Category Archives: politics

Nuclear, The Story Not Told

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Two numbers.

Hydro: 1.30 deaths per terawatt-hour of energy generated.
Nuclear: 0.03.

I spent thirty years in power electronics and systems engineering. I’m used to evaluating risk from data. When I first looked at those two numbers sitting side by side in the same table, I had to read them twice. Then I went looking for where the data came from, who had reviewed it, and whether anyone had poked holes in it. Nobody had. The methodology is consistent across multiple independent sources, and the numbers have held for years.

The question that’s stuck with me since is a simple one: why does one of those numbers drive policy, and the other one barely gets mentioned?

That’s not a rhetorical question. It has an answer. And the answer is worth understanding, because the same mechanism is almost certainly operating right now on something else entirely.

August 1975

Henan Province, China. Typhoon Nina hits a cold front and drops roughly a year’s worth of rain in 24 hours. The Banqiao dam, built to handle a so-called thousand-year flood, gets overtopped. Sluice gates are partially blocked by sediment. The dam fails. Then 62 downstream reservoirs fail in sequence.

A wall of water six meters high and ten kilometers wide moves down that valley at close to 50 kilometers an hour.

Direct deaths: approximately 26,000. Total deaths, once you account for the famine and disease that followed the destruction of the regional water supply and agricultural system: somewhere between 171,000 and 230,000 people. The Chinese government suppressed the numbers for decades. Most people in the West have never heard of Banqiao.

Nobody stopped building dams.

No global regulatory freeze. No decades-long moratorium on new hydroelectric construction. Banqiao killed more people than every nuclear incident in history combined, and the policy response was essentially nothing.

Hold that thought.

Nuclear’s Actual Record

Three events define public perception of nuclear power.

Three Mile Island, 1979. Partial meltdown. Serious incident. Zero direct deaths. Peer-reviewed studies found no measurable increase in cancer incidence in the surrounding population. The containment system worked.

The public response: mass panic. The regulatory response: construction permits frozen across the United States. No new nuclear plant ordered after 1974 was completed for decades.

Chernobyl, 1986. A genuinely catastrophic failure of a reactor design with known safety flaws, operated outside its safety envelope during a test. Peer-reviewed death toll: approximately 433. That number gets reported in popular media as tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands. The peer-reviewed literature does not support those figures.

Fukushima, 2011. This one needs context. A magnitude 9 earthquake and a 15-meter tsunami killed approximately 20,000 people directly and destroyed the regional infrastructure. The nuclear plant failure was a knock-on of that disaster, not a standalone event. Hospitals were already overwhelmed, supply chains already broken, shelters already strained.

That context matters, and it makes what follows more striking, not less.

Deaths from radiation: zero. UNSCEAR and the WHO both confirm no member of the public or plant worker died from acute radiation exposure.

Deaths from the evacuation: 2,313. Officially certified by the Japanese Reconstruction Agency. Cohort studies compared evacuated groups against matched groups in the same disaster zone who were not subject to the nuclear evacuation order. The excess mortality still tracks to the evacuation specifically, not the general disaster. Patients pulled off ventilators and loaded onto buses. Elderly evacuees in unheated gymnasiums in March without their cardiac medications. Long-term displacement that drove a documented spike in strokes, heart attacks, and suicides.

The evacuation killed 2,313 people. The radiation killed none.

Germany’s response: shut down all nuclear plants within twelve months.

The Thing Nobody Talks About

If nuclear is the thing people are afraid of, coal is the thing nobody discusses.

Coal sits at 24.62 deaths per terawatt-hour. That’s not an accident rate. That’s a baseline. It runs every hour the plant is operating, in every community downwind, invisibly.

The mechanism is particulate matter, specifically PM2.5. Fine particles that bypass your lung filtration and enter the bloodstream. They drive ischemic heart disease, stroke, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The people dying from this don’t die in a dramatic event. They die over years, and the death certificate says heart disease, not power plant.

In the United States alone, between 1999 and 2020, 460,000 deaths were directly attributed to coal particulate emissions. That’s a peer-reviewed figure from a study published in Science in 2023, based on Medicare records.

Globally, fossil fuel air pollution causes an estimated 5.13 million excess deaths per year.

No headlines. No evacuation zone. No footage. No panel of experts. It just happens, continuously, and we have decided as a society that this is acceptable.

Why the Data Didn’t Matter

This is the part worth sitting with.

The deaths-per-TWh data has been available and consistent for a long time. The numbers aren’t new. So why did the policy response to nuclear go one way and the response to everything else go another?

The answer isn’t scientific illiteracy, though that plays a part. The answer is how human risk perception actually works, and specifically a category psychologists call dread risk.

Before applying it to nuclear, try it somewhere closer to home.

Roughly 40,000 people die in car accidents in the United States every year. Commercial aviation kills, in a typical year, somewhere between zero and a few dozen. Per mile traveled, you are orders of magnitude more likely to die in a car than on a plane. Most people know this, at least abstractly. And yet a significant portion of the population is afraid to fly and gets in the car without a second thought.

That’s not stupidity. That’s a predictable failure mode of the human nervous system. Dying in a plane crash feels uncontrollable, invisible in its causes, and catastrophic in its image. Dying in a car feels like something that happens to other people who weren’t paying attention. The statistics are not what’s driving the fear response. The characteristics of the event are.

Psychologists have a precise vocabulary for this. The factors that amplify perceived risk include: whether exposure is voluntary or involuntary, whether the mechanism is visible or invisible, whether effects are immediate or delayed, and whether the hazard carries prior cultural associations with catastrophe. Score high on those dimensions and people will treat a low-probability event as an existential threat. Score low, and they’ll accept a high-probability harm without complaint.

Nuclear hits every trigger. Radiation is invisible. Exposure is involuntary. The effects are delayed. And the word “nuclear” has carried the weight of Hiroshima and Nagasaki since 1945. Thirty years of Cold War civil defense films, fallout shelter drills, and duck-and-cover exercises had done their work long before Three Mile Island. The public was primed.

Coal has none of that. It kills more people per unit of energy than any other source in widespread use. It kills them slowly, distributed across populations, through mechanisms that show up on death certificates as heart disease and stroke. There is no “coal incident” that preempts the evening news. So coal never triggered the dread response. It just kept running.

Here’s where it gets interesting from a broader perspective. Once you understand that nuclear had a unique set of psychological vulnerabilities, you also understand that those vulnerabilities were predictable. And predictable vulnerabilities are usable ones.

You didn’t need to fabricate data to keep nuclear from expanding. You didn’t need to lie about the death toll or invent risks that didn’t exist. You just needed to keep the fear operational. Any outcome you wanted from that situation, whether it was energy policy, geopolitical competition, protection of existing energy assets, or genuine environmental concern, ran through the same lever. The mechanism did the work regardless of the motive behind it.

That’s how you get a policy response that froze an industry after an incident with zero deaths, while an energy source that kills hundreds of thousands of people a year kept operating without comment.

The data didn’t change the policy because the data was never the driver of the policy. The fear was the driver, weaponized by a lot of different actors. And fear, once well-established in a culture, doesn’t need new information to sustain itself.

What It Cost

After Three Mile Island, the NRC froze construction permits and shifted to an adversarial licensing posture. Plants that were 80% complete had to be redesigned to meet new rules written after they broke ground. The rules kept changing. Cable separation distances. Concrete specifications. Redundant backup systems. Each rule issued as a response to perceived risk, none ever rolled back.

The industry has a name for it: the regulatory ratchet. Rules only move in one direction.

The result: construction timelines doubled. Overnight capital costs increased by over 200%. An industry that had been commercially viable became financially impossible.

One example makes it concrete.

The Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant on Long Island, New York. Construction started in 1973. The original cost estimate was $75 million. The plant was completed in 1984 at a final cost of $6 billion. The regulatory environment had changed so many times during construction that the finished plant was essentially built twice. After completion, the plant ran a single low-power test. It never delivered commercial electricity to a single home. In 1989, Long Island Lighting Company transferred ownership to New York State for one dollar. The plant was decommissioned.

Zero deaths at Three Mile Island. The containment worked. The response was to make nuclear power economically unbuildable for the next forty years, and to leave a completed $6 billion power plant sitting idle until it could be taken apart.

The Question the Data Left Open

The engineering question was answered a long time ago. Deaths per terawatt-hour is a clean metric. The data is consistent across multiple independent methodologies. Nuclear kills fewer people per unit of energy than any fossil fuel, and roughly the same as wind and solar. Hydro sits at 1.30, driven almost entirely by a single dam failure in 1975 that most people in the West have never heard of.

The question the data leaves open is not whether nuclear is dangerous. The data settled that. The question is why the data didn’t matter, what it cost us that it didn’t, and whether you can now look at any other technology or industry and spot the same pattern running.

Find something that scores high on the dread risk dimensions. Invisible mechanism. Involuntary exposure. Delayed effects. Prior cultural associations with catastrophe. Then look at what the data actually says about it versus what the policy response has been.

The mechanism is still running. The only variable is what it’s pointed at today.

Here is the file

nuclear_video_slidesDownload

M.A. Harris is a systems and mechanical engineer with 30 years in power electronics and a particular interest in how engineering data interacts with public policy. He writes hard science fiction as M.A. Harris and runs The Unretired Engineer on YouTube.

📺 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Scifiengineer-09
🔗 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-a-harris
📚 Published works (M.A. Harris): https://www.amazon.com/author/m-a-harris

The Technology Lapped the Argument

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*Related video: https://youtu.be/Rt3u7k1Qn2Y

I spent the last years of my engineering career inside the EV supply chain. SiC power modules, fast charging infrastructure, the physics that makes any of this possible. When the market stalled and Wolfspeed went into Chapter 11, I was among the people who lost their jobs to the gap between technology that was ready and deployment that wasn’t managed well.

So I have some standing to say this: most of what you’re hearing about EVs right now is noise. The signal is somewhere else entirely.

What the argument is actually about

The loudest voices say EVs are failing. Mandates reversed, high-profile products stumbled, the market is retreating. Some of that is true. Most of the framing around it isn’t.

What’s happening is a culture war machine doing what it does: taking a nuanced engineering and industrial policy question and flattening it into a yes/no yelling match. The anti-EV drum is politically useful to a coalition that learned to hate the mandate era. That’s a social politics problem, not an industrial one.

The previous administration pushed hard on EVs and that push was heavy-handed. Mandates handed down by people who had never read a cost model. Timelines written by committees with no idea what it takes to retool a supply chain. You can’t magic this into existence. The regulatory overcorrection was real and it wasn’t sustainable. The current environment is closer to “let the market work,” which was always the more defensible position.

That’s not a retreat on EVs. It’s a retreat on mandates. Those are different things.

The one policy thread that actually matters

There’s a legitimate industrial policy question buried under the noise, and it has nothing to do with the culture war.

Chinese battery manufacturers operate at a cost and scale US industry can’t currently match. BYD LFP packs at $81/kWh against North American packs struggling to get below $120/kWh. That gap is structural. It’s the product of state subsidy, overcapacity investment, and a decade of manufacturing maturity that didn’t happen here.

Tariffs are a response to that. Not a new tool — tariffs have always been part of industrial policy. They buy time for US manufacturing to find its footing before the cost differential makes the conversation moot. They slow the bleeding. They don’t end the issue. The hard commercial work still has to happen inside that window of protection.

While the argument raged, the engineers kept working

The two real technical objections to mass EV adoption were range and charge time.

Range has been largely answered for most drivers. The argument was always more perception than physics for the majority of use cases. There’s still a range/cost trade-off at the edges, and for certain use cases — long hauls, thin infrastructure corridors — it’s real. But for the suburban commuter with a predictable route, it was a phantom.

Charge time was the harder objection. It’s the one that lands with people who have driving patterns that don’t fit a neat daily commute.

That objection just got answered. CATL has announced a lithium-ion pack that goes from 10% to 80% charge for a long-range car in 5 minutes — essentially what you spend at a gas pump. With a cycle life as good or better than existing packs. That’s not a lab result. That’s a discontinuity arriving at production scale.

The cost curve has been moving the same direction for years. $137/kWh in 2020. $108/kWh in 2025. Consensus puts it at $60-80 by 2030. And unlike the internal combustion engine, which hit a performance plateau a while ago — where further gains tend to require turbos, complexity, and reliability trade-offs — battery technology still has a long way to run on the improvement curve.

The original technical case against EVs is now essentially closed.

The part most people haven’t thought through

Here’s the engineering insight that gets lost in the political argument: the EV value proposition is not uniform across vehicle categories. It runs in opposite directions depending on what you’re building.

A large pickup truck is a worst case. Heavy vehicle requires a big battery. Big battery adds weight. More weight means lower range. Lower range demands an even bigger battery. The vicious circle compounds fast, and the economics get brutal.

A mid-range car is a much better case. A small car is better still. An e-bike is the virtuous circle running full speed — light vehicle, small battery, low cost, genuinely better than the alternative on almost every axis.

The early EV push got this backwards. It over-emphasized large, expensive vehicles in categories where EV physics work against you, and under-served the mid and lower segments where the virtuous circle runs hard. That product mix failure wasn’t inevitable — it was a choice, driven by margin structure and political optics.

The companies that are finally starting to fix this understand where the physics are on their side.

What I expect to happen

The social politics will move on when the machine finds a new nuanced topic to flatten. It always does. The yelling tends to continue well past the point where it makes any sense, but it does eventually stop.

The regulatory environment is already normalizing. The tariff question is real and separate — you don’t abandon it just because the culture war has moved on, because the industrial competition with China doesn’t care about US political cycles.

Quietly, at the mid and lower price points, there’s no deep quitting. The product mix is starting to fill in where it should have been years ago.

By the time the US political environment fully resolves its feelings about EVs, the engineering will be a generation ahead of the debate. The technology wasn’t right five years ago for most buyers. It’s about right today. Tomorrow it will be better, and the gas engine curve doesn’t have the same headroom left to answer with.

The technology lapped the argument. Almost nobody noticed while it was happening.

Mark Harris is a systems and mechanical engineer, recovering from a career in EV power electronics, and the author of Stranded in the Stars (Book One, The Sea of Suns Trilogy). He writes about engineering, technology, and the creative life at This World and Others. The Unretired Engineer is on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@Scifiengineer-09

We Handed Them the Market

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Related video: Range Anxiety — The Unreal Reality

I’ve been involved with EV power and propulsion for much of the last 30 years. My latest stint was at Wolfspeed, developing SiC power modules for EVs and fast chargers. When the EV market stalled and the company went into Chapter 11, I was among the people who lost their jobs.

I still think EVs are the right direction. I don’t own one. That’s not a contradiction, it’s the actual story, and the video above is where I work through it.

The short version: range anxiety was always overblown for most drivers, and the auto makers never built the product mix that met the needs of the broad market. Now the industry is driving hard away from EVs, especially in the US, and that’s just wrong-headed. The video closes on that but doesn’t dig into why. This post does.

The Part That Stings

While the US was arguing about mandates and turning the issue into clickbait, China was engineering.

BYD is selling comfortable, adequate-range EVs in the $15–20K range. That’s the vehicle that moves the majority of buyers. Not the Cybertruck, not the F-150 Lightning, not the Rivian. A practical car at a price most people can actually consider.

We handed them that market. Not through malice or conspiracy, but through a combination of policy that optimized for the wrong things and an industry that focused on protecting its margins.

The policy pushed hard for EV adoption with mandates, subsidies, timelines. Some of that pressure was probably warranted. The market would have gotten there on its own, but the question of when and at whose expense was real. The intervention accelerated some things. What it didn’t do was direct the industry toward the product that would actually move the needle for most buyers.

The industry copied Tesla’s playbook; premium vehicles, long range, performance, high price points. That was the wrong lesson. Tesla used that model to fund the manufacturing and infrastructure investment that actually mattered. Everyone else just took the margin and stopped there.

The charger network made the same error I described in a previous video: build for the metric that looks good in the grant report, not the outcome that matters to the driver. 97% uptime. 71% charging success rate. Two different measurements, only one of which tells you whether the thing worked.

Why Big Auto Isn’t Saving Itself

I always loathed the heavy-handed government push on EVs and what I read as gaslighting on the rationale. Mandates handed down by people who had never looked at a cost model. Timelines written by committees that had no idea what it actually takes to retool a supply chain or build an infrastructure.

At the same time, I think some intervention was warranted. Not because the market was wrong about EVs, but because the market was optimizing for the next quarter. And the externalities of the status quo were landing on people who weren’t in the pricing model.

Intervention at scale creates dependencies. The industry made bets premised on the government backstop continuing. When the political environment shifted, those bets didn’t just look bad, they collapsed. And the response has been to drive hard back toward gasoline, as if that solves anything.

US old-line auto companies have been struggling for decades, and the reasons are structural. They’re trapped by regulatory capture and built-in costs that make adaptation nearly impossible.

Start at the sales end. Their dealer networks are regulated state by state, which makes wholesale change all but impossible. Safety regulations run through a system where insurers push regulators to require improvements that the industry develops partly because those improvements push up vehicle margins. Manufacturing plants are at their core decades old, and the capital they represent sits on the books, write it down and you impair the balance sheet. Design is path dependent by habit and incentive: most changes are incremental tweaks to last year’s platform because that’s easy, cheap, and legible to accounting.

And the margin structure makes it worse. Bill-of-material cost for a vehicle increases slowly with size and content. Market value is largely bling-dependent. So the incentive always points toward large, well-fitted vehicles where the spread is widest, and away from the small practical vehicle where there’s almost none.

Meanwhile, the manufacturing model has already been cracked. A new generation of EV makers proved you can build at scale in the US, turn a profit, and drive down the cost curve without the legacy overhead strangling the old players. Big Auto is watching that happen and still can’t follow, because the legacy network isn’t just a cost problem, it’s a constraint on every decision they make.

Moving back to gasoline doesn’t fix any of this. It may help sales volume near-term, but fewer and fewer buyers are willing to pay up for big iron, and as the recent spike in gas prices reminded everyone, the cost of operating a gas vehicle is not as predictable as it felt a few years ago.

The wholesale abandonment of EVs is as wrong-headed as the mandates-first push that preceded it. You’re walking away from the future as it’s getting its feet under it, and you’re not fixing your actual problems in the process.

Different direction, same failure mode: optimizing for the political moment rather than the real problem.

What I Expect to Happen

The market will keep sorting this out despite the policy environment, not because of it.

Amazon is sponsoring the Slate, a small electric truck aimed squarely at the price point where the volume is. Ford is talking about smaller, value-forward platforms. The product mix gaps are starting to fill in, and the players doing it understand they have to meet buyers where they are, which is around $20K for a vehicle that’s good enough and built around what EVs actually do well.

BYD is a harder question. It was built on the back of Chinese state support and practices that wouldn’t survive scrutiny elsewhere, but that doesn’t change what it demonstrates: a level of technical maturity across product fit, design, and manufacturing that very few other automakers can match. Tariffs and regulatory barriers will slow it down. They won’t hold permanently. Some form of that capability will find its way into the US market, and when it does it will accelerate the shakeout that’s already coming for Big Auto.

Charging infrastructure will improve in the corridors where the economics support it and stay thin everywhere else, and that’s how it should work. Where it’s thin, the economics will eventually pull in local investors, the same way any other service infrastructure fills in. It won’t be fast, but it will happen.

The transition will come, just slower and more expensively than it had to be. The destination is probably the same. The cost of getting there is substantially higher, and much of the value being created will go to manufacturers who aren’t American. That’s the envelope effect of all the intervention and counter-intervention stacked on top of each other.

The engineers mostly knew it was going to be complicated. Technical change at a social scale always is. The complicated part is rarely the technology.

Mark Harris is a systems and mechanical engineer, recovering from a career in EV power electronics, and the author of Stranded in the Stars (Book One, The Sea of Suns Trilogy). He writes about engineering, technology, and the creative life at This World and Others. The Unretired Engineer is on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@Scifiengineer-09

What is Propaganda…is it different from Fake News?…and when is it good?

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World War I Posters That Reveal The Roots Of Modern Propaganda
By All That’s Interesting
Published December 26, 2016
Updated July 10, 2019
These World War 1 propaganda posters courtesy of the U.S. government provide a fascinating look at the America of a century ago in the midst of the Great War.

Propaganda is the more or less systematic effort to manipulate other people’s beliefs, attitudes, or actions by means of symbols (words, gestures, banners, monuments, music, clothing, insignia, hairstyles, designs on coins and postage stamps, and so forth). Deliberateness and a relatively heavy emphasis on manipulation distinguish propaganda from casual conversation or the free and easy exchange of ideas. Propagandists have a specified goal or set of goals. To achieve these, they deliberately select facts, arguments, and displays of symbols and present them in ways they think will have the most effect. To maximize effect, they may omit or distort pertinent facts or simply lie, and they may try to divert the attention of the reactors (the people they are trying to sway) from everything but their own propaganda

Britannica.Com on propoganda

If you spend a little time absorbing this definition, which I have no quarrels with, you realize that what has been called Fake News IS largely propaganda. And it IS what the US main ‘news’ channels have been practicing either somewhat accidentally or wholly on purpose for the last four + years. They have been sliding this way for decades, but it has slid down the slippery slope to this end state quickly over the last few. (Read my post on the Slippery Slope…Looking at this topic I realize this fits into that type of situation where the Slippery Slope IS real, all of the actors are in the game and the rational observers have no impact on the discussion AT ALL.)

Is propaganda ever appropriate? I can’t tell. I want to say NO not just ‘no’ but HELL NO. But I also see how difficult it is to get everyone on the same page and can see that in general if there is a societal good that can be defined as good then making sure everyone is on board is also Good.

But….a big one.

I think that with the internet and the explosion of ‘near news’ outlets propaganda and its bastard child fake news, become a very bad thing, an evil. Everyone learns about propaganda and they get a sense that in the right hands it is good, in the wrong hands evil. So it becomes something of a standard tool, because most of us sees ourselves as ‘one of the goodies.’

The problem is that all sides of an argument get a say. And the general populace do not have any deep sense of the reality of the situation, the nuances etc. If you are generally democrat you see mostly democratic outlets. If Republican, only that line. While some resources have centrist voices, they always shade one way or the other, and many outlets are purposefully hard over. One sides group gets propagandized into believing their trope. The other side…the other trope.

So as Scott Adams points out you get two radically different views of the same events. To the point that the objective reality is not even in view of those Propagandized. Take the Capital Intrusion, one side, clearly nonviolent non threatening, good people protesting an at least murky election. Other side clearly violent, threatening, evil people trying to overturn a fair election.

In this war of propaganda the sides are purposefully pushed apart because the two sides cannot allow ‘their’ segment to wander. They rationalize deleting and spinning evidence because it is not important and muddles the message.

But…but…but…Journalism!

Journalism has always had an element of propaganda. Yes there was a period when it was portrayed as noble to present just the facts but the reality was this was at best a hope and and worst cover. The same schools essentially TEACH propaganda methodology as part of the general curriculum. Again in one view to inoculate the innocent learner against it, in the alternate view because there are a lot of jobs in public relations and advertising (commercial propaganda) as well as in government (propaganda straight up though usually for neutral topics.)

And….”If it bleeds it leads”…news of any kind is a business. Yes you can point to billionaire liberals propping up various operations. But at the end of the day news is a good way of turning a billionaire into a millionaire over time. The operation has to support itself or it cannot last long. What Fox showed was that you could get an audience by bending the news in a certain way and feeding them ‘red meat.’ They tried (mostly succeeded) in a combination of pretty clearly factual reporting and pretty clearly politicized editorial content though you were left to guess which was which. What a lot of the other operations couldn’t really afford to do was the factual reporting. Editorializing everything with a left bend…but left the audience to believe they were giving ‘just the facts.’ And probably excusing themselves by closing their senses to the much more complex nuanced reality…Though it is not clear most of those smiles even have a clue that such a thing exists.

Sigh…and so it goes…have not watched TV/Video news in years, probably never will again, despise its superficiality and bias. Even the talk shows are uselessly one sided these days, making the whole realm a danger to the Republic rather than the safety valve it was supposed to be.

Of ratchets and slopes, slippery or otherwise

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Crossbow and the crank/ratchet for cocking it medieval period, WikiCommons

As commented on before I pay attention to Scott Adams of Dilbert fame as an interesting thinker with a fairly well defined but undefinable political gestalt. Uber liberal realist Trump supporter is maybe the best description.

One of his mantra’s is that Slippery Slopes are Not a Thing.

The following is my interpretation of his position.

A point of view/policy item with a broad ‘option space’ and supporters on both ends, say like gun control, will slide in a direction that is acceptable to the general polity (something like the Overton Window) until some point it will no longer be acceptable. Those who wish to push the policy towards one end or the other will eventually meet resistance and be unable to move the policy further ‘their way’ until some change occurs. That change may move the policy ‘back’ or ‘forward’ but it is acceptability that controls. This says that the idea of a ‘slippery slope ‘with its imagery of reaching a point where you lose control and slide to some end point it false on its face.

Having thought about this I agree with the premise in a general sense.

Two, I think important, quibbles:

1) That in a highly emotional and very dynamic situation such as one might have in the ancient Demos of Greece, or say a Constitutional Congress, a French State Committee…, the slippery slope appears to me to be a real threat. The whole of the polity is in the fight as it were and there is no stable base of opinion to dampen high flights of rhetoric and emotion. In such situations you have a tendency to move to the end state without the intermediary and if this is then enforced on the outside world the results are likely to be calamitous if the topic is one with a high degree of emotional attachment with the broader public. The Demos were tiny isolated city states and they killed a few important people and destroyed themselves but it was in the end fairly evolutionary. The US constitution was very conservative in its basis and while the result was ‘liberal’ it was not that crazy and was in line with most of the populous, plus it was a huge area with a tiny population, where malcontents could often go west if they wanted. The French Revolution was a bloody multi decadal disaster because it didn’t have any other damper than time and blood….To a large degree I don’t see this as that active other than in a Social Network Today…to some degree it explains some of the crap that goes on in odd corners of the web.

2) More important than 1) is the fact that the ratchet is IMO real. That once a law or regulation is in place it tends to create a new baseline and constituency. If the issue is fairly hot there will be pushback but in general people are for stability and a law or regulation will become entrenched. It only takes time for that to then be the jumping off point for a new effort to extend whatever policy. This may not be very logical on its face but it is a reality and is one of the reasons that any human system tends to atrophy with time. So the party who tends to desire more law and regulation have a tendency to have the edge here and they will turn the crank on the ratchet whenever they get the chance.

While England is not the US in any sense one should look at it as a bit of a case study, though the lack of the 2nd Amendment is a huge factor. A century ago guns were rare more because of their cost than anything else. Then regulation started to build up. Because of no 2A and it was very gradual there was not much push back. Today not only is any kind of firearm in private possession effectively illegal so are any edged/pointed device inclusive of scissors. The ratchet is real…the slippery slope is a thing only in very constrained cases.

Deep Funk

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Gallup Pole, Deepest dive ever recorded.

Makes one wonder, no proof that the election was stolen or that there was massive irregularities. Also not really proof that Big Business and Big Labor agreed to suppress any push back on the result. And maybe that is all right. Is it possible that Orange Man Bad helped defeat himself? That he was both so toxic to the pretty elite and beloved by the deplorable that a large number of people who supported the Trump administration but deplored the man voted Blue in the conviction that Orange Man Bad would win anyway. Convinced he would win they were fairly positive about the future….now…deep funk.

Just sayin… as the niece has said.

A little air, a bit of heat, some light

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What Global Warming? 148 New (2020) Scientific Papers Affirm Recent Non-Warming, A Degrees-Warmer Past at WattsUpWithThat

Climate Change Horror Porn is another tool of the apparat to frighten us. In realty there is an objective truth out there…none of us know it. Two sides largely aligned Left and Right though not precisely have taken sides and because the liberal left is ascendant and deeply intwined in academia and the media they are trying to ‘scare us straight.’ It might be well intentioned in many cases, but ideologues, abusers, users and grifters have gathered around a powerful ideological tool that can be used to manipulate the population.

  • The science such as it is….which is a lot…but not what you are told it is by the media and the ideologues who want to use it.
    • Climate science
      • What climate was/is/will be:
        • Is based on models of how the whole atmosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere work.
          • Early simple models were very illuminating.
          • Complex models are horribly sensitive to incorrect knowledge and unknowns.
        • A lot of it is based on prior history comparing things like plant and sea life growth vs temperature, CO2 etc.
          • But most of this knowledge is based on proxies up until a decade or at most two ago.
          • Plus sparse and non technical accounts up until the modern era
          • Has a sparse and erratic technical record from about a century and a half.
          • Decent deep record for a couple of decades.
          • Can see what it is today in fair but not omniscient detail.
        • We model the future based on models that we ‘test’ against the past. Like the stock market sometimes these models can do an ok job. But that is only because of parameter fiddling to ‘match the curves.’ The models are by necessity highly simplified and often just plain wrong. For example:
          • recent discovery that cloud impact on surface temperature can increase not decrease surface temperature. And that it may depend on where you are in the world.
          • Recent discovery that CO2 concentration’s affect on green house is not linear and tapers quickly at higher concentrations.
          • That the planetary heat balance is highly affected by cooling at the poles, and that the magnetosphere/sun link into the climate also is highly linked at the poles.
          • Etc.
        • While the first climate models that brilliant men and women came up with less than a century ago have been proven to be largely correct, the details are practically, hardly better modeled today than they were in the 1950’s.
        • Today there are literally hundreds of complex computer models and that are run many times with many different start parameters. They generate families of predictions, effectively at random. Those predictions are never even close to right at a rate greater than chance.
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Grumping

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So I pay way to much attention to the internet though I do focus on STEM topics other than libertarian leaning current events and world view ‘stuff.’

One of my favorites is as I have said Scott Adams of Dilbert fame. You can find him on the web quite easily…well unless his support of Orange Man Bad got him kicked off at last.

But one of my grumps ever since the start of Covid has been his ‘blithely panicked’ (yes I meant that) response to what I see as a very serious but never, ever, even close to civilization ending, epidemic.

While I do not agree with those who call it just a flu, I do agree that it has been blown out of all proportion. I suspect that the response has killed more people (untreated conditions, suicide, drug overdose, ennui…) than the disease has.

Also the impact, being highly focused on people like me (a bit older with co morbidities) was tragic but after the first 3 months clearly within the realm of reasonable countermeasures to limit spread among the affected community without broad swath lockdowns (which were and are Fascistic over reactions.)

But Orange Man Bad drove a lot of folks into the fear and freak out theater business and there was nothing that reasonable people (Orange Man Bad amongst them) could do about it. Now ZombieJoe and his HenchWench will use the winding down of the fear frenzy to cover up a lot of their wild eyed supporters power grabs and revenge fantasy role playing.

Now one of the tropes is how hideous this disease is because of its lingering effects. Horrors, you may loose your sense of smell, have brain deficit issues, other health affects lasting who knows how long???

Get a Fucking Grip. I have had several serious infections due to physical damage early in my twenties (bone infection can recur more than once after 40 years!!!!) I also seem to get a really really really bad flue reaction every few years. These episodes have left me depressed and enervated for months…getting on for years. I often hear folks commenting about how serious infections drag out and lead to knock on effects.

This Covid HORROR is only something because we are paying millions of people billions of dollars to pay attention to this one thing.

What that attention has given us is a huge pile of data on what a viral infection can do the human body. And a whole bunch of youngish punkish doctors have seen this effect in detail in multiple patients for the first time and think its something new.

It’s not new, ask any group of older folks with less than perfect health records. And look at reality, this infectious vector and others have been around for hundreds of millions if not billions of years. A variant of this one might have helped kill of the Fucking Neanderthals (along with our ancestors and a few rocks and clubs.)

I was born in the year of the Hong Kong flu, probably a worse flu than this one but much less of a problem because travel was vastly less easy and people didn’t panic when an unknown disease popped up. They had lived with Polio, Typhoid, Yellow Fever, the Mumps, etc, etc most of their lives and were still stunned by the efficacy of the penicillin and its ilk.

I know that few will read this post and even if they did it would have no effect, but as with most Grumps, it helped me. Thank you for your support.