Category Archives: Web Article Review

Taiwan and nuclear weapons

According to The Strategist, Taiwan had an overt nuclear weapons program until 1976 and a covert one into the 1980s. It has nuclear reactors similar to the ones in Japan that can be converted to produce weapons-grade plutonium in short order if that decision is made.

Weak security guarantees from the United States, coupled with escalating aggression from China, may soon present Biden [this article is from December 2020] with a Taiwan that believes its only option for survival is to take a page from the Israeli playbook and restart a covert nuclear weapons program. When Taiwan went down that path between 1967 and the late 1980s, the government in Taipei ultimately backed away from nuclear weapons because it appeared China was liberalising and heading toward democratisation…

According to China expert Michael Pillsbury, author of The hundred-year marathon, the Chinese Communist Party intends to integrate Hong Kong and Taiwan back into China in time to achieve ‘Middle Kingdom’ status by 2049—the centennial of the CCP’s victory over the Guomindang in the Chinese civil war…

Taiwan already has two operational nuclear power plants on opposite ends of the island that could produce plutonium. It could use a ‘Japan option’ of enriching its radioactive materials for weaponisation in a short timeframe.

The Strategist

I think we take it for granted that nuclear proliferation is driven by a few rogue states. But this does not appear to be the case. The world appears to be on the verge of getting much more dangerous. Every country with nuclear weapons increases the odds (depressingly, the certainty, given enough time) of a nuclear detonation somewhere, sometime.

The Cuban Missile Crisis would seem to offer a cautionary tale. Put some nuclear missiles on an island near an aggressive nuclear superpower, and bad things can happen. We give our (U.S.) democratically elected leader at the time for avoiding catastrophe by acting tough and making the authoritarian leader “blink”. How much of that was luck, and how long until our world’s luck runs out if we keep taking risks like that? Another cautionary tale would be China’s invasion of Korea in the 1950s. They did not have nuclear weapons at the time, the U.S. not only had them but had recently used them, and China did not “blink”.

raccoon dogs, and mouth watering donkey balls

I was reading about raccoon dogs in the context of wildlife farming and zoonotic diseases in China. Heavy stuff. On the lighter side, they are cute little guys and popular in Japanese folklore such as Super Mario Brothers. Raccoon dogs are more like dogs than raccoons. (Raccoons are not rodents and not like anything else, they are just kind of their own thing.) Also, they are quite literally ballsy:

For centuries, Japanese people have associated tanukis with magical folklore and luck. Referred to as “bake-danuk,” these mythical tanukis are mischievous shapeshifters. One exaggerated feature is the tanuki’s giant scrotum, which represents good luck with money. In cartoons, paintings, and commercials, this part of the animal’s anatomy is often illustrated as a pair of “money bags.” The enlarged testes represent good luck with money, more so than anything sexual. Tanuki totems are placed inside businesses to bring money.

Mental Floss

Come to think of it, I guess I have heard of animal scrota being used as money purses before. I guess they can be tanned into leather, and are already sort of the right shape.

On a closely related note, here is a recipe for mouth watering donkey balls:

I love these little balls of meat heaven! Aside from the delicious taste, what also got me to try this dish, was the number of ingredients. I mean, with just 5 ingredients that I am sure you have at your home right now, you can make this perfect meal! I usually eat them as is but just the other day, I added them on my spaghetti. It was Spaghetti and meatballs! It was awesome! You also don’t need any type of sauce to enjoy these balls. The flavor will make your mouth water and the smell, the smell is perfect! Make sure to contain the smell for that meaty-heaven aroma! Enjoy!

Cook it Once

anti-climate science propaganda techniques

This article in BBC is about propaganda used by the fossil fuel industry in the 1990s to convince the public to doubt the emerging consensus among climate scientists. Basically, the technique was to find the tiny minority of legitimate scientists with dissenting views, and then heavily publicize those views. Reporters like dissenting views because they are interesting, and when they are being bombarded from all sides by an extremely well-funded campaign, they will tend to present those views as having equal weight to the overwhelming majority view. So the public is not exactly hearing pure lies (although there are certainly some of those, such as statements that there was “no evidence” of human contributions to global warming), but 50% of what they are hearing represents the consensus of 99% of scientists and 50% represents the views of the dissenting 1%.

This is difficult to counter, because scientists are trained to communicate the uncertainty of their work. Corporations behave amorally to maximize their profits, which is interesting because they are comprised of people who generally have some moral scruples. People will behave to maximize their own interests to some extent, but I don’t believe that is the only factor. They will also rationalize their behavior, or they will often lack information about the contribution of their individual role to the bigger picture, which may be an amoral or immoral result.

There are a couple good quotes from Al Gore in the article, including saying climate science propaganda is a crime on the level of World War II war crimes. I would agree with this – the companies that did (and are certainly doing) things like this chose to put the lives and livelihoods of billions of future humans at risk for the sake of maximizing their own wealth in the short term.

the numbers on shark attacks

This article in Grid says there are about 70 shark attacks on humans per year, worldwide. That’s attacks, not deaths. This article doesn’t have the death numbers, but I recall seeing elsewhere that it is typically single digits. And it’s not because sharks are not around where people are swimming – they are.

Humans are pathetic in the water. If sharks wanted to eat them, it would be so easy for them. If they tasted good and a shark were like, “Oh, my goodness, there is a human, let me have a bite,” there would be between 10,000 and 50,000 bites a day. There’s a lot of sharks in the ocean and a lot of people that are recreating there.

We don’t see that. We see very few, about 70 a year. And although there are 70, more than half of them are in poor visibility water where the shark makes a mistake. So the fact that the bites that we do see are where conditions are turbid and where people happen to be intersecting with where there are sharks sort of underscores the notion that sharks do not eat people — we aren’t on the menu.

Grid

So if we are trying to be rational, we shouldn’t even worry about sharks, even compared to other things that can and do go wrong in the water, most obviously drowning.

common vaccines provide some protection against Covid-19

This makes some sense to me. By getting jabbed with needles as much as possible, we train our bodies to deal with a wide range of diseases, including ones it hasn’t seen yet.

How can a vaccine designed to protect against one disease be effective against a different disease?

Researchers think the vaccine trains the body to respond more quickly and more effectively to any pathogen it sees, Bruxvoort said…

One hypothesis is that different viruses have common characteristics that apply to all, said Dr. Lara Jehi, the Clinic’s chief research information officer and co-author of the Clinic-Brigham and Women’s study.

Cleveland.com

I remember reading about the BCG vaccine, which is a vaccine given to babies in tropical countries where tuberculosis is common. It leaves a scar, unfortunately, but I wonder if it could be part of the reason tropical countries in general seem to have been more resistant to the disease. Although I think another possible factor could be that people in tropical countries and poorer countries (which often go together) are just more used to and accepting of disease and their experience with Covid was not as thoroughly reported.

transactional analysis

My high school actually had a mandatory class on transactional analysis, a model of human interactions developed by Eric Berne in the 1950s. I didn’t find it particularly helpful at the time, and haven’t heard much about it since then. But it is interesting:

At the heart of Berne’s model are three ego states that live in each of us: the Child (the most natural, vulnerable, and spontaneous part of our personality, keeper of our creative vitality and our most unalloyed capacity for pleasure); the Parent (the part of us that unconsciously mimics the psychological responses of our parents as we observed them in childhood); and the Adult (the competent and self-possessed part of us capable of making sound decisions in our best interest). All three coexist within us, and all three play into our social interactions…

But beyond the simplest and most complementary exchange — one Adult issuing the stimulus, another Adult giving the response — most of social transactions are a chaos of mismatched and ever-switching ego states. The confusion — the wounding — happens when the lines of communication cross and the interaction becomes not between two people in parallel and consistent ego states, but between one part of one person and a different part of the other: Child-Adult, Adult-Parent, Parent-Child, and all the other possible non-equivalences. This basic pattern, a diagram of which became the book’s cover, is what defines a game — “an ongoing series of complementary ulterior transactions progressing to a well-defined, predictable outcome” — a patterned, self-defeating psychological interchange, in which one ego state issues a stimulus concealing the emotional need of another ego-state, then receives a response to the hidden message and reacts negatively to it, frustrating both parties and garbling communication in a way that injures intimacy.

The Marginalian

If I were going to give my younger self advice, I would say don’t assume you know what other people are thinking. Even when you are interacting with others, your thoughts and emotions usually have to do a lot more with what is going on in your own mind and body than theirs. So don’t assume you know what they are thinking or what their intentions are, or what type of reaction they are trying to elicit from you. That’s sounds like funny advice – don’t ascribe intentions to people. People certainly have intentions, but when you try to guess what they are you will often be wrong. See listen and observe, think, and then make up your own mind. Even if they do have malign intentions, which happens more rarely than my younger self would have thought, you still have some control over your emotional reaction and near total control over your own behavior. If you are a person who can be quick to anger, like my younger self, it is better to walk away from the offending person and take some time to reflect than to react in the moment. Some people will take this as a sign of weakness or “nonassertiveness”, but I have learned that reacting in anger is usually unpleasant for everyone, including me, and I tend to regret it later. I will confront that person later in a more rational frame of mind, if I feel the confrontation is worth it, but often I decide it is not. So pick your battles carefully, younger self, and there are not too many battles worth picking.

Kernza

Kernza is a perennial grain that is potentially much easier on the environment than wheat and other annual grains, at least on a per-acre basis. The problem, for now, is that yields are nowhere near wheat yields, so producing an amount of Kernza similar to today’s wheat yields would require around five times as much land. Researchers are working on the problem, but they have been working on it for decades and the progress doesn’t seem to be fast enough for this to be the magic bullet that saves the planet.

Noam Chomsky on Biden, Saudi Arabia, and Israel

Noam Chomsky is 93 as I write this, so who knows how much longer we will hear his first-person commentary on current events? I’ll keep reading and reporting it as long as we do.

On Saudi Arabia:

In the case of Biden’s visit, first things presumably include renewed efforts to persuade MBS to increase production so as to reduce high gas prices in the U.S. There would be other ways, for example, a windfall tax on the fossil fuel industries that are drowning in profits, with the revenues distributed to those who have been gouged by the neoliberal class war of the past 40 years, which has transferred some $50 trillion to the pockets of the top 1%. That, however, is “politically impossible.”

Politically even more impossible in elite calculations would be the feasible measures to try to stave off catastrophe by moving rapidly to cut off the flow of these poisons. These need not, however, be the calculations of those who have some interest in leaving a decent world to their children and grandchildren. Time is short.

There are broader considerations in Biden’s Middle East tour. One goal surely is to firm up Trump’s one great geopolitical achievement: the Abraham Accords, which raised tacit relations among the most brutal and criminal states of the Middle East North Africa (MENA) region to formal alliance. The accords have been widely hailed as a contribution to peace and prosperity, though not all are delighted. Not, for example, Sahrawis, handed over to the Moroccan dictatorship to secure its agreement to join the accords — in violation of international law, but in conformity to the “rules-based international order” that the U.S. and its allies prefer to the archaic and unacceptable UN-based order.

Truthout

So there you have it. I have suspected for awhile that the UN is dead, with U.S. politicians mostly not even talking about it. Bernie Sanders talked about it, but he didn’t get elected as I recall. I am not sure how much longer we will have the benefit of Bernie Sanders’ commentary on current events…

And it is not obvious to me whether a next generation of leaders is emerging to replace these voices. The next generation of “liberal” leaders, it seems to me, is more focused on rhetoric and symbolic action around race and gender issues, rather than fundamental issues of social and economic fairness, equal opportunity, and peace. There is a risk that coming generations will be affected by a sort of shifting baseline syndrome where they will not even be aware that these issues even exist or how much the median conversation has shifted from meaningful to meaningless.

What was Abenomics

Bloomberg has a long article on the economic policies of Shinzo Abe. Basically, the Japanese economy stopped growing after the 1990s economic crisis. Not just low growth, but no growth in GDP for about a decade followed by a sharp contraction during the 2000s financial crisis. Deflation or declining prices were a symptom of this. At the same time, Japan had very low unemployment throughout. Part of the story is that the economy is starved for workers due to an aging economy, political resistance to immigration, and low participation in the work force by women. Some “Abenomics” was basically a policy of massive government borrowing and spending aimed at shocking the system back into a growth mode. It sort of worked, but it seems to be reverting to the mean now.

I think there are a few lessons. This helps me understand why central banks want to have a low but positive inflation rate. You don’t want to money supply to constrain growth. You want to have rational immigration and guest worker policies that allow in the workers with the skills your economy needs that your native population is unable or unwilling to fulfill. This can be politically difficult, obviously, and you want to do it humanely for the people involved. Governments can borrow and spend with reckless abandon in times of crisis, and then they need to be able to ratchet back quickly when the economy picks up and the private sector is able to pick up the slack. Also politically very difficult. Rational child care and health care policies to remove barriers to working women would help.

But finally, it does not seem like life in Japan is all that bad. So another lesson might be that there is a path to a low-growth economy where life is not that bad, people have meaningful work and their basic needs are met.

lobsters are not immortal, or at least only sort of

From McGill University:

So why do we stop growing, while lobsters don’t? The cells that make up our body are constantly making new cells by dividing. A biological technicality causes us to lose a bit of DNA at the ends of our chromosomes (structures made up of DNA and proteins) after each replication. DNA contains the blueprint for our lives, so in order to make sure we aren’t losing crucial information during these divisions, the long molecules of DNA are protected by shorter segments of DNA at their ends called “telomeres.” An analogy would be the plastic tips on a shoelace that prevent it from unraveling. When a cell multiplies, the only part of the chromosome that is lost is a piece of the telomeres. But as we age, our telomeres get shorter, until they reach a critical point where the cell can no longer replicate without damage to its essential DNA. When this occurs, the cell becomes inactive or dies. Shortening of telomeres is linked to senescence and increased risk of disease. Other contributors to aging include oxidative stress (hence the appeal of antioxidants).

Lobsters have a perpetual supply of telomerase – the enzyme that can restore telomeres, helping cells avoid that fateful end. Humans also have telomerase, just not enough to overcome the constant shortening of telomeres. In fact, telomerase is often found in cancer cells, giving tumours a survival advantage.

Unfortunately for our pal Larry, a large supply of telomerase can be a double-edged sword. Lobsters are still more likely to die with age because their hard-shell exoskeleton moults and has to be regrown. This requires reams of energy, eventually too much. As a result, common causes of death for lobsters are exhaustion, immobility, and shell disease, although the leading cause is still predation.

McGill

The article goes on to say that there are actually some jellyfish that are biologically immortal, meaning they do not age or ever die of old age, although they can be killed.

Given an infinite span of time, the odds of a “biologically immortal” organism being killed would seem to be 100%. So this does not sound like immortality to me in a colloquial sense, But figure out this mystery and come up with a drug to restore our telomeres without causing cancer, and we could live for a long, long time if we are careful. Would our brains hold up more than a century or so?

Interestingly, and this is a frequent point of conversation my son likes to bring up, the Norse gods are “biologically immortal” because they do not age but they can be killed (sorry, Thor fans). But the Greek/Roman gods are truly indestructible. I recall one story where Zeus was cut up into little pieces and put into a bag by another one of the gods. Eventually, somebody let him out and the pieces just assembled themselves together again and he continued being Zeus.