Alzheimer’s Disease Research Goes Viral

When the brains of people who have been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease are examined, clusters and tangles of two proteins, amyloid and tau, are observed.  It has long been assumed by most experts that the disease is caused by these protein clusters interfering with neural function.  Research on this path focused on decreasing the accumulation of these proteins in the brain. However, progress has been small, and it has not yet determined whether amyloid and tau are a cause or an effect of the disease.  An article in The Economist, Do viruses trigger Alzheimer’s?, summarizes some recent discoveries that support the possibility the disease could be activated by viruses. 

“In the summer of 2024 several groups of scientists published a curious finding: people vaccinated against shingles were less likely to develop dementia than their unvaccinated peers. Two of the papers came from the lab of Pascal Geldsetzer at Stanford University. Analysing medical records from Britain and Australia, the researchers concluded that around a fifth of dementia diagnoses could be averted through the original shingles vaccine, which contains live varicella-zoster virus. Two other studies, one by GSK, a pharmaceutical company, and another by a group of academics in Britain, also reported that a newer ‘recombinant’ vaccine, which is more effective at preventing shingles than the live version, appeared to confer even greater protection against dementia.”

Kudos go to Professor Ruth Itzhaki who long ago detected a potential correlation between a common virus that infects much of the population, but rarely infects the brain, and Alzheimer’s.  She observed that when the virus does manage to infect the brain it can cause severe inflammation in regions that are sites for Alzheimer’s disease damage.

“Ruth Itzhaki, formerly of Manchester University and now a visiting professor at the University of Oxford, has championed this idea for almost 40 years. The bulk of her work has focused on herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV1), best known for giving people cold sores, which infects around 70% of people, most without symptoms. The virus normally lives outside the brain, where it can lie dormant for years. It is flare-ups that can lead to cold sores.”

“In rare cases, the virus can also lead to massive inflammation in the same brain areas that are most affected by Alzheimer’s. In experiments conducted in the early 2000s, Professor Itzhaki found that if she infected lab-grown human brain cells with HSV1, amyloid levels inside the cells increased dramatically. That led her to suspect a causal connection.”

“What’s more, in 1997 Professor Itzhaki found that people with a genetic variant known to increase Alzheimer’s risk, ApoE4, were only more likely to get the disease if they also had HSV1 in their brain. In 2020 a group of French scientists showed that repeated activations of the virus, seemingly harmless in people without ApoE4, more than tripled the chance of developing Alzheimer’s in those with it.”

One would have hoped that Itzhaki’s research would have generated interest much earlier.  Now the medical researchers are struggling to catch up.

“In a bid to push forward Professor Itzhaki’s theory, a group of 25 scientists and entrepreneurs from around the world have assembled themselves into the Alzheimer’s Pathobiome Initiative (AlzPI). Their mission is to provide formal proof that infection plays a central role in triggering the disease. In recent years their work detailing how viruses trigger the build up of proteins linked to Alzheimer’s has been published in top scientific journals.”

Evidence of a tie between the shingles virus and the HSV1 virus has now been observed.

“Researchers at Tufts University, working with Professor Itzhaki, have probed why such reactivation occurs. In 2022 they found that infection with a second pathogen, the shingles virus, could awaken the dormant HSV1 and trigger the accumulation of plaques and tangles. This may explain why shingles vaccination appears to be protective against dementia. In another study published in January, the Tufts researchers also showed that a traumatic brain injury—a known risk factor for Alzheimer’s—could also rouse HSV1 and start the aggregation of proteins in brain cells grown in a dish.”

If this viral hypothesis proves valid, it is fantastic news for those who fear a long decline into dementia, and those who are already experiencing that decline.  Viruses can be controlled by vaccinations and by antiviral drugs, potentially eliminating future disease and limiting current disease.

“The viral theory has promising implications for treatment. Current therapies for Alzheimer’s, which attempt to reduce levels of amyloid in brain cells, merely work to slow the progression of the disease. If viruses are a trigger, though, then vaccination or antiviral drugs could prevent future cases. Such treatments could also slow or halt the progression of Alzheimer’s in those who already have the disease. None of this requires major breakthroughs. Antivirals for the cold-sore pathogen already exist and are off-patent. And the shingles vaccine is now routinely offered to elderly people in many countries.”

“Around 32m people around the world are living with Alzheimer’s disease. If antiviral treatments can indeed slow, delay or prevent even a small subset of these cases, the impact could be tremendous.”

  

Plastic Particles in the Brain: The Amount Just Keeps Growing

We are living in the age of plastics. They are fantastically useful.  Their properties can be tailored by tuning the chemical content to provide desired attributes.  They are generally inexpensive to produce.  Some products can be recycled, but the process is more expensive than producing fresh material, so the only economic benefit is derived from public relations gestures.  They have become ubiquitous.  Initially, we worried that they were such long-lasting products that they would be permanent eyesores as they collected on roadsides and beaches.  We now know that they are far from robust materials.  They contain dangerous chemicals that can leach from their surfaces.  Particles can cleave from their surfaces as they interact with the environment.  These particles can then fragment into even smaller particles producing more surface area from which chemicals can leach.  If the particles become small enough, they can enter our blood stream via our lungs or our intestines.  At that point, they can find a home for themselves and the chemicals they bear in all of our organs and body parts.

There is no place on earth that has been found safe from plastic pollution.  It has only been a few years since scientists began to realize these tiny plastic particles can be a threat to human health.  The article, Study Finds Hundreds of Thousands of Plastic Particles in Bottled Water, provides a perspective on current findings with a focus on the common plastic water bottle.

“Plastic water bottles, a long-known enemy of our Earth, are finding their way into human bodies in huge quantities—well, pieces of them are. A study published this week shows just how much plastic we drink with bottled water: Researchers from Columbia University and Rutgers have found at least 240,000 plastic particles in the average liter of bottled water, a major health concern.”

“Most of the plastic particles found by the researchers were extremely small nanoplastics, which have a diameter of less than one micrometer—making them invisible to the naked eye. Nanoplastics have been historically challenging to study due to their extremely small size, but as technology has improved, scientists are now finding them almost everywhere—including in the environment, plants, animals, beverages, foods, and our human bodies.”

“While the full range of health effects of nanoplastics and microplastics in our bodies is not yet fully understood, what experts do know is already very concerning. Like all plastics, microplastics and nanoplastics are known to contain any mix of additive chemicals.  More than 16,000 such chemicals have been counted in plastics, and none have been classified as ‘safe.’ At least 25% are already officially classified as hazardous. A few concerning plastic chemicals include hormone-disrupting and cancer-causing phthalates, PFAS, and bisphenols; asbestos and toxic heavy metals such as lead and arsenic; and much more. Additionally, microplastics can absorb and accumulate toxic chemicals in the environment, which leach into living bodies, waters, soils, and plants.”

“Most plastic water bottles are made of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic. At least 150 chemicals are known to leach from PET plastic beverage bottles into the liquid inside, including heavy metals like antimony and lead, and hormone-disruptors like BPA. Plastic PET bottles are even more likely to leach toxic chemicals if they are recycled, or are kept in warm environments, are exposed to sunlight, or are reused. Single-use plastic bottles also contain PFAS, a class of chemicals that are particularly dangerous to human and environmental health.”

A recent article (March,2025), Human microplastic removal: what does the evidence tell us?, provides a glimpse at what might be happening when these tiny particles accumulate in our bodies.  The focus is on our plastic-laden brains as determined by measurements taken from deceased subjects.

“A recent paper in Nature Medicine by Nihart et al. found that the human brain contains approximately a spoon's worth of microplastics and nanoplastics (MNPs), with levels 3–5 times higher in those with a cohort of decedent brains with a documented dementia diagnosis (with notable deposition in cerebrovascular walls and immune cells).  Particularly, brain tissues were found to have 7–30 times higher amounts of MNPs than other organs such as the liver or kidney. Also of note, the microplastics in the brain were of a smaller size (<200 nm) and most often polyethylene.”

“This aligns with the observed exponential increase in MNP environmental concentrations over the past half-century. Particularly, 10 to 40 million tonnes of emissions of microplastics to the environment are estimated per year, with this figure expected to double by 2040.”

Little is known about what all this means.

“The current evidence base (largely based upon animal and cell culture studies) suggests that MNP exposure can lead to adverse health impacts via oxidative stress, inflammation, immune dysfunction, altered biochemical/energy metabolism, impaired cell proliferation, abnormal organ development, disrupted metabolic pathways, and carcinogenicity.  These can lead to direct or indirect consequences to various organ systems, including respiratory, gastrointestinal, cardiovascular, hepatic, renal, nervous, reproductive, immune, endocrine, and muscular.”

And don’t forget, people diagnosed with dementia tend to have 3-5 times the plastic particle concentrations in their brains when they die.  That has to mean something, but it is not yet known whether plastic concentration is a cause or an effect.

The most interesting findings presented in the article are summarized here.

“Although MNP [microplastic and nanoplastic] concentration was not influenced by factors such as age, sex, race, or cause of death, there was a worrisome 50% increase in MNP concentration based on the time of death (2016 versus 2024).” 

If plastic particles were simply accumulating in our bodies, one would expect older persons to have accumulated higher concentrations.  This suggests that the body has some mechanism by which it can excrete plastics, either as particles or by first breaking them down into component chemicals.  There is little to no evidence yet for any such process in humans, but the authors do make the following observation.

“In fish models, it takes approximately 70 days to clear 75% of accumulated brain microplastics, suggesting that decreased inputs and increased outputs must both be maintained for long enough durations to see measurable changes.”

The authors also state that plastic particle concentrations increased by 50% between the years 2016 and 2024, an eight-year period.  They also predict an increase in the rate of plastic loading of the environment of about 100% over the period 2024 to 2040, a sixteen-year period.  Does that mean we will likely have three spoonful of tiny plastic particles in our brains in 2040, or could it be much higher?

The fact that plastic concentrations increased over the eight-year period means the plastic sources are exceeding any plastic sink mechanisms in the body.  There should then have been some level of age effect. The sample of deceased may have been too similar in age to detect a difference, or the ratio of plastic particle source to sink may have only recently exceeded 1.0.

It is scary to combine how little we know of what is happening to us now with the knowledge that whatever it is, it will get much worse in the near future. 

There are many ways in which small plastic particles enter the environment and proceed to enter our bodies.  Limiting the use of plastics seems to be the only solution.  It is probably too much right now to ask people to stop wearing and washing plastic clothing, but immediately stopping the use of those damn plastic bottles would be a good first step.

  

South Korea: Can a Falling Population Enter a Death Spiral

 It has been clear for many years that the earth’s population will soon peak and begin to decline.  The number of countries with populations that are already decreasing is growing.  The drop in birth rates seems to be universal, but not identical.  Each national culture provides its unique fertility history, with all seeming to suggest that the decision to produce fewer infants is a voluntary choice, one that does not require economic, political, or environmental conditions to drive it.  Gideon Lewis-Kraus provided a great survey of current thoughts on this phenomenon in a New Yorker article: The End of Children: Birth rates are crashing around the world. Should we be worried?

Lewis-Kraus provides perspective on current discussions and a quote from a well-regarded demographer. 

“Anyone who offers a confident explanation of the situation is probably wrong. Fertility connects perhaps the most significant decision any individual might make with unanswerable questions about our collective fate, so a theory of fertility is necessarily a theory of everything—gender, money, politics, culture, evolution. Eberstadt told me, ‘The person who explains it deserves to get a Nobel, not in economics but in literature’.” 

What was most interesting about the article was a description of the situation in South Korea, a country where the birth rate was not just decreasing, it was plummeting.  Fertility is defined as the average number of children each woman produces.  To maintain a stable population a fertility of about 2.1 is required.  Currently, South Korean fertility is so low that any group of three women is likely to produce two children rather than the six required to maintain the population.  That is demographic collapse at an incredible rate.

“South Korea has a fertility rate of 0.7. This is the lowest rate of any nation in the world. It may be the lowest in recorded history. If that trajectory holds, each successive generation will be a third the size of its predecessor. Every hundred contemporary Koreans of childbearing age will produce, in total, about twelve grandchildren. The country is an outlier, but it may not be one for long. As the Korean political analyst John Lee told me, ‘We are the canary in the coal mine’.”

Does the experience of the Korean population represent something unique to that nation, or is it perhaps something that could be inevitable for populations that willingly decline?  Some South Korean history is necessary.

“A decade after the Korean War, the country’s per-capita G.D.P. was below a hundred dollars—less than that of Haiti. People ate tree bark or boiled grass, and children begged in the streets. After a military coup in 1961, the new authoritarian leadership tied its economic program to the cultivation of a citizenry that was smaller and better educated. It was an all-hands-on-deck approach to the labor force. Social workers fanned out to rural communities, where they encouraged women to have no more than three children. The government legalized contraceptives and pressed for the use of IUDs. These initiatives dovetailed with an emphasis on ethnic homogeneity and traditionalist values. Biracial children of American servicemen, along with the children of unwed mothers, were shipped abroad for adoption, and Korea became known as the world’s largest “exporter” of babies.”

“The program was regarded as a smashing success. In the span of twenty years, Korea’s fertility rate went from six to replacement, a feat described by Asian demographers as ‘one of the most spectacular and fastest declines ever recorded.’ A crucial part of this plan was the educational advancement of women, which the same demographers called ‘unprecedented in the recent history of the world.’ Far fewer Koreans came into existence, but those who did enjoyed a similarly improbable rise in their standard of living. Parents who remembered hunger produced children who could afford cosmetic surgery.”

The government took note of the “less is better” fertility results and seemed to conclude that even less would be even better.

“When Korea neared replacement, in 1983, its leadership might have reconsidered its policies. Instead, it doubled down with a new slogan: ‘Even two are too many.’ By 1986, the Korean fertility rate reached 1.6. This remained stable for about a decade, then fell off a cliff. The government has now devoted approximately two hundred and fifty billion dollars to various pro-natalist efforts, including cash transfers and parental-leave extensions, to no avail.”

What is it like to live in a country that knows its population is heading towards zero?

“Korea’s demographic collapse is mostly taken as a fait accompli. As John Lee, the political analyst, put it, ‘They say South Korea will be extinct in a hundred years. Who cares? We’ll all be dead by then.’ The causes routinely cited include the cost of housing and of child care—among the highest in the world. Very little in Korean society seems to give young people the impression that child rearing might be rewarding or delightful. I met a stylish twentysomething news reporter at an airy, silent café in Seoul’s lively Itaewon district. ‘People hate kids here,’ she told me. ‘They see kids and say, “Ugh”.’ This ambient resentment finds an outlet in disdain for mothers. She said, ‘People call moms “bugs” or “parasites.” If your kids make a little noise, someone will glare at you’.” 

“In the southern city of Gangjin, I stopped at a coffee shop and encountered a sign on the entrance that read ‘This is a no-kids zone. The child is not at fault. The problem is the parents who do not take care of the child.’ The doors of Korean establishments are frequently emblazoned with such prohibitions. The only children I saw on Seoul’s public transit were foreigners.” 

Lewis-Kraus tries a summary statement for the causes of population decline.

“For most of human history, having children was something the majority of people simply did without thinking too much about it. Now it is one competing alternative among many. The only overarching explanation for the global fertility decline is that once childbearing is no longer seen as something special—as an obligation to God, to one’s ancestors, or to the future—people will do less of it. It is misogynistic to equate reproductive autonomy with self-indulgence, and child-free people often devote themselves to loving, conscientious caretaking.”

But, developing disdain for children and mothers is too startling.  One can’t help but feel that some fundamental change has occurred in South Korea, and we need to understand what it is.

Lewis-Kraus provided some intriguing references, with the first coming from the Norwegian demographer, Vegard Skirbekk.

“Two decades ago, Skirbekk helped contrive a thought experiment called “the low-fertility trap hypothesis,” which proposed the possibility of an unrecoverable downward spiral. Ultra-low fertility meant far fewer babies, which meant far fewer people to have babies, or even to know babies; this feedback loop could even shift cultural norms so far that childlessness would become the default option.”

“This eventuality had seemed remote. Then it more or less happened in Korea. When I asked Skirbekk if other countries might follow suit, he replied, ‘Quite a few, possibly’.”

A second insight was provided by a Finnish demographer.

“Rotkirch, the Finnish demographer, underscored the notion that reproductive cues are social. ‘In a forthcoming survey, I want to ask, “Have you ever had a baby in your arms”?’ she told me. ‘I think in Finland it’s a sizable portion that hasn’t’.”

Humans evolved over millions of years while living in groups.  Success of these groups would require that members be capable of collective action and be able to provide resources and an environment in which newborns can become adults.  Traits that would support group success can be expected to develop.  Two that seem relevant here are the hormonal responses generating affection for infants, and peer pressure that encourages members to follow behaviors of the majority.

Humans became wired to appreciate and be pleased by human infants.  Females are born with a consuming interest in babies and mothering.  Men and women both experience hormonal surges in the presence of an infant.  Females excrete more of the bonding hormone oxytocin than males, while males also experience a drop in testosterone level when near an infant.  Evolution has provided these effects to ensure that enough infants will survive to further the species.

We evolved living in groups where babies and children would be as plentiful as resources would allow.  It is easy to see how evolutionary physical responses could develop.  We now live in small family groups.  If, as in South Korea, the most probable outcome is one-child and no-child families, children could easily live most of their lives, or at least their formative years, without ever physically encountering an infant.  Could these hormonal responses to infants fade over time if they have never been activated?

We, of a certain age, grew up in societies where families with children were the norm.  A crying child on an airplane invites feelings of sympathy, initially, at least.  But if the norm has flipped and the majority has no experience with raising children, and no understanding of why a child might be crying are how difficult it is to control the crying, then disdain for the poor parent might be the first response.  It is never easy to be a disruptive minority in any society.  Disgust and intolerance can soon follow.

Have we created societies where the economic and social interests in having children are disappearing, and we are now relying on subtle hormonal surges that may also be disappearing to get us interested in parenting?

Have we stumbled upon yet another existential threat to human civilization?  If Koreans seem unconcerned by the fact that their population will essentially disappear in a few generations, is it surprising that people seem to prefer to live in the moment and not worry about climate change which is coming upon us in a few generations as well, or that more and more plastic particles are entering our bodies?

Here’s a final thought.  If we don’t have children, why worry about the future?

 

Immune Amnesia: Measles Is Much Worse Than We Thought

It has long been recognized that the measles virus is about the most infectious agent that humans encounter.  It has also long been recognized that vaccination against the virus is very effective.  Consequently, the disease had been erased from our consciousness—until recently when we learned that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had impressed Trump with his knowledge of medical matters and was selected to be placed in charge of the agencies that treat infectious diseases.  For many years Kennedy has been encouraging people to avoid vaccinations, including that for the measles virus.  Kennedy’s wacky ideas play well with the anti-vaccination sentiments that arose from the politics of the covid pandemic.  He will now have an opportunity to cause even more grief for our nation.

Consider this report: Measles Outbreak Continues to Spread in West Texas.  It provides details on a growing outbreak.

“As a measles outbreak expands in West Texas, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health and human services secretary, on Tuesday cheered several unconventional treatments, including cod liver oil, but again did not urge Americans to get vaccinated.”

Kennedy seems to think treatment of measles infection is more important than avoiding infection.

“Texas doctors had seen ‘very, very good results,’ Mr. Kennedy claimed, by treating measles cases with a steroid, budesonide; an antibiotic called clarithromycin; and cod liver oil, which he said had high levels of vitamin A and vitamin D.”

“While physicians sometimes administer doses of vitamin A to treat children with severe measles cases, cod liver oil is ‘by no means’ an evidence-based treatment, said Dr. Sean O’Leary, chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Infectious Diseases.”

“Dr. O’Leary added that he had never heard of a physician using the supplement against measles.”

Experts say that measles is so infectious that a vaccination level of 95% is required to inhibit the spread of infections.  Covid-related politics has had an effect on vaccination rates.

“Just 93 percent of kindergarten students nationwide had received the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella in the 2023-24 school year, down from 95 percent before the pandemic.”

The Texas measles outbreak has spread to nine counties, with the one in which the infection emerged having a school student vaccination rate of about 80%.  Politics and conspiracies encouraged by Kennedy have multiplied the regions that have vaccination rates below 95% allowing infections to spread.

Only one child has died from infection thus far.

“About one in five people who catch measles will be hospitalized, according to the C.D.C.”

“While most measles cases resolve in a few weeks, in rare cases the virus can cause pneumonia, making it difficult for patients, especially children, to get oxygen into their lungs, or brain swelling, which can lead to blindness, deafness and intellectual disabilities.”

Measles is far from a negligible disease that might make vaccination optional.  And it is far worse than the immediate response to infection suggests.

“The virus also weakens the immune system in the long term, making its host more susceptible to future infections. A 2015 study found that before the M.M.R. vaccine was widely available, measles may have been responsible for up to half of all infectious disease deaths in children.”

The weakened immune system is explained in the article Measles and Immune Amnesia.

“The risk associated with measles infection is much greater than the sum of its observable symptoms. The immune memories that you have acquired are priceless, built over many years and from countless exposures to a menagerie of germs. Measles virus is especially dangerous because it has the ability to destroy what’s been earned: immune memory from previous infections. Meanwhile, the process of fighting measles infection leaves patients especially vulnerable to secondary infection. The worldwide increase in measles prevalence is cause for concern because morbidity and mortality from the disease extends far beyond acute measles infection.”

“One of the most unique—and most dangerous—features of measles pathogenesis is its ability to reset the immune systems of infected patients. During the acute phase of infection, measles induces immune suppression through a process called immune amnesia. Studies in non-human primates revealed that MV (measles virus) actually replaces the old memory cells of its host with new, MV-specific lymphocytes. As a result, the patient emerges with both a strong MV-specific immunity and an increased vulnerability to all other pathogens.”

The process of containing the measles virus destroys many of the memory T-cells and B-cells that recall prior infections and provide the ability to fight reinfection.

“The number of T cells and B cells significantly decreases during the acute stage of measles infection, but there is a rapid return to normal WBC (white blood cell) levels after the virus is cleared from the system. This observation masked what was really going on until researchers were able to evaluate the qualitative composition of recovered lymphocyte populations. We now know that the memory T-cells and B-cells that are produced immediately following infection are dramatically different from those that existed before the measles infection. Not only have pre-existing immune memory cells been erased, but there has been a massive production of new lymphocytes. And these have only one memory. Measles. Thus, the host is left totally immune to MV and significantly vulnerable to all other secondary infections.”

It was possible to analyze mortality rates before and after the availability of the measles vaccine.  The results were startling, indicating the effects of measles infection produced mortality from other viruses due to damaged immunity.

“Examination of child mortality rates in the U.S., U.K., and Denmark in the decades before and after the introduction of the measles vaccine revealed that nearly half of all childhood deaths from infectious disease could be related to MV infection when the disease was prevalent. That means infections other than measles resulted in death, due to the MV effect on the immune system.”

Fortunately, the depressed B-cells and T-cells slowly rebuild to levels that make them again effective against other diseases that had been encountered.

“Furthermore, it was determined that it takes approximately 2-3 years post-measles infection for protective immune memory to be restored. The average duration of measles-induced immune amnesia was 27 months in all 3 countries. Corresponding evidence indicates that it may take up to 5 years for children to develop healthy immune systems even in the absence of the immune suppressing effects of MV infection. If MV infection essentially resets a child’s developing immunity to that of a newborn, re-vaccination or exposure to all previously encountered microbes will be required in order to rebuild proper immune function.”

If you have read this far, congratulations are in order.  You now know more about measles than Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

  

The United States: The Destruction of the Regulatory State

In short, a regulatory state is one in which private actors are allowed to pursue their goals until these actors cause pain and disruption to the state and its population.  The state then moves in and regulates whatever activities caused the disruption so that it will not happen again.  Legislation is often required to impose appropriate constraints on private activities.  Consider a market failure that has led to a monopoly situation in which one provider of a service or product controls prices and service availability and is using its advantage to restrict competition and charge exorbitant prices for its contribution to the economy.  The state will require a team of experts to understand how this situation developed and what type of legislation and regulation might be needed to correct the situation.  Legislation tends to be general in an attempt to capture a range of possible threats to the state, regulation tends to be specific, making it difficult to incorporate all possible cases into the legislation.  This team of state experts must remain available over time to evaluate other circumstances as they arrive from continued variations in activities presented by the private actors.  Some team of experts within the state must judge whether the specific activities encountered fall under the purview of the legislation and if a regulatory response is necessary and legally appropriate.

One can produce a short version of the economic history of the United States.  It would describe a series of events in which private actors discovered a means to make a lot of money in such a way that they benefited but society in general suffered.  In other words, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer.  The state intervened to provide more balance and limit the power private entities could accrue, and society moved on.  Inevitably, subsequent episodes would occur and the process was repeated.

Private actors have never liked being regulated and have long tried to weaken or eliminate this function of the state.  This, in spite of wealth in millions transitioning to wealth in billions. The attack has followed two paths, one judicial and one political.

 The judicial approach was to argue that if a given law contained ambiguities relative to a given case, the interpretation should be made by courts rather than the state agencies involved.  In 1984, in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, the Supreme Court ruled that if the agency’s interpretation seemed reasonable it should be upheld.  This became known as the “Chevron doctrine.”  Last year, 2024, the Supreme Court voided the Chevron doctrine and placed responsibility for interpretations on the courts.  The wealthy and the powerful took this as a win.

The political approach was to take control of the Presidency and Congress and make the agencies provide politically correct rulings.  Until Trump and Musk, this approach had not been very successful.  Civil Service rules made wholescale firings of federal employees difficult.  Musk and Trump came along planning to do whatever they wanted and dare anyone to try and stop them.

Their approach has been to fire people who are easy to fire and terrorize the remainder hoping that they will resign and go away.  This is not an approach designed to provide functional governmental agencies.  It is an approach designed to eliminate such agencies and replace them with something.  But what?  Given that Musk is driving the process, it will have something to do with technology.  Will each agency be replaced by an AIbot trained on libertarian principles?

Best bet: before the collapse of the federal workforce is complete, the public will notice that government agencies provide useful services and raise enough of a stink that even Republican politicians will fear for their careers and put a halt to it.

  

Covid and Society

 The dictionary definition of the term pathogenesis is “the origination and development of a disease.  Jonathan Kennedy used the term to describe how infectious diseases and their consequences have altered our human civilization in his book Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues.  Epidemics have occurred frequently throughout history, with the major ones having significant consequences.  He provides this perspective.

“Outbreaks of infectious diseases have destroyed millions of lives and decimated whole civilizations, but the devastation has created opportunities for new societies and ideas to emerge and thrive.  In this way, pathogens have been the protagonists in many of the most important social, political and economic transformations in history: the transition from a planet inhabited by multiple species of human to one in which Homo sapiens reigned supreme; the replacement of nomadic hunter-gatherer society with sedentary agriculture; the demise of the great empires of antiquity; the transformation of Christianity and Islam from small sects in Palestine and Hijaz to world religions; the shift from feudalism to capitalism; the devastation wrought by European colonialism; the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions; and the creation of the modern welfare state.”

Perhaps the most interesting sections of the book involved the role of the Black Death in causing the demise of feudalism and the rise of capitalism, and the depiction of industrialization as a form of plague in which crowded conditions led to massive deaths from infectious diseases.

Plagues tend to produce the most pain for those most vulnerable: the poor.  The Black Death hit medieval societies repeatedly over a period of a few hundred years.  Loss of life was so great, fifty percent or more, that the supply of serfs to produce the necessary food and other products that emanated from a feudal society disappeared.  Feudalism was never a very efficient way to produce things.  A transformation occurred, initiated either by former serfs or by landowners, that initiated the practice of leasing land to the agricultural laborers.  This gave the former serfs the motivation to produce as much as possible.  The laborers would perform better when they formed groups to negotiate and work together.  Eventually the formed groups would compete with each other for land and workers and the equivalent of companies would be formed.  This transformation took place over several centuries, beginning first in England and gradually spreading to other European countries.

Industrialization in England produced conditions where fewer agricultural workers were needed, and more were required in factories being built in towns and cities.  This drove rural people to arrive in crowded living and working conditions where hygiene and diseases were poorly understood.  Infections would propagate easily leading life expectancies to plummet.

“The new provincial towns and cities really dragged down the national life-expectancy figures.  They were not only considerably lower than the figure for England and Wales, they also fell markedly in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.  The numbers are skewed by very high infant mortality rates, with one in five babies dying before their first birthday.  In the central areas of Manchester and Liverpool, you could expect to live about twenty-five years—a shorter lifespan than at any time since the Black Death.  The figures are worse when we focus on just the poor.  Life expectancy for factory laborers was seventeen in Manchester and fifteen in Liverpool.  Death rates were so high among urban working classes that the population was only able to sustain itself because of the continual inflow of people from the surrounding countryside, and increasingly from Ireland.” 

If the Industrial Revolution was to proceed, an interventionist government must arise and provide improved welfare for all the citizens.  And that is what happened.

If one finds Kennedy’s picture compelling, it is inevitable to ponder what, if any, are the consequences for societies from the recent Covid pandemic.  Clearly, there have been many changes, but only time will tell if they will be permanent.  Children may have effectively lost about a year of education.  The trend towards remote work has proved difficult for those providing office space and those supporting the office-space workers.  Those with valuable assets thrived during the pandemic, those without suffered, increasing economic inequality.

Unfortunately, the pandemic seems to have generated responses that threaten the very nature of our society.  Responses to Covid required governments to take actions.  People were told to accept restrictions on their activities.  In effect, they were expected to behave like members of a community, willing to try to protect each other from harm.  In too many cases, people responded to such requests with not only a “no,” but rather a “hell no.”  This attitude is one long popular with the political right, reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher’s dismissal of society.

“There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.”

This sort of thinking seems so unnatural.  Humans evolved needing the society of a group to survive.  Sharing resources was necessary for food, shelter, security, and the survival of infants.  Evidence exists that even Neanderthals had acquired the tendency to protect and nurture the weak and disabled among the group.  Our religions taught us to aid the unfortunate among us. Such instincts are likely millions of years old, permanently residing in our genes. They have been the basis for social democracies that formed after the last world war, including our own.

Thatcherism flows inevitably from the inequalities inherent in capitalism.  The wealthy feel comfortable assuming that their wealth was the result of their hard work and intelligence, but the misleading corollary of that assumption is that the poor must not be working hard, or they are not very smart.  A religious equivalent has arisen in which the fortunate are viewed as worthy of God’s grace, while the unfortunate are deemed unworthy.  These attitudes appear to be dragging society back to a harsher, less stable—perhaps less survivable—era.

One could make the argument that we emerged from the Covid pandemic with Democrats being the conservative party representing traditional social values, while Republicans have become progressives, anxious to burn the house down so they can build a new one. 

Covid did not create these trends, but it did accelerate them.

 

The Rival World Order: Autocracy Inc.

 US President Joe Biden has issued warnings that the world is moving towards a consequential conflict between democracies and autocracies.  By democracies are meant the United States, European nations, Canada, South Korea, Australia, and Japan, nations with strong economic relationships and military ties such as NATO.  The most aggressive autocracies include Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.  This group of states has avowed geopolitical goals opposing those of the democracies, and are actively collaborating politically, economically, and militarily in “creating a new world order.”  Anne Applebaum tells her readers that if this is all you recognize as the problem, you are missing half the conflict.  She presents the argument in her book Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World.

Applebaum argues that the nature of autocracy has changed, and it is critical that we recognize the differences.

“Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy but by sophisticated networks relying on kleptocratic financial structures, a complex of security services—military, paramilitary, police—and technological experts who provide surveillance, propaganda and disinformation.  The members of these networks are connected to not only one another within a given autocracy but also to networks in other autocratic countries, and sometimes in democracies too.  Corrupt, state-controlled companies in one dictatorship do business with corrupt, state-controlled companies in another.  The police in one country may arm, equip, and train the police in many others.  The propagandists share resources—the troll farms and media networks that promote one dictator’s propaganda can also promote another’s—as well as themes: the degeneracy of democracy, the stability of autocracy, the evil of America.”

The author then makes statements that demand clarification.

“Unlike political or military alliances from other times and places, this group operates not like a bloc but rather like an agglomeration of companies, bound not by ideology but rather by a ruthless, single-minded determination to preserve their personal wealth and power: Autocracy, Inc.”

“Instead of ideas, the strongmen who lead Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Angola, Myanmar, Cuba, Syria, Zimbabwe, Mali, Belarus, Sudan, Azerbaijan, and perhaps three dozen others share a determination to deprive their citizens of any real influence or public voice, push back against all forms of transparency or accountability, and to repress anyone, at home or abroad, who challenges them.”

Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela provides a good example of a beneficiary of Autocracy Inc.  Despite sanctions by the US and others, he thrives as he continues to extract wealth from his country.

“Yet President Nicolás Maduro’s regime receives loans from Russia, which also invests in Venezuela’s oil industry, as does Iran.  A Belarussian company assembles tractors in Venezuela.  Turkey facilitates illicit Venezuelan gold trade.  Cuba has long provided security advisors and security technology to its counterparts in Caracas. Chinese-made water cannons, tear-gas cannisters, and shields were used to crush street protestors in Caracas in 2014 and again in 2017, leaving more than seventy dead, while Chinese-designed surveillance technology is used to monitor the public too.  Meanwhile, the international narcotics trade keeps individual members of the regime, along with their entourages and families, well supplied with Versace and Chanel.” 

 Applebaum has stated that modern autocracies are not driven by ideas and ideology, but she then details how they are unified in participating in the destruction of democracy as a viable form of governance.  Democratic nations, with their traditions of basic human rights, are viewed as an existential threat.  Autocracies have tended to focus on the sovereignty of each nation, a concept that allows a regime to do whatever it wishes to its people, as a more convenient goal.

 “Modern autocrats differ in many ways from their twentieth-century predecessors.  But the heirs, successors, and imitators of these older leaders and thinkers, however varied their ideologies, do have a common enemy.  That enemy is us.”

“To be more precise, that enemy is the democratic world, ‘the West,’ NATO, the European Union, their own internal democratic opponents, and the liberal ideas that inspire all of them.”

If the long list of autocracies view “us” as their enemy and wish to destroy our way of life it seems appropriate to consider our chances of winning this conflict.  Applebaum provides numerous examples of how the institutions of democratic nations are being attacked by autocracies in an attempt to discredit democracy as a form of governance and promote autocracy as a more efficient option.  Most of this international activity is situated in the big four: Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.  Less emphasized is that these same four are also planning for possible future warfare by building up their military capabilities.  Planes, ships, soldiers, and even missiles are fairly easy to track, but cyber weapons are often known only after they’ve been activated.  It is abundantly clear that the four mentioned nations are working on cyber weapons that could severely damage the people and infrastructure of democratic nations, primarily the US.  We will not know what they are capable of until they demonstrate their capabilities.

Applebaum sticks with her notion that our opponents are a loose agglomeration of criminal states intent on kleptocracy.

“…the democracies…should think about the struggle for freedom not as a competition between specific autocratic states, and certainly not as ‘war with China,’ but as a war against autocratic behaviors, wherever they are found: in Russia, in China, in Europe, in the United States…The autocracies want to create a global system that benefits thieves, criminals, dictators, and the perpetrators of mass murder.  We can stop them.”

The author provides little to cheer about when it comes to countering kleptocrats, assuming that is our main issue.  Criminals are active, law enforcement is reactive.  And the history of international finance suggests there is way too much money to be made helping kleptocrats deal with their resources to ever be able to shut down the undesirable practices.

“…Delaware, Nevada, South Dakota, and Wyoming—nice, normal American states, full of nice, normal Americans—have created financial instruments that nameless investors can use to hide their money from the world.”

The terms “existential crisis” and “existential threat” appear in Applebaum’s analyses, yet she refuses to pose the democracy versus autocracy conflict in such terms.  Her relevant situation from the twentieth century is the postwar conflict between the West and the Soviet Union known as the Cold War.

“In no sense is the modern competition between autocratic and democratic ideas and practices a direct replica of what we faced in the twentieth century.  There are no ‘blocs’ to join and no Berlin Walls marking neat geographic divides.  Many countries don’t fit comfortably into either category, democracy or autocracy.  As I’ve written, some autocracies—the U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Vietnam—seek cooperation with the democratic world, don’t want to upend the UN Charter, and still see the advantages of international law.  Some democracies—Turkey, Israel, Hungary, India, the Philippines—have elected leaders who are more inclined to break conventions on human rights than to uphold them.  Because autocratic alliances are largely transactional, they can shift and change, and often do.”

What if Applebaum is wrong, and the proper twentieth century analogy is not postwar but prewar?  Putin’s western yearnings are not very different from Hitler’s eastern yearnings.  China’s world-dominance yearning exceeds Japan’s goals for Asian-Pacific dominance.  In that earlier era, the democracies failed to realize the threats they faced until it was very late and nearly lost a world war.  Could they be making the same mistake again?

Putin has made it clear that he intends to take control of not only Ukraine but also NATO countries that were once part of the Soviet Union, or even the Russian Empire.  Yet, NATO is not preparing for war, it is half-heartedly assisting Ukraine in what it hopes will continue to be a proxy war.  To survive, Ukraine must assemble at least the second most powerful army in the region, along with a defense industrial base that can produce a significant share of the armaments needed to contend with Russia.  This is necessary because NATO, in spite of its avowed responsibilities, doesn’t seem to have the will to arm for war.

The democracies continue to treat China as if it is a nation that would be satisfied peacefully existing as a member of a family of advanced societies and economies.  China has repeatedly proven such thinkers wrong, yet this optimism persists.  Meanwhile, China openly pursues world economic, political, and military dominance.

The threat from autocracies is bigger than Applebaum’s Autocracy Inc.  Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea have a mission: the discreditation of democracies.  They are collaborating in Russia’s battle with Ukraine.  If Ukraine should fall to Russia, they will have succeeded.