Risk versus chaos

I got up this morning and with some reluctance looked at the news, and I was immediately reminded of something a former student of mine said years ago.

The subject was environmental degradation and climate change, and the question I asked the class was when Americans would be motivated in sufficient numbers to initiate a real change in our environmental policy.  What she said, near as I can recall, was this.

"It won't happen until things have gotten a great deal worse.  Nothing will change until ordinary middle-class people with houses and cars and bank accounts turn on the taps in their kitchen and no water comes out.  Until their kids can't walk to school without wearing gas masks because of the air pollution.  When they go to the grocery store and find the shelves empty.  We're all too comfortable, and when we're comfortable, it's too easy to disappear into that comfort and assume it could never be any other way."

I think we might have crossed that line, not with respect to the environment, but in the governance of the United States as a whole.

In a few short weeks we've been catapulted into chaos.  The powder keg was already there, fashioned over long careful years of preparation by the constant fear-talk of people like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.  That message of the Big Bad Other is, honestly, what propelled Donald Trump into the presidency, with his constant harping on illegal aliens destroying America.  Your way of life is in significant peril, they said -- all the while creating exactly the conditions that would imperil our way of life once the match was lit.

What exactly set the powder keg off was almost irrelevant; it could have been anything.  In this case, it was twofold; the lockdown from the COVID-19 pandemic, coupled with the murder of a black civilian by a white policeman who had already been investigated multiple times for using excessive force.  It's like the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife by Serbian extremist Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo in 1914.  That one act was the first card falling, but the entire house of cards was already there -- and in five years, twenty million people were dead and whole countries devastated beyond recognition.

And like in World War I, the people who could step in and prevent the catastrophe instead are inflaming matters and making it far, far worse.  Donald Trump, who will do anything to protect his bloated ego, was so pissed off by being mocked as "BunkerBoy" on Twitter for his escape into a protected bunker and refusal to appear publicly that he decided to stage a photo-op to prove what a tough, macho strongman he is.  He had the police attack peaceful demonstrators in front of St. John's Episcopal Church in Washington D. C. with tear gas and rubber bullets, then marched out in front of it holding a Bible (upside down) and threatened to unleash the military on civilians exercising their right of assembly.

"If the city or state refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residence," he said, "then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Gage Skidmore, Donald Trump (29496131773), CC BY-SA 2.0]

His loyal ass-kissers were effusive in their praise.  "No one else would have had the guts to do this," crowed former governor of Wisconsin Scott Walker.  Florida Representative Matt Gaetz said this was the start of the military hunting down "members of Antifa... like we do those in the Middle East."  Not to be outdone, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas had this to say:

Anarchy, rioting, and looting needs to end tonight.  If local law enforcement is overwhelmed and needs backup, let’s see how tough these Antifa terrorists are when they’re facing off with the 101st Airborne Division.  We need to have zero tolerance for this destruction.  And, if necessary, the 10th Mountain, 82nd Airborne, 1st Cav, 3rd Infantry—whatever it takes to restore order.  No quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters.

And you know what "no quarter" means.

Shoot to kill.

We're on a precipice right now, and the people who could rein in this lurching, out-of-control president -- the men and women of his own party -- are refusing to do anything but throw gasoline on the fire.  The only possible solution, the only thing that might keep us from descending into chaos, is if the ordinary middle-class people like the ones my student spoke of will stand up and say "Enough."  We've got to be willing to give up our comfortable, privileged safety and risk being seen and heard by a government that at the moment is doing everything in its power to stop citizens from speaking up and acting in the cause of justice.

I'll end with a quote from Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here, which was written in 1935 but is frighteningly prescient:

The tyranny of this dictatorship isn't primarily the fault of Big Business, nor of the demagogues who do their dirty work.  It's the fault of Doremus Jessup!  Of all the conscientious, respectable, lazy-minded Doremus Jessups who have let the demagogues wriggle in, without fierce enough protest. 

A few months ago I thought the slaughter of the Civil War, and the agitation of the violent Abolitionists who helped bring it on, were evil.  But possibly they had to be violent, because easy-going citizens like me couldn't be stirred up otherwise.  If our grandfathers had had the alertness and courage to see the evils of slavery and of a government conducted by gentlemen for gentlemen only, there wouldn't have been any need of agitators and war and blood. 

It's my sort, the Responsible Citizens who've felt ourselves superior because we've been well-to-do and what we thought was 'educated,' who brought on the Civil War, the French Revolution, and now the Fascist Dictatorship.  It's I who murdered Rabbi de Verez.  It's I who persecuted the Jews and the Negroes.  I can blame no Aras Dilley, no Shad Ledue, no Buzz Windrip, but only my own timid soul and drowsy mind.  Forgive, O Lord! 

Is it too late?

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a fun one -- George Zaidan's Ingredients: The Strange Chemistry of What We Put In Us and On Us.  Springboarding off the loony recommendations that have been rampant in the last few years -- fad diets, alarmist warnings about everything from vaccines to sunscreen, the pros and cons of processed food, substances that seem to be good for us one week and bad for us the next, Zaidan goes through the reality behind the hype, taking apart the claims in a way that is both factually accurate and laugh-out-loud funny.

And high time.  Bogus health claims, fueled by such sites as Natural News, are potentially dangerous.  Zaidan's book holds a lens up to the chemicals we ingest, inhale, and put on our skin -- and will help you sort the fact from the fiction.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Viral nonsense

Some days, optimism is just a losing proposition.

Today's reason for repeated facepalms has to do with COVID-19, better known as Wuhan coronavirus.  It's not that the virus isn't scary enough by itself; there are currently 75,000 cases of confirmed COVID-19 worldwide, just over 2,000 of which have died of the illness.  So the mortality rate still isn't as high as that of this year's influenza strains, but it's enough to be worrisome.

So I suppose it's an understandable enough impulse -- to ascribe some kind of underlying reason for an event that otherwise just appears to be an unfortunate example of the chaotic nature of the universe.  But for fuck's sake, can't we try to restrain that a little bit?  Because the nonsense about this epidemic is really beginning to piss me off, and (I suspect) piss off the legitimate researchers, as well.

First, we have the evangelical wingnuts weighing in.

Rick Wiles, of TruNews, who has been something of a frequent flier here at Skeptophilia, jumped into the fray with the statement that the coronavirus was God's "death angel" sent to visit destruction upon us because of the push in the United States for LGBTQ rights, and also for all the "filth" in television and movies.  When the topic was raised of why (if that was so) the vast majority of cases were in China, Wiles didn't hesitate.  It's because China has a "godless communist government that persecutes Christians."  "God is about to purge a lot of the sin off this planet," he said.

Then there's the ever-entertaining Jim Bakker, who said that yes, coronavirus is bad, but it can be "cured in twelve hours" by a solution of colloidal silver.  That, coincidentally, he's selling by the bottle on his television show ("Call now to get yours!  Only forty dollars!").  Never mind that colloidal silver doesn't do a damn thing for a viral infection, and also has a permanent side effect -- it turns your skin a bizarre blue/gray color, a condition called argyria.

Maybe he's hoping that if all his followers turn blue, they won't feel so awkward supporting a politician who is orange.  I dunno.

Then the conspiracy theorists got involved.

It couldn't possibly be that the COVID-19 was introduced into the human population in the usual fashion -- via accidental contact with an animal vector.  This is virtually always the cause of so-called "emergent viruses," from the deadly Ebola, Marburg, and Lassa fevers to diseases like chikungunya, which usually doesn't kill you but makes you wish it did (the name comes from the Makonde language of Tanzania, and means "doubled over with pain").  But no, that's too prosaic.

It has to be biowarfare.

COVID-19  [Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of the CDC]

The first piece of the conspiracy theory came when Charles Lieber, chair of Harvard University's Department of Chemistry, was arrested and charged with "making a materially false statement" regarding funding received from China.  So far, big news to academics, but not of much interest to the rest of us.

Until it came out that some of the funding came from Wuhan University.

Well, no way was that a coincidence.  Then a Chinese researcher was arrested trying to smuggle 21 vials of "biological substances," so of course there was no way it could be anything else but coronavirus, because Chinese + biological samples = deliberate viral terrorism.

Cue all the conspiracy fans to start having multiple orgasms.

Okay.  Where to start?

First, Lieber's arrest had nothing to do with coronavirus, and neither did the arrest of Zaosong Zheng, the Chinese researcher/smuggler.  And if you dig a little deeper, you find out that Zheng was trying to smuggle the samples out of the United States and back to China, not the other way around (which is what you'd expect if there was some kind of horrible plot by the Chinese to cause a pandemic using a manufactured bioweapon), and... most importantly... the "biological substances" weren't even virus cultures.  They were cancer cells that he was hoping to get back home so he could publish the data from the cultures under his own name and scoop the American researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where he'd stolen them from.

But even that information didn't make much of a dent.  So The Lancet decided to respond.  One of the most prestigious and respected medical journals in the world, The Lancet published a couple of days ago a statement by 27 medical researchers, epidemiologists, and health professionals saying that there was nothing artificial about COVID-19.  They write:

The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins.  We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.  Scientists from multiple countries have published and analysed genomes of the causative agent, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and they overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife, as have so many other emerging pathogens.  This is further supported by a letter from the presidents of the US National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine and by the scientific communities they represent.  Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice that jeopardise our global collaboration in the fight against this virus.  We support the call from the Director-General of WHO to promote scientific evidence and unity over misinformation and conjecture.

There you have it.  The people who have actually studied this stuff have spoken authoritatively.  So when this came out, you would expect that the conspiracy theorists would chuckle in an embarrassed sort of way and say, "Wow, what a bunch of goobers we are."

You would be wrong.

This just reinforced their conviction that something big was afoot, because now they had proof that not only was COVID-19 a Chinese-manufactured bioweapon, the evil scientists responsible were covering it up.  How did they know this?

Because there was no evidence.  Duh.  You think evil super-conspirators are dumb enough to leave evidence?

And because the whole story wouldn't be complete without an American politician getting involved, just a couple of days ago Tom Cotton, Senator from Arkansas -- who is in some kind of contest with Matt Gaetz and Louie Gohmert to see who has the lowest IQ in Congress -- stated that "we have to keep our minds open:"

I'm suggesting we need to be open to all possibilities and we need to demand that China open up and be transparent so a team of international experts can figure out exactly where this virus originated.  We know it didn't originate in the Wuhan food market based on the study of Chinese scientists ...  I'm not saying where it started, I don't know.  We don't know because the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) won't open up to international experts.  That's what we need to do so they can get to the bottom of where the virus originated and hopefully can effect a diagnostic test and vaccine for it. 

Let's take the professor [Professor Richard Ebright of Rutgers University]  He was ...in fact today cited in the Asia Times saying that it was quite possible that it was a laboratory incident.  That's not saying this is a bioweapon, but we do know they were investigating and researching coronavirus in that laboratory.  It could've been an accidental breach, it could've been a worker that was infected.  My point is that we don’t know until we get all the evidence from the Chinese Communist Party, it is only responsible, not irresponsible, to keep an open mind about the hypotheses.

Okay.  First of all, we already have fucking international experts.  27 of them, in fact, who have stated unequivocally that COVID-19 is of natural origin.  Second, if you actually read the Asia Times article (or in Cotton's case, have a staffer read it to him), you find out that Ebright said "there was no indication that the virus had been artificially modified," but "there was no way to rule out" that the epidemic hadn't started in a lab accident.

Which is an example of typical scientific caution.  You can't rule something out for certain unless you have proof.  No proof = there's still a possibility.  But this is a far cry from Cotton's statement that "it's quite possible that it was a laboratory incident."

The whole thing is making me grind my teeth down to nubs.

But that's the problem with conspiracy theories.  The more you argue, the more convinced the conspiracy theorists become.  And if you're arguing, you're either a dupe or a shill.  It's kind of the opposite of the scientific method; with conspiracy theories, the less evidence you have, the more likely it is.

Because those conspirators are just that sly.

Anyhow, that's the latest on coronavirus.  It's bad, but not as bad as the flu, which we deal with every single year without people having complete meltdowns.  It'll probably dwindle, the way most epidemics do -- no one I've talked to who knows about viruses and epidemiology is particularly concerned that this is going to be the next Black Death.

But try to convince the evangelical lunatics, conspiracy theorists, and Tom Cotton of that.

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This week's book recommendation is a fascinating journey into a topic we've visited often here at Skeptophilia -- the question of how science advances.

In The Second Kind of Impossible, Princeton University physicist Paul Steinhardt describes his thirty-year-long quest to prove the existence of a radically new form of matter, something he terms quasicrystals, materials that are ordered but non-periodic.  Faced for years with scoffing from other scientists, who pronounced the whole concept impossible, Steinhardt persisted, ultimately demonstrating that an aluminum-manganese alloy he and fellow physicists Luca Bindi created had all the characteristics of a quasicrystal -- a discovery that earned them the 2018 Aspen Institute Prize for Collaboration and Scientific Research.

Steinhardt's book, however, doesn't bog down in technical details.  It reads like a detective story -- a scientist's search for evidence to support his explanation for a piece of how the world works.  It's a fascinating tale of persistence, creativity, and ingenuity -- one that ultimately led to a reshaping of our understanding of matter itself.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]