LifeItself

Scientifically speaking,  stupid  people harm themselves while also harming others. In addition, stupid people are irrational and erratic, and are very dangerous to others. After discussing the destructive role of the stupid in any society whatsoever, I will focus on the delicate interplay of actions of intelligent and helpless people, who in balance make or break a functioning democracy.  Unless things change fast in the US, we can kiss our democracy goodbye for decades. If you want to see how a virulent ascent of the stupid looks up close, and what implications it has for our fight against social injustice and climate change, please watch the brilliant " Don't Look Up " movie. Unvaccinated people demonstrating in Los Angeles. There are tens of millions of the raving mad and/or angry, stupid people in the US and other developed countries. Source: New York Times , 12/25/2021. I overlapped at UC Berkeley with Professor Carlo M. Cipolla for a decade, until his death in t...

Normally, I never write blogs every three days, but here I go. Since I am a scientist, not a politician, my quantitative assessment will be based on a careful analysis of the available data. The bottom line of this blog is shown in Figure 0 .  First, there are all incremental deaths in the US over and above German deaths multiplied by four to scale the German population to the size of the US population (the blue curve).  Second, for the reasons described below, one can subtract 1/3 of the US deaths that occurred in nursing homes.  These deaths have been caused by 40 years of neglect and the horrific state of the US for-profit industry that mines old people. The remaining 35,000 incremental deaths in the US (the red curve) can be attributed to the disastrous policies of the federal government under Trump.  That's nearly twelve 9/11 body counts in the US, with more to come. Figure 0.  The excess deaths in the US compared with German deaths multiplied by...

Well, friends, many things have happened since my last update of April 21, 2020.  I should advise the more sensitive readers to skip this post, because some of the language and content may be unsuited for their delicate taste buds. Earlier today, I listened to and watched on Zoom an excellent seminar given by a friend from the Imperial College in England.  The esoteric subject of the talk was how surface charge and rock-oil-brine interactions limit or help oil recovery from difficult reservoirs.  The audience consisted of about 110 people from the Imperial College, Edinburgh, KAUST, Oxford, TU Delft, Yale, and several Chinese and US universities, and companies.  It was all great and would not warrant a report in this blog, were it not for the fact that in the last two minutes someone hijacked the computer of one of the participants and "bombed" our meeting by posting a video of a young white man rubbing with his erect penis the genitals of a 4-6 month old baby ...

The Amazon forest is burning. If you look at the satellite map in Figure 1, you will see that Brazil's tropical forest is being methodically plundered and destroyed by people who mean business. That Brazilian   "friend" of our own destroyer of the world is doing his best to encourage the burning and empower his criminal supporters. But on the multiple aerial photos of the forest, I also see drought. Parts of the rain forest are dry and ready to be burned. Global climate change is likely a contributing factor. In summary,  a brutal liquidation of the priceless rain forest by the criminal farmers and ranchers running amok + climate change and drying of the forest = a global-scale calamity. From Mike Haywood's collection of course. And so that you have a clearer concept of what is happening here, president Trump is directly and personally implicated in the big Amazon burn. By blocking the Midwestern farmers from selling soybeans to China and US ranchers from sellin...