What an excellent, thoughtful piece to begin one's Saturday morning. The stupidity of humans is perhaps only exceeded by our hubris. This entire society we've created - of vast wealth, freedom from hunger and disease, comfort, entertainment and security - can be wiped out in a matter of minutes by a man-made or natural catastrophe. I'm c…
What an excellent, thoughtful piece to begin one's Saturday morning. The stupidity of humans is perhaps only exceeded by our hubris. This entire society we've created - of vast wealth, freedom from hunger and disease, comfort, entertainment and security - can be wiped out in a matter of minutes by a man-made or natural catastrophe. I'm currently reading The Children of Ash and Elm, a history of the Vikings. Had not known that a series of volcanic eruptions in the AD 500s had blotted out the sun for years, leading to crop failures, starvation and the erasure of population from swaths of the northern climes. Imagine that today with seven billion hungry mouths to feed. We can also see society crumble from a nuclear exchange and EMP or, more likely, our electric grids fail due to the green madness of unreliable wind and solar. Not sure where this musing leads except to observe that a nation that places itself in the hands of a corrupt, senile and imbecilic leader of a cabal of carnival freaks is not likely to fare well in any calamity. Especially when the populace has become so soft, indolent and compliant that they let a relatively mild virus put the nation into a lawless lockdown and tolerated medical stupidity on a massive scale in the name of "soy-yence." Perhaps a little pain is good for us and more reliance on the Stoics is required?
Do you recommend this history, Bruce? I'd like to read a good one of the Vikings. I've been diving into the history of medieval Scotland and Britain---yes, I still make a distinction; Scotland Forever!--and Vikings were so much part of that.
Yes. One EMP and we're back to the preindustrial era. I don't think we're prepared for that.
It's a slog but filled with interesting information. The first almost 100 pages were about the various gods, giants etc. I guess necessary to set the stage Seems to be picking up. I need to start reading more during the day but work keeps pulling me back in. 20 pages before bed and zzzz.......So much for "semi-retired."
Aye, lad, I would fight ye to the death, but me giant Scottish yam sacks are skidding on the peat because me bonnie wee kilt shrunk in the wash so I must knit a cradle for the boys before they explode and wipe out the Highlands with their volcanic Scot might . . .
Plus, I'm a third Scot, a third English, a third German, with some Irishers in the woodpile somewhere, so I am always fighting with meself and therefore so exhausted I can barely drag me and my yams to me pub. Be a good lad and spot me a pint, eh?
Does he say Why? I would have thought the middle of the 14th century was fit that bill. It was the time the little ice age started and the black plague hit. Crops froze in the fields and people starved by the tens of thousands and continued to starve until hardier crops were introduce and of course the black plague killed about 1/3 of the population. The plague was so bad that wolves ran in the streets of Paris.
Antibiotic resistance is becoming more and more common and frankly is THE biggest problem in microbiology (I teach Medical Microbiology). We need to invest in finding solutions beyond antibiotics since bacteria evolve resistance so rapidly, but it is an uphill battle. The age of antibiotics is not completely over, but we are getting dangerously close. 😖 my father in law died in the ICU from a hospital acquired pneumonia cause by a resistant bacterial infection. They tried the antibiotic of last resort (causes kidney failure) and that didn’t work. Then there was nothing left to try, literally nothing. This situation is becoming more common. 😔
Yes! Bacteriophages look promising! I’ve talked about them to my students for the past 20 years (I remember hearing about them in grad school). I recently found a pretty comprehensive journal article regarding recent phage research, but in between grading and kids and etc. I know I didn’t finish reading it. I need to find it again!
True enough then, substitute antibiotics for vaccine - but will all Americans believe the CDC and whoever the government is that the medicines will work? Or only some?
I don't want to sound too cynical but I can see that if any mea culpas were forthcoming, there would be arguments as to how genuine they were. There's that much distrust..
I think it depends. Antibiotics have been around forever. A lot of vaccines have, too (e.g. polio). The mRNA vaccines have not, and they don't seem to be working like we were told they would.
I agree with you re the mRNA doses, perhaps because of the speed in which they were developed.
For me though the problem looking forward is the lack of trust a large portion of the American public has towards the medical establishment and government in general. Will they take its guidance on the next pandemic?
This is such a huge issue going forth. They have lost the trust of the public because they abused the trust of the public. I have felt so betrayed and let down by institutions that I once trusted and defended. Not just institutions like the CDC or the WHO, but also the process of peer review for scientific publications. Journals themselves have shown their biases toward “fad ideologies” and against scientific fact. It’s truly disheartening.
By your response I take it you won't be listening to anything any authority ('experts') has to say. Who then will you believe? Or during the next pandemic are you going to wing it?
I'm sure it would have been no consolation to someone dying of the plague in the 14th century that historians have determined there was a worse time to be alive then their time. Just like I'm sure that someone currently dying of Ebola in Africa or someone being tortured by some Junta would not be comforted. It's not only time, it's also place and personal situation. All middle-class Americans are incredibly blessed and lucky compared to the majority of people, not only throughout human history, but even today.
That is what my husband says of modern Americans - that we are the freest, the healthiest, the wealthiest people in history. Are we perfect? No. Do we have much to be thankful for? Yes. Should we be happy? I think we should.
I cannot fathom how people in this country don’t see this. I’m well aware that everyone has different circumstances some better than others. But to not be able to see that simply being born in this country means you have won the lottery is willful blindness.
So twice within two millenia we had catastrophic crop failures, disease and social breakdown. And we think we so advanced and immune to that. I do worry about the world my grandchildren will live in.
btw - these dialogues are why I love what Bari has done here. Interaction with smart people who all see things a bit differently. Thanks you both.
Could be the loss of the bees this go around. Or my faith says the world will be cleansed by fire next time. All that activity in the Ring of Fire and elsewhere gives me pause.
Since history always repeats itself, we're long overdue for a Black Plague/Ice Age/sunblocking event that will change the world as we know it. Covid was only a dress rehearsal for the grade school pageant, and we handled that so terribly I cannot imagine how humanity would deal with a population killer of 33 percent.
I think the 9nly good thing that came out of covid is that regardless of which side each of us settled on we all know that something truly problematic is coming and we will react better. Better at assessing if it is truly problematic, better at responding if it is.
I would love to think we learned something valuable from this Covid experience, so we don't repeat the mistakes but accentuate the stuff that works during the next catastrophe. Politicians have short memories, though, so I'm not hopeful from that end. Everyday people DO learn, though, so next time we may just sort through the options for ourselves and work it out.
It's what Bruce Miller said above. Volcanic eruptions blotted out the sun for years, leading to crop failures and widespread famine. It was essentially nuclear winter before nukes.
Yikes! EMPs, volcanos, plagues, famine, and pestilence....The list of possible disasters is long, but it always has been. Nothing is sure except that we will all eventually die of something. In the meantime, how shall we live so that our lives bless others and help, in some small way, to improve this screwed up world? That's what I'm trying to figure out, and I'm guessing the rest of you are, too.
Aldous Huxley was a modern day seer, a soothsayer. He wrote "Brave New World" in 1931 and we are watching his predictions unfold today. Huxley was genius who really foresaw the future. I was forced to read "Barve New World" in high school and thought Huxley was coocoo for coco puffs but then I was 16 year old and didn't know my ass from a tea kettle.
There were some things in today's essay I did not agree with:
"Law is one domain that has particularly curtailed suffering, especially the physical type: the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill in the 1970s and 1980s in the name of individual rights and dignity; the state-by-state campaigns of the 1990s and 2000s to abolish the death penalty. Or, more recently, the growth of the right-to-die movement and its legalization in 10 states plus D.C. if given a fatal prognosis from a physician—a right that our friends in Canada have expanded to include chronic mental illness or economic hardship."
"Law is one domain that has particularly curtailed suffering, especially the physical type: the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill in the 1970s and 1980s in the name of individual rights and dignity"
Now instead of the mentally ill living in state institutions, getting three meals a day and a roof over their heads, they are living on the streets, defecating on the sidewalks. Granted, many of the state institutions were snake pits. However, those pushing to deinstitutionalize the mentally ill, could have fought to change the snake pits into clean, sanitary, compassionate mental hospitals with trained mental health workers on staff.
Instead these callous "compassionate, caring" leftist dumped them on the streets and the "caring" left never looked back, declaring their crusade a triumph. I would have labeled it a horrible, inhumane, failure.
I have a much different take on the death penalty. Ted Bundy was a brutal, murdering psycho who murdered at least 14 women in the most horrible manner. These were 14 deaths we know of. Law enforcement knew he had killed many more but couldn't prove it.
The "compassionate" left always beats their breasts over the execution of murders but never thinks about or consoles the families of the murdered. The left wanted to give Bundy three hots and a cot for the rest of his miserable life. That's right. Let's give this animal three hot meals a day and a warm dry place to sleep and free medical care for the rest of his life at our expense.
The unicorn rainbow party is insane. They have a hard time with reality. Insanity has been defined as someone who has had a break from reality. I think that describes the left to a T.
Of interest to me is you bringing up Bundy. You see Ted Bundy killed two friends of mine. Girls I was literally hanging out with shortly before they were killed. And it is that case that turned me hard against the death penalty. I saw the terror he caused. I felt the loss of innocence. I also saw the circus around his execution where hawkers were selling "Bundy Fries" around Stark that day. I saw the cheers and the joy in those who went to hang out at the prison that day. And I then understood that I could never support the death penalty again. You can read accounts of it on line if you want. There is also a long history of crowd behavior around executions going back a thousand years. Executions is a soul destroying action even when we know they are guilty of heinous crimes. It's the government demonstrating their power over us. Just look at who they execute (the poor, destitute, mentally ill and dark skinned) and it tells you everything you need to know about what the death penalty actually is. There was no joy for me that day back in 1989. No great relief. Nothing.....................I felt nothing.
Yes, LonesomePolecat, Huxley was amazingly prescient. The elites at the World Economic Forum who are running the Western world are not concerned with the suffering of the masses, their concerns are all about ESG & the climate. Humans are simply an annoyance with their anxiety, depression, suicides, concern over massive violent crime increases, homeless people defecating on their lawns, inflation and loss of meaning.
Today most people are not Huxley's "happy slaves" but miserable sufferers.
As the author, who prepared for her difficult pregnancy by watching the horrors of "1917," I prepared for the coming dystopia by reading Leon Uris' "Mila 18." The story of the death-defying Jewish freedom fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto. These nobel souls knew their death was a near-certainty yet took out many Nazis before they were killed themselves. I finished the book October, 2019. This somewhat prepared me for the Covid lockdowns and the violent riots following the death of George Floyd.
My previous twenty years, spending a great deal of time actively combating the university and Islamist totalitarians taught me that the end of freedom in the US might be near.
Because I was emotionally prepared, I was ready to immediately do many things to protect my family, including buying another home outside our home state of California in August of 2020. This gives me a solid feeling that I am being conscientious given the knowledge I have gained about future probabilities.
In February of 2021 I reread "Brave New World" for further clarity on the mindset of our modern day techo-totalitarians.
I believe we can do a great deal to prepare ourselves by striving to understand where we may be headed. Then hopefully the pain will not be as great.
What an excellent, thoughtful piece to begin one's Saturday morning. The stupidity of humans is perhaps only exceeded by our hubris. This entire society we've created - of vast wealth, freedom from hunger and disease, comfort, entertainment and security - can be wiped out in a matter of minutes by a man-made or natural catastrophe. I'm currently reading The Children of Ash and Elm, a history of the Vikings. Had not known that a series of volcanic eruptions in the AD 500s had blotted out the sun for years, leading to crop failures, starvation and the erasure of population from swaths of the northern climes. Imagine that today with seven billion hungry mouths to feed. We can also see society crumble from a nuclear exchange and EMP or, more likely, our electric grids fail due to the green madness of unreliable wind and solar. Not sure where this musing leads except to observe that a nation that places itself in the hands of a corrupt, senile and imbecilic leader of a cabal of carnival freaks is not likely to fare well in any calamity. Especially when the populace has become so soft, indolent and compliant that they let a relatively mild virus put the nation into a lawless lockdown and tolerated medical stupidity on a massive scale in the name of "soy-yence." Perhaps a little pain is good for us and more reliance on the Stoics is required?
Bruce, thanks for posting. I've added The Children of Ash and Elm to my reading list!
Do you recommend this history, Bruce? I'd like to read a good one of the Vikings. I've been diving into the history of medieval Scotland and Britain---yes, I still make a distinction; Scotland Forever!--and Vikings were so much part of that.
Yes. One EMP and we're back to the preindustrial era. I don't think we're prepared for that.
I am in LV and was at a bar with a beer on tap called Kilt Lifter.
It's a slog but filled with interesting information. The first almost 100 pages were about the various gods, giants etc. I guess necessary to set the stage Seems to be picking up. I need to start reading more during the day but work keeps pulling me back in. 20 pages before bed and zzzz.......So much for "semi-retired."
Aye, lad, I would fight ye to the death, but me giant Scottish yam sacks are skidding on the peat because me bonnie wee kilt shrunk in the wash so I must knit a cradle for the boys before they explode and wipe out the Highlands with their volcanic Scot might . . .
Plus, I'm a third Scot, a third English, a third German, with some Irishers in the woodpile somewhere, so I am always fighting with meself and therefore so exhausted I can barely drag me and my yams to me pub. Be a good lad and spot me a pint, eh?
An absolutely brilliant post to this excellent Saturday morning esssy.
Way too kind. Soon enough I'll revert back to the norm.
My husband is a historian and he has said that the year 545 A.D. was the worst year to be alive.
Does he say Why? I would have thought the middle of the 14th century was fit that bill. It was the time the little ice age started and the black plague hit. Crops froze in the fields and people starved by the tens of thousands and continued to starve until hardier crops were introduce and of course the black plague killed about 1/3 of the population. The plague was so bad that wolves ran in the streets of Paris.
On the misery scale, I think that's hard to beat.
The bubonic plague still exists, by the way. And it may be evolving as we speak.
So we all might be in line for some misery ahead (If so, the writer of this essay might get the societal suffering she's looking for).
Wearing masks won't help. And vaccinations might not work.
Then again, not wearing masks and not getting the syringe won't help either..
Plague can be cured with antibiotics. What we really need to worry about is whatever they are cooking up with their gain-of-function research.
More and more bacteria have become antibiotic resistant. Some in the medical field have said the age of antibiotics might be over.
Antibiotic resistance is becoming more and more common and frankly is THE biggest problem in microbiology (I teach Medical Microbiology). We need to invest in finding solutions beyond antibiotics since bacteria evolve resistance so rapidly, but it is an uphill battle. The age of antibiotics is not completely over, but we are getting dangerously close. 😖 my father in law died in the ICU from a hospital acquired pneumonia cause by a resistant bacterial infection. They tried the antibiotic of last resort (causes kidney failure) and that didn’t work. Then there was nothing left to try, literally nothing. This situation is becoming more common. 😔
I'm sorry for your loss! 😞
Yes! Bacteriophages look promising! I’ve talked about them to my students for the past 20 years (I remember hearing about them in grad school). I recently found a pretty comprehensive journal article regarding recent phage research, but in between grading and kids and etc. I know I didn’t finish reading it. I need to find it again!
True. And potentially problematic!
True enough then, substitute antibiotics for vaccine - but will all Americans believe the CDC and whoever the government is that the medicines will work? Or only some?
That's where the suffering might come in.
This one will not unless I see some genuine mea culpas.
I don't want to sound too cynical but I can see that if any mea culpas were forthcoming, there would be arguments as to how genuine they were. There's that much distrust..
That could be but I am a pretty good judge of credibility and I am open to the possibility of genuineness. But I take your point.
I think it depends. Antibiotics have been around forever. A lot of vaccines have, too (e.g. polio). The mRNA vaccines have not, and they don't seem to be working like we were told they would.
Scuba I almost always agree with you but cannot here. Both antibiotics and vaccines are the result of modern meficine.
Agreed, but other vaccines and treatments had to go through a longer testing process than the mRNA vaccines. They weren't rushed through.
I agree with you re the mRNA doses, perhaps because of the speed in which they were developed.
For me though the problem looking forward is the lack of trust a large portion of the American public has towards the medical establishment and government in general. Will they take its guidance on the next pandemic?
This is such a huge issue going forth. They have lost the trust of the public because they abused the trust of the public. I have felt so betrayed and let down by institutions that I once trusted and defended. Not just institutions like the CDC or the WHO, but also the process of peer review for scientific publications. Journals themselves have shown their biases toward “fad ideologies” and against scientific fact. It’s truly disheartening.
“Forward” not “Forth”
I doubt it!
By your response I take it you won't be listening to anything any authority ('experts') has to say. Who then will you believe? Or during the next pandemic are you going to wing it?
I'm sure it would have been no consolation to someone dying of the plague in the 14th century that historians have determined there was a worse time to be alive then their time. Just like I'm sure that someone currently dying of Ebola in Africa or someone being tortured by some Junta would not be comforted. It's not only time, it's also place and personal situation. All middle-class Americans are incredibly blessed and lucky compared to the majority of people, not only throughout human history, but even today.
That is what my husband says of modern Americans - that we are the freest, the healthiest, the wealthiest people in history. Are we perfect? No. Do we have much to be thankful for? Yes. Should we be happy? I think we should.
I cannot fathom how people in this country don’t see this. I’m well aware that everyone has different circumstances some better than others. But to not be able to see that simply being born in this country means you have won the lottery is willful blindness.
Yes but it's easily lost and we'd better start understanding that.
It is really lost for those who never grasped it to begin with.
So twice within two millenia we had catastrophic crop failures, disease and social breakdown. And we think we so advanced and immune to that. I do worry about the world my grandchildren will live in.
btw - these dialogues are why I love what Bari has done here. Interaction with smart people who all see things a bit differently. Thanks you both.
Could be the loss of the bees this go around. Or my faith says the world will be cleansed by fire next time. All that activity in the Ring of Fire and elsewhere gives me pause.
Since history always repeats itself, we're long overdue for a Black Plague/Ice Age/sunblocking event that will change the world as we know it. Covid was only a dress rehearsal for the grade school pageant, and we handled that so terribly I cannot imagine how humanity would deal with a population killer of 33 percent.
I think the 9nly good thing that came out of covid is that regardless of which side each of us settled on we all know that something truly problematic is coming and we will react better. Better at assessing if it is truly problematic, better at responding if it is.
I would love to think we learned something valuable from this Covid experience, so we don't repeat the mistakes but accentuate the stuff that works during the next catastrophe. Politicians have short memories, though, so I'm not hopeful from that end. Everyday people DO learn, though, so next time we may just sort through the options for ourselves and work it out.
What we should have learned is not to put the politicians in charge.
Well I learned a lot.
It's what Bruce Miller said above. Volcanic eruptions blotted out the sun for years, leading to crop failures and widespread famine. It was essentially nuclear winter before nukes.
When the Yellowstone Volcanic lets go, as it's well overdue to blow, everyone in North America--perhaps the world--will experience that nightmare.
I can't allow myself even to think of that. Truly terrifying and eminently real.
We are also long overdue for a reversal of the poles and hominids were just getting started during the last one.
The Earth's core has stopped spinning.
Yikes! EMPs, volcanos, plagues, famine, and pestilence....The list of possible disasters is long, but it always has been. Nothing is sure except that we will all eventually die of something. In the meantime, how shall we live so that our lives bless others and help, in some small way, to improve this screwed up world? That's what I'm trying to figure out, and I'm guessing the rest of you are, too.
That could happen, soon or in 500 years, but I'm not going to add it to my worry list.
Oh, I agree, I don't worry about things I can't control. Yellowstone is one of millions of things in that category!
Why wouldn't have England been? Why did England's existence depend on the plague?
And if Harold had not taken the arrow in the eye with his untrained levies at Hastings, after his triumph at Stamford Bridge?
Aldous Huxley was a modern day seer, a soothsayer. He wrote "Brave New World" in 1931 and we are watching his predictions unfold today. Huxley was genius who really foresaw the future. I was forced to read "Barve New World" in high school and thought Huxley was coocoo for coco puffs but then I was 16 year old and didn't know my ass from a tea kettle.
There were some things in today's essay I did not agree with:
"Law is one domain that has particularly curtailed suffering, especially the physical type: the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill in the 1970s and 1980s in the name of individual rights and dignity; the state-by-state campaigns of the 1990s and 2000s to abolish the death penalty. Or, more recently, the growth of the right-to-die movement and its legalization in 10 states plus D.C. if given a fatal prognosis from a physician—a right that our friends in Canada have expanded to include chronic mental illness or economic hardship."
"Law is one domain that has particularly curtailed suffering, especially the physical type: the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill in the 1970s and 1980s in the name of individual rights and dignity"
Now instead of the mentally ill living in state institutions, getting three meals a day and a roof over their heads, they are living on the streets, defecating on the sidewalks. Granted, many of the state institutions were snake pits. However, those pushing to deinstitutionalize the mentally ill, could have fought to change the snake pits into clean, sanitary, compassionate mental hospitals with trained mental health workers on staff.
Instead these callous "compassionate, caring" leftist dumped them on the streets and the "caring" left never looked back, declaring their crusade a triumph. I would have labeled it a horrible, inhumane, failure.
I have a much different take on the death penalty. Ted Bundy was a brutal, murdering psycho who murdered at least 14 women in the most horrible manner. These were 14 deaths we know of. Law enforcement knew he had killed many more but couldn't prove it.
The "compassionate" left always beats their breasts over the execution of murders but never thinks about or consoles the families of the murdered. The left wanted to give Bundy three hots and a cot for the rest of his miserable life. That's right. Let's give this animal three hot meals a day and a warm dry place to sleep and free medical care for the rest of his life at our expense.
The unicorn rainbow party is insane. They have a hard time with reality. Insanity has been defined as someone who has had a break from reality. I think that describes the left to a T.
Of interest to me is you bringing up Bundy. You see Ted Bundy killed two friends of mine. Girls I was literally hanging out with shortly before they were killed. And it is that case that turned me hard against the death penalty. I saw the terror he caused. I felt the loss of innocence. I also saw the circus around his execution where hawkers were selling "Bundy Fries" around Stark that day. I saw the cheers and the joy in those who went to hang out at the prison that day. And I then understood that I could never support the death penalty again. You can read accounts of it on line if you want. There is also a long history of crowd behavior around executions going back a thousand years. Executions is a soul destroying action even when we know they are guilty of heinous crimes. It's the government demonstrating their power over us. Just look at who they execute (the poor, destitute, mentally ill and dark skinned) and it tells you everything you need to know about what the death penalty actually is. There was no joy for me that day back in 1989. No great relief. Nothing.....................I felt nothing.
Yes, LonesomePolecat, Huxley was amazingly prescient. The elites at the World Economic Forum who are running the Western world are not concerned with the suffering of the masses, their concerns are all about ESG & the climate. Humans are simply an annoyance with their anxiety, depression, suicides, concern over massive violent crime increases, homeless people defecating on their lawns, inflation and loss of meaning.
Today most people are not Huxley's "happy slaves" but miserable sufferers.
As the author, who prepared for her difficult pregnancy by watching the horrors of "1917," I prepared for the coming dystopia by reading Leon Uris' "Mila 18." The story of the death-defying Jewish freedom fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto. These nobel souls knew their death was a near-certainty yet took out many Nazis before they were killed themselves. I finished the book October, 2019. This somewhat prepared me for the Covid lockdowns and the violent riots following the death of George Floyd.
My previous twenty years, spending a great deal of time actively combating the university and Islamist totalitarians taught me that the end of freedom in the US might be near.
Because I was emotionally prepared, I was ready to immediately do many things to protect my family, including buying another home outside our home state of California in August of 2020. This gives me a solid feeling that I am being conscientious given the knowledge I have gained about future probabilities.
In February of 2021 I reread "Brave New World" for further clarity on the mindset of our modern day techo-totalitarians.
I believe we can do a great deal to prepare ourselves by striving to understand where we may be headed. Then hopefully the pain will not be as great.