Link and Comments: Personal Liberty and Seat Belts

Posted on Saturday 25 July 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

As I was saying: Washington Post: How mask fights echo seat belt fights: ‘The right to be splattered all over their windshields’

As transportation secretary in the Reagan administration, Elizabeth Dole pushed for mandatory seat belt laws. The idea created angry divisions among the public as some Americans said their rights were being infringed. Stephen Teret, a public health expert at Johns Hopkins University, recalls the era.

“We are a country that very, very much values personal freedoms,” Teret said. “And there are always some people who see their personal freedoms as being more important than the common good. And that’s the fight public health has always had.”

Dole appeals to college students:

Lecturing to a college classroom, Dole says, “How many of you think it’s important to buckle your safety belt every time you get into a car?”

Not everyone raises their hands.

“Do you know that every 10 minutes someone is a killed in car accident?” she asks. “Do you know that every 10 seconds someone is injured?”

The students look startled.

Dole wasn’t finished.

“Do you know that each of you in this classroom can expect to be in a car crash at least once in your lifetime?” she says.

Then the camera zooms in on her face.

“Now,” she says, “is there anyone here who doesn’t think it’s important to buckle up every time you get into a car?”

But this misses part of the point. Sure, you’re free to jump off a bridge if you like, or drive over a cliff, with or without a seatbelt; but car safety, like pandemic protection, is a matter of social responsibility. In the case of seat belts, the more people who die in car crashes not having worn seat belts raises the insurance premiums of everyone, even those who did wear them; the responsible people pay a price for the selfishness of the irresponsible people. Just as people who don’t wear masks because PERSONAL LIBERTY could well be spreading the virus and infecting other people. The anti-mask zealots don’t seem to understand that — or more likely, don’t care.

And from direct and indirect experience: cars of the 1940s and ’50s were deathtraps. If your car went off the road and flipped over, you were gone. This is common in movies of the era, and I saw it in a newspaper clip in a scrapbook of my grandmother’s, about some incident in the ’50s, in which some enormous car of that era (something like a 1956 Buick perhaps, https://www.google.com/search?q=1956+buick), had run off the road and flipped over, and killed three of her cousins.

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Link and Comments: Federal Deficits and Pandemic Relief

Posted on Thursday 23 July 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

One of the themes of my blog here is that reality is complex. While many if not most people (especially conservatives) cling to simple, black and white, alternatives to every issue, and think the right answer is always white, the truth is almost always gray, sometimes circumstantial.

Thus the H.L. Mencken quote: “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

Today’s example comes from an op-ed by New York Times technology columnist Farhad Manjoo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farhad_Manjoo) who contributes both to NYT and NPR (and who lives in the Bay Area, I think, but can’t find a confirming source at the moment).

Today’s essay: America Looks Hopelessly Broke. It Isn’t. Subtitle: “For 40 years, both the left and the right have been unnecessarily obsessed with deficits, to the detriment of the well-being of citizens.”

Print title: “How to Fix America: Spend, Spend, Spend”

This sounds intuitively suspect, because Republicans are always worrying about the federal deficit, when it comes to social services and pandemic relief, except when they’re not, when it comes to cutting taxes for the wealthy or to expanding the military budget. (These last two are always priorities of Republicans, no matter what the state of the economy or the world.)

The point, as Paul Krugman and others have made, is that the government is not like your household. The federal deficit is not like your mortgage and car loan. (Actually, the point there is that many households carry such debt for years, decades, and don’t consider it a moral failing, as Republicans feel about the federal deficit.)

This point dovetails with recent posts about the idea of Universal Basic Income, or the economic theories in that early Heinlein novel, which suggest that the government’s role in the economy is, literally, to simply print enough money to grease the economy, to keep it going, because the innovators and inventors keep creating new potential wealth. The idea that money should be tied to the gold standard, say, is a fantasy: it implies that cumulative wealth is fixed, a non-zero sum game. But that can’t be true, otherwise cumulative wealth would never have increased since we were all living in caves. OK, or all living as farmers and herders. But it does increase, and the government’s job is to facilitate the spread of that wealth throughout the economy. By literally printing money if necessary.

But let’s hear from Farhad Manjoo, who’s read a couple recent books, by Carter and Kelton:

And whenever anyone is brave enough to suggest that the government itself should provide useful services to Americans — whether big-ticket items like health care, child care and college education, or smaller things like an upgraded electric grid or a national broadband service — the first reaction from many on the right and the left is one of defeat and resignation. “How will you pay for it?” they ask. And, often, the whole conversation stops right there, because with a trillion national debt, America looks hopelessly broke.

It is not. Kelton argues that our government’s inability to provide for citizens isn’t due to a lack for money; instead, our leaders lack political will.

Kelton — who has worked as an economist for Democrats in the Senate and as an adviser to Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns — is one of the leading proponents of Modern Monetary Theory, or M.M.T. The theory argues that because the government is in charge of its own currency, it cannot “run out” of money the way a household or a business can, and it therefore does not need to raise taxes to fund government spending.

And

M.M.T. is controversial even among left-leaning economists — Lawrence H. Summers, who once worked as Barack Obama’s director of the National Economic Council, has called it “a recipe for disaster” — and it’s easy for non-economists to get lost in the many technical debates surrounding the idea.

But one doesn’t need to buy into everything about M.M.T. to see Kelton’s fundamental point — that in the 40 years since Ronald Reagan won the White House, both the left and the right have been unnecessarily obsessed with deficits, to the detriment of the well-being of citizens.

(I see here the text online has been revised form the version in print today!)

He follows up with a dig at Obama’s 2008 stimulus after the Great Recession—because he “lowballed” it; it wasn’t enough.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Culture, Economics | Comments Off on Link and Comments: Federal Deficits and Pandemic Relief

Skiffy Flix: Rocketship X-M

Posted on Thursday 23 July 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

Now the fun starts. Having dutifully watched the precursors of science fiction films in the mostly horror films of the 1930s and ‘40s (with just two SF films from before 1950, Metropolis from 1927 and Things to Come from 1936), I’m now beginning rewatches, or perhaps in a few cases first watches, of the principle science fiction films of the 1950s. There were half a dozen a more a year (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_science_fiction_films_of_the_1950s), more than a dozen in some years. (I don’t plan to watch them all; perhaps the best 2 or 3 from each year. Planned list here.) What triggered this eruption? No doubt studies have been done; offhand I’d speculate that the film industry took a few years to recover after the end of World War II, and with the use of rockets (the German V-2s) in that war, and speculation about using rockets to launch into space, ideas for Hollywood films emerged. Also, print science fiction anticipated these themes by decades, but at the end of the 1940s, and early ‘50s, stories and novels about building moon rockets became more plausible, and were more realistically depicted. (e.g. Heinlein’s “The Man Who Sold the Moon”; Clarke’s Prelude to Space, reviewed here, https://www.blackgate.com/2020/06/18/we-have-launch-arthur-c-clarkes-prelude-to-space/ )

But Hollywood has never been full of scientists or engineers who strive to depict space flight realistically; it is full of entertainers who seek audiences, and so who depict things in ways that are intended to be dramatic, that appeal to audience’s sense of adventure and danger, but that are scientifically illiterate, even nonsensical. (This is a consequence of most people being stuck at the first stage of my hierarchy of awareness, projecting intuitive, even infantile, notions of how the world works, into environments and on to scales where those notions don’t apply.)

And this is the reason I’m watching all these old movies—really, my primary motive. I’m fascinated to see exactly what ideas Hollywood producers, and unschooled scriptwriters, had about how spaceflight would work, or, if there’s a way to tell, what shortcuts and cheats they took, despite knowing better, to appeal to audience biases. (A typical one: how spaceship make swooshing or roaring sounds as they pass. I’m sure many people still don’t understand why this is nonsense, but anyone writing any kind of science fiction should.)

So here we are. My plan is to watch these 30 or so principle SF films from the 1950s in chronological order. There were just two in 1950. The big budget one was Destination: Moon, with a script by Robert A. Heinlein (based somewhat on the story mentioned above), but a lower-budget one was finished and released first, by a month. This was Rocketship X-M, released in May 1950.

The film was written, produced, and directed by one Kurt Neumann; it starred Lloyd Bridges and several others including Hugh O’Brien; it had a musical score by Ferde Grofe. Neumann did the 1958 film The Fly (the first version, with Vincent Price and David Hedison), but otherwise has had no enduring reputation. Ferde Grofe is still known as the composer of the “Grand Canyon Suite,” a piece I grew up listening to (and still hear occasionally on my local classical music FM station), but which today strikes me as 3rd rate Beethoven’s Pastoral. I found his music in this film simply noisy, or sappy; but standards and styles of music change, as I noted about the music in Things to Come. Of the actors, Lloyd Bridges was popular in the ‘60s in a TV series called Sea Hunt, and later featured in the 1980 parody film Airplane! – he was the one in the control room who, increasingly stressed, kept saying things like, “I sure picked the wrong time to give up smoking!” or “to give up crack cocaine!.” And so on.

To the film. In this case it might be easier to summarize the plot relatively briefly, and then make comments.

Gist

The first manned rocketship launches, with four men and one woman, on a mission to the Moon. A rocket malfunction sends them far off course, and they reach Mars instead. There they find evidence of a ruined civilization, radiation suggesting nuclear war, and savage natives who kill three of the five. The other two return to Earth but run out of fuel and crash. Despite this, the mission director is confidant a second spaceship will be built.

Take

The film has modest special effects and decent acting, but is marred by typical Hollywood fantasy physics, a dated sexist theme about the woman scientist, and a cliche romantic subplot. The lesson on Mars about the danger of species self-destruction is a bit heavy-handed, but apt for its time.

Summary

  • The film is about the first manned spaceship—and not just that, but the first to attempt to reach the moon. It’s a rocket crewed by four men and one woman. The rocket launches on schedule, and heads for the moon. The name means Rocketship Expedition Moon.
  • Along the way there is a thump that indicates the engines have stopped; and then a streak of meteorites goes by. An error in calculation, to restart the rocket, leads them to keep accelerating, with everyone falling on the floor…
  • When they wake up, they realize they are way off course, but, as it happens, are approaching Mars! (The captain justifies this coincidence by supposing that “something infinitely greater has taken control” of their mission.)
  • And so they land on Mars. There’s atmosphere here, so no need of pressure suits, just gas masks. They emerge and walk outside, in a land obviously filmed in Death Valley—and here the film, otherwise in black & white, is sepia toned—as they walk over sandy, rocky hills.
  • They come to sand dunes, and see a ruined structure, circular and with a tower in the middle, evidence of a past civilization. They detect radiation. They conclude that the civilization here exhibits the tendency of advanced culture to self-destruct. [Remember this was 1950, just after nuclear bombs ended World War II, and the threat of complete nuclear destruction hung in the air.]
  • They rest in a canyon, but then returning to their ship, they encounter primitive people, like cave men, on the ridges above them, tossing rocks and throwing spears. Only two of the five survive and make it back to their rocket, and take off.
  • The two are the pilot (Lloyd Bridges) and the one woman, Dr. Lisa Van Horn (Osa Massen). She realizes that they don’t have enough fuel to land successfully on Earth. She manages to contact Earth, to send them the message about what they found on Mars, and the two of them embrace as their rocket crashes into the Earth.
  • The director on Earth faces the press, and insists the mission was not a failure—it proves that rocket travel is possible. And the message about what happened on Mars is information that could prove the salvation of the world. And that work on RX-M 2 will begin the next day.

Comments

  • The launch is set at White Sands, in New Mexico, and the last medical check the five astronauts undergo is to have their blood pressure taken.
  • With just 17 minutes before launch, the launch director, Dr. Fleming, holds a press conference with the astronauts sitting at a table in front of a roomful of reporters. Fleming invokes flying saucers and robot missiles to explain how a base on the moon would enable the control of world peace.
  • He goes on to describe the ship’s flight path: it will launch straight up to a height of 300 miles, then turn 90 degrees to a direction parallel to the surface of the Earth -! He doesn’t use the word orbit. Indeed, this is how the launch plays out; when the rocket reaches a certain height, it pivots somehow, the astronauts holding on as if tilting. How is this done? We see bank and gyro indicates as in a plane. (And an altimeter, and an “air speed” dial.) No mention of, say, retro-rockets. This bizarre flight-path, with no explanation of how the rocket makes its 90 degree change in flight path, is the most bizarre anti-scientific conceit of the film.
  • In the press conference at the beginning the issue of women’s roles immediately comes up. Does Dr. Horn have any comments, “from a woman’s angle?” She’s coolly professional, at first. As the film proceeds, this theme expands, with remarks by the male astronauts about the stress she must feel, and so on. There’s a scene in which the ship’s captain, and she, independently make elaborate calculations (with paper, pencil, and slide rules) for adjusting their course, and get different answers. The captain rejects her answer, and you think she’s about the break into tears. At the end, when she realizes they don’t have enough fuel to safely land on Earth, she does break into tears.
  • And there’s romance! As the two survivors, pilot Floyd Graham and Dr. Horn, return to Earth, he waxes about walking at night along a Lake Locarno in Italy, and how until now he hadn’t thought of her as a woman… They embrace, and realizing they have only minutes to live, claim to sense the long life they might have had together. It’s sappy, even though the romance is doomed, and it’s gratuitous, like the weddings that ended so many early era space opera novels.
  • The rocket is multistage, though the first stage is seen to be still firing when it drops behind the main ship. The main ship then lands on its tail (on Mars) and takes off again without that first stage. (That’s plausible; the trip had been planned for the Moon, with its lesser gravity, and Mars’ gravity is also less than that of Earth.)
  • We see the usual misunderstanding of gravity and orbits; we’re told the rocket will accelerate until it reaches the “equilibrium” point between Earth and Moon, and then let the Moon’s gravity draw them onward. Later, as the ship returns to Earth, Dr. Horn advises that when they see an increase in speed (how are they measuring speed??) that will mean they’ve reached Earth’s gravity. (Argh.)
  • The most egregious error is the central thesis of the story: that having lost control of their rocket on its course to the Moon, they revive themselves and find themselves approaching Mars. This betrays a mass misunderstanding of the enormous size and scale of the solar system, and ignores the infinitesimal chance that an error in their course would lead to anyplace interesting. (This is the same error Velikovksy, if anyone remembers him, made; cf. Sagan’s book Cosmos p91.) It is as if, having missed one’s freeway exit in LA, one found oneself in Paris. Alas, few SF TV shows or films are much better at this; to casual viewers of all these shows, all those stars and planets are just up there, out there somewhere, all more-or-less equally remote.
  • The astronauts wear ordinary clothes at all times. On Mars they do wear oxygen masks, but no suits.
  • The astronauts experience ordinary gravity aboard the ship, but in scenes when they are supposedly weightless, this is demonstrated by having objects abruptly float into the air (on visible strings), even having to be held down. This is not how weightlessness works. Lost in Space used the same gimmick.
  • The Earth they see has no clouds, of course. There’s odd talk about how the sun still shines on them, until they reach *outer* space (which is entirely dark?) During the flight they look back at Earth, and ahead toward the Moon, and the phases don’t match as they should.
  • The meteorites look like balls of tinfoil—actually like three balls of tinfoil clumped together–and they all look exactly the same. And of course they make roaring sounds as they go by.
  • They do the same ridiculous 90-degree turn before descending to Mars.

Also

  • The 1960s TV series Lost in Space cribbed, or echoed, several things from this film: the floating objects in weightlessness; the stream of asteroids passing the ship; the idea of the ship going out of control and missing its target.
Posted in Movies, Skiffy Flix | Comments Off on Skiffy Flix: Rocketship X-M

Test Post

Posted on Wednesday 22 July 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

I’m trying to allow comments to posts, but only for two days. I’ve tried this before, and it hasn’t seemed to work. When I allow comments indefinitely, I get thousands of spam emails. The resetting applies only to new posts, like this one. If you see the post, please comment, anything at all.

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Link and Quotes: Frank Bruni on the pandemic and freedom

Posted on Wednesday 22 July 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

I saw this via Facebook, and I can’t just now find a cleaner URL:

NYT: Frank Bruni, So This Is Your Idea of Freedom?

He’s says more eloquently what I was trying to say a couple days ago.

What does the abject failure of the United States, the richest country in the world, tell us about ourselves? In the mirror of Covid-19, how is America reflected?

Before I share my answers, I want to make clear: I remain deeply in love with America and fiercely proud of it, for reasons that would take several newsletters to do justice to.

But right now I’m just as deeply and fiercely worried. Our struggle with this pandemic has convinced me that somewhere along the way, we went from celebrating individual liberty to fetishizing it, so that for too many Americans, all sense of civic obligation and communal good went out the window.

…

Somewhere along the way, we also developed an immature definition of freedom, conflating it with selfishness, convenience and personal comfort. That’s writ large in the freak-out over masks. In reality, they’re “a ticket to more freedom,” Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado said a few days ago when he instituted a requirement that Coloradans wear them in many circumstances. “It makes it less likely that businesses will be shuttered. It makes it less likely that people will die. It makes it more likely school will return.”

In other words, important freedoms for all sometimes require slight adjustments by individuals. That’s not tyranny. That’s responsibility.

Posted in Culture, Science | Comments Off on Link and Quotes: Frank Bruni on the pandemic and freedom

Andrew Sullivan: Inspiration for this Blog; essay on Pandemics

Posted on Tuesday 21 July 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

[draft]

Trying to look away from all the stories about crazy protesters who object to wearing masks and who think the pandemic is all a conspiracy theory they can blame on people they don’t like…

To look at long thought-pieces by the adults on the planet about the effects on society of past pandemics, and the possible effects of this one.

Today, Andrew Sullivan—

—With an aside about Andrew Sullivan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Sullivan). He’s a political commentator and blogger, whose blog The Daily Dish launched in 2000 (according to Wikepedia) and which I discovered later that decade. Sullivan claims to be a conservative, and he’s Catholic, but he’s also gay, and so his takes on many topics have always been unpredictable. Again according to Wikipedia, he broke with the conservative movement in the George H. Bush era, because of the Republicans’ rightward shift on social issues.

His Daily Dish blog migrated to other sites, and then he stopped blogging in 2015. But in recent years he’s been writing weekly columns for New York Magazine (https://nymag.com/, not to be confused with The New Yorker), which I haven’t followed because there are only so many sites (or newspapers or magazines) one can follow every day or week. But one site I do follow, Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True (https://whyevolutionistrue.com/, which is only occasionally about abstruse recent discoveries in evolutionary science, much more often about cats, or issues of the day), has followed and occasionally posted about Sullivan’s NYMag columns. And today, about Sullivan’s last column for that magazine, before he moves back to a personal website, to be called The Weekly Dish, a subscription site. (It’s his living.)

This is pertinent because Sullivan’s Daily Dish was the inspiration for this blog.

Previously, as sole editor of Locus Online beginning in 1997, I posted occasional editorials (as Charles N. Brown did in every issue of Locus Magazine), about website or science fictional topics, such as convention reports, and then in 2003 created a “blog,” as everyone was doing in those years, in Blogger, a then popular blogging hosting site, which was linked from the Locus Online homepage (That was Views from Medina Road). This ran for a decade, but was confined mostly to, again, website or SF topics, or other topics loosely relevant or interesting to a science fiction audience. That decade-long blog migrated at some point to WordPress, and then to a directory of my current blog; the entire earlier blog is at http://www.markrkelly.com/Views/.

Having been laid off from work in late 2012, and inspired by Sullivan’s Daily Dish – and also, to create a repository for family history and photos – I created my own domain name, markrkelly.com, using WordPress, to create a blog on general topics, as Sullivan’s did. Sullivan’s mode was to link to some current newspaper article or magazine essay, quote a paragraph or two, and then make his own comments. Exactly like my “Links and Comments” posts. Sullivan also allowed comments, which I haven’t done; he could check comments and accept or reject daily, because that was his full-time job. Since I’ve never had the following that Sullivan has, virtually all of the comments I’ve gotten, when I’ve allowed them, have been spam. Thousands and thousands of spam comments. So I turned comments off.

The problem with posting everything on my own domain, of course, is that once I’m hit by the proverbial bus, or have an Afib-derived stroke, my entire site will exist only for another two or three years until my registry of the domain name expires. The content will all still exist, on the Locus server, but no one will be able to find it. I don’t know if there’s a solution to this problem; likely, no one will care.

—So, back to Andrew Sullivan on the pandemic. A Plague Is an Apocalypse. But It Can Bring a New World. The meaning of this one is in our hands.

A long, well-researched essay.

Plagues have been major movers of historical events. They appeared once humans settled down…

Our species seems never to have experienced epidemic diseases for the vast majority of our time on earth, encountering them only when we settled down, formed stable, concentrated communities, and started farming and domesticating animals for food. Plagues were usually a function of diseases that jumped from precisely those animals in close proximity and spread through concentrations of the human population in settlements, villages, towns, and cities as civilization began. Humans lived in more intimate relations with animals; their settlements compounded filth, infected water, fleas, and excrement human and animal. We were unknowingly creating a petri dish and calling it home.

…Plague is an effect of civilization.

The fall of Rome….

And plagues drive people crazy. You might call them mass-disinhibiting events. It’s not hard to see why. When the plague returned to a fast repopulating Europe in the 14th century, in the Great Mortality known as the Black Death, up to 60 percent of Europeans perished in an astonishingly short amount of time. When normal life has been completely suspended, and when you don’t know if you’ll be alive or dead in a week’s time, people act out.

A cultish sect, which had first arisen earlier in Italy, emerged in Germany, for example, called the flagellants. These half-naked protesters traveled from town to town on foot in pilgrimages, atoning for the sins they believed had caused the plague, and whipping themselves bloody and raw as penance, in bizarre public rituals that drew big crowds. They rejected the established Church, claimed to have direct access to Jesus and Mary, disrupted Masses, and, as time went by, radicalized still further, becoming increasingly populated by the poor and ever more anti-Semitic. Forbidden to take a bath, shave, or change clothing on their pilgrimages, they also doubtless became unwitting spreaders of the disease as they moved from place to place and masses of panicked penitents greeted them.

Plagues do not usually unite societies; they often break them apart in this way. Around the turn of the 20th century, for example, Asian immigrants were blamed for an outbreak of bubonic plague in San Francisco and Honolulu; in 1918, enterprising xenophobes settled on Spain as the source of the new and deadly flu and called it “the Spanish Lady,” to add a soupçon of misogyny. In the polio outbreaks at the beginning of the past century, immigrants from Southern Europe were scapegoated. In general, the wealthy escape from cities in plague times, minorities are blamed, the poor revolt, families are torn apart, and cruelty abounds.

Trump: “Chinese virus.”

And with a literally existential event taking place all around them, 14th-century Europeans shifted in their spirituality as the Romans had done before them. Just as the sixth-century plague had finished off the old religion of the Roman gods and brought the final triumph of Christianity, so a newly personal and mystical variety of that religion replaced the more institutional one. Sects from the lower classes began to emerge — like the Lollards in England, who rejected key Catholic doctrines and translated the Bible into English. In these rebellious religious subcultures, the seeds of the Reformation were sown.

Key passage about the benefits of a world-shaking event:

Paradoxically, the Black Death also reshaped and rebuilt the rural economy to benefit the poor. With half the population suddenly wiped out by bubonic plague, food became plentiful and cheap as soon as the harvests returned, because there were so many fewer mouths to feed, and the price of labor soared because so many workers had perished. Day laborers suddenly had some leverage over the owners of land and exploited it. A manpower shortage also led to innovations. With fewer people on higher wages, for example, the cost of making a book became prohibitive — because it required plenty of scribes and copiers. And so the incentive to invent the printing press was created. Industries like fishing (new methods of curing), shipping (new kinds of ships both bigger and requiring less manpower), and mining (new water pumps) innovated to do more with fewer people. The historian David Herlihy puts it this way: “Plague … broke the Malthusian deadlock … which threatened to hold Europe in its traditional ways for the indefinite future.”

There will be more pandemics as humans fill up the planet the destroy more and more of the natural habitat (as Brazilians burn down the Amazon jungle).

And finally:

Knowledge of a brutal new virus does not prevent its spread. Only a much more profound reorientation of humankind will lower the odds: moving out of cities, curtailing global travel, ending carbon energy, mask wearing in public as a permanent feature of our lives. We either do this to lower the odds of mass death or let nature do what it does — eventually so winnowing the human stock that we are no longer a threat to the planet we live on.

That’s the sobering long view. It is hard to look at the history of plagues without reflecting on the fact that civilizations created them and that our shift from our hunter-gatherer origins into a world of globally connected city-dwelling masses has always had a time bomb attached to it. It has already gone off a few times in the past few thousand years, and we have somehow rebounded, but not without long periods, as in post-Roman Europe, of civilizational collapse. But our civilization is far bigger than Rome’s ever was: truly global and, in many ways, too big to fail. And the time bomb is still there — and its future impact could be far greater than in the past. In the strange silence of this plague, if you listen hard, you can still hear it ticking.

Posted in Culture, Science | Comments Off on Andrew Sullivan: Inspiration for this Blog; essay on Pandemics

About the Pandemic and Individual Liberty

Posted on Monday 20 July 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

There’s a point to be made about the zealots insisting on individual liberty, when they go ballistic about refusing to wear masks (example links below). Do they bristle at the intrusion on individual liberty that there are laws that prevent them from smoking cigarettes in department stores? Do they object to their exercise of personal liberty by being obliged to buy auto insurance, or to wear seat belts? (There actually was a debate about personal liberty and government intrusion, in the 1960s when seat belts came to be required.) To buy homeowners’ insurance to get a mortgage? Do they object to having to stop at stop signs because their individual liberty should allow them to blow through intersections never mind the risk and danger to themselves and others? Answer: No, they do not. They’ve accepted that these are matters of policy that are part of the formal or informal social contract, agreements made to enable us all to get along and to suppress selfishness at the expense of others. Yet they don’t understand that the mask situation is exactly like that. Thus Americans’ perverse obsession with personal liberty, and denial of scientific expertise, is resulting in more deaths, proportionally, than all but a dozen other countries on the planet.

I think these people are upset not out of principle, but because they resent anyone telling them to do something today that they didn’t have to do yesterday. Resistance to change.

This relates to my issue with Libertarianism; we don’t all live separately on isolated islands or ranches on the prairie. We live in a complex society, even those who don’t live in big cities, that depends on the cooperation and interconnection of us all. Americans seem to have this fetish about personal liberty that is especially dangerous in situations like a GLOBAL PANDEMIC, when people should behave in ways that promote the common good. It’s not socialism, it’s not communism — it’s the most effective strategy for SURVIVAL. Thus compared to many other countries, the US is miserably failing in our response to the pandemic. And our moron president is in denial of this; and a substantial portion of US voters believe anything he says. Sigh.

These people are dimwits, or worse.

Sean Feucht Calls California COVID-19 Restrictions ‘Tyrannical’ and ‘Insane’

DeAnna Lorraine Claims That ‘God Does Not Want Us Wearing Masks’

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Lunacy, Science | Comments Off on About the Pandemic and Individual Liberty

Quotes: Opening Lines: Carl Sagan, Gene Wolfe

Posted on Monday 20 July 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

Carl Sagan, COSMOS (1980)

The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us — there is a tinging in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.

The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I believe our future depends on how well we know this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.

Gene Wolfe, THE FIFTH HEAD OF CERBERUS (1972)

When I was a boy my brother David and I had to go to bed early whether we were sleepy or not. In summer particularly, bedtime often came before sunset; and because our dormitory was in the east wing of the house, with a broad window facing the central courtyard and thus looking west, the hard, pinkish light sometimes streamed in for hours while we lay staring out at my father’s crippled monkey perched on a flaking parapet, or telling stories, one bed to another, with soundless gestures.

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Links and Comments: Search Engines; Responses to Disease

Posted on Sunday 19 July 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

I found the piece mentioned two days ago about London reforms after the Black Plague. Actually it was New York reforms after the 1860s. It’s an opinion piece in the NYT that was online four days ago, and that appeared in today’s print edition.

(Search engines on all sites are still seldom completely useful. One issue with the NYT site is that news stories and opinion pieces have different headlines online vs. in print. (Why? I’m not sure.) So after seeing this essay again, in print this morning, searching the NYT site for the headline “Mass Death Is Not Inevitable” turned up nothing. The online title was Your Ancestors Knew Death in Ways You Never Will. At least NYT made one improvement recently: the online articles say at the bottom what day’s print paper, even to the section and page, the article will appear in. But I’m not sure they do this in advance, or in this case I would have taken note.)

Donald G. McNeil Jr., Your Ancestors Knew Death in Ways You Never Will. AKA in print: “Mass Death Is Not Inevitable.” Subtitled online, “Some say we’re doomed. But science and public spending have saved us from pandemics worse than this one.”

The online version as an interesting graph (does this link work?) of death rates since 1800 due to various epidemics, of various diseases like small pox and cholera now defeated via vaccines. But here are the key para’s:

The death rate began dropping after the 1860s. New Yorkers — both citizens and doctors — had finally stopped arguing and reached consensus on some basic issues.

First of all, most finally accepted the “germ theory” of disease, acknowledging that it was caused by invisible enemies, not by swamps, trash, manure or the other nuisances that underlay the “miasma theory,” which held that bad smells caused disease. (Only a century earlier, Americans had given up on the “humors theory,” which posited that disease was caused by imbalances among blood, urine, sweat and bile that had to be rebalanced by bleeding, sweating or purging.)

They also agreed that whether immigrants had brought some diseases or simply suffered from them, no one was safe until everyone was safe, so they made public health universal.

As a result, New Yorkers took certain steps — sometimes very expensive and contentious, but all based on science: They dug sewers to pipe filth into the Hudson and East Rivers instead of letting it pool in the streets. In 1842, they built the Croton Aqueduct to carry fresh water to Manhattan. In 1910, they chlorinated its water to kill more germs. In 1912, they began requiring dairies to heat their milk because a Frenchman named Louis Pasteur had shown that doing so spared children from tuberculosis. Over time, they made smallpox vaccination mandatory.

Libertarians battled almost every step. Some fought sewers and water mains being dug through their properties, arguing that they owned perfectly good wells and cesspools. Some refused smallpox vaccines until the Supreme Court put an end to that in 1905, in Jacobson v. Massachusetts.

And goes on with:

Today, Americans are facing the same choice our ancestors did: We can listen to scientists and spend money to save lives, or we can watch our neighbors die.

Thoughts on this:

  • Medicine, as Lewis Thomas wrote a book about, is the “youngest science.” It was only 100 or so years ago that doctors realized washing their hands saved people’s lives.
  • The demonization of immigrants, denying them health coverage and driver’s licenses, hurts everyone. “No one was safe until everyone was safe.” It’s an investment; it’s risk management. How immigrants get here is a separate issue.
  • Reforms based on science.
  • And how Libertarians objected. (In the way religious fundamentalists object to so many other measures of progress.) I don’t want to debate about libertarianism, but I will say that there are flavors of the idea. On the one hand, I have no objection to the idea that people should be allowed to live their lives freely, without government oppression. On the other hand, libertarians seem to think an ideal society would involve no taxes and no regulations. The way I’ve seen this formulated is that libertarians want all the benefits of society without paying for any of its obligations. (“You didn’t build that road.”) Without taxes and regulations and government oversight, who would have built the Interstate Highway System? Launched men to the moon? Keep corporations from cheating their customers and killing many of them for the sake of capitalist profits?
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Quotes: Edward Abbey, David Deutsch

Posted on Saturday 18 July 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

Some things are relative, and some things are not.

Edward Abbey, DESERT SOLITAIRE (1968)

This is the most beautiful place on earth.

There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary. A houseboat in Kashmir, a view down Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, a gray gothic farmhouse two stories high at the end of a red dog road in the Allegheny Mountains, a cabin on the shore of a blue lake in spruce and fir country, a greasy alley near the Hoboken waterfront, or even, possibly, for those of a less demanding sensibility, the world to be seen from a comfortable apartment high in the tender, velvety smog of Manhattan, Chicago, Paris, Tokyo, Rio or Rome—there’s no limit to the human capacity for the homing sentiment. Theologians, sky pilots, astronauts have even felt the appeal of home calling to them from up above, in the cold black outback of interstellar space.

David Deutsch, THE FABRIC OF REALITY (1997)

If there is a single motivation for the world-view set out in this book, it is that thanks largely to a succession of extraordinary scientific discoveries, we now possess some extremely deep theories about the structure of reality. If we are to understand the world on more than a superficial level, it must be through those theories and through reason, and not through our preconceptions, received opinion or even common sense. Our best theories are not only truer than common sense, they make far more sense than common sense does. We must take them seriously, not merely as pragmatic foundations for their respective fields but as explanations of the world. And I believe that we can achieve the greatest understanding if we consider them singly but jointly, for they are inextricably related.

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