Wear your mask

The pandemic is an insidious threat -- you cannot sense its presence -- and there's no instrumental means of detection (unlike other common insidious threats like electricity and methane).  All the indicators are lagging indicators; we can know where it was, not where it is.

What that means is you do not know -- you cannot know -- what your risk is.  It is by-definition impossible to know what your risk is.  (Remember that while it's statistically unlikely that you personally happen to be standing next to the person who was so startlingly fortunate as to have the "lethal as MERS" Omicron mutation occur during their initially asymptomatic infection, that's not a statement about your risk.  It's a statement about how likely that event is in the population, given a certain set of assumptions.  Your risk? inherently unknown.  Assume that the person next to you is shedding.)

Your single best means of avoiding death is to get (and keep getting) vaccinated.  This is not enough to prevent spread, and spread is how the disease gets worse.  So vaccination is not sufficient unto your civic duty.  You must also avoid infection.

Your single best means of avoiding infection -- and you want to avoid infection, because infection increases your risk -- is to wear a mask.  

Today, in the current state of the plague, wear a mask means a half-face respirator with a full gasket seal, no exhaust valve, and P100 filters.  (You're not a health-care professional with a need to dispose of your mask. You're going outside absolutely as little as possible -- which means you don't, unless necessary to avoid material harm -- you're bagging your mask in an impermeable plastic bag when you get home, and since it's a respirator, you can take the filters off and wash it from time to time.  Slather it with hand-sanitiser more frequently than that.  Yes, this costs more up front, but given that you're going to need it for at least the next year, your total cost is less this way.)

If you leave the house, you do it with the mask on.  It stays on the whole time you're out of the house.

When can we stop wearing masks everywhere?

When the disease is extirpated.

Given full population vaccination, universal mask use, and time, the disease will be extirpated.

Yes, there's a whole lot of public support required to get there; it's not as simple as always wearing your mask.  Yes, there are a bunch of evil people on Team Virus who think freedom means they are free to commit contagion.  At a minimum, don't be like that.  Wear your mask.

Duty requires.

Chaff in the fire

 I have to be careful with metaphors; what makes sense to me doesn't always make sense to other people, or they give me odd looks after awhile and say "how did you think of that?"

That's your caveat.

To a virus, an organism is fuel.

There is no normalcy for fuel in a fire.

The fire goes out on its own when the fuel is exhausted.  (We are not going to get into "heat, fuel, and oxidiser" because this is a metaphor; Aristotelian fire, if you will.)

If we want the pandemic to end, we have to end it.

What we've got right now (I'm in Ontario, Canada) is a government taking the view that using hoses is expensive and disruptive; you only use the hose when the fire is of a certain size and scope, and then you stop instantly when the fire is noticeably smaller.

If someone were to apply this policy to an actual house fire, it would be instantly recognised as lunacy.  You put the fire out, completely and definitively out, as quick as you can by any available means. If you can't put the fire out, you get out as fast as you can.

Since we're all in the position of being piles of dry hay while some spectral lunatic runs around with a lighter, you'd think we'd have noticed this is a problem in some politically meaningful way, but it turns out that we can't.  There's no effective opposition because the entire political system has been captured by mammonite axioms which say that the purpose of government is to guarantee the profitable conduct of business to the benefit of the incumbent rich.  Spending money to support the general prosperity or even keeping people from dying is unacceptable and wrong.

Ending the pandemic takes a bunch of things; they're all well-understood things. (A planned real shutdown for three weeks, which means everyone and everything commercial, which in turn means feeding people/paying them to stay home during; mandatory vaccination delivered to the home as a public service; enforced quarantines at borders with careful testing to exit; widespread and effective testing freely available in the population; track-and-trace with quarantine and enforcement powers; free effective masks for all; universal and continuous mask wearing outside the home; no public gatherings or non-essential human contact until extirpation.)

The critical, core, missing thing is the political will to do it, because an exercise of the civil power capable of ending the pandemic can do other things; it can decide to tax the rich, it can decide to decarbonise, it can decide to consign mammonism -- a belief we are watching unambiguously decide it's fine with killing every living human person if profits increase -- to the ash-heap of history.  Those in control prefer your death to any change in the status quo.

Many have died who need not have died.  Many have been harmed who need not have been harmed.

Our government is incompetent AND malicious.

It's past time to make an end of this.

Climate consulatation

Submission to the Environment and Climate Change Canada’s public consultation on Canada’s 2030 Emission Reduction Plan: 

I'm writing to you with my response to the public consultation, and to urge the federal government to act with the speed and scale necessary to tackle the climate emergency.

Nothing on the plan is anything more than whistling past the graveyard.

The predictions Arctic Amplification Hypothesis -- that an ice-free Arctic ocean leads to very rapid warming and a loss of hydrologic stationarity for a long period of time, hundreds to thousands of years -- have so far held.

That loss of hydrologic stationarity -- climate scientist for "it rains at predictable times, in predictable amounts" -- is the loss of agriculture.  No food means no nation.  (The PRC are "hoarding" agricultural products, if you read a certain segment of the press; alternatively, they're grimly aware of these events and recognise that their legitimacy as a government rests on preventing hunger.)

The appropriate response is threefold:

1. zero fossil carbon extraction and use everywhere the writ of the Government of Canada runs, as soon as materially possible (try for 2025; it should have been no later than 2000), without exception, by any necessary means.

2. replace agriculture to guarantee food security to all Canadians; this must be done by a diversity of sufficient means, because we cannot know today what means will work.  Indigenous methods should be a significant but not sole part of this.

3. infrastructure replacement so that the residential housing stock works in the climate we're going to have, so that we have a post-fossil-carbon transportation system, so that we've got widely distributed import-replacing primary industry able to maintain communications, anaesthetised dentistry, vaccination, and the infrastructure we've built.  All of this has to be built so the rising sea does not destroy it.

Time is short.

Careful scientific enquiry from multiple teams give the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica another five to ten years, after which we may expect abrupt sea level rise measured in metres.  (You do realise that a meter of rise notionally puts salt water almost to Montreal, or that two metres floods Fredericton and cuts the highway and rail line where they go around the Bay of Fundy?  Or that the actual, complex, result of hydraulic damming in the St. Lawrence likely floods both Montreal and Toronto?)

The appropriate response is _at least_ full national mobilisation as for an early 20th century global war, because those were much smaller threats than we face as the bill comes due for the Carbon Binge.

Sincerely,

Graydon Saunders