to test whether the observed size shifts represent rapid evolutionary changes in response to natural selection.

“If natural selection plays a role in the patterns we observed, our results suggest that smaller bird species might be evolving faster because they experience stronger selection, are more responsive to selection, or both,” said co-senior author Brian Weeks, an evolutionary ecologist at the U-M School for Environment and Sustainability.

“Either way, body size appears to be a primary mediator of birds’ responses to contemporary climate change.”

So, if larger-bodied birds are responding more slowly to global change, what’s the prognosis for the coming decades, as temperatures continue to climb?

“Our results suggest that large body size could further exacerbate extinction risk by limiting the potential to adapt to rapid, ongoing anthropogenic change,” said study lead author Marketa Zimova, a former U-M Institute for Global Change Biology postdoctoral researcher now at Appalachian State University.

“In contrast, the body-size effect on evolutionary rates might increase persistence of small taxa if their rapidly changing morphology reflects a faster adaptive response to changing conditions.”

It’s important to remember the broader context in which this is happening. Specifically, the fact that bird populations are declining dramatically. It’s kind of neat to see natural selection in action like this, but it’s important to remember that this isn’t birds “changing their body sizes”, it’s the death or decreased reproductive success of birds that, in this case, are too big, or have wings that are too short. What I said about squid and lizards last October applies here as well:

When the average limb length of a Caribbean anole population changes, that doesn’t mean that we’ve got the same number of lizards and they all just have different legs. It means all of the ones with different proportions died. If you lay tens of thousands of eggs at a time, like the squid, then your population can probably bounce back pretty quickly if a few of you adapt to changing conditions. For those of us who reproduce more slowly, a drop in population like that means that it will take that much less to kill off everyone that remains.

If bird populations were stable as this change took place, then I don’t think there would be much cause for concern, but they’re not. They are adapting to climate change, but combined with habitat destruction, pollution, and pesticides, that may not be enough for many species. The world is changing around us, and every species on the planet is responding to it, ourselves included. Whether we are able to survive will depend on how quickly we adjust, and how much we do to slow down the warming. At the moment, it’s not looking good.

Thank you for reading! If you liked this post, please share it around. If you read this blog regularly, please consider joining my small but wonderful group of patrons. Because of my immigration status, I’m not allowed to get a normal job, so my writing is all I have for the foreseeable future, and I’d love for it to be a viable career long-term. As part of that goal, I’m currently working on a young adult fantasy series, so if supporting this blog isn’t enough inducement by itself, for just $5/month you can work with me to name a place or character in that series!

Video: Are Giraffes OP?

I’m focused on finishing the first draft of my current novel this month, so there’s a decent chance that I’ll have a few more days on which I end up not having much of a blog post. All of this is to say, I’m going to leave you with Tier Zoo, to explore the question of whether or not giraffes are overpowered.

Video: What Does It Mean To Be Indigenous?

If you care about the environment, or justice for the ongoing crimes of colonialism, you probably hear about the various Indigenous groups around the world, and how they tend to be on the front lines of the fight to stop the greed-fueled destruction of the only planet we’ve got. At one point or another, it may have occurred to you what “Indigenous” actually means – who counts as “Indigenous”, and who doesn’t? As Andrew Sage points out in the video below, while we can define a plant or animal as “indigenous” based on whether it was introduced to its habitat by humans, how does that work for us? We “introduced” ourselves to every habitat on the planet, except a small part of Africa, and it’s commonly accepted that there are Indigenous people on every continent, so what “counts”? Is it a matter of heredity? Of culture? Of lifestyle?

I don’t think there’s a clear answer, and even if there was, I’m not the person to propose it. Andrew approaches as a theory question, examining relationships with land and between people, history, and more. Check it out, and if you like his work, consider supporting him on Patreon.

Austin Police Association Demonstrates the Problem with Reform

A few days ago, voters in Austin Texas overwhelmingly decided that they wanted more civilian oversight of their police department. I’ve often heard Austin described as an oasis of progressiveness, and this vote seems to support that. Even in progressive cities, police still tend to operate with little to no meaningful accountability, and so a people in Austin set about trying to change that. As the movement supporting the change puts it:

Under Austin’s current oversight system, the police are responsible for investigating themselves. Prop A will ensure that investigations include civilians with fact-finding ability.

Prop A will ensure any future police contract contains strong oversight provisions to hold police accountable and deter misconduct like excessive force.

Prop A will ensure that accountability and oversight are required in every police contract, bringing stability and predictability to the oversight system and focusing bargaining on pay and benefits.

Court settlements related to police misconduct cost city taxpayers almost $20 million last year and millions more just last week. Prop A will reduce those costs by ensuring there is a strong deterrence for misconduct.

At the same time, the police proposed their own changes, and really managed to demonstrate how much they’re in tune with community concerns:

Prop B is Even Worse than What We Have Now.

  • It eliminates anonymous complaints. Currently anonymous complaints allow police officers and the public to report misconduct without fear of retaliation, and they are doing so.
  • The civilian oversight system will not have access to information about every incident or complaint, and will not be able to actively participate in classifying or investigating complaints.
  • It expands the felony prohibition on membership on the oversight panel to include people with certain misdemeanors as well.
  • The only way the city will be able to strengthen oversight will be through the police contract and with agreement by the police union, a system that has failed residents for decades now.
  • In testimony FOR legislation to block all civilian oversight systems in Texas from unfettered access to information about incidents, APA President Thomas Villareal said, in no uncertain terms, that civilians should have no role in oversight of police.

Still, the voters spoke overwhelmingly, with 79% of voters supporting Prop A, and 80% of voters opposing prop B. That means that, according to law, Austin will now have greater civilian oversight of police, and greater accountability when it comes to police misconduct. In response, the Austin Police Association has demonstrated why cops aren’t workers, and cop unions are in direct conflict with the interests of the working class. See, a union protects its workers against abuse and overreach by bosses, but in the case of a police union, they’re protecting the police from us. Police unions work to ensure that, as enforcers of the rich and powerful, they are not accountable to the peasantry. With that as context, what do you think the APA had to say about this change in law?

The Austin Police Association is aware of the election results and is taking immediate action to determine the city’s intentions regarding the implementation and enforcement of the illegal provisions contained in Prop A. The APA simply will not stand by while this city and anti-police activists operate with blatant disregard for state law and the rights and protections afforded to our hardworking men and women. The APA continues to prioritize negotiating a long-term contract; however, we will not be forced back to the table under a structure in which a new city ordinance attempts to unlawfully interfere with the statutory rights associated with the meet and confer process. We look forward to finding these answers so that we can get back under a long-term contract that allows for our police department to recruit hire and retain the best and brightest people who wish to serve this community in a law enforcement capacity.

Get it? Law and order means that the cops are the law, and we follow their orders. If we try to reign them in, our authority is, by that very action, illegitimate. They pretend to care about the rules that nominally govern society, but when they lose, that pretense evaporates.

This is why police reform doesn’t work – because the police actively work against it every step of the way, and like it or not, our society gives them a huge amount of power and deference. To take another example, requiring officers to wear body cameras doesn’t really do any good if they keep turning them off or hiding footage when they don’t want a record of what they’re doing. These people are a problem for society, and it’s pretty clear that when it comes to democracy, they think they know better. We’ll see how their efforts to avoid oversight play out in the coming months, but even if they lose every legal battle they pick, I fully expect cops to continue acting as if they are personifications of the law, rather than servants of it. They are a class of people set above the ordinary rabble, and they value that privilege and power more than anything. I’m willing to bet that for a great many of them, that power is what drew them to the profession in the first place, which makes them the worst possible people to have it.

Despite my pessimism, I do hope that Prop A is enforced, and that it makes a difference. Police are out of control in the US, and while I think that some of that is inherent to the nature of their job, abolishing them is going to be a long-term project. Anything that reduces the harm they cause in the short term has my support.

Dark Powers Resurrect Dead Argument, Demonstrate Need for Direct Action

Many years ago, when I was still fairly new at this whole climate blogging thing, I came across a fantastic website called Skeptical Science that had a list of all the arguments against the scientific consensus on man-made global warming, along with their rebuttals. I was also an avid consumer of Peter Sinclair’s work, and between those resources, and my old hobby of arguing with deniers on the internet, I ran into the claim that the planet hadn’t been warming in years – over a decade, in fact. Specifically, the claim was that global warming stopped in 1998.

This was, of course, a dishonest argument. 1998 was the ultimate cherry-pick, because of an unusually strong El Niño that caused ’98 to stand out from the broader trend. Because it was such an outlier, using it as a starting point allowed dishonest actors to draw a line showing an apparent temperature decline, by ignoring the years prior. From Climate.gov:

Did global warming stop in 1998?

No, but thanks to natural variability, volcanic eruptions, and relatively low solar activity, the rate of average global surface warming from 1998-2012 was slower than it had been for two to three decades leading up to it.

How much slower depends on the fine print: which global temperature dataset you look at, whether it includes the Arctic, and the exact time periods you compare. Regardless, the big picture of long-term global warming remained unchanged.

Global temperature trends by decade

(top) Based on NOAA data, global average surface temperature (orange line) has risen 0.13°F (0.07°C) per decade since 1880 (red line), which is nearly identical to the rate of warming during the 15-year period from 1998-2012 (gray line). (bottom) The rate of warming from 1998-2012 was slower than the two preceding 15-year periods, but faster than the two 15-year periods before that. NOAA Climate.gov graph, based on data from NCEI.

Those who deny the scientific evidence of human-caused global warming turned the slowdown into a slogan: “Global warming stopped in 1998.” In scientific journals and assessment reports, climate experts described the episode as a “pause” or “hiatus” in the previous decades’ rapid warming: they knew it wouldn’t last.

Not only was 1998-2012 the warmest 15-year period on record at the time, but greenhouse gases continued to climb to new record highs, and other climate indicators continued to show the impacts of long-term, global-scale warming: subsurface ocean heating, global sea level rise, the melting of glaciers and ice sheets, and record-low Arctic sea ice extent.

The argument was dead on arrival, but it was never meant to be truly alive. It was designed to spread doubt among people who didn’t know enough to spot the lie, and to support the beliefs of those already committed to denial. Understanding the intent of an argument like that is important, if you want to understand why, a decade later and a good bit warmer, some people are trying to bring it back to life:

For those who can't see it, this is a screenshot of a tweet by one John Shewchuck that reads:

For those who can’t see it, this is a screenshot of a tweet by one John Shewchuck that reads: “After over 1,000 queries via Twitter, Youtube comments, various blogs, and during my talks, every #ClimateScam alarmist completely avoids answering the question … Why are we in a 7-year cooling trend? They fear data – like a vampire fears the sun.” Followed by a graph showing Lower Tropospheric Global Temperature Anomalies from 2015 to 2022, with a trendline showing a very slight decline.

They don’t need real arguments, because the climate denial “movement” exists to support the interests of some of the most wealthy and unscrupulous people on the planet. On the one hand, I feel almost nostalgic. I was so much younger and more naïve when I first met this particular bullshit. On the other hand, it’s a testament to just how much power stands against real action on climate change. All they have to do is keep spending money, and the arguments they like will hang around forever, no many how many times they’ve been refuted. More than that, bought politicians will continue pretending that arguments like this have even a shred of merit. Still, this means I get to bring out one of my favorite gifs, at least from this particular debate:

The gif shows 7 previous "cooling periods", each one warmer than the last, between 1970 and 2020.

The gif shows 7 previous “cooling periods”, each one warmer than the last, between 1970 and 2020.

This is called The Escalator, and it shows very nicely how cherry-picked data sets can show a “cooling trend”, even in the midst of a rise in temperature that has climate scientists shitting their proverbial pants. The most recent iteration of this lie was debunked earlier this year, but I doubt you could convince Mr. Shewchuck of that. I particularly appreciated this tweet from climate scientists Zeke Hausfather:

The tweet reads:

The tweet reads: “While our emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases are driving long-term warming, natural variability in the form of El Nino and La Nina (ENSO) events can have a big impact on year-to-year changes. If we remove the effects of ENSO from the record, we see clearer warming:” Followed by a graph showing the Berkley Earth temperature record (blue), with a recent “pause” visible over the last few years, along with the temperature record with ENSO removed (orange) showing a more steady rise in temperature.

The thing is, I feel pretty comfortable saying that this “cooling trend” is about to reach its end, and we’re all going to be worse off because of that. The deniers will be worse off, of course, because it’ll kill their zombie talking point, and they’ll have to wait a bit before they can re-animate it and go back to insisting it’s alive and well. The rest of us will be worse off, because this whole global warming thing is getting to be a serious problem.

As I wrote a couple weeks ago, scientists have detected an anomalous spike in sea surface temperatures that seems to be separate from the coming El Niño. By itself, that would already herald an increase in extreme weather, and an increase in air temperature. Add in El Niño, and it seems likely that things could get pretty wild. More than that, there’s some concern that the temperature spike might indicate that a line has been crossed, with regard to the ocean’s ability to absorb heat. If that absorption is slowing down, or if some of that heat is returning to the atmosphere in a new way, then the rate of warming may be about to increase dramatically.

The problem with this “cooling trend” line is that even if it were sincere, it relies on a vague hope that there’s some causal factor, still undiscovered, that explains the apparent pause. Even were that the case, we’d still need to account for the known thermal properties of CO2 and other greenhouse gases, because as I’ve said before, it’s physically impossible to pour that stuff into the atmosphere without trapping more heat. It’d be like putting on a heavy winter coat, and expecting to cool off over time.

I’m posting this in part because it’s worth having more rebuttals out in the world. More that that, though I’m posting this to point out the way that the concentrated power of capital – the aristocrats at the top of big corporations – can keep arguments going forever, no matter how much evidence is provided to prove them wrong. We can work to debunk and persuade, but by itself, that will never be enough. If we want change, we have to make change. We have to organize, coordinate our actions, and bring and end to this greed-fueled rush to extinction.

Thank you for reading! If you liked this post, please share it around. If you read this blog regularly, please consider joining my small but wonderful group of patrons. Because of my immigration status, I’m not allowed to get a normal job, so my writing is all I have for the foreseeable future, and I’d love for it to be a viable career long-term. As part of that goal, I’m currently working on a young adult fantasy series, so if supporting this blog isn’t enough inducement by itself, for just $5/month you can work with me to name a place or character in that series!

Solidarity Sunday: Support the WGA Strike

I’m sure most of you have heard of this, but the Writers’ Guild of America has been on strike recently. The reason for the strike is pretty simple – revenue from TV shows and movies used to come primarily from advertising, and each time a property aired, a fraction of that ad revenue went to the people involved in its production. Now, revenue comes through subscription services, and the people involved in the production – like writers – don’t get anything from repeat views. Basically, they went from being financially rewarded for writing a popular show, to getting nothing beyond their initial payment, while profits skyrocket.

Basically, capitalism innovated a new way to not pay workers.

I support this strike, in case it needed to be said, so no matter how many Hollywood executives are begging me to write for them, I won’t be crossing the picket line. If you want to help out in a more material way, and you have the resources, here are a couple places to which you can donate help keep the WGA supplied during their siege.

Show solidarity to build solidarity – if the WGA wins this, its members will be better equipped to help other unions with their own efforts, and the closer we will be to being able to get the revolutionary change we so desperately need.

How “AI” Technology Can Dramatically Increase Research Speed

While I’m still a bit leery of the art, I think my real problem with most of the stuff we’re calling “AI” is the context in which it exists, same as with other forms of automation. There’s also a reasonable concern about the energy requirements of this technology, but today we’re going to look at one of the was in which it could be a huge benefit to all of us.

The development of computing machines in the 20th century made a lot of things possible, including new avenues and scales of research. The climate models that have, despite what you may have heard, done a surprisingly good job at projecting future warming, needed the capabilities of computers. Like its predecessors, this new AI technology opens up new approaches to research that were previously off the table.

An artificial intelligence system enables robots to conduct autonomous scientific experiments—as many as 10,000 per day—potentially driving a drastic leap forward in the pace of discovery in areas from medicine to agriculture to environmental science.

Reported today in Nature Microbiology, the team was led by a professor now at the University of Michigan.

That artificial intelligence platform, dubbed BacterAI, mapped the metabolism of two microbes associated with oral health—with no baseline information to start with. Bacteria consume some combination of the 20 amino acids needed to support life, but each species requires specific nutrients to grow. The U-M team wanted to know what amino acids are needed by the beneficial microbes in our mouths so they can promote their growth.

“We know almost nothing about most of the bacteria that influence our health. Understanding how bacteria grow is the first step toward reengineering our microbiome,” said Paul Jensen, U-M assistant professor of biomedical engineering who was at the University of Illinois when the project started.

Figuring out the combination of amino acids that bacteria like is tricky, however. Those 20 amino acids yield more than a million possible combinations, just based on whether each amino acid is present or not. Yet BacterAI was able to discover the amino acid requirements for the growth of both Streptococcus gordonii and Streptococcus sanguinis.

To find the right formula for each species, BacterAI tested hundreds of combinations of amino acids per day, honing its focus and changing combinations each morning based on the previous day’s results. Within nine days, it was producing accurate predictions 90% of the time.

Unlike conventional approaches that feed labeled data sets into a machine-learning model, BacterAI creates its own data set through a series of experiments. By analyzing the results of previous trials, it comes up with predictions of what new experiments might give it the most information. As a result, it figured out most of the rules for feeding bacteria with fewer than 4,000 experiments.

“When a child learns to walk, they don’t just watch adults walk and then say ‘Ok, I got it,’ stand up, and start walking. They fumble around and do some trial and error first,” Jensen said.

“We wanted our AI agent to take steps and fall down, to come up with its own ideas and make mistakes. Every day, it gets a little better, a little smarter.”

Little to no research has been conducted on roughly 90% of bacteria, and the amount of time and resources needed to learn even basic scientific information about them using conventional methods is daunting. Automated experimentation can drastically speed up these discoveries. The team ran up to 10,000 experiments in a single day.

This is the kind of thing that could, at least in theory, lead to the rapid development of new antibiotics – something we definitely need. I think the odds are good that even without using robots to do experiments, this technology could accelerate a great many fields of research. I’m not looking for some kind of magical tech “solution” to climate change or pollution, but there’s a real possibility that advances due to this tech could enable us to survive conditions in the future, which would destroy us in the present.

Of course, that all depends on who gets to decide what kind of research is prioritized, and what is sidelined. Our technology may give us the ability to do marvelous things, but it will never fix the injustice, inequality, and suffering that are a deliberate outcome of our current political and economic system. Technology won’t ever remove the need for revolution, all it will do is change the landscape in which we fight.