No vaccine for stupidity

 By Dave Whamond

Marx and the Seldon paradox

 From David Brin, the SF author

[...] There is another, related concept – the Seldon Paradox, named after Hari Seldon, the lead character in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation universe, who develops mathematical models of human behavior that are sagaciously predictive across future centuries. In that science fictional series, Seldon’s methods are kept secret from the galaxy’s vast human population – on twenty-five million inhabited worlds – because the models will fail, if everyone knows about them and uses them.

This effect is well-known by militaries, of course. It is also why so many supposed tricks to predict or game the Stock Market – even if they work at first – collapse as soon as they are widely known. 

But the Seldon Paradox goes further. A good model that stops working, because of widespread awareness, might later-on start to work again, once that failure becomes assumed by everyone.

One example would be what happened in my parents’ generation, that of the Depression and the Second World War. At the time, everyone read Karl Marx. And I do mean almost everyone. Even the most vociferous anti-Marxists could quote whole passages, putting effort into understanding their enemy. 

You can see this embedded in many works of the time, from nonfiction to novels to movies. All the way to Ayn Rand, whose entire scenario can be decrypted as deeply Marxist! Though heretically-so, because she cut his sequence off at the penultimate stage, and called the truncated version good.

Indeed, Asimov’s Hari Seldon was clearly (if partially) based upon Marx.

Particularly transfixing to my parents' generation were Marx’s depictions of class war, as power and wealth grew ever more concentrated in a few families, leading – his followers assumed – to inevitable revolt by the working classes. So persuasive was the script that, in much of the wealthy American caste, there arose a determination to cancel their own demise with social innovations!

One, innovation, in particular, the Marxists never expected was named Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose game plan to save his own class was to fork over much of the wealth and power by investing heavily to uplift the workers into a prosperous, educated and confident Middle Class. One that would then be unmotivated to enact Karl's scenario.

Or, as Joe Kennedy was said to have said: "I'd rather have half my fortune taken to make the workers happy than lose it all, and my head, in revolution." (Or something to that effect.)

== It worked, SO well that eventually... ==

Whether or not you agree with my appraisal here, the results were beyond dispute. The GI Bill generation built vast infrastructure, supported science, chipped away at prejudice, and flocked to new universities, where the egalitarian trend doubled and redoubled, as their children stepped forth to confidently compete with the scions of aristocracy. And thusly brought a flawed but genuinely vibrant version of Adam Smith's flat-fair-open-competitive miracle to life! That is, until…

…until all recollection of Karl Marx and his persuasive scenarios seemed dusty, irrelevant, and mostly forgotten. Until the driving force behind Rooseveltism – to cancel out communism through concentrated egalitarian opportunity – became a distant memory. 

At which point, lo and behold, conditions of wealth and power began shifting back into patterns that fit into Old Karl’s models with perfect snugness! With competition-destroying cartels and cabals. With aristocracies greedily and insatiably vampiring the system that had given them everything. (Ayn Rand's elite 'looters.") With the working classes fleeced, like sheep. And then (so far figuratively) eaten.

At which point the writings of Marx – consigned for 80 years into the dustbin – have regained interest from disgusted, formerly upward-mobile classes. Books that are now flying off the shelves, all over the world, pored-over eagerly… 

...but not by those who need awareness the most. Surrounded by sycophants and flatterers, they will deem themselves to be demigods, until the tumbrels come for them. Or until another FDR rescues them, in the nick of time. (Don't count on it.)

Because of the Seldon Paradox. 

== And yes, the anti-vax movement is another example ==

There are reasons why the Greatest Generation adored FDR above all other living humans. And the next American so-beloved? His name was Jonas Salk. The Man Who Gave Kids Back Their Summer....

...because until the miracle of his vaccine, parents terrified of polio kept their children away from public parks and swimming pools... and I barely remember parent-talk of their joy and relief, letting me stroll the neighborhood and nearby streets in safety.

How does this relate? Childhood vaccinations worked so well that most citizens forgot how much people suffered from two dozen lethal and "non lethal" diseases such as measles, mumps, etc. And they forgot the horrors of polio and diphtheria and tetanus (reputed to be the very worst way to die.)  And yeah. The Anti-Vax movement well resembles phase one of the Seldon Paradox. 

And woefully we are already seeing signs of phase two. 

[....]

Some other pieces I have written on this subject:

People try to help one another 

Most political unrest caused by soaring inequality

Big scary radical left agenda

The richest Americans get even richer

In the US, they think we're communists

Where Adam Smith went wrong

Golf courses take up more land than solar farms

Coal apologists are always going on and on about how solar panels will cover the whole world if we go solar and don't keep on using coal.  It is utter rubbish, of course.  And here's a nice chart showing how absurd it is.  By the way, 13% of all electricity in Australia comes from rooftop solar.  Yes.

 From Dr Paul Dorfman

China becomes global tech leader

 From Jesse Jenkins

How China went from clean energy copycat to global tech leader www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Comment by Chris Bataille

From a US perspective, this is fundamentally worse than Sputnik, and it is having the exact opposite and wrong reaction to 1957 - retreat, shutting down basic science and clean tech commercialization, instead of diving into creating a national science complex and building fast.

Yes. The religious loons have won. The US is retreating into a new dark age.

So this is what red America looks like

 By Bill Bramhall

Measles

 Apposite, because JFK jnr, a virulent anti-vaxxer, has been appointed secretary for health in the USA.

Wegovy dramatically cuts cancer risk

From The Guardian

Weight-loss drugs offer a new weapon in the global fight against cancer, with “enormous potential” to [both] prevent new cases and shrink tumours, doctors said as research showed the jabs can cut the risk of developing the disease by a fifth.

Blockbuster injections such as Wegovy [Ozempic] have revolutionised the treatment of obesity, and recently been approved for use in other areas of medicine, including reducing the risk of heart attacks, strokes and cardiovascular-related deaths.

Now experts say they increasingly believe weight-loss drugs could play a big role in preventing and treating cancer, the second leading cause of deaths globally.

A study presented at the world’s largest cancer conference found patients taking the drugs were 19% less likely to develop 13 obesity-related cancers, including ovarian, liver, colorectal, pancreatic, bowel and breast cancer.

The research involving 34,000 people, led by the Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, also found patients were half as likely to die over 15 years compared with patients not taking the jabs, also known as GLP-1 receptor agonists (RA).

The study co-authors, Dr Cindy Lin and Dr Benjamin Liu, said: “Our findings are significant in that they could change the paradigm of obesity management by suggesting early intervention with GLP-1 RAs could delay or prevent obesity-related cancer development.” There could be “multiple” ways in which the drugs cut the risk of cancer – not just by helping people to lose weight, they added.

A second study published at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) annual meeting suggested weight-loss drugs could reduce the risk of cancer coming back in breast cancer patients – and boost their prospects of long-term survival. Researchers from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre in New York said the jabs could cut the risk of cancer recurrence and be a “new tool” against the disease.

A third paper released at ASCO and led by Yale University, also looking at breast cancer patients, suggested taking weight-loss drugs reduced the chances of the disease returning.

Speaking in Chicago at ASCO, Dr Mitchell Lazar, the director of the institute for diabetes, obesity and metabolism at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, said: “GLP-1 based therapies are highly effective at producing weight loss, and thus one of the fundamental mechanisms by which they improve cancer outcomes is via the impressive weight loss that they produce.

“Obesity is a risk factor for nearly all cancers, in both men and women. Thus the revolution in the medical treatment of obesity has enormous potential to prevent new cancers, reduce the severity and growth rate of existing tumours, and synergise with new cancer-specific therapies.”

Dr Jennifer Ligibel, a senior physician at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute who was not involved with the studies, said: “These are exciting, preliminary findings of a link between use of GLP-1 RAs and cancer risk.” They added to previous work suggesting the drugs could reduce cancer risk, she added.

A study published last December showed they were associated with a 50% reduced risk of bowel cancer in people with type 2 diabetes. “Individuals with diabetes who were prescribed a GLP-1 RA had a lower risk of colorectal cancer as compared with individuals who were not prescribed one of these drugs,” Ligibel said.

Dr Julie Gralow, the chief medical officer of ASCO, said the evidence was not clear yet as to whether the potential benefits of weight-loss drugs in reducing cancer risk were just as a result of weight loss – or whether there were other, unknown factors at play.

Gralow, a world-renowned cancer expert who was named woman oncologist of the year in 2023, said she was absolutely certain the jabs would become a much greater focus of cancer prevention research in the future. “The more we can do to reduce the risk factors and prevent cancer, the better,” she added.

“I do think that there are so many potential and already proven health benefits to these drugs, that it would be icing on the cake if we saw that they were also reducing cancers.

“I am very hopeful about overall improvements in health from this class of drugs.”

Cancer Research UK’s chief clinician, Prof Charles Swanton, cautioned it was still “early days”. There have been suggestions the drugs could even raise the risk of certain cancers, although recent research on thyroid cancer and pancreatic cancer has cast doubt on those concerns.

“Well-designed prospective trials with randomised data will provide more clarity on the potential and safety of weight-loss drugs to lower people’s risk of cancer,” said Swanton.

One wonders what the antiscience and antivaxxers think about this.  Will the far right take us back to the middle ages, more than just socially?

The war on science

From ClimateCrocks

When major corporations realized that mainstream science was a threat to their business models, they began the now 50 year long global War on Science – mustering the vast resources of the richest organizations the world has ever known, and the most sophisticated psychological tools of influence, they have destroyed the ability for a large part of our population to distinguish what is real, and what is not.

They wanted us to believe that cigarettes are fine, that acid rain was overblown, and that climate change was a hoax, perpetrated by evil scientists who wanted to control us. They’ve been wildly successful, and that success has bled over into a number of related areas.

Financial Times (paywall):


It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly when the Republican party became the anti-science party, but the process probably began in the 1980s, when the Christian right first emerged as a major force in conservative American politics.

Since then, the journey has been smooth and swift. In 1982, 50 per cent of self-identified Republicans told the US general social survey they had “a great deal of confidence” in the scientific community. Twenty years later 50 per cent had become 40, and last year just one-third of Republicans held that view, compared to two-thirds of Democrats.

It would be easy to dismiss this trend as merely exasperating — an obstacle to progress on climate change and a source of irritation at extended family gatherings — but over the past 18 months, the politicisation of attitudes to science may have directly cost as many as 60,000 American lives.
This is the stark implication of a new study from the Yale school of public health, which found that since Covid vaccines became widely available in the US, the mortality rate of registered Republicans in Ohio and Florida climbed by 33 per cent during America’s winter Covid wave last year, compared with just a 10 per cent rise among Democrats.

Since vaccines became available, Covid death rates are now almost three times higher in Republican areas than Democrat-dominated ones. With pandemics likely a recurring part of our future, anti-vaccine attitudes and the populist movements that carry them will continue to hamper public health campaigns across the world. But no developed country has a problem as entrenched and as lethal as the US.

A visual argument for vaccines

 From a Twitter thread by Rachel Clarke

A ward of polio victims, incarcerated inside "iron lungs" in 1950s America. Many are children, their lungs paralysed, unable to breathe unaided. Thanks to vaccination, no-one has caught polio in the UK since the 1980s.

Breakthrough technology purifies water using sunlight

 From EurekaAlert (with hat tip to GrandesMedios, where I first saw the report about it)

Source: GrandesMedios

A global research team has been able to transform brackish water and seawater into safe, clean drinking water in less than 30 minutes using metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) and sunlight.

In a discovery that could provide potable water for millions of people across the world, researchers were not only able to filter harmful particles from water and generate 139.5L of clean water per kilogram of MOF per day, but also perform this task in a more energy-efficient manner than current desalination practices.

The World Health Organization suggests good quality drinking water should have a total dissolved solid (TDS) of <600 parts per million (ppm). Researchers were able to achieve a TDS of <500 ppm in just 30 minutes and regenerate the MOF for reuse in four minutes under sunlight.

This world-first research was published in the prestigious journal Nature Sustainability.

Lead author Professor Huanting Wang from the Department of Chemical Engineering at Monash University in Australia, said this work opened up a new direction for designing stimuli-responsive materials for energy-efficient and sustainable desalination and water purification.

"Desalination has been used to address escalating water shortages globally. Due to the availability of brackish water and seawater, and because desalination processes are reliable, treated water can be integrated within existing aquatic systems with minimal health risks," Professor Wang said.

"But, thermal desalination processes by evaporation are energy-intensive, and other technologies, such as reverse osmosis, has a number of drawbacks, including high energy consumption and chemical usage in membrane cleaning and dechlorination.

"Sunlight is the most abundant and renewable source of energy on Earth. Our development of a new adsorbent-based desalination process through the use of sunlight for regeneration provides an energy-efficient and environmentally-sustainable solution for desalination."

Metal-organic frameworks are a class of compounds consisting of metal ions that form a crystalline material with the largest surface area of any material known. In fact, MOFs are so porous that they can fit the entire surface of a football field in a teaspoon.

The research team created a dedicated MOF called PSP-MIL-53. This was synthesised by introducing poly(spiropyran acrylate) (PSP) into the pores of MIL-53 - a specialised MOF well-known for its breathing effects and transitions upon the adsorption of molecules such as water and carbon dioxide.

Researchers demonstrated that PSP-MIL-53 was able to yield 139.5L of fresh water per kilogram of MOF per day, with a low energy consumption. This was from desalinating 2,233 ppm water sourced from a river, lake or aquifer.

Professor Wang said this highlights the durability and sustainability of using this MOF for future clean water solutions.

"This study has successfully demonstrated that the photoresponsive MOFs are a promising, energy-efficient, and sustainable adsorbent for desalination," Professor Wang said.

"Our work provides an exciting new route for the design of functional materials for using solar energy to reduce the energy demand and improve the sustainability of water desalination.

"These sunlight-responsive MOFs can potentially be further functionalised for low-energy and environmentally-friendly means of extracting minerals for sustainable mining and other related applications."

The anti-science crowd can take a bow.  Once again, science and technology have found a solution to a real problem, have found a way to improve people's lives.

Smug pilots

 A cartoon by Will McPhail

Freedom

 

Full vaccination against Covid suppresses development of mutations

 From a Twitter thread by Chise

This is fantastic. A recent study out of the University of Maryland presents the first evidence that full vaccination against COVID-19 actually SUPPRESSES emergent mutations of SARS-CoV-2 Delta variants therefore successfully debunking the myth that vaccines promote mutations.

COVID-19 vaccines are fundamentally restricting the evolutionary and antigenic escape pathways accessible to SARS-CoV-2 and full vaccination suppresses SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant mutation frequency. Researchers here showed that countries with higher vaccination rates generated FEWER mutations, suggesting less of a chance for the virus to gain virulent mutations in high vaccinated countries. Researchers found vaccination coverage rate was inversely correlated to the mutation frequency of the SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant in 16 countries of 20 countries studied and discovered Delta variants evolved differently under the positive selection pressure in the United Kingdom and India. Conclusion? Vaccines SUPPRESS emergent mutations. They DON’T promote them. You can find the study here.

Vaccination rates by country

 Herd immunity probably requires at least 70% of the population be vaccinated.  Only one country has reached that, though others are close.  It's instructive to look at the difference between Canadian ans US levels.  In Canada, all parties support vaccination.  In the USA, the Republicans and their QAnon allies maintain that Covid is fake, the vaccines dangerous, and that it's all part of a communist plot.  Demented.

Wear your frigging mask....in 1919

 Nothing new under the sun.  There were selfish idiots back then too.  

This is a cutting from 1919, most probably―that was the year when the Spanish Flu hit Australia, and W.A. Holman was premier of NSW from 1913 to 1920.

Don't vax on me!

 Toon by @AndyMarlette

Blood clot hysteria

 The risk of blood clots from the AstraZeneca vaccine is very low.  The key question is whether the risk from the vaccine is greater from the risk of getting Covid-19 and dying from it--or getting serious long-term illness.  For example, even in Australia, which has done very well to limit infections and deaths from Covid, there have been 910 deaths.  If the country vaccinated its entire population with the AstraZeneca vaccine, we could expect 4-6 cases of blood clots per million vaccinations, or a total of 150 cases of blood clots.  Of those, 25% or 37 people would die.  The risk skew is obvious.  It's much better to be vaccinated than to get Covid.

The hysteria becomes even odder when we consider how many blood clot cases happen from other things which people do not worry about.

Source

Anti-vaxxers

A cartoon by Rick McKee

Covid: a tale of two states

From Open Mind (Tamino):

Disastrous.

Hydroxychloroquine: a 45% increase in death risk

President Cretin

From Mother Jones

“What do you have to lose?” President Donald Trump asked reporters last week while, once again, promoting the controversial drug hydroxychloroquine as a potential coronavirus treatment. 

It turns out, as experts have repeatedly warned, a whole lot.

A new Lancet study released on Friday and first reported by the Washington Post revealed that taking hydroxychloroquine to combat COVID-19 was connected to a significantly increased chance of death. The study, which examined 96,032 patients and is the largest to investigate the antimalarial drug’s potential in fighting the virus, had even more alarming news for taking hydroxychloroquine with an antibiotic, the combination once touted by Trump as a “gamechanger” in the fight against coronavirus. “For those receiving hydroxychloroquine and an antibiotic—the cocktail endorsed by Trump—there was a 45 percent increased risk of death and a 411 percent increased risk of serious heart arrhythmias,” the Post reported.

The astounding findings come on the heels of a study published last month that reported more deaths among US veterans treated with hydroxychloroquine than those who received standard care. Trump initially claimed that he hadn’t seen the veterans’ study—a curious assertion considering his aggressive campaign to promote the drug—but then on Tuesday accused the medical researchers of political motivation. “That was a false study done,” he said at a White House event. “It was given by obviously not friends of the administration.”