Society

Human beings are wanderers who roam the world in search of adventure. And this love of adventure creates a need for home: homecoming makes wandering worthwhile. Hence human beings have devised instruments that help them to navigate, so as to guide them to their destination and — most importantly — to guide them back again, to the place where they are at home. The sextant was one of the most beautiful examples of this: an instrument for steering by the stars, which you held to your eye, and which reminded you of the vastness of the space across which you peered and the littleness of your own ambitions. Our ancestors who steered by the sextant never doubted the fixed background to human life, the unchanging heavens by which they navigated.

Not all inventions change the world. But some do — and they do it by greatly lowering the cost of a fundamental economic input. This inevitably causes an economic revolution that brings about a new political and social order by opening previously impossible economic opportunities,  creating vast new wealth in the process. We are in the middle of such a revolution today, thanks to the microprocessor, which first came to market in 1972 and really took off with the introduction of the personal computer in the early 1980s. The microprocessor, a dirt-cheap computer on a chip, hugely reduced the cost of storing, retrieving and manipulating information. Computing power that cost $1,000 in the 1950s today costs a fraction of a cent.

Pope Francis met with Joe Biden on Friday. It’s always a boost for a world leader to be snapped smiling with the Pope. But for Biden, who flashes rosary beads during stump speeches and has a habit of crossing himself when talking about his political opponents, the visit may have involved a presidential fib. Since Inauguration Day, Biden has been locked in a dispute with America’s Catholic bishops over his public support for abortion — a position which developed in curious tandem with his rise up the Democratic ticket during the last election cycle, even while B-roll of him hugging nuns played in his campaign ads.

President Joe Biden is set for his rendezvous with climate destiny at the Scottish Event Campus in Glasgow on Monday. The president left Washington on Thursday empty-handed after congressional Democrats abandoned an attempt to put his infrastructure and climate package to a vote. “I need you to help me. I need your votes,” Biden implored them. “I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that the House and Senate majorities and my presidency will be determined by what happens in the next week.” At least he wasn’t invoking anything as serious as the future of the planet to get their backing. Nancy Pelosi weighed in, according to Politico’s Laura Barrón-López, telling her colleagues that overseas parliamentary leaders had asked whether American democracy can survive.

“I do not have any accounting of what the Chinese may have done, and I’m fully in favor of any further investigation of what went on in China. However, I will repeat again: the NIH and NIAID categorically has not funded ‘gain-of-function’ research to be conducted in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”  That was Dr Anthony Fauci during a May 2021 congressional hearing. It kicked off a months-long national media effort to frame questions around gain-of-function research and US-taxpayer-funded virus manipulation as a Royal Rumble between Fauci and Senator Rand Paul. When he testifies or sits for friendly network interviews, Fauci depends on semantics.

Anyone wishing to appreciate the nature of our two-tier society needs only to contrast the fate of St Anthony Fauci with that, say, of General Mike Flynn or any of the dozens of political prisoners who are, many of them, being held without charge in appalling conditions in a Washington, D.C. prison even as I write. Fauci has been a carbuncle on the countenance of American life at least since he help spread the myth of heterosexual transmission of AIDS in the 1980s. The new Chinese flu was custom made for his brand of panic-mongering and totalitarian posturing. Just a few weeks ago, he was saying that it was “too early” to say whether we would be allowed to gather for Christmas.

On Tuesday, Frances Haugen, speaking to the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, compared Facebook to tobacco and opioids while pushing for similar regulations. Haugen, a 'whistleblower' who came forward after Facebook dissolved her team and who admits she never worked on child safety during her time at Facebook, told a terrifying story about an app that harms young girls. Social media is like a drug. We hear this all the time. We’re powerless addicts in the face of its influence. We need to keep the kids safe from it. But is it? And do we? I used to call myself a Twitter addict. It’s the first thing I check each morning and the last thing I look at at night.

Nye Bevan, the British socialist, famously denounced the nuclear unilateralists in his party for sending a future foreign secretary 'naked into the conference chamber’. Unless Congress passes the stalled budget reconciliation bill, President Biden will fly to the COP26 Glasgow climate conference, which starts in less than three weeks’ time, in a similar state of undress. Before the Paris agreement in 2015, UN climate change conferences were about hammering out the texts of binding climate treaties and agreeing to emissions reduction targets. All that has changed. Climate change targets are now decided in advance by individual countries in their Nationally Determined Contributions, draining climate conferences of drama and turning them into a giant show-and-tell.

'The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.’ — Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922 Wittgenstein wrote that as an ontological and epistemological foundation for his larger belief in freedom of speech. He who controls the language also controls reality, something that today's left understands brilliantly, even devilishly. America historically has not limited freedom of thought and speech, and the resulting clash of ideas has improved our national discourse. The language police makes us weaker intellectually by limiting the world in which we live. The language around climate change and the green movement is one more area the left wants to control, especially given that trillions of dollars in spending are on the line.

Something is rotten at the University of Guelph. Just what deceased creature has gotten stuck under the floorboards remains unclear, but a strong odor of something that’s not right assails the nostrils when one reads the open letter recently penned by Dr Byram Bridle, an immunologist and tenured professor at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, addressed to the president of the university. What has happened at Guelph is a useful case study for everyone, because vaccine mandates are spreading like the plague they aim to cure.

There is a trope in science fiction movies in which some alien or machine intelligence determines that humans are a scourge, and that in order to protect the galaxy, humanity must be eradicated. There is no shortage of examples, but some personal favorites include The Day the Earth Stood Still, Alien and Planet of the Apes. And who could forget the T-800’s grim prognostication in Terminator 2 that 'it’s in your nature to destroy yourselves'? Back in the real world, we aren’t quite at the point of developing an artificially intelligent Skynet that will take control of our nukes and bring about our collective demise. But a Vox piece from last week leaves me concerned that we’re headed in the wrong direction.

Anthony Fauci's rolling audition for Dancing With the Stars continues. Fauci this week appeared in yet another interview on CBS, where he was asked about the possible impact of the coronavirus on the holiday season. He replied that it was 'too soon to tell' whether Americans would even be able to gather safely for Christmas. Which got me wondering: how far are these seasonal COVID restrictions supposed to go? I have no problem, for example, socially distancing by a factor of 10 from anyone who orders a pumpkin spice latte. But double-masking the Indians in a Thanksgiving play could prove more than a little historically insensitive. Is Fauci serious? Think of the demographics most likely to flout COVID restrictions: Texans, barflies, Democratic governors.

Really, the Facebook outage should not have been as entertaining as it was. As Jon Stokes, the founder of Ars Technica, observes, if Facebook, with its hyper-sophisticated software and security practices, is vulnerable to sudden collapse, what does that say about energy infrastructure run on 'old Windows installs'? The potential for far greater carnage is tremendous. But it was entertaining, and I think what it made so was the fact that the damage was so comprehensive that security systems in the Facebook offices crashed and its employees could not enter the building to fix the problem. Here were some of the smartest people in the world and they could not get through a door. You can imagine the coffee cooling in their paper cups.

There was a factory. Now there are mountains and rivers. If this is paradise, I wish I had a lawn mower. I thought we’d start over, but I guess I was wrong. And as things fell apart, nobody paid much attention. Don’t leave me stranded here. I can’t get used to this lifestyle. So go the lyrics to the 1988 Talking Heads song '(Nothing But) Flowers.' As bitterly cynical as it is catchy, the tune is an environmentalist anthem written from the perspective of some laggard who cannot adapt to life after a cataclysmic refashioning of society into a paradise not unlike Rousseau’s state of nature. I think of it as my personal hymn in the age of COVID. Could there be a more fitting song for the present?

Am I ‘fully vaccinated’? For the last few months I was sure I was — but recent events are making me doubt myself. Take Monday, when President Biden rolled up his sleeve and presented his unusually hirsute arm for his third Pfizer shot. This followed some federal health advice last week that people over 65, as well as 18-to-64-year-olds with ‘underlying health conditions’ or ‘jobs that increase their risk of developing severe COVID’, are eligible for a third dose of Pfizer. ‘The booster line is if you're fully vaccinated — the bottom line is that if you're fully vaccinated and — you're highly protected now from severe illness, even if you get COVID-19,’ explained the President with his trademark clarity.

Last week, the Lancet medical journal became briefly internet-famous when it published the following sentence on its Twitter account: ‘Historically, the anatomy and physiology of bodies with vaginas have been neglected.’ The sentence is a pullquote from a bigger article, but boy does it capture the imagination on its own. Like a Hieronymous Bosch painting, you can return to it again and again, always finding something new and surprising to appreciate. There’s the musicality of it, all those four- and five-syllable words that roll pleasantly off the tongue. There’s the faintly macabre invocation of ‘bodies’, followed by ‘with vaginas’, suggesting a collection of corpses accessorized with (but not necessarily attached to) a bunch of birth canals.

After the House of Representatives decided yesterday that it would be, well, a bit much to leave millions of Israeli civilians at risk of being blown up in their own beds, the 'progressive' wing of the Democrat party was devastated. 'Minutes before the vote closed, Ms Ocasio-Cortez tearfully huddled with her allies,' ran a heartrending report in this morning's New York Times, describing the House’s 420-to-9 decision to approve funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system. 'The tableau underscored how wrenching the vote was for even outspoken progressives, who have been caught between their principles and the still powerful pro-Israel voices in their party, such as influential lobbyists and rabbis.