Narrative disjunction

After about a hundred and fifty years of effort, it's about slunk into general political understanding and widespread thought that you can't have a just patriarchy; that the idea of enacting a patriarchy is itself unjust.

Not a universal awareness; not controlling, in any political sense.  But actually meaningfully politically there.

Climate, though, climate hasn't had -- and hasn't got! -- a century and a half.  About the best you can get are scattered voice saying "everything has to change", meaning that human institutions must be altered to prevent disaster.

That's wrong; it is in fact not the case that everything must change; it's hard to find a human institution that even pretends to agree that it needs to change, and everything is discussed in terms of future choices and options, rather than pressing present necessity.  What we've got is a situation where change has come to everything.  There will be more; we do not know with confidence how much, only more than; the floor is vaguely predictable, but not the ceiling.

(The folks pushing adaptation are generally a mix of "don't inconvenience me", "this isn't important", and refusing to think about the scale of the problem.  They're still imagining something like our present industrial society.)

Agriculture flatly requires a combination of sufficient soil, sufficiently predictable rainfall, and sufficiently predictable weather in general.  That's going.  Even the IPCC  can't imagine it continuing to exist past 2050. It'll come back, but it'll come back on a time scale of millenia, when people need to eat every day.

The entirety of our industrial capacity rests on fossil carbon; adhesives, insulators, seals, coatings, and lubricants are involved in everything.  All of those derive from fossil carbon sources.[1]  Air-source carbon can in principle be substituted, but to a first approximation no one is doing it.

The entirety of our financial system rests on fossil carbon; money gets created through making loans.  Oil exploration loans, housing loans, car loans, and consumer credit between them focus the entirely system rigidly on a fossil carbon status quo.  Nothing is going to change without fixing this part of the problem, and the minimum fix for it is "new economy, new politics".

Which in turns means a new construction of social status -- taking people who have the greatest social standing, agency, and power, and reducing them to a lesser state -- and that, historically, is where heaps of skulls come from, because being really rich causes brain damage; you stop being able to think "you know, I don't need to be the richest; I could just be quite comfortable and busy and well-liked".  You tend to insist that nothing is allowed to change if it affects you.

Which, well, that appears to be about where we all are, in the narrative.

Reality is indifferent to narrative.  Reality is not something with which we can negotiate.  Reality does not contain much in the way of excess capacity.

Everything is changing.  The Last Normal Year is in the past somewhere.  The future is hungry.

[1] I have a can of hyper-organic hemp-oil wood finish.  The coating lining the can is from a fossil carbon source; likely the paint in the label is, too.  Never mind the lubricants in the machine that made the can, the insulators on the electrical conductors, seals in the hydraulics, etc.

More than sufficient incompetence

 Approximately a thousand years ago, the Globe and Mail articles on Doug Ford's alleged drug dealing produced a "that's not much of a surprise" response.  Today I find myself feeling excessively slow, because those articles reached a conclusion that if Doug had had something to do with selling hash, it sure looked like he'd been at least a couple levels up as a distributor, rather than your local weed man.  (It also carefully didn't say anything much about whether this was a business Doug had ever actually left.)

Today, it's hard to avoid a notion that whether or not Doug left that business is the wrong sort of question; is there someone to whom Doug retains obligations from those days?  (I am embarrassed by how long it took me to think of this question.) Hard to think there wouldn't be; Doug got somewhere, but it wasn't the top.  And real organized crime is hardly distinguishable from some regular lines of business until you get into precise details of title and so on.  They're getting a cut.  Why they're getting a cut isn't something you expect to know. Completely plausible that Doug straight up owed somebody getting rid of paid sick leave and it's not on the table out of political conviction -- Doug's only reliable conviction is that people who don't do what he says are bad people -- but because Doug's boss says it's not allowed.

That has some long-term implications for Ontario politics.

The present implications are that the PC government is not merely incapable of taking effective public health measures, is not merely incapable of learning, is not merely collectively innumerate, and is not merely focused on trying to wring partisan advantage from a pandemic; it is not even that the definition of profit is completely disjoint from how many people get killed due to the regular function of your business.  It's that policy is being set on the instructions of the premier's boss, without any pretense of civil government, the consent of the governed, or that the government is responsible to the electorate.

It's a pure example of the oligarchical view that the function of government is to maintain a pool of helpless labour, ideally free labour, which is required to do precisely what it is told regardless of circumstances.  It's the attitude of a slaveholder who has outsourced labour management to the government, and who has very specific expectations about how nothing ever increases their costs because that would decrease their profits, and that horror of decreased profits clearly contravenes the divine mandate for the natural order.

Time to enact some structural change.

You'd think this was obvious

 So there's a policy petition; change the policy from pandemic mitigation (and the horrors we observe that strategy to produce) to extirpation.

I've signed it; I would urge you to consider doing the same.

Rₜ, R₀, and vaccination

There's a "nothing in real life is ever this simple" formula about what fraction of the population needs to be immune ("have a robust immune response"), before you can stop worrying about the spread of a disease:

If R₀ (or Rₜ) is 5 (in the vicinity for wild-type COVID-19), you need 80% of the population to have a robust immune response to keep the disease from spreading using herd immunity alone.

If R₀ is 10, which is not implausible for some of the observed COVID-19 variants, you need 90% of the population to have a robust immune response to keep the disease from spreading using herd immunity alone.

Knowledgeable people who are not doing the "nothing is ever this simple" version are saying things like "at least 85%" about the necessary vaccination level for herd immunity; the current vaccination rates, even in the US, aren't anywhere close to enough to keep the disease from spreading.

If 85% vaccination is required to get to herd immunity, we can't get there this year; at least twenty percent of the population is too young to be given any current COVID vaccine, even if absolutely every adult gets vaccinated with an mRNA vaccine.  Approvals for use as paediatric vaccines are being sought for all the COVID vaccines, but right now the age cutoff is 18.  Several of the vaccines can't get to 85% effectiveness, either; so far only the mRNA vaccines have effectiveness levels high enough that, in principle, vaccinating absolutely everybody would be sufficient to extirpate the disease.

We know, from several national examples of effective public health, that you don't need a vaccine to extirpate the disease; you can institute movement controls, food delivery, necessary "hold in place" payments so people can not work and not starve, enforced quarantines, and a robust track-and-trace system, and extirpate the disease that way.  It'd be really expensive to do that now, rather than in the beginning, but it could be done.  Effective public health measures are not being done as a matter of deliberate and conscious profits-before-people policy, targeting reopening rather than extirpating the disease.

The variants now spreading affect children and young people more seriously than the wild type.

We can expect, if we treat some level of vaccination -- any level of vaccination we can achieve this year -- as grounds to generally drop COVID restrictions,  that we will see the continued spread of the disease.  It will produce many more dead children compared to the wild type, and it will (given the Brazilian example) put vaccinated people into hospital, possibly in large enough numbers to overload the system.  (The system overload threshold is decreasing over time, as health care personnel are being expended by the strain.)

What the vaccines accomplish, even the "this won't stop spread" vaccines, is to greatly reduce your odds of harm if you should contract the disease.  You are much, much less likely to die or to require hospitalization.  This is useful and worthwhile; by all means get vaccinated.  Just remember that this is a personal-scale benefit, not a systemic solution.

The other thing the vaccines do, because they are not sterilizing vaccines, is increase the odds of worse variants developing in a given individual; more infectious variants arise when the virus spends a long time reproducing inside one host.  That is, the virus and the host's immune system stalemate, and the virus reproduces many more times than usual, increasing the odds of a mutation that increases virulence happening.  This is a big part of why you don't want people catching the disease in the first place and why the "just let it burn through the population and it's over" take is extremely dangerous.  The sixty percent vaccination rate that's guessed as the eventual full voluntary uptake is, as the sole public health measure, a recipe for worse COVID.

The policy that comes out of this ought to be:

1. vaccinate everybody as soon as possible, starting with the people in the groups most likely to catch the disease
2. adopt the full public health measures, including movement controls, enforced quarantine, and a required complete economic shutdown so people can stay home
3. an explicit requirement that reopening happens if and only if the disease is extirpated; no level is acceptable

because otherwise we're just going to keep going round and round in this merry dance.

(There's a political truism that things mostly go away on their own, if you just wait a bit.  That's not true of diseases, and it seems rather difficult for a lot of politicians to absorb that it's not true of diseases.)

The importance of selecting achievable objectives

Our World in Data will give you a graph; I think that link takes you to the current version of:

Oddly enough, Blogger can't cope with SVG, so pardon the grainy PNG. (Opening in a new tab may help; the original image is large, and might get better scaling that way.)

It's a log graph; those horizontal dashed lines are an order of magnitude apart.  We've got four groups; from the bottom, prompt extirpation, eventual extirpation, cost minimization with effective public health mechanisms, and cost minimizations without effective public health mechanisms.

I think it's an absolute no-brainer that trying for cost minimization was and is a mistake.  I think it's painfully obvious that the good people of Canada have no possibility of getting any approximation of good government -- in this context, definitionally one attempting to extirpate the disease, rather than trying to minimize the cost of the disease to select segments of society -- and we haven't got effective public health mechanisms with respect to the pandemic, because various provincial governments just flatly refuse to even consider funding them.

And now we're looking at an act of public optimism in Canada -- that delaying second doses of vaccines will provide effective long-term protection, because surely the first dose protective effect will have some sort of linear decay -- rather than, you know, doing what we  know works to extirpate the disease, because the rot runs deep and literally no one in a position of power is capable of picking an objective that's not measured in money.  The countries in the extirpation groups did it without a vaccine; a vaccine is extremely helpful, especially for health care workers, but you don't actually require one.

You do need a competent civil power; the official ideology looks completely irrelevant.  (Westminster democracy, ultra-capitalist constitutional republic, authoritarian communists, constitutional republic, constitutional republic, authoritarian communists, and the range of per-capita GDP is broad.)

Figuring out how to stop being a failed petrostate isn't going to be cheap.  Figuring out how to decarbonise and keep feeding everybody is going to be hard, never mind "not cheap".  COVID is pretty much easy mode compared to either of those, and what claims to be good government has entirely failed; it's failed so hard it shows no sign of noticing it's failed, or that success was an option.

It leaves me fearful and sad.  We're going to have to do so much better than this.