The pig pandemic is here

Don’t we have enough bad news? There’s always something slipping its way into our nightmares, and this one is the African Swine Fever sweeping across Asia.

It is being described as the biggest animal disease outbreak the world has ever seen. Its impacts are already profound in Asia and beyond, with increased export demand certain to support pork prices for the foreseeable future. There will be longer-term implications of Asia’s African swine fever (ASF) outbreak, too, concerning the production and consumption of pork, some of which are already becoming apparent.

Nice to know pork prices will be propped up by the ongoing devastation. But read the rest: a quarter of the world’s pig population faces imminent death. And it’s spreading!

Official figures from China show the national pig herd had declined by 32% year-on-year by July, with an estimated 100 million pigs lost already. While some of the losses will be directly or indirectly linked to the disease itself, the reduction is also being heavily driven by vast numbers of producers choosing to slaughter their herds and get out of pigs before the virus gets to them.

Rabobank is forecasting that, by the end of the year, China’s pig herd will have halved. Given that it numbered 700 million and accounted for half the world’s pigs before ASF struck in August 2018, the damage the virus is causing is plain for all to see.

And that is just China. ASF is continuing to spread across Asia at a worrying rate, confirmed in September for the first time in South Korea, where six cases were confirmed within two weeks, and the Philippines, where 12 cases were recorded in one area in a short time.

In Vietnam, infected soon after China, the virus has reached all 63 provinces and around 5 million pigs have been killed. Rabobank forecasts a 15-20% reduction in pork production in Vietnam this year.

An industry comprising millions of, often remote, ‘backyard’ farmers, with little concept of biosecurity was always going to be easy prey for a virus that can travel and survive in tiny quantities for a long time on animals, people, clothes, vehicles and equipment. It also became clear at an early stage that the virus had become embedded in the pig feed chain and was being spread via swill feeding. It is also in the human pork supply chain, helping its spread around the continent.

It hasn’t yet affected the American midwest (Hello, Iowa! I hear you’re a major pork producer?) or Europe, but oh boy, imagine the chaos if it did. I hope our understanding of biosecurity is more robust than that of Chinese farmers, but I have my suspicions that no, our local swine farms are not at all constrained by science. Capitalism, baby!

Worse than Lovecraft: What if the Old Ones were real, but they’re all extinct?

Fantasio

One of my commonly made arguments against the likelihood of finding extraterrestrial intelligence is that it seems to be remarkably rare on our planet — I’m not making a joke about Republicans (although I could), but am stating a fact, that in the half-billion year history of animal life on Earth, only one species has followed the evolutionary strategy of extreme reliance on technology, ours. It doesn’t seem to be a common way for complex multi-cellular organisms to succeed, so we should expect that even if that kind of life is common on other worlds, it’s not likely to produce organisms we can talk to.

But what if I’m wrong? What if intelligent life had arisen on Earth multiple times? Would we be able to recognize it in the geological record?

Forget about the SF tropes of finding the equivalent of the Statue of Liberty on a beach somewhere, or digging up a transistor radio. All the monuments and all the toys we’ve built would be crumbled away and ground into dust in a million years or so. But what about chemical traces? We’ve been pumping out all kinds of novel chemistry, maybe some bits of it would leave a signature behind for our successors to discover.

That’s the question asked in this article by Schmidt and Frank. What should we look for?

If an industrial civilization had existed on Earth many millions of years prior to our own era, what traces would it have left and would they be detectable today? We summarize the likely geological fingerprint of the Anthropocene, and demonstrate that while clear, it will not differ greatly in many respects from other known events in the geological record. We then propose tests that could plausibly distinguish an industrial cause from an otherwise naturally occurring climate event.

Like they say, there’s a fair amount of uncertainty — on a geological scale, we don’t know how long industrial byproducts will linger. Stuff like plastics and halogenated organics might persist for a long time, in the right environment, such as after being buried and sequestered. Maybe we should look in ancient sediments for compounds that are likely to have been produced by a technological society.

In a real twist, the authors also wrote a science fiction story about such a search. What if we found PCBs and transuranic elements in a deep stratum, and what if it was also associated with an abrupt change in climate or the biota of the time? How would scientists interpret that?

What I found most chilling, though, was the long list of unexplained, abrupt climate shifts they describe in the geological record. Worst case scenario: what if they were all caused by the appearance of species that achieved some kind of global dominance (not necessarily technological) that led to a brief period of self-defeating triumph that always led to their inevitable extinction?

I think I just gave myself nightmares. What if we launched a SATI (Search for Ancient Terrestrial Intelligence) program, found multiple instances, and learned that our peculiar niche is more common than we thought, and always leads to our decline and disappearance? Would that knowledge allow us to change, do better, and escape our doom, or would it tell us that any attempt would be futile?

Worse than finding Cthulhu would be finding it’s traces, and learning that it was long dead, it’s annihilation pre-ordained by its nature, as we will be.

Schmidt GA, Frank A (2019) The Silurian hypothesis: would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record? International Journal of Astrobiology 18(2): 142-150.

When did “liberal” become a slur?

It wasn’t when the Republicans started sneering at the word. That was a mark of honor. I was happy to call myself a liberal during Reagan’s term.

It really started going rancid when Bill Maher adopted the label. “Liberal” now meant sexist hack and apologist for war and racism.

A week previously, Maher appeared on MSNBC’s flagship breakfast show, Morning Joe (9/12/19), where he claimed that the Democrats’ left-wing (i.e., Bernie Sanders) was a “cancer” destroying the party, warning that the left is “scarier and crazier than Trump,” and nominating a leftist as its presidential candidate would spell disaster in the next election. (Decrying the supposed unelectability of the left is a favorite pastime of elite pundits—FAIR.org, 2/26/19, 7/2/19, 8/21/19.)
Media almost unanimously present Maher as a “liberal” (e.g. Salon, 10/11/14, 9/21/19; USA Today, 7/8/18; New York Post, 6/29/19) or even a “progressive” (The Hill, 2/2/17) comedian. Yet any inspection of his political positions dispels this illusion. To be sure, he generally supported President Barack Obama and opposes Donald Trump (although he has been known to do the opposite of both). But he also has a long history of repeatedly taking reactionary positions on many subjects, especially war.

On his previous Comedy Central show Politically Incorrect, Maher praised the Vietnam War as “necessary,” arguing it helped end the Cold War. (The US officially began its involvement in Vietnam 36 years before the dissolution of the Soviet Union.) In 2013, he joked about killing antiwar activist Medea Benjamin after she interrupted Obama, and recanted his anti-Iraq War position, claiming, “Iraq is doing better than I thought it would be.” He praised George W. Bush for “creating a country” there.

Need I point out that he’s also an anti-vaccination atheist, and a libertarian? He uses his criticisms of Trump as a merkin to cover up his fundamental illiberalism. But this part is legitimately true:

Ultimately, Maher has built up an impressive following and continues to espouse snarky elitist hot takes weekly for HBO, earning an estimated $10 million per year doing so. Call him a racist, a bigot or an astute businessman; just don’t call him a liberal.

Although I can’t say that embracing the values of the 1990s through the Trump years to his own profit is exactly the mark of a principled person.

I don’t call that teaching

I guess Professor E.David Davis of the North Carolina State University never learned how to teach, although he did learn how to be a sexist jerk.

Maira Haque is a junior at NC State and was outraged by what she said Davis said in class to another student. Haque says Davis called on a female student in the class and when she didn’t have the answers to his questions about an assignment, things escalated.

“You’re 20 years old and you forgot to bring this assignment in. Were you dropping the head as a child? Do you have memory problems?” Haque said.

Next, she said, the professor selected another student to answer a question and she too didn’t have the answer.

“She didn’t have the paper either and before he even could begin berating her or anything, she said ‘I have memory problems too,’” Haque said. “And that made everyone laugh, but he kept going and he was like, ‘I guess the women in this class are useless. I guess I should call on a man.’

How well does belittling your students work as a pedagogical exercise, I wonder. Students are already anxious and overworked, I don’t need to ramp that up; if I see a number of students struggling to keep up, that tells me that I need to slow down and try to help. That’s my job.

Don’t worry about Professor Davis. He had an excuse for his behavior. It’s the same excuse I’ve heard from assholes for years.

The professor justified his comments by saying, “Well, obviously, it was a joke. Women are obviously useful because we need them for a species to reproduce,” according to a Twitter video.

“It was just a joke”, compounded by the distasteful argument that “we” (I presume he means us men?) need them just for their ovaries.

That guy should not be teaching at all. I won’t say that it sounds like he’s been dropped on his head a few times, but will instead suggest that his university send him off for remedial training in basic education skills and in humanity. We need to help him catch up with the good faculty, you know.

Jacob Wohl gives Elizabeth Warren a lock on the presidency

Once again, Jacob Wohl claims to have a sexual assault victim, and once again he gives a presser in Burkman’s driveway. This time, it’s an accusation against Elizabeth Warren, that she had sex with a Marine bodybuilder. Surprise, the “victim” showed up this time.

Whoa. A 70 year old woman had sex with a muscular 24 year old man? As long as it was consensual, good for her. I have to agree with this sentiment.

Spectator writer Caroline McCarthy joked, “Look, I get that this is BS and the “decorated, former U.S. Marine” will mysteriously cancel on the event, but Elizabeth Warren being a voracious cougar who hooks up with 24-year-old bodybuilders would make me want to vote for her.”

Except, of course, that this is a Jacob Wohl story, so you know it’s all lies. It’s also already falling apart. The Marine tried to claim that the scars on his back are a result of wild crazed sex with Warren (woohoo!), but unfortunately someone dug into his instagram feed and found his original explanation.

I prefer to imagine a naked Elizabeth Warren totally dominating a beefy young man, lashing him viciously with a chain, but I’m sorry, it just didn’t happen. Jacob Wohl never says anything accurate.

Why isn’t he in jail already?

You mean whining about being insulted doesn’t work?

An interesting historical anecdote: Andrew Johnson was a reviled president who went on a whistlestop tour — you know, campaign rallies — to energize his followers and stir up support. It didn’t go well. He was frequently insulted, and his response was to go on furious rants (sound familiar?) and rage at everyone. Guess how that went.

Johnson angrily denounced with one of the strangest tirades of the tour: “I have been traduced! I have been slandered. I have been maligned. I have been called Judas — Judas Iscariot and all of that.”

By the time it was over, Johnson had been humiliated and his reputation was in tatters.

I’ll be curious to see how effective the temper tantrum strategy will be for a president whose reputation is already in tatters.

Moloch just ate another baby

Once upon a time, Todd Starnes tried to get me fired. He raged about me on Fox News, posted it on various wingnutty sites, and made enough noise that a university lawyer contacted me to let me know that they were getting all these complaints…and also to reassure me that they had my back, and nothing I said was actionable.

So you’ll forgive me if I chortled smugly at this headline.

It’s good news, also because it makes me wonder if Fox News is getting a bit worried about their intimate association with far-right radicals and is trying to edge away a bit. Democrats may worship Moloch, but Republicans definitely worship Mammon, and their god is feeling some heat lately.

There clearly is big money in self-help books and pick-up artistry, though

I think I first heard about Peter Boghossian years ago when that “street epistemology” fad swept over atheism, and I thought that sounded like a good idea — being able to communicate about key concepts in atheism and skepticism in a casual, informal way? Sign me up. Then I witnessed some of it at meetings and on YouTube and was quickly de-impressed. It mainly seemed to be a game of leading questions calculated to trap uninformed people into contradictions, not into thinking, and to leverage their discomfort into considering alternatives. Proponents hate me when I say it, but Ray Comfort figured this out before they did, and he’s not exactly a brilliant philosopher.

My disenchantment only grew as I learned more about this Boghossian fellow. He’s an obnoxious ass! Are you telling me he’s a master of the gentle art of persuasion? If so, he doesn’t practice what he preaches.

Now he’s come out with this book, How to Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide, which is just nuts. What next? Trump writing a book on modern physics, Deepak Chopra writing about mathematical rigor, PZ Myers becoming an Instagram model, Uwe Boll producing a movie classic? Boghossian and his coauthor, James Lindsay, are temperamentally and intellectually incapable of writing a guide to handling challenging conversations. They’ve always relied on simply pandering to the biases of their right-wing friends.

I’m never going to buy their book and have no interest in reading it. Oliver Traldi has written a review…a charitable review, even, although it does reject their approach, and notes that a lot of it is rehashed pablum from the self-help genre.

All in all, How to Have Impossible Conversations was better than I expected. If you do as Boghossian and Lindsay say and not as they do, you’ll probably be more successful in persuading people during contentious conversations — as long as you have enough common sense to exclude the weird shit as well.

That “not as they do” is important. Boghossian and Lindsay are just the worst.

Traldi also brings up another criticism that I’d felt worming around in my guts in all my encounters with this “street epistemology” stuff, but he expresses it well for me.

If, as Boghossian and Lindsay seem to indicate, the readers’ own beliefs are as brittle as anyone else’s and rest on as shaky a foundation, why should they be in the business of trying to persuade anyone of anything? If we are really masters of doubting everything we believe, why would persuasion techniques be a rational thing to try to engage in? What would we be trying to persuade people of… stuff we ourselves don’t think is true? Who in the world would that help?

That’s a fundamental question. What, exactly, are we atheists trying to do? Answer that first, before you try to tell others how they’re supposed to be like you.