Debunking anti-EV claims

Myths about EVs

War is not the answer

to a properly posed question

I cannot remember when the United States has not been at war somewhere on planet Earth.  With more than 700 known military outposts circling the globe, it is difficult to see how this finally ends in anything other than catastrophe.

…

Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017 (Allen Lane, 2017; Penguin pb 2018) by Ian Black, who was Middle East editor of the Guardian until 2016 and served for 35 years as the paper’s Jerusalem Correspondent, Diplomatic Editor, and Chief Foreign Editorial Writer.  Twenty-six chapters comprise the book, covering Palestine from 1882 until 2017, including the beginnings of the Zionist movement through the hundredth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration and President Donald Trump’s promise, fulfilled in 2018, to move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance (Profile Books, 2020) by Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Palestinian Studies at Columbia University, is the second.  His story of six declarations of war on Palestine (1917-1939, 1947-1948, 1967, 1982, 1987-1995, 2000-2014) generally follows the timeline of Enemies and Neighbors.  I imagine a new edition will include the seventh declaration of war.  The history of Palestine over the past hundred years is intertwined with that of his family, who were leaders of Palestinian society and politics until 1948.  The book includes a photograph of the ruin of the family house.  Family history and archives are a source of much of his material.

Against Erasure: A Photographic Memory of Palestine before the Nakba (2016, in Spanish by Ediciones del Oriente y el Mediterráneo, Madrid; Republished in 2024 by Haymarket Books, translated into English) by Teresa Aranguren and Sandra Barrilaro.  This collection includes rescued photographs of a vibrant life in Palestine that included Arabs, Christians, and Jews who lived on the land that politicians and adherents of the three Abrahamic religions and cartographers called Palestine, then and now.

Khirbet Khizeh: A Novel (Originally published in Hebrew in 1949; 2008 in English translation by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux; also known as Hirbet Hizeh and Hirbet Hizah) by S. Yizhar (1916-2006) who was Yizhar Smilansky.  Y. Smilansky was born in Rehovot and was a member of the Knesset from 1949-1966.  He previously served as an intelligence officer during the 1948 – 1949 war that led to establishment and recognition of the State of Israel.  Khirbet Khizeh is a short historical novel (109 pages) about the expulsion of the Arabs from the fictional village of that name.

Liberalism, working classes and climate policies

Interview

What is the most that a working-class person could hope for from a net-zero future? At present, in the vision being broadly promoted, it’s the same hard work, the same exploitation, but with a heat pump instead of a gas boiler. What do people fight and die for? They don’t fight and die for a fluorescent-lit strip mall. They don’t go and die to have central heating. Much of the discourse around net zero seeks to replicate all the comforts of middle-class life—for the middle class. That it needs the working class to come on board and do their bit to achieve it is one of many hypocrisies.  

Industrial policy

Why we don’t and probably can’t have one

James Galbraith starts with a high level review of the three Biden bills that take a stab in the direction of industrial policy. His tone is “damning with faint praise”: they probably have and will produce some positive results, but are not game-changers. And they do not amount to an industrial policy.

The second half of the post gives the real meat: why, as they say in Maine, you can’t get there from here. In this case, financiers, tech oligarchs, and arms makers hold sway, with the influence of academics, scientists, and unions greatly reduced. The current power players simply don’t care about the public at large having nice things, here a productive economy that generates shared prosperity.

Fluvoxamine in combo with bromhexine, cyproheptadine, and niclosamide

Paxlovid is prescribed, but some other drugs can be repurposed 

Some evidence of good outcomes for treatment of COVID

Fluvoxamine is an SSRI for treatment of OCD

bromhexine, cyproheptadine, and niclosamide

Early treatment with these drug combinations in COVID-19 outpatients reduced the likelihood of clinical deterioration significantly. It also led to rapid reductions in viral load, serum cytokines, and the burden of post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 (PASC) symptoms.

Lambert’s COVID roundup

State of play

For March 2024

think of this post as my “director’s cut” on Covid

Before I begin: (1) Covid is not “over”; mass infection from the pandemic continues. (2) Covid is airborne. 

Long COVID resource

An evolving document  from Pandemic Patients 

For many people, being exposed to SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) results in illness characterized by mild symptoms, resolving in a matter of days or weeks. In fact, research has found that 30-60% of COVID-19 cases may be entirely asymptomatic (Shang et al., 2022; Wang et al., 2023). However, that is not the only potential outcome, and each infection is a new opportunity for long-term symptoms to develop (Bowe et al., 2022).

In fact, some people experience severe, debilitating symptoms that may last for several years and may not improve over time (Fernandez-de-las-Peñas et al., 2023). Other people recover from COVID-19, but as a result of the infection, they are now vulnerable to many types of health conditions, known as “post-COVID conditions,” or “PCCs” (Fernandez-de-las-Peñas et al., 2023; Xie et al., 2023).

These conditions affect nearly every organ in the body and range from benign to life-threatening (Bowe et al., 2022; D’Isabel et al., 2023; Zhao et al., 2023; Novak et al., 2022; Fernandez-de-las-Peñas et al., 2023; Xie et al., 2023; Peter et al., 2022; Abbasi, 2022; Ormiston et al., 2022; Ma et al., 2023). However, there is no way to know who will be susceptible to a particular condition until it manifests.

There appears to be a reciprocal relationship between COVID-19 and PCCs:

• Underlying health factors place people at higher risk of severe illness from COVID-19.
• People who experience severe illness from COVID-19 have a greater risk of developing one or more PCCs (Xie et al., 2023; Perez Giraldo et al., 2023).

However, the damage done by COVID-19 is cumulative (Bowe et al., 2022). Even someone who recovers from an asymptomatic (Ma et al., 2023) or mild case (Novak et al., 2022) of COVID-19 is at risk of developing one or more PCCs.

In fact, a recent review by Boufidou et al. (2023) noted that those who were reinfected were more prone to developing long-term symptoms—in comparison to those who were only infected once—and more prone to “various complications, including potential cardiac, pulmonary, or neurological problems” (p. 7). Even asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections can result in long-term symptoms such as fatigue, loss of taste or smell, or chronic cough (Ma et al., 2023).

The outrage industry

Teri Kanefield

Discusses the discussion 

UV against SARS

Joey Fox has an explainer

Ultraviolet Germicidal Irradiation (UVGI), also known as Germicidal Ultraviolet (GUV) simply refers to using UV light to inactivate microbes like viruses, bacteria or fungi. They will still be floating in the air or found on surfaces and you will still touch them, ingest them or inhale them, but they become harmless.

There are many different ways UV light can be used and it often causes confusion. To know whether the UV system you are using is extremely effective, okay, useless or harmful, you need to be able to recognize the different types.

…

Of all the methods we have to clean the air with a long historical evidence base, upper room UV is the most effective.

Here’s a table summarizing the approaches 

How to hide a pandemic

It’s all about messaging…. People won’t be worried about the COVID damage if they are 

fed enough propaganda

Four years in, the pandemic response (such as it is) has devolved into propaganda. Public Health agencies have emphasized Public Relations as the primary tool for crisis management, and a crop of “science communicators” has sprung up out of obscurity to help shepherd public opinion and guide it to a happy place. Reflections on the failure of the CDC, for example, have focused on a need to revamp scientific communication rather than do anything of substance.

…

we would have benefited from reacting in a timely manner to specific pieces of information that were unquestionably bad news for the trajectory of the pandemic. For example the recognition of aerosol spread, the possibility of reinfection, the rapid evolution of the virus, the possibility that vaccine-only strategy would fail to bring the pandemic to an end, the accumulation of long COVID within the population, and widespread infections of children leading to long-term health risks. These were all crucial pieces of information that painted a dire picture for the trajectory of the pandemic, yet they were not given the urgent attention they deserved. Worse still, each one of these risks was pointed out, months and years before they were acknowledged by public health.

COVID factsheet

From DHS

a flier about basic COVID-19 precautions - particularly for small events/gatherings. All the icons and entire flier are CC0/public domain/free to use: less COVID  

How to control airborne viruses

Excellent overview with links from Joey Fox

Respiratory pathogens, including influenza, COVID-19, RSV, measles, tuberculosis, and the common cold, primarily spread through the airborne route.

When an infectious person breathes, talks, sings, coughs, or sneezes, they release respiratory particles from their mouth or nose that can contain infectious viruses or bacteria. Larger respiratory particles fall to the floor quickly. Smaller respiratory particles, which are called aerosols, can float in the air. The main way most people get infected with respiratory pathogens is by inhaling a sufficient dose of infectious respiratory aerosols over time. This is known as airborne transmission, aerosol transmission or inhalation transmission.

Transmission of airborne diseases happens when people share air. The main risk for airborne transmission is:

• short-range airborne transmission: when you are within about two meters from an infectious person.
• shared-room airborne transmission: when you share a room with an infectious person. This is the cause of super-spreader events where many people can get infected at once. Smaller rooms, crowded spaces and poorly ventilated areas create higher risk for transmission.

The dose makes the poison.

The higher the dose, the greater the risk of infection. A model of how this works can be seen in this publication.

The Relative infection risk parameter increases with 

• higher virus emission, 
• higher activity, 
• higher breathing rate and 
• duration of exposure. 

It decreases with 

• better masking and 
• better air cleaning.

On intellectual humility

What it means and how it can help solve seemingly intractable political problems

intellectual humility is the willingness to admit that something you believe might be wrong. Think of it as a cousin of open-mindedness or a willingness to listen and carefully consider someone else’s truths. The concept isn’t entirely new—Aristotle and others in the philosophical tradition spoke of intellectual virtues—but there has been a marked increase in research on the subject by behavioral psychologists and other social scientists in the last twenty years. In this series, Conversations on Intellectual Humility, we bring the conversation back to the agora, pairing scholars of intellectual humility with community leaders to explore manifestations of intellectual humility outside the academy.