Welcome back to The Upheaval Reading Thread, where I occasionally share an assortment of some of the more helpful or especially interesting things I’ve read in recent weeks, and you can offer your own thoughtful reading suggestions / argue about stuff in the comments.
I hope you’re excited folks, because this edition is all about Science! (Exclamation point mandatory.)
If you missed the blockbuster exposé on the origins of the coronavirus published last month in, of all places, Vanity Fair, it is a must-read. It contains too many jaw dropping moments to quote here, but summarizes itself like this:
A months long Vanity Fair investigation, interviews with more than 40 people, and a review of hundreds of pages of U.S. government documents, including internal memos, meeting minutes, and email correspondence, found that conflicts of interest, stemming in part from large government grants supporting controversial virology research, hampered the U.S. investigation into COVID-19’s origin at every step. In one State Department meeting, officials seeking to demand transparency from the Chinese government say they were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s gain-of-function research, because it would bring unwelcome attention to U.S. government funding of it.
I start with the lab leak story because I don’t think we have even begun to grapple with what it might mean – for politics, for public trust, for “Science” etc. – if the COVID-19 pandemic is shown to have (or simply becomes broadly factually accepted by the public as having have) not only escaped from a lab, but potentially originated as the product of scientific tampering with an otherwise not-yet-infectious-to-humans bat coronavirus, and subsequently killed at least 4 million people around the world – or about 66,666 times the number that died from the Chernobyl nuclear accident. And then scientists and governments acted together to cover it up.
The consequences may be unpredictable, but consequences there will be.
Chronicler of populism Thomas Frank (author of such books as What’s the Matter with Kansas? and The People, No) takes a first stab at thinking about some of those consequences:
The answer is that this is the kind of thing that could obliterate the faith of millions. The last global disaster, the financial crisis of 2008, smashed people’s trust in the institutions of capitalism, in the myths of free trade and the New Economy, and eventually in the elites who ran both American political parties… Now here we are in the waning days of Disastrous Global Crisis #2. Covid is of course worse by many orders of magnitude than the mortgage meltdown — it has killed millions and ruined lives and disrupted the world economy far more extensively. Should it turn out that scientists and experts and NGOs, etc. are villains rather than heroes of this story, we may very well see the expert-worshiping values of modern liberalism go up in a fireball of public anger.
American philosopher and big-tech critic Matthew Crawford (author of the fascinating The World Beyond Your Head and Why We Drive) takes a broader view, arguing that the process of how science is conducted and used has itself been corrupted over time.
He notes that, “Increasingly, science is pressed into duty as authority,” and is “invoked to legitimise the transfer of sovereignty from democratic to technocratic bodies, and as a device for insulating such moves from the realm of political contest.” But:
For authority to be really authoritative, it must claim an epistemic monopoly of some kind, whether of priestly or scientific knowledge. In the 20th century, especially after the spectacular successes of the Manhattan Project and the Apollo moon landing, there developed a spiral wherein the public came to expect miracles of technical expertise (flying cars and moon colonies were thought to be imminent). Reciprocally, stoking expectations of social utility is normalised in the processes of grant-seeking and institutional competition that are now inseparable from scientific practice. The system was sustainable, if uneasily so, as long as inevitable failures could be kept offstage.
Not anymore: “The ‘anti-science’ tendencies of populism are in significant measure a response to the gap that has opened up between the practice of science and the ideal that underwrites its authority.”
Curtis Yarvin, an actual, honest-to-God monarchist who writes entertaining subversive material over at the Grey Mirror Substack, similarly argues that “gain of function” virus experiments, and the coronavirus that may be the result of them, are symptomatic of a professional scientific institutional system that is fundamentally broken:
Science, in the body of one institution, has gone from collecting and breeding rare fluffy bunnies, hairy frogs and cute jungle cats, to collecting and breeding deadly bat viruses. For no concrete reason that anyone can identify—beyond a grant writer’s boilerplate. Our great brain, our world brain, our history-ending brain, was delighted, for years, with this work. It puts Ukrainian methods of graphite-reactor testing in perspective. Now the reactor has exploded—undeniably exploded—and we are all wondering what’s happened to our brain. What even is going on here? Is science having a stroke?
In the end it was decided that the chief engineer was not responsible for Chernobyl. The plant director was not responsible for Chernobyl. Not even the general secretary was responsible for Chernobyl. In the end, history decided, it was the USSR itself—all its institutions, and all its ideologies—that was responsible for Chernobyl. Was the cause of covid science itself—or rather, some systematic problem that affects how science is done today? Could that problem be even bigger than science? Shit.
In his view, “The self-funding, self-managing, decentralized enterprise of 21st-century science falls prey to three dark patterns (among others)”: stamp collecting (doing science just for the sake of doing science), self-licking ice-cream cones (problems caused by the attempts to solve them), and playing with fire (self-explanatory). “Covid is a kind of perfect trifecta of all three tropes.”
Science journal Nature brings us the news: Oxitec, a British biotech firm, has released a test group of bio-engineered Aedes aegypti mosquitos into the wild in Florida to eradicate the disease carrying pests to humanity in a novel manner.
The genetically engineered males carry a gene that passes to their offspring and kills female progeny in early larval stages. Male offspring won’t die but instead will become carriers of the gene and pass it to future generations.
Yes, science fiction fans, this is the genophage from Mass Effect, but for the little biters.
Will releasing a genetically transmissible plague into the world, even just for one species of dangerous mosquito, be safe or have unintended consequences? I don’t know, I wasn’t on that conference call or whatever. I guess we’ll find out.
According to a recent UN report, clashes between the forces of the Turkish-backed Government of National Accord and the Libyan National Army of eastern warlord Khalifa Hifter were proceeding normally near Tripoli in March of 2020 when retreating Hifter forces “were hunted down and remotely engaged” by “lethal autonomous weapons systems” including a Turkish-made STM Kargu-2 drone “programmed to attack targets without requiring data connectivity between the operator and the munition.”
This would potentially mark the first time that, in other words, fully independent killer robots were unleashed on humans on the battlefield. Or as Zachary Kallenborn puts it here, we have now entered “a new chapter in autonomous weapons, one in which they are used to fight and kill human beings based on artificial intelligence.”
Cheers?
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Let’s review the last 18 months, for the winners is was a runaway success in terms of real, raw power including violence, vast sums transferred to the elites, their enemies leaderless, impoverished, demoralized, scattered.
Trump is gone, mostly because COVID allowed voting fraud on a massive scale.
Americas cities burned- in the most massive use of force on American soil since the Civil War. Indeed, that presently was the second Civil War in 2020 and the Dems won this time by forfeit. The people in those cities know who’s boss - the nearest historical analogy is the SA running amok in Germany in 1933 before being reined in.
All those pesky small businesses are crushed.
Trillions flowed to the loyalist woke corporations both from the treasury (heard of Blackrock, Boeing?) and from consumers with no place to buy but Amazon.
Every business but especially small business knows they exist at the whim of the state.
Moreover in the traditional use of power to humiliate Americans are forced to this day to submit to face Sharia.
The elites and their strivers are United in their grasp of America - as TIME boasts:
The Republic fell on January 20th - in case you missed it- and we have no Constitution and no real laws.
The Dems most reliable street soldiers- criminals- run amok while the Police are being destroyed along with our cities.
The Border is opened - as is the nation - to Plunderers high and low.
Power in the raw is exercised over us by psychotics, with their only limits being frankly their own personal cowardice.
If you look above you’ll notice all the losers crushed by the machine were Republicans, and the runaway victors Democrats. I do not mean politicians, I mean the common man, I mean voters. The Dems and the elites knew who their enemies were - the people above- and crushed and looted their enemies, burning their cities.
Now this is normal history, normal politics returns.
Raw power- you crush your enemies, reward your followers.
I kinda doubt that the lab-leak story is going to have much political effect. It seems to me that almost no matter what your political worldview was, the lab leak just confirms it.
Also, the rapid vaccine development just shows that, even though those science guys can screw things up pretty badly, it's good to have them around to clean up. Worst case is somebody else (eg China) has screwing-up science guys and you don't. So you better keep funding yours.
Plus, the zone has already been flooded with so much shit that future revelations are just going to drown in it. From the VF article: "Steve Bannon, for instance, joined forces with an exiled Chinese billionaire named Guo Wengui to fuel claims that China had developed the disease as a bioweapon and purposefully unleashed it on the world. As proof, they paraded a Hong Kong scientist around right-wing media outlets until her manifest lack of expertise doomed the charade."
While the genetic modification of mosquitoes is not something to take lightly, I found this article about a similar program with screwworms to be interesting:
If you believe it was a lab leak and I do, it is not unique. Both the the US and the UK had lab leaks of live smallpox virus, a far deadlier disease. We got lucky as the US leaks never got into the wild and the UK leak was contained after one lab employee was infected. God only knows what happened with Soviets and post-Soviets. And the political response to the virus did far more damage than the virus itself. Unfortunately, the Chinese now know that our political leadership is completely crazy. This does not bode well for the future.
Nobody knows how many people the virus killed because the data was corrupted with people dying with the virus, not necessarily of the virus and with multiple comorbidies. There is also an unknown but large number of deaths that will show up due to missed cancer screenings, delayed heart procedures etc. This was a combination of the medical industry being all COVID all the time for months last year and the panic porn causing people to be afraid to go out. And then there is is the mixed messaging from CDC etc causing a sharp increase in anti-vax sentiment which will lead to more deaths in the future. But I was really talking about the gigantic economic damage.
IMO, current "excess deaths" estimates are reliable indicators, and those generally give numbers above 4 million. The "large number of deaths" that will "show up" due to delayed health care can also be estimated, and is nowhere near 4 million. You can talk about economic damage, but how to balance it against lives depends on your priors. So your "far more damage" claim is at best contingent on priors that many of us do not share, and so should not be presented as anything like an established fact.
Excess deaths is certainly a useful analysis. However, those would also include deaths caused by the lockdowns. And some of the events that may have an impact haven't happened yet so can only be guessed at. What if the virus killed mostly people on their last legs. Then excess deaths should go negative in the future
What if anti-vax bleeds over into other diseases. What if the Chinese are emboldened by the lunacy to do it again. What if the lockdowns had no impact on the spread of the disease causing the economic damage without changing the death toll.
If you take the new vaccines esp mRNA you are volunteering to be guinea pigs for psychopaths.
I also have Gulf War syndrome knowledge otherwise; they panicked and gave us all Mestarin at large doses (see Senator Jay Rockefeller hearings) and it made us sick - as they panicked over Saddam’s nerve gas arsenal. In my case it passed- because I quit at 5 pills (full course would have been hundred or more). Then they lied for years.
Mr Lyons,
Politics is Power.
Let’s review the last 18 months, for the winners is was a runaway success in terms of real, raw power including violence, vast sums transferred to the elites, their enemies leaderless, impoverished, demoralized, scattered.
Trump is gone, mostly because COVID allowed voting fraud on a massive scale.
Americas cities burned- in the most massive use of force on American soil since the Civil War. Indeed, that presently was the second Civil War in 2020 and the Dems won this time by forfeit. The people in those cities know who’s boss - the nearest historical analogy is the SA running amok in Germany in 1933 before being reined in.
All those pesky small businesses are crushed.
Trillions flowed to the loyalist woke corporations both from the treasury (heard of Blackrock, Boeing?) and from consumers with no place to buy but Amazon.
Every business but especially small business knows they exist at the whim of the state.
Moreover in the traditional use of power to humiliate Americans are forced to this day to submit to face Sharia.
The elites and their strivers are United in their grasp of America - as TIME boasts:
https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/?amp=true
The Republic fell on January 20th - in case you missed it- and we have no Constitution and no real laws.
The Dems most reliable street soldiers- criminals- run amok while the Police are being destroyed along with our cities.
The Border is opened - as is the nation - to Plunderers high and low.
Power in the raw is exercised over us by psychotics, with their only limits being frankly their own personal cowardice.
If you look above you’ll notice all the losers crushed by the machine were Republicans, and the runaway victors Democrats. I do not mean politicians, I mean the common man, I mean voters. The Dems and the elites knew who their enemies were - the people above- and crushed and looted their enemies, burning their cities.
Now this is normal history, normal politics returns.
Raw power- you crush your enemies, reward your followers.
Just our first time.
>"Trump is gone, mostly because COVID allowed voting fraud on a massive scale."
Right, sure.
Trust the plan.
And please don’t blame the scientists, good grief.
Do you really blame Lysenko? Stalin would have killed him!
If you're going to continue to cite with approval white-nationalist-adjacent morons like Moldbug (Yarvin), I won't be subscribing for much longer ...
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/11/why-i-am-not-white-nationalist/
Hmm, thanks for the link Mark
I kinda doubt that the lab-leak story is going to have much political effect. It seems to me that almost no matter what your political worldview was, the lab leak just confirms it.
Also, the rapid vaccine development just shows that, even though those science guys can screw things up pretty badly, it's good to have them around to clean up. Worst case is somebody else (eg China) has screwing-up science guys and you don't. So you better keep funding yours.
Plus, the zone has already been flooded with so much shit that future revelations are just going to drown in it. From the VF article: "Steve Bannon, for instance, joined forces with an exiled Chinese billionaire named Guo Wengui to fuel claims that China had developed the disease as a bioweapon and purposefully unleashed it on the world. As proof, they paraded a Hong Kong scientist around right-wing media outlets until her manifest lack of expertise doomed the charade."
While the genetic modification of mosquitoes is not something to take lightly, I found this article about a similar program with screwworms to be interesting:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/05/flesh-eating-worms-disease-containment-america-panama/611026/
If you believe it was a lab leak and I do, it is not unique. Both the the US and the UK had lab leaks of live smallpox virus, a far deadlier disease. We got lucky as the US leaks never got into the wild and the UK leak was contained after one lab employee was infected. God only knows what happened with Soviets and post-Soviets. And the political response to the virus did far more damage than the virus itself. Unfortunately, the Chinese now know that our political leadership is completely crazy. This does not bode well for the future.
>"And the political response to the virus did far more damage than the virus itself."
The political response killed 4 million people?
I guess I missed that little news item ...
Nobody knows how many people the virus killed because the data was corrupted with people dying with the virus, not necessarily of the virus and with multiple comorbidies. There is also an unknown but large number of deaths that will show up due to missed cancer screenings, delayed heart procedures etc. This was a combination of the medical industry being all COVID all the time for months last year and the panic porn causing people to be afraid to go out. And then there is is the mixed messaging from CDC etc causing a sharp increase in anti-vax sentiment which will lead to more deaths in the future. But I was really talking about the gigantic economic damage.
IMO, current "excess deaths" estimates are reliable indicators, and those generally give numbers above 4 million. The "large number of deaths" that will "show up" due to delayed health care can also be estimated, and is nowhere near 4 million. You can talk about economic damage, but how to balance it against lives depends on your priors. So your "far more damage" claim is at best contingent on priors that many of us do not share, and so should not be presented as anything like an established fact.
Excess deaths is certainly a useful analysis. However, those would also include deaths caused by the lockdowns. And some of the events that may have an impact haven't happened yet so can only be guessed at. What if the virus killed mostly people on their last legs. Then excess deaths should go negative in the future
What if anti-vax bleeds over into other diseases. What if the Chinese are emboldened by the lunacy to do it again. What if the lockdowns had no impact on the spread of the disease causing the economic damage without changing the death toll.
"I truly hope that the mRNA vaccine is a stunning scientific breakthrough."
It will be but not likely in the way you want.
I have political knowledge otherwise.
If you take the new vaccines esp mRNA you are volunteering to be guinea pigs for psychopaths.
I also have Gulf War syndrome knowledge otherwise; they panicked and gave us all Mestarin at large doses (see Senator Jay Rockefeller hearings) and it made us sick - as they panicked over Saddam’s nerve gas arsenal. In my case it passed- because I quit at 5 pills (full course would have been hundred or more). Then they lied for years.
And they were just panicking bureaucrats at DOD.
We have far worse now. Far worse.
God saves your soul, not your ass.
Not being snarky.
You take the vax, pay the tax.
Watch.
Be safe.
Madam,
We stand guard now by being the ones who won’t do their worst bidding. The Force Not in Being to make a sad pun.
Directly there are men with guns who WON’T obey say a Swalwell (Bomb Flyover country).
This is all we can do.
That and wait for clearer skies.