Surely, getting Covid would, for most people, cause a certain degree of immunity. That is what the immune system is for, after all. A vaccine imitates that process. It is entirely conceivable that getting a disease would be better than vaccinating in some cases. Remember the 2009 influenza epidemic? One study showed that getting that strain of influenza conferred better immunity than the vaccine available at the time.
The logic behind infection being better than a vaccine is usually this: The body responds, possibly, to multiple, and different, molecular configurations on the infectious agent, and learns to recognize them. A vaccine is almost always targeted to a smaller set of molecular configurations, so naturally a vaccine would not prime the immune system in as many different ways as the infection would.
That is a nice logical argument, but the empirical data clearly indicates it is wrong. The available vaccinations work better than infection in creating immunity. So why is this true?
I don’t think we fully understand this yet, but I’ll offer two lines of thinking. First, the somewhat more obscure but possibly very important. Remember, despite the fact that reporters and even doctors (and Facebook and Twitter self styled experts) only know about one part of the multi-part immune system, the b cell mediated anti-body response to an infection. There are other pars as well, including the t cell response, which amounts to t cell mediated death of infected cells, and the memory system for both t and b cell systems. Both of these systems work in concert with other aspects of the immune system, that involve for example cells that find a pathogen and bring it to specific sites in the body where it is interrogated, and responded to.
There is research to suggest that for some diseases (not Covid specifically but other respiratory viruses) an infection may elicit a very rapid response by the t cell system, which does the infection in fast enough that the b cell system does not fully develop an “evolved” memory response to use later in the event of a second infection. However, over time, with repeated infections, all of the various parts of the adaptive immune system figure it out and fully respond, and now the individual has excellent immunity.
Personally I suspect that this explains the curious phenomenon that no children or young adults are zero percent likely to get a cold, but lots of people in their 70s or older claim that they never had a cold in their lives. They did, they forgot, and in the mean time, their immune system developed a strong response to common colds. This is an untested hypothesis, so don’t go around thinking it just yet.
The larger point is this. If that research is meaningful, it may be the case that the immune system is capable of tripping over itself, so a natural infection produces a less than idea result. Meanwhile, a vaccine is designed to not do that. Remember, if we have a few vaccines for a given infection, those vaccines represent a small subset of many potential vaccines that were tried out and either gave indications of ineffectiveness or bad side effects. Perhaps those earlier variants of the vaccine are analogous to less than effective immune responses to natural infection.
Which is a nice segue into the second idea. Imagine a target in a shooting range, one of those outlines of the body with a few areas designated (by bull’s eye symbols) as places to shoot. Imagine firing a gun semi-randomly at the target and maybe hitting it in a few places. If you do that a bunch of times, you may now and then accidentally hit the head, and have a clean kill. All the other shots are either totally ineffective, or only “wound” the target. That is natural immunity to a natural infection.
Alternatively, you shoot the target in the head once and it is dead. One bullet, one shot, but a perfect shot aimed at exactly where you have to shoot to have the best result. That is a carefully designed vaccine. It doesn’t matter how many other body parts (surface configurations of molecules on a virus) the natural immunity responds to, if there is one main configuration (in this case, part of the spike protein) that the vaccine focuses on. And no, the virus doesn’t easily mutate in such a way that the spike protein is different enough that it can’t be targeted. This is a part of the virus that is highly conserved. It cant change much, or the individual virus with the change can’t reproduce. A target can’t exist without a head. It will always have a head, and if you can always hit the head, then you always win, and all the other strategies are lesser.
Everyone knows that CRT, aka, Critical Race Theory, is a law school or graduate level subject that is not taught in American K-12 classrooms. More precisely, and I quote Wikipedia, “Critical race theory (CRT) is a body of legal scholarship and an academic movement of civil-rights scholars and activists who seek to examine the intersection of race and law in the United States and to challenge mainstream American liberal approaches to racial justice.”
Everyone also knows that when Right Wing Goons, Contaminants, and Bloody Insurrectionists talk about CRT they are not actually talking about the law school class. They are using CRT to refer to things that are actually being taught in KL-12 schools, that they don’t want taught there. Continue reading Yes, CRT is being taught in our schools, if this is CRT:→
One day I returned home and realized I had forgotten the shampoo. It was a devastating revelation.
You are probably thinking, “First World problem,” right? Well, it wasn’t because at the time I was living in the actual co-called “Third World.*”
Home, for me at the time, was one of the most remote non-polar research sites ever. “Going to the store” meant driving across nearly impassible roads for a day, a ride that would cause enough damage to the old Land Rover to require some $500 of repair on average. Then a few days in a sort of city (Isiro, Zaire) where I would spend considerable effort assembling the food and other supplies for a stint as long as I could manage, hopefully 4 to 6 weeks. Basically, as much as the old Land Rover could hold. Then, the trip back. So, going to the store was a week out of my research time, costly, and dangerous (because of the roads).
I had taken a shower the morning of my return to the field, at my friend Bwana Ndgege’s house, and left the shampoo in the bathroom. Yes, devastating.
What I did not know at the time was this. Later that very morning, Bwana Nndege saw the bottle of shampoo in the bathroom. He picked it up and walked out in front of his house, which was located in a part of the city where one might see people waking around on their daily business, but not too many people. Shortly, he saw a man walking down the street, and hailed him over. Bwana Ndege did not know this man.
“Say, do you happen to know the researchers that live in Ngodingodi, a research village down the road past Wamba, on the Mambasa road?”
“There is still a road there?” the man asked.
“Truth be told, not really a road any more, but they go town there with their land rover. The blue one with the different color doors. Know it?”
“No, not really, never heard of any of this,” the man answered.
So, Bwana Ndege handed him the shampoo, and said, “Well, anyway, could you pass this on to someone who might? They left it here this morning.”
“OK, no problem,” the man said, taking the shampoo.
Now, I should mention, that the good people of the Eastern Congo are averse to crime, and are honest. There are, of course, criminals there just like anywhere else, but such is not your average Zairois. At the same time, a bottle of shampoo is a commodity people save up for, feel lucky to have, and desire. Handing this man the bottle of shampoo with only the vaguest instructions or prospects like this would be similar to finding a random person on the street of an American city and handing them a short stack of loose ten dollar bills and asking them to pass it on to someone who might pass it on to someone etc. with the hope that it gets to a city 500 miles away, and to a particular vague address. It just would not work.
So what happened next?
About three weeks after I returned, sans shampoo, I was up in the hilltop research camp working on some notes, when I smelled something different. I asked one of the local people who worked there what that might be. She sniffed the air, and said, “Maybe the nomads?”
There is a local tribe called the Bahama (or Wahama, or just Hama) who rarely pass through with their small herds of cattle. Cattle don’t live in this forest, and can’t survive the parasites, but a couple/few times a year, a Hama man will pass through with a couple dozen head. Probably, some circumstance in his life and business makes passing through a zone where some of his cattle will get sick better than going some other route. One can imagine.
Anyway, she was right. The smell was the cattle coming down the road. We stood on the top of the hill and watched as a couple of dozen long horned Sanga cattle passed by, followed by a few straggling calves and a Hama man driving them. He glanced up the hill and saw me, which caused him to sprint up the path and issue a greeting.
Sanga Cattle. Not the Congo, but nearby Rwanda. From Wilson, RT, “Crossbreeding of Cattle in Africa” DOI: 10.15640/jaes.v7n1a3 “Hey, what’s new?” (Standard greeting in the area: “Habari gani?”)
“No news,” I replied. I asked our local employee to get the water bottle and cup, assuming he wanted a fresh drink. Which he did.
As he appreciatively downed the liquid, he asked me, “Is this Ngodigodi? The place where you white people work?”
“Yes, it is,” I replied, bemused that he would know that, since our presence was semi-secretive, in order to avoid drawing attention to our neighborhood, which would in turn potentially mess up the folks who lived around us.
That’s when he pulled out the bottle of shampoo and handed it to me. “Some guy up the road a ways told me to give this to you.”
In sum: First world problem and third world solution.
The thing is, this was not an unusual event. It was normal.
Well, it was a somewhat extreme and amusing, story-generating version of normal. Normal is more like I go to a guy’s store and say I want to exchange money, and he says he can’t but he knows someone who can, and it turns out that is also the guy I’m hoping to get a rebuilt fuel injector from, and he is the sibling of a person who is offering bags of ground cassava for pretty cheap, but they all live in different places but are visiting relatives, and somebody needs a ride across town. Three people, actually, with stops along the way. So, after three hours of driving around with people and stuff, three hours of meeting and greeting, counting out giant piles of near worthless local currency, goods and services being exchanged, a couple cups of tea and a chupa of beer or two, and at the end of the day, I end up completing an important bank transaction in the land without banks, my truck will get fixed, and we can eat for a month, all stuff I would have done in the US in less than 45 minutes, but here, it is a series of social events bound together with a ToDo list, and a full day’s activity.
Yesterday morning my wife stopped at her usual coffee shop to pick up the coffee she ordered in advance on line. The barista’s kid was sick so he was not there, and the shop was closed. But the person working at the adjoining business said, “yeah, he’s out, but I’ll tell him you get a free coffee tomorrow.” Then this morning, she stopped by and a third person who also did not work there said, “are you the person who gets the free crafted press? Here, saving it for you” and so on. A series of trust-based events to fix a supply chain problem, a supply chain problem that is an amateur version of the Big Giant Supply Chain Problem that every human being who lives anywhere that is not the First World experiences daily with all things, where it is simply the way it is, all the time.
A supply chain problem in the US could be called a First World problem, but really, it is something a little different. It is the thin but heretofore persistent veneer of the First World sloughing off in a spot or two, revealing the fundamental Third World nature of human society and economics, underneath it all. The great First World accomplishment is re-organizing the Third World reality so things run more smoothly and everything takes less time. The benefit is that a term like “supply chain problem” is a bemusing neologism rather than a daily descriptor for most Americans. The cost is the dehumanization of the system.
The Republicans broke one of our oldest, most stable, and most useful institutions.Just hours after the coffee exchange, I happened to see in a newspaper report another neologism: Skimpflation. The New York Times muses: “The quality of many services has deteriorated since the start of the pandemic — a problem that the NPR show “Planet Money” has labeled “skimpflation.”” What the Gray Lady and its commentators do with this concept is to launch on a Biden-Leveling screed meant to keep the fight between the left and the right even-looking, which is a crime that paper commits every day. But what they hit on, accidentally, is the point I’m making here. Two points, really. 1) Third World life is just under the surface, and 2) If you get your expectations in order, this change we are having has some serious benefits; it isn’t all down side.
There is a third point. This is all Trump’s fault. And the Republicans. By ripping apart as many systems as they could, and by encouraging rather than fighting the Covid pandemic, they damaged or broke all the things that matter to most of the people, while leaving the rich intact. We are now more like Zaire/Congo than we ever were. (Like our postal system, on the verge of collapse. Many countries don’t even have a postal system. They just have this guy who happens to be walking down the street, or a muzungu with a working vehicle who happens to be going across town…) The Republican goal is to turn the US into a sea of Third World humanity with the supply chain ever broken, with a small wealthy and somewhat larger and less wealthy ex-patriot-esque community living behind walls in some serious priv. That is what Republicans always wanted, that is what they are finally getting.
The world where that story of shampoo happened unraveled, several times, in the intervening period between then and now. Hundreds of thousands have died violent deaths there, or worse, and there was even a systematic holocaust. A region about a third of the United States with a population of about a fifth of the United States has been living in economic strife and social upheaval because that top-heavy post colonial system eventually blows up. We will have that here as well, if the Third Worlding planned by Bannon, Trump, McConnell and the other Republicans is fully realized.
We could be rescued, of course, by a fascist superhero of some kind. Yes, this is Hitler’s playbook being applied. It is a very plausible scenario. Fear creates a movement, spiritual and physical terror, propaganda. Or, as they say in Mein Kampf, “Angst schafft Bewegung, spirituellen und physischen Terror, Propaganda.” Hitler’s program worked because Germany of the time was a broken society with a broken economy and a balkanized government. The White Supremacist program wouldn’t work well in an America that wasn’t beaten and damaged. Lucky for the Republicans, this handy dandy disease came along just in time to put us on the mat and hold us down long enough to create the beginnings of a Third World society, in which a movement could grow, spiritual and physical terror could be applied, and propaganda deployed. MAGA, insurrection, CRT/Replacement Theory.
Perhaps it is time to start stocking up on shampoo.
Note: The term “Third World” is considered inappropriate to refer to countries previously referred to as “Third World.” Untwist your shorts, I did not use that term to mean that in this essay. Thank you very much, re-read if necessary.
If you are anti-CRT being taught in K-12 schools, you are a moron, because it isn’t. If you are one of the emerging gaggle of goons who now insist that “liberals are denying CRT being taught in schools” then you are a moronic paranoid eejit.
Maybe you don’t really know much about CRT and realize that, but you have been groomed an organized by a right wing think tank to use CRT as a scare tactic to raise money and run a campaign. The Trump Criminals have a word for when you are being used by someone else, a word I don’t like to use but if fits; You are a cuck. At least you might be less of a moron in this case.
If, however, you understand that CRT is a buzzword for curriculum that honestly addresses history, talks about things like slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, and the systemic racism that exists in so many area of our society, then maybe you are a person who does not want the finger pointed at you. Maybe you make the argument that you don’t want kids to feel bad about their past, but that is bullshit. What you really don’t want is for your kids to come home and look at you, listen to what you say, realize what you do, figure out how you think, and realize their daddy is a Nazi.
Kind of a sensitive subject, I know, but if you are working to get CRT out of our schools, you are not a good person. In the old days (ten years ago) you would know to sit down and shut up. Please consider doing that now.
Anti CRT? That makes you a racist, and more specifically, a white supremacist. Not a good look.
Why do we like The Great British Baking Show? It lacks a chef who’s whole shtick is to be an asshole. The judges are fair, consistent, and open, even if the White Supremacists at The Sun are annoyed when a British-born Bangladesi from Bedfordshire wins. The judging process is meant to be entertaining, educational, and encouraging, if sometimes very baudy. The contestants reflect interesting diversity in both their own backgrounds and their diverse approaches to cooking. There is interesting and evolving interaction between the people on the show. We like the tent and the challenges it creates, especially in some seasons.
And of course, many of us watch the show to see the crashes.
Baldwin was on set filming for the upcoming Western movie “Rust” at the Bonanza Creek Ranch in New Mexico Thursday when the prop gun he was handling misfired, killing cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and injuring director Joel Souza. Souza remains in the hospital.
It’s unclear whether the gun contained blanks or what was discharged.
This is tragic, though not the world’s most important problem. But it happens now and then. I’d worry about the use of guns with blanks in any situation, and I think accidents like this have happened outside the context of filming a Hollywood movie.
Here’s the solution: Invent a series of firearms that look like the various models one would use in films or on stage, but that don’t have the capacity of shooting bullets of any kind, including blanks, but that look like they are shooting bullets. This is not beyond the capacity of our modern day technology. Sure, it would be expensive, but so is every other single thing used in making movies.
Then, disallow actual firearms of any kind on any stage or set.
Over the last few years, the Atlantic Ocean and other parts of the world smashed their weathery fists into the faces of climate change deniers again and again until the denial of climate change fell to the mat, bleeding, and forever silent.
I wish. It wasn’t quite that extreme, but nearly so. In certain social settings, a person ranting about climate change, say a decade ago, would be looked at as though they might have a lose screw. Me, for example, at a family gathering. But a few weeks ago, a matriarch in my extended family, whom I might have expected to give me the stern look during one of my own rants, began ranting herself about climate change, and how astonishing it was that people could not see that it is real. I had to get her a glass of water. Times have changed. The big storms have spoken, and American society has listened, and at the very least, the deniers now look like the ones with the loose screw.
However, storms are not the biggest problem with future climate change. Sure, a storm can cause floods that kill hundreds of people. Sure, storms can carve away large sections of the shoreline, including those on which humans have built towns and cities, more so especially as sea level rises. Sure, strong tornadoes can destroy a storm shelter as though it wasn’t there, or pick up a school bus and throw it into a ravine, or whatever they want.
But storms are whiny babies compared to their own mothers, the weather-mother that causes the storms to be worse to begin with, and that will eventually become recognized as the real problem with global warming: heat. Continue reading Heat Kills. More Heat Kills More→
Rituals are things people do in a more or less consistent matter, often to the extent that the manner of doing is more important, or at least, more persistent, than any possible original reason for doing the thing. Ritualized behaviors are all around us, even in highly modern settings like medicine. As a possibly apocryphal example, I will refer to the story of the oven roast. Grandma had the best recipe for a roast beef, and passed it on to daughters, not by writing it down, but rather, by showing how to roast the beef, and the daughters wrote it down. That recipe was passed on, in written form, to grand daughters, and one day one of the grand daughters roasted the beef for the whole extended family for Sunday dinner. One of the younger folk marveled at the great roast beef, and someone else noted that it was grandma’s recipe.
“But what makes it so good, better than when I cook it,” an in-law said.
“I’m not sure. Maybe it is cutting the end of the roast off before putting it in the oven?” said the granddaughter who had done the roasting that Sunday.
In Ramsey County, Minnesota (home of Saint Paul) you can be jailed for up to 90 days, and fined up to $1,000, if you are found in a park after hours. “Hours” in Ramsey County parks are from sun up to sun down, so the hours change daily and in pragmatic terms, are subjective.
I can see having a rule about when you can be in the park, and fixing it to sunlight makes sense, and I can even see a modest punishment for offenders. But three months in jail because you thought the sun was still up 15 minutes after sundown? Note to those reading this from the equator: The sun continues to brighten the northern sky long after official sundown, since the penumbra is quite wide in high latitudes.
That was in the Star Tribune, the region’s newspaper of record. In the same issue is an op-ed penned by a local retired cop who has a new job of screaming at clouds. There was a horrific and tragic shootout at a local bar the other day, in which over a dozen innocent bystanders were shot, one killed. It was a shootout among some bad hombres including one with an open warrant. Old Guy Cop made the argument that if only cops were allowed to make “low level stops” (aka pretextual stops) then this shooting could have been avoided. The argument goes like this: Cops were formerly allowed to pull people over for things like busted taillights. In so doing they would also end up finding felons with outstanding warrants, so they were thus kept of the streets. But now with all the “defund the police” talk this isn’t the case anymore, thus the shooting. Continue reading What ya gonna do when they come for you?→
Promethean Secular Frontier (PSF) is an educational/secular humanist page meant to provide a community for discussion on various topics ranging from the natural sciences (astronomy, physics, geology, biology/evolution, etc), to social sciences (psychology, sociology, anthropology, archeology, etc), to philosophy (religion/theology, epistemological, rationalism, morality, etc). Our goal at PSF is to bring concepts that are different for laymen audiences and make them understandable and easily digestible to people seeking knowledge. PSF also wants to create a community that promotes inquiry, skepticism, critical thinking and secular humanism.
Small correction: I was a faculty instructor at Harvard, but actual professor (later) at University of Minnesota.
Once upon a time in the Congo, there was a democratically elected President; Some* called him the “Big Man.” The Big Man was elected every seven years by a majority of 97.8%. The people loved him because before he became President, war was everywhere, and just before that, the colonial overlords and punishers were everywhere. You couldn’t get a break. Then after a brief interlude of a different duly elected president who died in an unfortunate execution, Big Man saw to it that there would be no more wars.
Well, not exactly. He had wars, and the people of the Congo were given the opportunity to get jobs fighting in the wars, but they were all in adjoining countries, and they were all paid for by the United States Congress. So no war without taxes, and that was good. Continue reading What is Freedom?→
That is a complicated question I will not answer here. But it also a stupid and misleading question, and that part of it I comment on, in relation to Minnesota specifically:
In Minnesota, between a third and half of the energy we expend is converted into useless heat or work, mainly owing to that fact that converting the source matter into something that produces usable energy has useless heat as a byproduct.
A large (and at this time not accurately accounted for) amount of energy is used moving or refining fossil fuels. Minnesota refines and moves (through pipelines and on trains) more energy-related matter (oil and coal) than any other state that does not also produce such products. We have no oil or gas wells, and no coal, but we are the crossroads for much of that material. If we did none of that, a pretty good amount of energy would be freed up for use elsewhere.
We use energy at an uneven rate throughout the day. If we mostly used electric vehicles, they would be mostly charged at night when demand is currently low.
People sometimes ask: If we stop burning fuel to make things move, and instead use electricity, where are we going to get all that electricity? (When someone asks you that, usually the answer they have in mind and that they are leading yo to, is “nuclear energy! free and clean!” so watch out for that.)
A huge amount of the energy we use now is used to do nothing. It is either turned into heat or it is used to make more of the stuff that we use to use energy. Simplistic questions like “If all the vehicles are electric, where will the energy come from?” this exist outside the actual reality of energy use. Ignore them and learn about energy use and transmission.
They caught the guy, but they are treating it like he was passing out pamphlets or something:
This is domestic terrorism. This is serious criminal conduct. But we are still making excuses for it instead of prosecuting it to the full extent of the law, as we should be. https://t.co/1i2Evo3lsY
