I lived in Istanbul for a year and needed a portable air cleaner in my apartment in order to stay there, I was wheezing before my time, the air quality was so bad. Even a lot of the muezzin calls were pre-recorded, I reckon. If it had been a Microsoft air cleaner, needing updates, I'd be dead. But the main thing is, Oscar, this is nonsense: Why are you wasting people's time with pie-in-the-sky hopey-dopey flatulence-to-Windsong parfumery? Are you insane? Wake people the f*ck up with your platform: don't put them back in Dreamville. We need all hands on deck, not more news from Dr. Dreck.
Even if we could get cold fusion and carbon extraction machines to work on any significant scale, why bother? We haven't and can't seem to solve the Human Problem. For all the optimism expressed by such projects, and the feel-good vibe it gives about Science (just as Science is about to hand us over to the AI squad for further processing, having decided to give up on making machines think like humans and have decided, rather, to go the other way, and have us think like machines: Wait till you see the new curriculum.) One could imagine a future of Stuxnet wars, us all 'taking out' each other's fusion grids and f*cking with each other's carbon depositories -- you know, to protect "national insecurity," the spooks would tell us. America would be at the forefront (or is that the storefront?), no doubt, just as it has all my life, two generations plus in, during which I can't recall when my government was not at war somewhere, f*cking with somebody, force-feeding them our exceptionalism.
Oscar aside, another recent science-related piece that got under my skin was "Patently False: The Disinformation Over Coronavirus Patents" by Jonathan Jarry, which I just stumbled across, like some brown-bagging bum from Steinbeck's Cannery Row. It appeared in the McGill University Office for Science and Society newsletter. (Hey, that's what Google coughed up first in answer to my search, and if their rankin' system is workin,' then this shoulda been the most important piece on the subject.) Jarry's an M.Sc., a master of science, his byline tells us most impressively. But his piece doesn't require that authoritative notification, as he himself is quick to point out: "The second lesson is that fact-checking certain bold claims can be remarkably simple, even without a science degree!" The first being, a little mud wrassle thang he does with the etymology of the word Coronavirus, slapping aroun' would-be conspiratators for theorizin' that patent mischiefin' medical elites caused the virus.
But when the master of all sciences gets into the science of the virus's origins itself, and explains that the novel coronavirus (our Covid-19) has no lab origins and is a spontaneous combustion out of the Wild East, my hackles were raised. "There is still zero evidence that this new coronavirus was created by humans and every indication that it mutated spontaneously, as viruses routinely do, and became good at invading human cells," writes Jarry. There's plenty of evidence of just that possibility, but no smoking gun proof; presumably our scientist knows the difference.
For one thing, as I've written about this past year, American scientists are openly pursuing research in synthetic biology, including so-called gain-of-function research, which is a method that essentially sees researchers f*cking with a virus until it becomes 'evil' in the lab. At which point researchers hope to map the genome, and send it off to Abcellera (or some such DARPA P3 partner), and have a vaccine ready for whatever 'hombre' virus comes along in 60 days or less, as promised. Ka-ching.
There was enough worry about a lab creation that the concern made the cover of Newsweek. America, which had paused gain-of-function research in 2014 under Obama (and Fauci), because of worries that a super-predator virus might escape from a lab, saw that g-o-f put back into play under Trump (and Fauci). In October, the MSM was snarking that Trump's Operation Warp Speed was nuts, and that no vaccine had ever taken less than two years to develop, but, once mid-November came around, Big Pharma was lit up like a Christmas tree of sudden near-perfect vaccines ready for distro. Never happened before in history, by the MSM's own admission. But this time, the MSM did not blink. Gawd help us, when the Singularity shows up, and we find ourselves carrying the husks of our former humanity to the Dumpsterà "ž , like some scene from Invasion of the Mind Snatchers. (My luck, I'll be last man standing.)
To paraphrase Jarry, "You know, not fact-checking certain bold claims about virus origins can be remarkably simple, even with a science degree!" Just Say No Conspiracies. And keep yourself purdy for when Big Pharma comes and knocks on your door to offer you a ka-chingalingadingdongding position in 'research', like they done in tobacky and oil and climate change science. These days, 'round Christmas time, when they play Satchmo's "What A Wonderful World," you gotta wonder if there's irony involved with the DJ.
Jarry is among those sciencephiliacs out these days touting the authority of science over the constant failures of our humanity, our inability to figure things out until we're at the edge, our endemic lack of trustworthy reasoning. We live lives of illusion. Lest we forget, science had its roots in alchemy. Some bonehead in the waybackthen had a notion if wished real hard over cauldron of something that lead would turn to gold. Well, a lot of contemporary scientists sure seem to know a lot about things turning into gold.
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