January 14

Half past January and it is cold. I did brave the cold for the few seconds it took to take in the bird feeder and then to put the filled feeder back out. The birds haven't found it yet and are probably staying in warm nexts. I think my thermometer on the fence is frozen. It surely isn't 40F out there. We have sun right now. But the next few days are supposed to be in single and low double digits.

I found this JAMA article by way of Naked Capitalism on a surge in childhood illnesses, especially measles. On the whole I am not very surprised having seen articles for several years about such new infections. I am surprised that the article mentions that the latest clusters appear to be in middle to high income areas with parents who generally have college degrees. Those demographics have historically vaccinated their children. COVID vaccine skepticism didn't begin the anti-vaccine movement but it did accelerate it. I have wondered if part of our problem is that the vaccines against measles, mumps, chicken pox, rubella, and whooping cough were very successful. I read stories of outbreaks since 2000 where doctors didn't recognize the diseases when they saw them in their examining rooms. The diseases had become so rare that doctors had only read accounts in their medical texts. Naked Capitalism included a post from a reader that had an account of the death of Roald Dahl's 7 year old daughter. We forget that children died from these diseases. But most of us don't have remembered experience with them.

Ugo Bardi posted an interesting piece about science and our ability to use what we understand as science to explain our world. Several decades ago I remember a controversy which changed the way certain medical studies were conducted. The typical procedure was to test drugs or treatments using a "double blind" system where neither the participants nor the researchers knew who got which treatment, placebo or which dose of drug. Usually the test subjects were men because the researchers were striving for repeatability and the monthly hormonal changes in women complicated the study. The they simply applied the results to women without checking whether such a program was safe and effective. Often it wasn't. That is why in the COVID trials they tested on men, women, women who were pregnant, children of various ages, etc. I often said that medicine was trying to be a hard science like math or physics (although some disciplines in physics have been yielding strange results) but medicine can't be a hard science because the subjects of medicine are so variable. We are finding that the larger and more variable the components of any system (economy, ecology, climate, people) the less likely we are to be able to study it scientifically in controlled conditions.

Ian Welch wrote a gloomy post about the sun setting on the American Empire. I thought a couple of weeds ago, when the Houthis began lobbing missiles and drones against shipping in the Red Sea that the map shown on a couple of the news programs resembled maps I saw in Alfred McCoy's book TO GOVERN THE GLOBE. He showed the choke points European countries fought to control since the 15th century and most of them are under attack: the South China Sea, the Red Sea and Suez, the Horn of Africa, the Arabian Sea. The trade passing through those points is lucrative and, in our present, necessary to the smooth functioning of our economies. Twenty percent of trade passes through the Red Sea. Already the situation has forced major maritime transport companies to avoid the area and re-routing around the southern tip of Africa incurring two weeks travel time and all the extra costs in labor and fuel. That means we all pay more. As the Houthis targeted more ships that weren't Israeli, linked to Israel, planning a stop in and Israeli port but were European and headed to European ports I thought that the conflict has already expanded into an East vs West contest.

Stray thought: it isn't just the Old World choke points that are under pressure. The Panama Canal is severely restricted how many and how large the ships that traverse the Canal because the area is in a drought. Without the fresh water they can't effectively work the levels and locks. I just noticed that one of the quotes refers to this situation.