This article says billionaires are “racing” to invest in longevity treatments. Top candidates attracting funding include various gene therapies, drugs, stem cells, and old people consuming the blood of children (seriously, this is real but presumably the children are fine). This article argues a known drug called metformin deserves more attention.
The Ukraine war grinds on as I write on April 7, with the Russian military seemingly pulling back from some areas while slaughtering civilians (hostages?) farther east and south. I proffered some limited views on the situation and media coverage of the war during the month, but I won’t go into it below.
Most frightening and/or depressing story: What causes violence? It’s the (prohibition and war on) drugs, stupid. Or at least, partly/mostly, the drugs.
Most hopeful story: There are meaningful things individuals can do to slow climate change, even as governments and industries do too little too late. For example, eat plants, limit driving and flying, and just replace consumer goods as they wear out. I’m mostly on board except that I think we need peace and stability for the long term survival of both our civilization and planetary ecosystem, and we are going to need to travel and get to know one another to give that a chance.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Ready.gov has posted helpful information on what to do in case of a nuclear explosion.
A lot of the violence in the U.S. and around the U.S. border if fueled by the drug trade. With drugs illegal, there is just so much money to be made that it is worthwhile for organized crime to form, heavily arm itself and take large risks to move those drugs and make that money. South of the border, organized crime is so heavily armed it is able to intimidate the authorities. North of the border, law enforcement has become militarized and heavily armed in response. This results in a balance of power but also one of the world’s most violent countries that is also prosperous and supposedly peaceful.
That’s my view of the U.S. But is it happening elsewhere. Yes, according to Der Spiegel, in the Netherlands. This might seem surprising, because the Netherlands is known for decriminalizing soft drugs (cannabis, hashish – wait, isn’t that just a kind of cannabis? – and now apparently synthetic drugs like ecstacy.) What is left though is hard drugs, specifically cocaine. Cocaine smuggling and trading is leading to similar violence to what we see in the U.S., although on a much smaller scale. If I read the article correctly, they have around 20 drug related murders per year. That is 20 too many, but it also happens in a month in any sizable U.S. city, so there is no comparison.
I think the U.S. should legalize, regulate, and tax soft drugs right away. We should get a health care system that provides physical and mental health care to people with drug problems. But what to do about the hard drugs? I don’t know, but I still think the violence may be more evil than the drug-related social problems. Just take the market away from the criminals first and then go from there.
I learned a few things from this Scientific American article. First, fungi can be very useful in space because they break down hydrocarbons, which are abundant but not hospitable to life, and turn them into sugars, which are not abundant in space and do support life. Second, they create hard carbonaceous materials which can provide protection, insulation, and even conduct electricity. Third, at least some scientists think fungi will be discovered in space. Fourth, the character Paul Stamets on Star Trek Discovery is named after a real scientist named Paul Stamets, who wrote the book Mycelium Running, which I have heard of an haven’t read. And finally, something I knew but for the record have no personal experience with to date, psychoactive mushrooms can treat depression, loneliness, and post-traumatic stress disorder, all of which are going to occur anywhere in our universe humans choose to go.
I am in favor of legalizing drugs, taxing them, and creating a universal health system able to deal with substance abuse and mental health issues. I believe this would result in a big reduction in violence and the prison population almost immediately. It turns out there is a ballot measure in Oregon to decriminalize possession of small amounts of all types of drugs (which hasn’t been voted on as I write this, but probably will have been when this posts.)
Most frightening and/or depressing stories:
Climate change, nuclear weapons, and pandemics. If I go back and look at last year’s post, this list of existential threats is going to be pretty much the same. Add to this the depressing grind of permanent war which magnifies these risks and diverts resources that could be used to deal with them. True, we could say that we got through 2018 without a nuclear detonation, pandemic, or ecological collapse, and under the circumstances we should sit back, count our blessings, and wait for better leadership. And while our leadership is particularly inept at the moment, I think Noam Chomsky has a point that political administration after political administration has failed to solve these problems and this seems unlikely to improve. The earthquake risk is particularly troublesome. Think about the shock we felt over the inept response to Katrina, and now think about how essentially the same thing happened in Puerto Rico, we are not really dealing with it in an acceptable way, and the public and news media have essentially just shrugged it off and moved on. If the hurricanes, floods, fires and droughts just keep hitting harder and more often, and we don’t fully respond to one before the next hits, it could mean a slow downward spiral. And if that means we gradually lose our ability to bounce back fully from small and medium size disasters, a truly huge disaster like an epic earthquake on the west coast might be the one that pushes our society to a breaking point.
Most hopeful stories:
I believe our children are our future…ya ya blahda blahda. It’s a huge cliche, and yet to be hopeful about our world I have to have some hope that future generations can be better system thinkers and problem solvers and ethical actors than recent generations have been. Because despite identifying problems and even potential solutions we are consistently failing to make choices as a society that could divert us from the current failure path. And so I highlighted a few stories above about ideas for better preparing future generations, ranging from traditional school subjects like reading and music, to more innovative ones like meditation and general system theory, and just maybe we should be open to the idea that the right amount of the right drugs can help.
Fossil fuels just might be on their way out, as alternatives start to become economical and public outrage slowly, almost imperceptibly continues to build.
There is real progress in the fight against disease, which alleviates enormous quantities of human suffering. I mention AIDS, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s disease above. We can be happy about that, of course. There are ideas about how to grow more food, which is going to be necessary to avoid enormous quantities of human suffering. Lest anyone think otherwise, my position is that we desperately need to reduce our ecological footprint, but human life is precious and nobody deserves to suffer illness or hunger.
Good street design that lets people get around using mostly their own muscle power. It might not be sexy, but it is one of the keys to physical and mental health, clean air and water, biodiversity, social and economic vibrancy in our cities. Come to think of it, I take that back, it can be sexy if done well.
Good street design and general systems theory – proof that solutions exist and we just don’t recognize or make use of them. Here’s where I want to insert a positive sentence about how 2019 is the year this all changes for the better. Well, sorry, you’ll have to find someone less cynical than me, and/or with much better powers of communication and persuasion than me to get the ball rolling. On the off chance I have persuaded you, and you have communication and/or persuasion super powers, let me know.
Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:
Whatever else happens, technology and accumulation of human knowledge in general march on, of course. Computer, robotics, and surveillence technology march on. The human move into space is much slower and painful than many would have predicted half a century ago, and yet it is proceeding.
I’ll never drop the waterless sanitation thing, no matter how much others make fun of me. It’s going to happen, eventually. I don’t know whether we will colonize Mars or stop defecating in our water supply first, but both will happen.
The gene drive thing is really wild the more I think about it. This means we now have the ability to identify a species or group of species we don’t want to exist, then cause it not to exist in relatively short order. This seems like it could be terrifying in the wrong hands, doesn’t it? I’m not even sure I buy into the idea that rats and mosquitoes have no positive ecological functions at all. Aren’t there bats and birds that rely on mosquitoes as a food source? Okay, I’m really not sure what redeeming features rats have, although I did read a few years ago that in a serious food crunch farming rats would be a much more efficient way of turning very marginal materials into edible protein than chicken.
The universe in a bottle thing is mind blowing if you spend too much time thinking about it. It could just be bottles all the way down. It’s best not to spend too much time thinking about it.
That’s it, Happy 2019!
Alternet has a wrap-up of the year in (U.S.) drug policy. To summarize:
In a bit of good news, the murder rate in the U.S. appears to be down this year compared to trends in the last several years, according to the New York Times.
In the cities in which data is available, murder has been down about 7 percent on average this year relative to the same point in 2017…
If murder falls about 4.5 percent nationally this year, the murder rate of about 5 per 100,000 will roughly be in line with 2009’s rate and half of what it was in 1980, the highest U.S. murder rate on record. The accompanying chart shows what the national murder rate since 1960 would look like with a 4.5 percent drop in 2018.
Tracking the change in murder nationally is far easier than explaining why it’s happening. There is still no consensus on why murder rose nationally in 2015 and 2016, though various theories have been proposed, including simple randomness. Similarly, a projected drop in murder in 2018 would not have an obvious cause. Employment of smarter technologies, expanded community intervention programs, and even colder weather could help explain year-to-year local changes.
If I had to speculate, it might be that the drugs in question in the current round of the war on drugs are simply not as lucrative, and therefore not as worth killing for, as the ones we saw in the 1990s. The real profits accrue to the people willing to take big risks to get the drugs across the border, and it could just be that the body count this time around has been shifted just outside the U.S. border. It may also be that the U.S. government at various levels has shifted toward a little more of a public health approach and a little less of a law enforcement approach. I could think positive and consider this progress, or I could be cynical and say it is partial because there is a wider range of ethnic and socioeconomic groups being affected this time around.
Most frightening and/or depressing stories:
Most hopeful stories:
Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:
There are people taking small doses of LSD and other psychedelics every day for their possible/suspected health benefits, and there may actually be some science behind this.
Microdosing psychedelics – the regular consumption of small amounts of psychedelic substances such as LSD or psilocybin – is a growing trend in popular culture. Recent studies on full-dose psychedelic psychotherapy reveal promising benefits for mental well-being, especially for depression and end-of-life anxiety. While full-dose therapies include perception-distorting properties, microdosing may provide complementary clinical benefits using lower-risk, non-hallucinogenic doses. No experimental study has evaluated psychedelic microdosing, however; this pre-registered study is the first to investigate microdosing psychedelics and mental health. Recruited from online forums, current and former microdosers scored lower on measures of dysfunctional attitudes and negative emotionality and higher on wisdom, open-mindedness, and creativity when compared to non microdosing controls. These findings provide promising initial evidence that warrants controlled experimental research to directly test safety and clinical efficacy. As microdoses are easier to administer than full-doses, this new paradigm has the exciting potential to shape future psychedelic research.