収束ゾーンでのライフ: Life in the Convergence Zone

Fuck, I hate the new generation of blog comment spambots.

See – some years ago, there was an XKCD comic about training spambots to make more and more accurate and relevant comments that ended with “What will you do when spammers train their bots to make automated constructive and helpful comments?” and “MISSION. FUCKING. ACCOMPLISHED.”

it was really pretty funny at the time

But now with LLMs it’s real easy to make spambots make reasonable comments that are actually talking about your blog posts. They’re on topic, they’re cogent, they’re positive – of course – and the ad is in the URL attached to the commenter name, thus far universally shilling one or another sort of AI tool.

Turns out, on topic and cogent botposts are still just noise of emptiness, since, after all…

…the ad is the only reason they’re there…

…and you can’t not know that…

…so…

…it’s all clockwork and empty, and…

…sorry, Randall. Turns out it’s not Mission. Fucking. Accomplished. It’s more Mission. Unfortunately. Accomplished, and the punchline this time is that the mission itself kinda sucked.

I do think that as this ramps up – which it absolutely will, I mean, it’s incredibly obvious that it will, I don’t even know how you write spam filters against this – Federated comments from bot-disallowing instances will be the only thing keeping blog comments usable at all. Fortunately for me, that’s where most comments on this blog come from these days, so… maybe ActivityPub will save this, too. You never know.

But holy shit, once those spam-blockers stop mattering, with LLM-generated boring-but-cogent comments start taking over, there’ll be no way to have even remotely reasonable blog comment sections on their own.

Not ones with actual people, anyway.

I was so excited about what’s now called LLMs in undergrad, too. The first time my incredibly primitive toy version talked back to me was like being struck by lightning in the best possible way, walking around in the lab shrieking “IT WORKS! IT’S ALIIIIIIIIIVE!” Then when I did my project demo, the head of the department was so disturbed by it that he literally left the room. Just walked out. I was expecting a bunch of Q&A and chat about the models and all the commentary I’d written about the kind of data you’d actually need vs. the bullshit 450-ish word database with made-up numbers I was using and talking about how to connect actual meaning to all this word probability chewing – you know, the actual hard part that the LLM people just decided to leave out – but insead he just freaked and left.

And now, well, here we are. Instead of incredibly cool game engines and entirely new computer control systems, it’s all just… “what can we fuck up today?”

Y’know, I kinda liked Dr. M – the guy who walked out – even if I did make fun of him at times.

Because, well, honestly…

…maybe he was the smart one about all this after all.

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RFK, Jr.’s lawyer sued the Federal government to have the Polio vaccine taken off the market.

That’s the latest from the Party of Plague at this time of writing.

Bringing back polio is scary enough – and juuust enough people are still alive who remember it, like Mitch McConnell – that RFK, Jr. himself is having to talk about this one. He lies, saying he does not want to take the polio vaccine – or any other vaccine – off the market, he just wants to make sure it’s “thoroughly and properly studied.”

He’s lying, of course. He’s used that line a couple of times, and it’s his tell.

It already has been thoroughly and properly studied. It was studied before it was released, and we have decades and decades of proof that polio vaccination works, that it is safe and it is effective.

We have literal decades of the largest possible real-world experience – entire national populations of study – showing this.

You can tell by the way we don’t have polio around much anymore, and how directly that followed widespread adoption of the polio vaccine, and how it did not hurt those vaccinated!

But none of that matters to him, because none of it gives the answer he and his vaccine-denialist following want, which is so-called “studies” that say vaccination is not safe and it is not effective, all these decades of reality be damned. That’s their definition of “proper”: “says whatever we want.”

Just as a reminder, and for the record, he’s said this year that there is no such thing as a safe and effective vaccine.

Remember that statement when he lies about not being “an anti-vaxxer,” because when he says that, he is lying.

You might notice a parallel here between this and how rightists attack gender affirming care for trans people in general, and the Cass Report in particular. Admittedly, it’s fewer decades of use, but it’s still decades.

Trans health care is getting exactly the same treatment.

That’s because it’s exactly the same playbook.

I’ve written many, many times over the years about the fundamentalist definition of truth, and how it has to do with whatever conforms to what they’ve decided God Said, which just always happens to be exactly the same as their agenda.

I’ve written many, many times over the years about how this attitude completely subsumed the Republican party, starting in the late 1990s, as the fundamentalist movement became the Republican Party. What they will do is whip up a bunch of government-funded cardboard science – a pretend science, a cargo cult of it, something that emulates the shape and form but none of the actual function, something that is designed to look like science to an outsider who doesn’t know much and doesn’t care to, but which is not science, in that it is always, always, always dedicated to producing “results” that they want, all so they can use it to further their political agenda.

This is just as the fundamentalist movement has done my entire life, because they aren’t interested in the truth, they’re interested in what they already wanted to hear.

It’s exactly the same playbook. Every time.

You might notice a parallel here between this and their love of Bush II’s torture programme, because torture, like the tragic shadow-play perversion of fundamentalist “Biblical science,” is not about getting to the truth. It’s about getting people to say whatever you want them to say…

reality

be

damned.

Same playbook, team. Every time. Including here. Again.

And so now, the Republican Party of MAGA, the Republican Party of Trump, all of which is to say the entire Republican Party, is literally a party dedicated to bringing back plagues.

It’s dedicated to other things, sure. Absolutely. None of them are good – they’re huge fans of white supremacy racism, of misogyny, of looting as policy, and so on. So many more.

But one of them – and one that cannot be denied any longer – is the return of plagues.

Literal, actual, plagues, with literal, actual, death tolls.

And you really need to pay attention to that.

Because look…

…

…I don’t know whether H5N1 “bird” flu is going to break through and start going human-to-human. It’s gone from bird to human a few times; a human to human mutation is harder.

But as an article in Nature a couple of weeks ago said, if it’s ever going to, this is going to be the time, because it’s absolutely everywhere amongst avian populations – and more recently, in cattle. So we already know it’s capable of making the leap to at least some mammals; we just don’t know if it’s going to make it to humans.

But if it does, the incoming fascist administration is going to do absolutely fucking nothing to stop it, or even mitigate it.

How bad will it be? We don’t know now and we won’t know then. We’ll have no idea. Remember this, from COVID: “If you don’t test, you don’t have any cases. If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any, but we do.”

There won’t be any testing, this time. There won’t be much data collection at all – nothing that gets under RFK, Jr.’s skin will be allowed.

They certainly won’t fast-track a vaccine. That was the one good thing Trump did the first time, and he’ll be damned if he’s going to make that same political mistake twice. They might even slow-roll or just outright block one – certainly anything but the oldest, slowest, traditional egg-culture version.

And no amount of mere reality will have the least bit of impact on that decision whatsoever.

So. Welcome to a new era of plagues, I guess. If one hits under the incoming administration, make sure the MAGAts in your sphere know that this is exactly what those stupid-ass motherfuckers were promised, and exactly what they voted for.

Oh, and it might be a good time to stock up on masks again, if you’ve stopped. Some of us recognise COVID hasn’t gone away, but most people pretend it’s gone. That may – and may not, we don’t know – be harder with H5N1.

But at the moment, at least, they’re quite affordable. If it turns out you’re gonna need them, that’ll change quickly.

Consider it… a dirt-cheap form of insurance. Hopefully one you’ll never need.

Unless vaccines go away.

Then you’ll definitely need it.

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It’s a dang good thing the pro-democracy party also fights climate change.

Seriously though, isn’t it?

We’re getting lucky in that, I suppose. The pro-authoritarian pro-fascism carbon-fuels companies are all on the fascist side, but I could imagine a world where somehow they weren’t, and that somehow the authoritarians ended up being the ones… not on the side of reality, gods no, but on the side against the oil barons.

It’s not even for economic reasons. Some might say that, but it’s a lie. They’re on the side of the fascists not for reasons of the economy, or for reasons of production capability, but solely to extend the lives of their dead-end end-of-life money machines for another decade or two longer, the world be damned.

So it’s a win-win, for us. The choice with Kamala Harris is just as clear as it was with Joe Biden, which is to say impossibly stark. She cast the deciding vote in the Senate on the Inflation Reduction Act which was also the biggest climate bill in the history of the US. When running in 2019, her campaign was more aggressively pro-renewables than Biden’s, and with a majority in Congress, she’ll pick up where Joe left off and take the ball much, much further.

My state’s three-time governor – who ran on climate change – appeared on television calling Project 2025’s plans to destroy renewable energy and ramp up climate change what it is: an assault on every living person. The interview starts at the 4:25 point, but the intro has information that some might find interesting or relevant. And he’s exactly right, not even just on climate – but on the future of industry, as well.

We’ll get to that last part in a minute.

Meanwhile, Trump is out there literally selling the country’s future for a billion dollars to oil companies, a quid-pro-quo of the clearest – and yet, most filthy – sort. He and the screaming disinformation machine called the GOP are out there saying windmills cause cancer and kill birds and that solar panels are toxic.

When given power, they use the law to suppress science, not just on climate, but every kind of actual science that contradicts their endless grasping for power and money. The appoint corrupt judges who revel in their own scientific and technical incompetence as they throw aside law in favour of their patrons’ demands. They hide reality from the public at every turn…

…all while throwing the country further and further behind in technology and industry, as other, less determinedly blind governments charge forward on the next great technology conversion staring us right in the face.

Like I said, we’ll get to the industry part, and now we’re here. Thanks for sticking around.

Remember how the UK used to be a global industrial leader? Probably not, I mean, I don’t either. It’s before my time. But it was true. Now they’re an also-ran, at best.

A lot of events combined to make that fall happen. I won’t talk about all of them. But I can talk about one:

The transition from a coal-based production economy to an oil-based production economy, and their complete failure to make it happen.

Fossil fuels, as a class, are now recognised as a disaster. But if you don’t know that yet – and this is in an era when people genuinely didn’t know that – if you’ve figured out how to make oil work? From the ground? From wells?! It just comes up when you drill?! It is an amazing power source.

You don’t have to mine it. You don’t have to haul it out of the ground, one agonising carload at a time. You don’t have people getting black lung, you don’t have collapses that kill hundreds, it’s so much easier and so much cheaper and so much faster that it’s barely even comparable.

And once you’ve got it – it’s a miracle fuel. Compared, again, to coal. The energy density is unlike anything anyone’s ever seen. It burns so much cleaner, and so much more controllably, than coal. The precision you can achieve with oil is, again, an entire quantum leap forward.

The technologies you can create with it are just as much a jump ahead. The materials you can make with it – not just burning it, but creating lubricants, plastics, detergents, water repellents – it’s flexible like nothing you’ve ever seen. There was even talk for a while of making food from oil, and frankly, it mighta coulda worked.

The US, after its Civil War, had a coal-based industrial complex. But, what with the US being a major oil producer, they made the switch over quickly and enthusiastically.

The UK, on the other hand…

…did not.

Not really. Yes, some, but not enthusiastically, and not for decades. There were too many vested interests in coal production, in a legacy coal industrial base, in all of it.

And by the time the so-called “London Fog” – actually not fog, but impossibly thick coal smog – cleared, they’d lost every advantage they’d ever had, and more.

That’s what Trump and the Republicans are doing, whether they know it or not. Sacrificing the future for a few more years out of the old technology of oil, a technology being swept away world wide both by necessity, and, more and more each day, by economics.

There is not one good argument left for oil. Not one. It is solely now about nostalgia, corruption, and power for the fossil fuel industry, not for production. It is a legacy technology, one which the sooner we lose, the better off we all will be. Yeah, there are still a few places where it’s still an arguable necessity, but those won’t last. Not for very much longer.

You may know people who still think oil and gas are “economically” better choices. They are not. Just as people insisted coal was the “economically” better choice in 1930s and 1940s Britain, it is not.

The days of oil and gas are very fucking numbered. The revolution really is here. And we’ll get to see it, or more of it, and soon – if the MAGAts can’t stop it.

And that, really, is all anyone should need to know.

Climate change is very real. Republicans know it, but don’t fucking care, because it doesn’t make them money, and they don’t want you to know it at all. And when push comes to shove, it is the most important issue, because it is literally a matter of civilisational survival, and they and their goddamn death cult friends are on the wrong goddamn side.

Tell your friends. Tell your family. Fight this fight…

…and we will win.

In more ways than one.

97 days remain.

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Let’s say you want to “prove” that red M&Ms are twice as common as any other colour M&M.

Bear with me – I have a point to this, and it’s about the far right and science.

Now, what you’re wanting to prove here it isn’t true – red M&Ms aren’t twice as common as any other colour, they’re one of the less used colours in fact. That doesn’t matter, though – you just want a study saying that, and you want it to look like it’s real.

So you get a bowl, and you randomly select a bunch of M&Ms from a supply of M&Ms. This is now your “random” sample. Let’s get counting!

Sounds okay, right?

Except beforehand, you pre-filled the supply of M&Ms with twice as many red M&Ms as any other colour.

So then you study your “random sample” of M&Ms and discover – oh look, there really are twice as many red M&Ms as any other colour! So you publish, and all the people who really, really want to say there are twice as many red M&Ms as any other colour quote you, and use your work, as you intended. A few of them will also write “studies,” using your study as a source, hiding it in footnotes so it looks like they’re doing new and separate work when really, they’re just reference laundering.

(If they were referencing your work in good faith, and doing additional work to build on it, that would be different. But we’re operating in a world of hilariously bad faith here, and in general, no actual additional work is done. And besides; they know.)

This is how fundamentalist “science” has always worked. This is how Paul Cameron used to produce his “studies” showing that 54% of gay men “regularly consumed the feces” of their sexual partners, how he showed that “homosexual men” were overwhelmingly made up of “violent predators.” He did so by pulling his “random selections” from a specifically loaded pool.

In his case, he often chose his “random population” of “homosexual men” out of a collection of imprisoned sex offenders. Since in his mind all LGBT people were, definitionally, sex offenders for the crime of existing – he also published “The Death Penalty for Homosexuality” advocating, well, what it says – I’m sure he felt just fine with that decision.

Now let’s apply this to the Cass Report and see what happens.

They start with a blanket statement of fact that “the evidence base” for gender supportive care “had already been shown to be weak” before they even got started on their review. That’s on Page 20, if you’re curious, and it’s basically a political statement. Opponents had declared it to be “weak” – particularly the Tories running the NHS – and therefore, it was. It is a conclusion presented before the data collection or the analysis, and a base assumption of the report.

“It’s already weak, so let’s prove it.”

If you’re putting your conclusion before you get to data or analysis, you have already given away the game. You just have. A lot of people won’t get that, but those of us who have spent a lot of time studying fundamentalist / reactionary “science” will recognise it immediately, because “creation science” does the same thing; they don’t do research to “find out where life came from,” they do research to “show God’s Hand in Creation” and prove Creationism is real, and they say that right up front.

Same shit, different sentences.

But once you’ve stated your originating intention, how do you go about it?

Let’s say you want to be able to say that there are “no high quality studies” supporting gender affirming care for children. That’s very easy to do: you just declare all studies supporting gender affirming care for children to be “moderate” to “low quality.”

How do you do that in a way that looks fair?

You do it by by deciding what “high quality,” “medium quality,” and “low quality” mean. You need to be clever about it. You can’t just say “if it supports what we oppose, it’s low quality,” even if that’s what you want to do.

So they were clever about it, and found a way that sounds real good to the casual reader.

First, they decided that only double-blind research really qualified as “high quality.” That sounds reasonable, right? It’s a gold standard for a lot of studies and for very good reasons.

But here’s the trick:

You literally can’t do double-blind studies on children with significant medical issues. Particularly not trans kids for gender affirming care. Why not?

1. It’s well past ‘ethical nightmare’ and into ‘how nice to see you again, Dr. Mengele’ territory, and,

2. They will always know, and in this context, can’t not know.

It is actually literally impossible. Any attempt of any reasonable length or size will degrade out of double-blind before it can complete.

And even if it was possible – they’re children, for fuck’s sake. Lying to them and their parents about their medical care? Giving them fake medications that they will absolutely know are fake after not all that long?

What do you think’s going to happen?

Ask me how I know about this, too.

But that’s not discrediting enough; there really is a lot of work out there, and you can’t just chuck it all out.

So then they went through through a hundred-plus studies that failed to meet this functionally impossible bar, and built a set of metrics to judge them. The structure of this judging followed the form of the Newcastle-Ottawa protocol, but using a different set of scales from the AGREE II protocol. That’s fair; AGREE II is common and, used properly, I understand it to be a good metric.

But there are categories in it, and those categories can be exploited, if you want.

And so the next step was to declare older gold-standard sets of guidelines and best practices – the 2009 Endocrine Society and the 2012 WPATH guidelines in particular, the latter of which built on the first – as lacking “reliability” and to state that they can’t be applied to the NHS even if they had it.

They did the same thing for 2022 WPATH, but that one mattered less because it was too new to have much weight.

I know – we seem to be very, very deep in the weeds here, it’s foggy and confusing and nobody’s sure which was is north. I’m sorry, this is what it’s always like when getting into this particular area of politics. But we’re getting there.

AGREE II includes two categories which are in general highly relevant to clinical analysis: “applicability” and “editorial independence.”

If you declare, as they did, that 2009 ES and 2012 WPATH (and 2022 WPATH) are not applicable to the NHS, and…

If you also declare, as they did, that studies that relied on these protocols are not “building on previous work” but are instead not adequately “editorially independent…”

…then you can heavily downgrade every study which relied on either of those protocols in your AGREE II matrix.

And oh my, look at all those red numbers in columns five and six of their tables.

Isn’t that just the cleverest thing? So deeply buried! And yet, so important.

Out of over 100 studies, the Cass Report went through and evaluated 11 studies on social transition support, 50 on puberty blockers and the like, and 53 on hormonal intervention beyond puberty blockers. With their chosen guidelines and using their chosen selection criteria, modified by their choices about editorial independence and applicability, they managed to reduce every study but two down to either “moderate quality” or “low quality.”

And once you’ve done that, if you go looking for “high quality” studies showing gender affirming care works for trans children, then oh look – our research shows are almost no high quality studies supporting gender affirming care for trans children! And none at all for social support!

Yay! Objective achieved, we can publish, and the New York Times can eat it up and echo it forever while rightist politicians have a field day campaigning to hurt queer kids.

It’s the same fucking trick every goddamn time. Not one single note has changed, the same kinds of people keep using the same kinds of routines, and it it’s all

one

big

goddamn

lie.

And it’s all because a lot of people would rather have a dead son than a live daughter, and some of them are billionaires, and so they’re willing to move heaven and earth to make sure if that’s the choice, they’ll get the one they want, the lives of their own children be damned.

Just like a lot of fathers used to kill their gay sons, and just like fundamentalist families flooded the streets of my town and many others with their own children that they made homeless and destitute at their leaders’ urgings, because they’d all rather see their children die than not be what they want.

If this reminds you of anything, maybe it should.

In all honesty, in all fair disclosure, I can’t prove this report was this sharply agenda driven. I’m just saying that it sure looks to me like it is, because I’ve seen this pattern before, and I’m seeing it again, and in these issues it’s always been used for evil.

[ETA: Or maybe I can prove it: Turns out Cass met with American rightist anti-trans politician Ron DeSantis specifically on banning gender transition and was also recommending the “gender-critical” polemic Irreversible Damage which compares gender transition to the holocaust before starting the report and describing herself as having “no fixed views.” That would, clearly, be a lie.]

Plus there’s the part where they immediately used this report to do what they wanted to do anyway, and issued a blanket ban on gender affirming care for trans kids, and then doubled down on it on their way out of power using a method that meant it couldn’t even be appealed for months.

I’m not even saying these studies are somehow earth-shatteringly great; some of them aren’t. Some of them really aren’t. There’s a lot of problems with population size, there’s the near-impossibility of double-blind (tho’ turns out it’s not impossible, at least not with young adults in particular rare situations), there’s a lack of funding and a huge political investment in making sure this isn’t studied, or if it is, that it’s not studied fairly. None of this leads to optimal science! And all of these issues do lead to issues with process and rigour and those do matter.

But even with all that, the results are still pretty fucking stark.

If nothing else, ask anyone who’d rather have a live daughter than a dead son, or a live son than a dead daughter, ask them how it’s going with their trans kid.

And ask about how they’d feel about a report like this being used to shut it all down.

I’m pretty sure they’ll tell you.

Sometimes, even if they’re Republicans.

102 days remain.

ETA: holy shit, the daughter Elon Musk denies is going at his lies about her, over on Threads. I won’t link to threads much but this? This is an exception.

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What.

“We have discovered that hard, electrical conductors (e.g., metals or graphite) can be adhered to soft, aqueous materials (e.g., hydrogels, fruit, or animal tissue) without the use of an adhesive. The adhesion is induced by a low DC electric field.“

Most importantly: it stays stuck with the voltage turned off. It’s stable for MONTHS. Reverse the polarity of the electrical flow and it unsticks. YES REALLY. This is some literal “Alessandro Volta playing around with bananas in a shed” science AND YET it WORKS and we DID NOT KNOW.

Here’s a video. Holy shit. What.

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The Biden Administration Pledges to Phase Out Coal Power Plants

I mean, West Virginia is going to elect a MAGAt senator to replace retiring Senator Manchin anyway, so politically, why not do the urgently necessary thing here? As massive changeovers go – and this is a massive technology changeover – 12 years is pretty reasonable, and the technology is absolutely there, so let’s goooooooooooo

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wow okay the weather guy in iowa who resigned due to all the threats he was getting because of reporting on climate change? I covered this in today’s Fascism Watch?

He just floated by my timeline on Mastodon.

Mastodon got reach I guess O.o

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

An interesting new paper out modelling COVID-19 infection rates – using long-established models – against carbon-dioxide readings taken within a space, assuming one infected person and four non-infected people, across time.

This study does not consider vaccination, which I think is probably a good idea given what it’s doing. But the short form is: according to what we know about this kind of modelling, what they consider well-ventilated works and by itself should be enough to take R0 below 1 for hospitalised patients without masks at all.

That doesn’t mean no infections at all, but it does mean a continually declining infection rate, as one case produces less than one infections.

Now, what they consider “well ventilated” is pretty aggro – it’s even more than I maintain here, and I have built what is considered by HVAC standards to be excellent ventilation. But they also aren’t taking filtering into account – this is just air-exchange, and doesn’t include filtration, just like it doesn’t include vaccination. It’s just raw use of CO2 as a proxy for everything else.

Plus it’s a bloody hospital setting, they can do it if they want. And they should very much want.

Anyway, what all this comes down to is: air exchange works. We also already know air filtration works. If we actually want to finish off COVID, the way to do it without getting a fascist insurgency is air exchange and filtration.

Apropos of everything, here’s another link to my air-exchange-based HVAC assistance project on github. There’s reasons I do this. Just saying.

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OKAY if you’re out east welcome to smoke season, I’m sorry, I’m seeing numbers out of New York City which are “Spokane surrounded by wildfires” bad, and that’s some bad, bad, bad shit.

The number you need to pay the most attention to is 2.5nm particles. Here’s what you need to build, fortunately it is easy and not expensive and it is MUCH BETTER than any casual filter you’ll buy of Amazon. You’ll need to replace the filter elements once a year or less even assuming a three-month fire season.

Those KF94 and N95 masks you were wearing for COVID? I hope you didn’t throw them out, because 1) COVID is still happening and long Covid is extremely nasty, 2) worn properly, they work GREAT on this kind of smoke.

This will be a recurring feature of your summers now. Not every year, but every couple, and not always this bad, but more than once this bad. Be ready.

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(This entry wouldn't crosspost, and neither would (3), for unknown reasons. So I'm doing it by hand.)