Ben Shapiro doesn’t care about anti-Semitism.

Ben Shapiro doesn’t care about anti-Semitism

I know. Shocking. Who would have thought it?

Ben Shapiro has a history of performative outrage over “anti-Semitic” ideas like disagreeing with the far-right, genocidal policies of the Israeli government, or acknowledging that Israel has a big lobbying presence in the United States. He also has a history of ignoring or excusing actual anti-Semitism, like Trump’s conflation of all Jewish people and the nation of Israel or, more recently Joe Rogan’s claim that, and I quote, “”The idea that Jewish people aren’t into money is ridiculous. It’s like saying Italians aren’t into pizza!”

I hope nobody reading these needs this explanation, but the idea that Jews are greedy is a very old stereotype that has been used for literal centuries to encourage hatred and distrust of Jewish people. Claiming that money is a part of Jewish culture the way Pizza is a part of Italian culture? Fucking hell, that’s like Ye West saying he thinks learning about Hannukah comes with “financial engineering”. In case it wasn’t clear, money is a part of most cultures I’ve heard of, and comments about Jews being “into money” are a bit rich, coming from a guy who got paid $200 million for his bigoted, reactionary podcast. Still, at least Shapiro condemned Ye’s antisemitism, and scolded Candace Owens for defending him. I know Rogan didn’t say that he loves Hitler, but surely Ben Shapiro would be upset by this, right?

Well, sort of.

See, Shapiro was bothered by it. If he wasn’t, why would have have had a private conversation with Rogan about it? But while Ilhan Omar, who did not say the same thing Rogan did, was worthy of condemnation even after she clarified her meaning and publicly apologized, Rogan was just misunderstood, and he gets a pass.

So, I think jokes are different than than, you know, actual honest observations. I did talk with Joe a little bit about this yesterday, and he was saying what I sort of suggested he was saying yesterday, which is everybody likes money and Jews are good with it. And, you know, again, that is a very different thing than, I think, how it came out on the air when Joe was talking about it.

I will say that there is a difference between making stereotypical comments and having a stereotypical worldview. When you talk about full damaging racism or antisemitism, it is actions that are tied to a full scale worldview that are truly damaging. Now, there can be prominent people who say things that then tie into that worldview or give credence to that worldview unintentionally by saying things. And that’s a problem. But the bigger problem is the worldview itself.

So, to take an example, if you make a stereotypical comment about Black people in a joke to a friend, is that good? No, it’s not good. It’s ugly and it’s bad and shouldn’t do it. Does that make you a racist for the rest of your life? No. It means you did a bad thing. It means you said a bad, racist thing. Does it mean that you even buy into a full scale racist world? No. And I think we’ve lost all nuance in this discussion. It’s true with antisemitism too. If somebody makes a Jewish joke, is that the same thing as somebody buying into a broad scale program with regard to Jewish conspiracy theory?

The reason why people’s radar went up when Joe said that is because when you say Jews love money, this does tie into a broader actual worldview about Jews, which is Jews are greedy and Jews are terrible, and they use their greed and horror in order to control world finance. And because they use their greed and horror to control world finance, they’re victimizing surrounding groups. This is, sort of, left-wing view of what Jews are – Jews are evil capitalist, predatory threats who are disproportionately successful because Jews are bad. Right, so, when you say things like Jews love money, it ties into that in one area. It can also tie into old-style religious antisemitism – the whole idea that Jews would sell out Jesus for 30 pieces of silver or stuff like that. You can see how it would tie into broader antisemitic worldviews. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that your comment was meant that way or that it does tie into that.

And I don’t think that the best way to fight racism or antisemitism is to fight these specific comments all the time. Or – you can mention them, you can point out that they’re bad and wrong. But to waste all of your ammo on that, as opposed to the broader worldview I think is a serious problem. It’s the broader worldview that needs to tumble down because that broader worldview sometimes allies itself with fellow travelers who believe things like capitalism is indeed bad, disproportionately successful people are bad and greedy, and that crosses streams of the antisemitic conspiracy theory that I suggested before. And now you have a real antisemitic movement. That’s really dangerous.

He didn’t mean it like that, guys. He just meant to say that Jews are good with money. Nothing wrong with that, right?

So yeah. Ben Shapiro doesn’t actually care about anti-Semitism. Huge, I know. Talking about conservative hypocrisy feels like beating a dead horse, but unfortunately this particular horse won’t stay dead. Hell, Shapiro even coined the term “JINO” – Jew In Name Only – to apparently distinguish between “good” Jews and “bad” Jews. It seems that how strongly he objects to anti-Semitic remarks depends on how friendly the person in question is to his cause (Rogan is pretty conservative on a lot of stuff), and how powerful the person is (Rogan is the biggest podcast host in the world, whereas Candace Owens works for Shapiro). The only principle to which he holds true, is his love of the hierarchy maintained by capitalism.

Videos: Beau of the Fifth Column on the ongoing saga of the Nord Stream pipelines.

Seymour Hersh is a Pulitzer-winning journalist whose career has legitimately served the public interest many times over the last few decades. As the second video below mentions, if you’ve heard of the Mỹ Lai massacre, at least in the U.S., it’s because of his reporting. In more recent years, he’s developed a reputation for what’s been described as an over-reliance on anonymous sources, often to support controversial claims, that smacks of gullibility. Despite that, his history demands at least some respect, and when it comes to who blew up the Nord Stream gas pipelines, I’m sympathetic to the idea that the U.S. is the most likely culprit. The thing is, contrary to what some seem to believe, the U.S. is not the only entity in the world with agency. Other countries act on their own, for their own reasons all the time. I feel the need to say this because there are people across the political spectrum in the U.S. who seem to believe that it literally controls the entire world. Life is more complicated than that, which I think is a good thing.

I am not, however, anything like an expert on this sort of thing, so I found these videos helpful. The first one digs into who has the motive and capability to do something like this. It makes the case that basically everyone except Germany has motive, and pretty much everyone probably has the capability.

 Hersh has written an article on his Substack that claims the United States blew up the pipeline. He outlines a plausible order of events, and bases it all on information from a single anonymous source, claimed to be involved in planning the operation. Again, I have no trouble believing that the U.S. would do this, but as Beau says in the video above, that applies to a lot of entities, not even limited to national governments. Hersh’s claim certainly has plausibility, but it’s only credibility lies in Hersh’s reputation – in how willing the reader is to take him at his word. This is by no means unique to Hersh, but it does mean that we haven’t actually been shown evidence. If I were to put out a blog post tomorrow saying that France did it, or Exxon did it, and cited an anonymous source, I think it would be perfectly reasonable for nobody to believe me. Hell, if I was contacted by someone claiming to be involved in the operation, I would immediately assume they were someone messing with me. If nothing else, choosing to leak that information to a random blogger with a couple hundred daily views (please share my work, but like – the good posts) would be profoundly irresponsible.

But my point – and it’s one I got from Beau in the video below – is that in terms of evidence, the article and its author are all we currently have. That doesn’t mean Hersh is wrong, but it does mean that some skepticism is probably warranted.

 

Some More News: Why Being Poor Is So Expensive

Just over a year ago, Tegan wrote a post for me about the Vimes Boots Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness, and about the Vimes Boots Index that it inspired. For those who are unfamiliar with the theory, you should read more Terry Pratchett. Since doing so will take some time, however, I’ll share the relevant excerpt:

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of okay for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.” – Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

The unfortunate reality is that this phenomenon extends far, far beyond boots, and is by no means limited to the pages of fiction. In our capitalist society, almost everything that’s used by rich and poor alike seems to be designed to be cheaper and easier for the rich, from durable goods, to banking services, to healthcare, and beyond. In fact, it’s such a big problem (in my eyes – rich people don’t think it goes far enough) that one could fill up and hour-long video (including ads) just digging into why it’s so damned expensive to be poor. If only there were people who did that sort of thing…

REI Workers Win Fight for Union Election

Corporations are utterly dependent on workers. They need workers to make their products, to ship their products, and to sell their products. Corporations also hate that dependence. Their least favorite part of capitalism is that workers, if they’re well-enough organized, can bring a company to its knees. The people running most corporations seem to feel that it is unjust for the peasantry to have that kind of power, so they’ve spent vast amounts of money to get the government to take their side. The work of last century’s labor movement has meant that they can’t just murder workers who refuse to work anymore, so they rely on the government to ensure that the general population is so poor and desperate that they’d literally run out of food and shelter if they tried to use a protracted strike to get better conditions. Unfortunately, this dynamic is a feature of the economic system we inhabit, and so it also applies to “good” companies that aren’t technically owned and run for greed alone.

REI is a good example of this. I worked there for a few months just prior to leaving the United States, in a lot of ways, they seem like a better form of corporation. They’ve got a nice story – a group of outdoorsy types decided that the equipment was too expensive, and decided to form a cooperative business for themselves and like-minded folk, to make their hobby more affordable. The company is a cooperative, but rather than being owned by workers, it’s owned by customers. To be clear – all REI workers are co-op members, but they’re a minority, and have probably a bit more power to affect company policy than the average U.S. voter has to influence government policy. Probably not zero, but close enough that, well, the workers still need to organize to get fair pay and treatment.

After REI employees in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio walked off the job Friday morning, the recreational equipment retailer agreed to schedule a union election vote next month and stopped pushing to exclude certain workers.

Following successful union drives at two other REI stores, employees in Beachwood last month filed for a union election with National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) seeking representation with the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU).

John Ginter, a sales associate at the Beachwood REI, told Cleveland-based Ideastream Public Media that he and his co-workers are seeking better working conditions.

“We are basically making demands that we have a livable wage, that we are able to live our lives outdoors, like REI’s mission statement includes,” he said. “So having a better work-life balance, being able to care for ourselves and to increase benefits for employees across the spectrum, whether or not they are part-time, full-time, whatever that situation would be.”

According to the report: “Ginter alleged REI has some ‘pretty rigid stipulations’ with regard to which employees are eligible for benefits and accrual of sick time. He also said he believes his REI location is ‘not living up to our diversity, equity, and inclusion statement.'”

Beachwood workers launched their brief unfair labor practice (ULP) strike Friday as an NLRB hearing got underway at the federal agency’s Cleveland office.

In a ULP charge that RWDSU filed Thursday with the NLRB, the union claimed REI “engaged in the unlawful surveillance of workers and/or created an impression of surveillance of the workers at the Beachwood store.”

RWDSU has also accused REI of putting forth “meritless assertions to delay the election” by claiming that sales leads, bike shop workers, and “casual” employees—or those who work part-time with irregular schedules—should not vote.

“RWDSU vehemently disagrees with REI’s objections,” the union said in a statement. “It is especially galling because, as the company unnecessarily fights RWDSU in Ohio, it is currently bargaining contracts with workers holding these same classifications at the SoHo, New York and Berkeley, California stores. REI’s hypocrisy is union-busting plain and simple and is a meek attempt to exclude more than half of the proposed bargaining unit to be eligible to vote.”

REI was far from the worst job I’ve had. I was hired as a cashier, and I honestly enjoyed the work. I got to help people plan for trips that I’d been on, share my experience with people who wanted advice, and I got a good discount on everything I bought. More than that, customers who buy from REI get money back based on how much they’d spent, and that dividend could come in the form of actual money, not just store credit. For people who buy a lot of outdoor gear, it’s actually a great deal, and I would recommend it. I’d honestly have been happy just working there, had the job not been in the United States.

During that stretch of time, Tegan and I were paying $300 per month for intensely mediocre insurance that, because we were trying to get at least a little government assistance (Obamacare and all that), came with a huge amount of paperwork, contradictory statements and instructions, and several insurance cards sent to us over the course of a year. When I went for my last doctor visit before leaving the country, none of the cards worked, and I was forced to pay $200 out of pocket for a 10 minute “checkup”. I think there was an option for insurance through REI, but it wasn’t viable for me as a part-time worker.

Still, REI puts a lot of effort into the whole, “we’re one big happy corporate family” message, and it’s honestly more compelling from them than most companies. Everyone got a voucher for one day off, planned in advance, specifically for the purpose of doing something outside, for example, and there were regular weekend activities like hikes or bike rides that people could join if they wanted.

But I’d like to draw your attention to something. The article I quoted is titled “‘Strikes Work’: REI Agrees to March 3 Union Election After Ohio Walkout”. I fully agree that strikes work, and that we should support them by default, but there’s something wrong with this situation. This wasn’t a strike for better pay, or a strike for safer conditions, or better health insurance, it was a strike to get an election in which they can vote on whether or not to form a union.

Again – simply forming a union required coordinated labor action, and permission from the company. Biden recently tweeted that workers have a right to form a union, but do they? REI workers had to strike just to get the right to vote on whether to form a union. It seems to me that, as with voting in elections, people shouldn’t have to fight every time they want to exercise their rights. Instead, people in the U.S. have to fight to exercise a whole host of rights and freedoms that they’re supposed to have, while companies steal from them, put them in danger, and spend the money that the workers make for them on union-busting, and on lobbying the government to further stack the deck in their favor.

The sad reality is that even with a supposedly progressive company like REI, the way capitalism is set up, management is always pitted against labor. Even in cooperatives that are owned and managed by workers in a democratic fashion, the workers themselves often have to take on the adversarial role of management, for the company to have a shot at surviving in an economy that’s very much built around the whims of the aristocracy.

This is why I don’t think “social democracy” is good enough. It’s better than what the United States has, to be sure, but it leaves capitalists in the driver’s seat, and requires constant struggle by the working class to exercise and maintain the rights they’ve won. That doesn’t mean I’d oppose it, of course. I’d happily take the version of the U.S. that a moderate like Bernie Sanders might create, but it’s not just about whether or not people have a decent life. It’s also about whether other people have the power to take that life away. The reality is that the American Dream was always a lie, and the ruling class, both in and out of government, have worked hard to make sure that it stayed a lie, as they’re doing to this very day. Organizing for better treatment is, without question, an important thing to do all by itself, but as has been noted many times in the past, it’s a first step, not the end goal. As long as the fundamental organization of the economy is designed to create so much inequality in power and wealth, the folks at the top will always be working to gain more control over the peasantry, and that will always be far easier for them than what workers have to do to keep what freedom they have.

I’m glad that REI outlets are unionizing, and I hope the trend continues, but I think this is a good reminder that even as we celebrate the progress we make, we have to be thinking about the next fight.

 

Biodiversity assessment shows 40% of U.S. ecosystems in danger of collapse.

I’ve mentioned in the past that I spent a couple years working as a field ecologist for the Wisconsin DNR. Most of what I did was catch snakes all over the southern half of the state (as part of a team), measure them, take metadata, and release them. For the garter snakes, we took DNA samples, and noted which subspecies they were. The purpose of this research wasn’t to discover anything new, so much as to assess the status of the garter snake population in that state. It was a fun job, I got to see a lot of the Wisconsin landscape, and it was neat to know that we were part of a larger effort. Not just in every state, but in pretty much every country, there are people doing the slow, daily work of counting organisms.

This is how the scientific community builds a picture, in data, of what’s happening in the world around us. It’s basically an ongoing physical check-up for the biosphere as a whole. Instead of checking temperature, heart rate, blood pressure, and all that jazz, we check snake levels, and tree count, and do bug inventories. I’ve taken part in a few studies like this on different reptile species, and been peripheral to similar work on plants, birds, and insects. I sometimes run into people who’re incredulous that scientists can claim to know that a species is in decline, or that an ecosystem is falling apart, and I think it’s because they don’t realize that we really do have people whose job it is to go out into the middle of nowhere and just… count everything.

I think it’s rare that a study will literally count every tree in a forest, but they absolutely will get a representative sample. Designate strips of forest a couple meters wide and a few dozen meters long, and count every plant in that strip. Do it a hundred more times in different parts of the forest, and you get data that lets you form a sort of impressionist image of the forest’s health. Do it year after year, at consistent times of year, and you can see how things are changing. Unfortunately, the result of all that work is that we know that 40% of ecosystems in the United States are in danger of collapse.

“This grim assessment adds to the mountain of science showing that we’re creating an extinction crisis,” said Tierra Curry, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity. “It’s suicidal of us to pretend that business as usual is more important than safeguarding the natural world we all depend on.”

The study is the most comprehensive to date on the status of U.S. ecosystems. It found that 51% of grasslands and 40% of forests and wetlands are at risk of range-wide collapse. Only 12% of U.S. lands are currently protected.

“Grassland loss is the biggest U.S. environmental disaster that gets the least attention,” said Curry. “Conversion of grasslands to suburban sprawl and pesticide-intensive agriculture is a primary reason we’ve lost 3 billion birds and why we could lose monarch butterflies and vital pollinators.”

Among animals, the evaluation found that freshwater species such as mollusks, crayfish and amphibians are the most threatened groups because of water pollution and dams. Insects like butterflies, bees and dragonflies are also highly imperiled, with 37% of U.S. bee species facing extinction.

For plants, nearly half of cactus species are vulnerable, making them the most jeopardized plant group. Around 30% of ferns and orchids are at risk, as are 20% of tree species.

“By taking nature for granted we’ve pushed natural systems to the brink of collapse,” said Curry. “We’ve been so neglectful for so long, but we can create a different world that doesn’t exploit nature and vulnerable human communities for never-ending sprawl and consumption.”

It’s not fair to say that nothing is being done, but as with climate change, if enough was being done, then we wouldn’t be at this point.

I think it’s worth discussing what “collapse” means, when it comes to ecosystems. It doesn’t mean that a blight falls upon the land, and everything dies, leaving only withered desert behind. I mean, that can happen, but even when it does, it’s not “the end”, but rather a shift to a new kind of ecosystem. The report itself describes collapse as involving

[…]a transformation of identity, loss of defining features, and/or replacement by a novel ecosystem. It occurs when all ecosystem occurrences lose defining biotic or abiotic features, and when when native biota are no longer sustained.

It might well be the end of the world for species dependent on the old ecosystem, but it’s both more complicated, and less final than what you might see in fiction. The problem is that a change like that can absolutely devastate connected human populations.

We’re worried about ecosystem collapse not just because we mourn the species lost, though I think we should do that, but also because we depend on those ecosystems, often in ways that most of us don’t even notice. I’ve talked before about ecosystem services – the myriad of ways in which natural ecosystems support all of humanity – and while the shift to a different ecosystem won’t necessarily remove all of those benefits, the loss in biodiversity will reduce them. During COVID, we’ve seen how our just-in-time supply chain fails in a crisis, and there’s no reason to think that that weakness is limited to our medical and medical supply systems.

As Dr. Curry says, trying to continue business as usual would be suicide for humanity. Well, most of it would be murder, since most of humanity has had little to no say in the course of events over the last couple centuries. The upside of this report is that “in danger” does not mean “doomed”. We’re on course to “doomed”, but we have the means and understanding to change course, if only we can disempower those working to prevent us from doing so.

If you want to get involved in this kind of work, look for “community science” or “citizen science” happening near you. Local nature centers or university biology departments are likely to have information. If you want to get involved in counteracting this, then look into stuff like pollinator gardens, seed bombing, and community groups that do trash pickup and tree planting and the like. The unfortunate reality is that our institutions have failed us, and are continuing to fail us. It may be that through organizing and hard work we can gain control of those institutions, but until then, doing what we can, where we can, with whom we can, can only lead us in the right direction.

 

Advocacy Groups Present Path to End Prison Profiteering

The law enforcement system of the United State is breathtakingly corrupt, cruel, and unjust. This is not a new claim, either in general, or on this blog. I personally want to work towards prison and police abolition. Many “offenses”, like drug use, don’t need to be offenses, and simply decriminalizing them would go a long way to reduce the “need” for a lot of our policing and prisons. Likewise, guaranteeing food, shelter, and health care would remove most crimes of necessity. Someone’s not going to steal coats or televisions to re-sell to avoid eviction if there’s no danger of being evicted. Someone’s not going to start making meth to pay for cancer treatment if there’s no requirement to pay. Sadly, while I’m sure many would say “that sounds nice in theory”, fewer are willing to actually work towards that, particularly within the halls of power. The enraging reality is that locking up and enslaving people makes a number of capitalists very wealthy at taxpayer expense, and at the cost of immeasurable suffering.

That’s why, while I support the effort to remove the profit motive from the USian so-called Justice System, I’m worried that those with the power to change things actively oppose that change. I know that Biden has made some noise about it, but he also played a major role in creating this problem in the first place, so forgive me if I doubt his intentions. Whether or not I turn out to be right, it’s important to make the case that doing it is possible. It can build the case for change, and if that change doesn’t happen, it can support the case for more radical action, in the face of a corrupt government that doesn’t represent the will of the people. All that being said, I’m glad to hear that a couple advocacy groups have released a “blueprint” for ending the use of private prisons in the United States:

To end the era in which prisons have become what Worth Rises executive director Bianca Tylek called “a business—one that is threatening our families, communities, and public safety,” the Biden administration must dismantle an industry that “has worked itself into every corner of the carceral system as incarceration has exploded over the past 40 years,” said the group.

“This is a pathway forward to a more just criminal legal system that does NOT put profits over people,” tweeted Color of Change.

The recommendations in the groups’ policy blueprint, Bearing the Cost, include:

  • Prohibiting for-profit healthcare in prisons, providing medications and hygiene products at no cost, and requiring better reporting on medical care;
  • Setting basic standards for food and commissary goods and preventing bundling of the services;
  • Making communication free and accessible and strengthening antitrust oversight;
  • Eliminating fees for money transfers and debit release cards and directing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to strengthen regulations for financial services for incarcerated people;
  • Conducting a comprehensive review of electronic monitoring of incarcerated people nationwide; and
  • Supporting the Abolition Amendment to end the use of unpaid labor in prisons.

“Over the last 40 years, the carceral system has grown into a vast network of corporations that use public-private partnerships to profit from the incarceration of our grandparents, parents, siblings, children, and other loved ones,” said Tylek. “They have created a carceral crisis and collected the windfalls on the taxpayers’ dime while the rest of us suffered. This policy blueprint provides the clearest roadmap for fulfilling the promise of justice that the Biden-Harris administration made and many expect it to meet.”

The blueprint was released a month after Biden signed the Martha Wright-Reed Just and Reasonable Communications Act of 2022 to empower federal regulators to ensure that charges for calls from correctional and detention facilities are “just and reasonable.” Currently, incarcerated people are charged as much as $9.99 for a cellphone call and $5.70 for a 15-minute landline call.

See, that last bit worries me – I don’t think there should be any charges for prisoners to talk to their families. Locking someone up, and then charging them for contact with the outside world is neither just nor reasonable. It feels more like an effort to force them into debt, in a society that seems to make it harder to get out of debt every year. Aside from the fact that constant debt payments and extortionate interest rates funnel a lot of money upward from the working class, debt also acts as an additional burden on people, making them more desperate for any income they can get, and therefor more likely to accept low pay and bad conditions.

I’ll just have to hope that my cynicism is unwarranted. It sounds like the communications act mentioned above is a step in the right direction, even if it’s not a big one, so I’ll absolutely take that as a win. Dismantling an entrenched industry is another matter entirely, but I’d love to see the Democrats prove me wrong about them by taking on that fight.

Nitrogen pollution causing soil to lose carbon

As I recently covered, sulfuric air pollution once acted as free fertilizer for farms. As efforts to clean the air succeeded, farmers had to increase their use of sulfur fertilizers to compensate. With that knowledge, it seems entirely reasonable to assume that nitrogen, another element often put in fertilizer, would behave in a similar manner. Apparently not.

Instead, the team found that under certain conditions, extra nitrogen causes dryland soil to acidify and leach calcium. Calcium binds to carbon, and the two elements then leave the soil together. This finding is detailed in the journal Global Change Biology.

To obtain their results, the research team sampled soil from ecological reserves near San Diego and Irvine that have been fertilized with nitrogen in long-term experiments. This allowed them to know precisely how much nitrogen was being added, and account for any effects they observed.

In many cases, nitrogen can affect biological processes that in turn influence how soil stores carbon. Such processes include the fueling of plant growth, as well as slowing down the microbes that help decompose dead things in the soil.

What the researchers did not expect was a big effect on carbon storage through abiotic, or non-biological means.

The pH scale measures how acidic or alkaline — basic — something is. In general, soils resist dramatic changes in pH by releasing elements like calcium in exchange for acidity. As nitrogen acidified soils at some of the sites in this study, the soil attempted to resist this acidity by releasing calcium. As it did so, some of the carbon stabilized by association with the calcium was lost.

“It is a surprising result because the main effect seems to be abiotic,” said Johann Püspök, UCR environmental sciences graduate student and first author of the study. “That means bare patches of soil with no plant cover and low microbial activity, which I always thought of as areas where not much is going on, appear to be affected by nitrogen pollution too.”

Dryland soil, characterized by limited ability to retain moisture and low levels of organic matter, covers roughly 45% of Earth’s land area. It is responsible for storing a large amount of the world’s carbon.

Future studies may shed more light on how much dryland soil is being affected by nitrogen pollution in the way the study plots were. “We need more information as to how widespread such acidification effects are, and how they work under non-experimental conditions of nitrogen deposition,” Püspök said.

However, since there is no quick fix for this phenomenon, and no clear way to reverse the process once it has begun, researchers recommend reducing emissions as much as possible to help soil retain its carbon stores.

“Air pollution generated by fossil fuel combustion has an impact on many things, including human health by causing asthma,” Homyak said. “It can also impact the amount of carbon these dryland systems can store for us. For many reasons, we have to get a handle on air pollution.”

Oh, joy.

Given that we already knew that high temperatures cause soil to release carbon, that was already a source of concern for me. Now it turns out that the air pollution I’m always raving about is doing that as well.

On the plus side, this means that as we end fossil fuel use, this particular effect should reverse, which could make a reduction in greenhouse gas levels happen more quickly. We’ll still get that temperature spike from decreasing particle pollution, but anything that causes levels to drop faster is a win for us, I think.

So while this is bad news in our current situation, I’ll take it as good news by looking to the future. .

 

Video: Ze Frank takes on slime molds

It feels like the more I work on this story, the more I realize that focusing on keeping the number of books down will make it worse overall. So I guess I’m gonna be another white dude with a very long fantasy series. Anyway, here’s Ze Frank with some True Facts about the slime mold:

 

Contaminated eyedrops lead to blindness, death in United States

Several over-the-counter eyedrop products from Ezricare Artificial Tears, and possibly some other eyedrop brands have been contaminated with drug-resistant bacteria, causing eye infections across 12 states that have blinded several people, and killed one that we know of. The identification of the brand is from products that patients reported using. Ezricare was the most commonly used, but other brands have been mentioned. The CDC is currently only telling people to stop using Ezricare products. For those who might be effected, here’s what the CDC recommends:

Patients should stop using EzriCare Artificial Tears pending additional information and guidance from CDC and FDA. If patients were advised to use EzriCare Artificial Tears by their healthcare provider, they should follow up with their healthcare provider for recommendations about alternative treatment options.

Patients who have used EzriCare preservative-free artificial tears and who have signs or symptoms of an eye infection should seek medical care immediately. At this time, there is no recommendation for testing of patients who have used this product and who are not experiencing any signs or symptoms of infection.

Eye infection symptoms may include:

  • Yellow, green, or clear discharge from the eye
  • Eye pain or discomfort
  • Redness of the eye or eyelid
  • Feeling of something in your eye (foreign body sensation)
  • Increased sensitivity to light
  • Blurry vision

This strain of Pseudomonas aeruginosa appears to be new to the United States, and both the CDC and FDA are investigating to figure out what happened. As I’m writing this, all reports point to 55 cases across CA, CO, CT, FL, NJ, NM, NY, NV, TX, UT, WA, and WI, with five people suffering permanent vision loss, and one death. It’s likely that the outbreak is worse than that, given that this is an early report, so again – if you use products like this and you start experiencing symptoms, get help – this is not something you want to just wait and see if it goes away, and the more advanced the infection, the harder to treat or to reverse damage done.

The big scare here, of course, is that this bacterium is, in the words of the CDC, extensively drug-resistant. This is a problem that has been growing for a while now. Experts did try to sound alarms on the over-use of antibiotics, particularly in the United States, but for the most part, they seem to have been ignored. The good news, and this is why you should seek treatment, is that one particular antibiotic called cefiderocol does seem to work on this strain. While there are millions of drug-resistant infections every year, and thousands of deaths, this seems to be the first outbreak linked to a contaminated product. Obviously the corporation is insisting that the link isn’t definitive, but it seems highly likely that more concrete proof will come.

Spread the word, and take care of yourselves and each other.

Video: History of the Great Dismal Swamp

I’m feeling tired for reasons, so today I’m just sharing something I came across while working on my current novel. I think swamps are fascinating as ecosystems (I’m not sure there are any ecosystems that aren’t fascinating), but the Great Dismal Swamp is special for its role in American history. It was initially a stop on the Underground Railroad, where Black people escaping from slavery could use difficult, wet terrain to hide from their pursuers. Over time, some people decided that the difficulties of living in the swamp were preferable to the difficulties of living at the mercy of white society, and so they formed communities out there. There’s a lot that we still don’t know about them, but maybe we’ll learn more some day. As Eric Sheppard says in the video, while there aren’t written records of these communities, their descendants are still out there (Sheppard is one), and some of them may still have an oral history of their families. It’s easy to forget, with the internet at our fingertips, how much we still don’t know about even fairly recent human history.