COVID and Safetyism

By Dom Nozzi

I continue to agree that some people (not all – I cannot recall the last time I wore a mask, for example) will be wearing masks for the rest of their lives. COVID is highly likely to be like the flu. Prudent people will be getting both a flu shot and a COVID shot every fall.

As for the state of affairs, I continue to think that the infection rate, hospitalization rate, death rate, etc., is way overblown by the media.

I’m currently reading a book called The Power of Bad. The authors talk about how humans are hard-wired to be profoundly affected by bad news and hardly affected at all by good news (in other words, bad news tends to stick with us and traumatize us for a long time, whereas good news does not tend to put us in a “good mood” for more than just a brief time. We forget “good” news very quickly).

Examples: what is a word that is the opposite of “trauma”? Does anyone ever have PTSD for good things? What is the opposite of “murderer”? What about the opposite of “disgust”? In each case, there is no “good” example because bad is way more influential and powerful to us than good, so our language has a large number of words for “bad” things and much fewer words for “good” things. The media and the Internet have significantly ramped up this problem of our always being terrified of bad to the point that we think and behave irrationally.

You really need to read the book.

Applying the concept to relationships, the authors note that studies find the most long-lasting relationships are those where both people in the relationship know that avoiding doing or saying bad things is far more important than doing good deeds for (or saying good things to) your significant other.

My on-going advice: stop reading or listening or watching the media – particularly when it is reporting on the hysteria topics such as politics or pandemics. If you don’t ignore the media, you will be gravely and wrongly misled into becoming convinced – like Chicken Little – that the WORLD IS COMING TO AN END. Examples: Steven Pinker and Michael Shellenberger and Bjorn Lomborg reporting that on a huge number of social/environmental well-being indicators, the world is making tremendous progress. Almost none of us know this because the media is manipulating us 24/7 with hysterical falsehoods. A great many of us therefore wrongly think all those indicators are significantly worsening every week. The media no longer reports reality and truth. Their almost single-minded objective is to maximize how much money they make. And the best way to do that is to exaggerate or use dishonesty to enrage and terrify us. I call it the “Daily Dose of Doom.”

I can always tell who watches the news or listens to the news or reads the news too much: They are the ones who are most afraid of such things as crime and environmental ruin and drugs and political doom. So much so that their perception of what is really happening in the world is extremely far from what is really going on. Studies confirm this, by the way. I also believe that those who continue to wear masks in public are nearly always people who watch far more news (the Daily Dose of Doom) than others.

In my opinion, with vaccines and boosters and extremely low rates of infection (or substantially negative infection outcomes) means that lock downs and mask wearing and group size limits and no hand shaking are instances of “safety theatre.” People wearing masks at this point are simply virtue signaling (“look at how safe and virtuous and ethical and wonderful and progressive I am for wearing a mask!”).

I’m not saying I want to force people to stop doing things like wearing a mask, but I am saying that I feel sorry that many people are so infected with the “safetyism” disease that they engage in extreme efforts to be “safe.” At some point, people need to realize that it is impossible to have 100% safety in life. There will always be some level of risk in life (thankfully!), and doing things like mask wearing or reduced socializing severely detracts from quality of life.

Life is too short to significantly curtail pleasant experiences in life due to worry over exquisitely tiny risks.

Black Rednecks and White Liberals (2005), by Thomas Sowell

A Review

By Dom Nozzi

I just finished reading this excellent book. The following are excerpts a few of my thoughts…

“The history of the black population of the US might be summed up in broad outlines as follows: Sold into slavery by African leaders, at a time when slavery was widely accepted in all civilizations, blacks entered a particular segment of American society and culture at the bottom, acquiring only the rudiments of Western civilization – not including literacy, in most cases – and a way of life influenced by a peculiar redneck culture.” Pg. 261

Sowell lists attributes of the redneck culture – a culture that did NOT originate in the US South, but instead was imported by colonists centuries earlier. These colonists originated from the hinterlands in Wales, Scotland, England, and Ireland. These European nations were the origin of such culturally dysfunctional attributes as:

*Aversion to work.

*Promiscuity.

*Lack of entrepreneurship.

*Reckless search for excitement.

*Drunkenness.

*Neglect of education.

*Violence.

*Lively music and dance.

*Strident religious oration.

*Unbridled emotions.

*Unwillingness to be industrious or hard-working.

*Exaggerated pride and the related tendency to duel or feud.

*Wasteful expenditures.

Similarly, despite the conventional wisdom, the following phrases originated in Scotland, England, Ireland, and Wales:

*”You be

*”She ain’t

*It don’t

*I hain’t

*”chittlins”

*”Yaller” for “yellow”

*”ax” for “ask”

*”y’awl” for “you”

*”dis” for “this”

*”dat” for “that”

Sowell notes that many blacks in the US exhibit such redneck behavior to a greater extent than most Americans because whereas only a small percentage of Americans lived in the South long enough to adopt such a culture, an enormous percentage of blacks brought to the US as slaves lived in – and thereby adopted – that culture.

“Freed after the Civil War but poverty-stricken, illiterate, unskilled and unacculturated to the demanding way of life in a free republic with a market economy, blacks began their history as a free people at the bottom of American society [much as such groups as the Irish, Chinese, Japanese, Italians, and Poles had done in the past]. One sign of their lack of preparation for life as a free people was a rate of mortality among blacks in the aftermath of emancipation that was greater than it had been under slavery. This was just one sign of a more general lag in adjusting to the norms of the society around them.

“The small enclaves of New England culture transplanted among blacks – via Oberlin College and Dunbar High School, as well as in black colleges established in the South by New Englanders – did NOT promote pride in the existing black redneck culture. On the contrary, the clear message in these enclaves was that the way most blacks talked, the way they behaved, and the whole set of redneck values they inherited, were all wrong and were things to be overcome. The wholly disproportionate number of black leaders and high achievers who came out of these small enclaves is further evidence in the case of “pride” versus “self-hate.”

Among both blacks and white liberals, there were those who thought that cultural changes among blacks were unnecessary [indeed, Sowell points out that many liberals, educators and academics celebrate the redneck culture of blacks], that there could be progress without internal cultural change, effects without causes. In the post-1960s world, such views gained the ascendency – and those who held these views often wondered why it was so hard to raise ghetto blacks out of poverty and social disintegration. Their answer was usually a call for more welfare state programs, more “pride” and “self-esteem,” and more steeping in the history of black achievement or white injustice. The actual track record of this approach, compared to the opposite approach in the New England enclaves, received virtually no attention.

“Fortunately, in the decades before this mindset became fixed, most blacks had become better educated and had lifted themselves out of poverty at a rate HIGHER than that after the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. For example, more blacks rose into professional and other higher level occupations in the years preceding the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than in the years following its enactment. This factual history served no one’s political agenda and has since been replaced by a fictional history that does.

“The economic advancement of blacks has been widely portrayed as due to the civil rights movement, and to political leaders – black and white – who have proclaimed themselves champions of black Americans. Since no one has as large a vested interest in opposing this view as its proponents have in perpetuating it, the politically more convenient view has prevailed, along with attributing the continuing economic and social gaps between blacks and whites to the sins and shortcomings of the latter.

“…the decline in whites’ hostility and discrimination toward blacks in Northern cities during the 19th century, followed by a resurgence of hostility at the turn of the century, were not just inexplicable swings of the pendulum in white public opinion. The masses of blacks arriving in the North at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century were denounced in the BLACK newspapers of the time for their crudeness, violence, and crime. It was not just a question of ‘perceptions’ or ‘stereotypes’ among whites…

“Clinging to a counterproductive culture in the name of group pride and avoiding changes because they could be labeled ‘self-hate’ are patterns that have no track record that would justify optimism. The evidence is all on the other side – but that matters only to those who value evidence over ideology…” pp. 261-3.

Sowell’s book introduced me to a term I had not heard before: “Cultural Cringe.” The term refers to instances where a culturally backward or dysfunctional culture encounters a more advanced, successful culture. Historically, dysfunctional cultures that experienced the “cringe” eventually became successful cultures because those dysfunctional cultures adopted the successful, beneficial traits of the more advanced culture they had encountered. Examples of this long ago are the backward Japanese culture and Scottish culture, and the many dysfunctional cultures that encountered the German culture. Sowell’s book shows, tragically, that many problems seen in America for black success and achievement in contemporary times are based on blacks (as well as white activists) who have resisted efforts to have the black culture more comprehensively adopt the successful traits of American culture, and instead have retained too much of their “black redneck” cultural traits.

While Sowell does not mention this, I think similar things could be said about many Native Americans.

Sowell also does not use the term “melting pot,” but it seems to me that the term can be applied to the “cultural cringe” as well. That is, for a less successful culture to become more successful, it needs to be able to adopt the cultural traits of an encountered successful culture in a “melting pot” sort of way. One example of this is to have members of the less successful cultures immigrating to the US be urged to speak proper English.

Sowell is one of America’s leading black scholars. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and later earned Master’s and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University and the University of Chicago (Illinois), respectively.

Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All (2020), by Michael Shellenberger

Apocalypse Never Excerpts

Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All (2020), by Michael Shellenberger

Shellenberger is a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment, winner of the 2008 Green Book Award, founder and president of Environmental Progress. Has been fighting for a greener planet for decades. He helped save the world’s last unprotected redwoods, and co-created today’s Green New Deal.

Despite End of the World claims by climate activists, there has been a 92% decline in death toll from natural disasters since its peak in the 1920s. The decline occurred during a period when global population nearly quadrupled. Both rich and poor nations have become far less vulnerable to extreme weather events in recent decades. A USGS scientist in California reports that after 40 years of research, we don’t see any relationship between past climates and the amount of area burned in any given year. The UN projects that crop yields will increase significantly under a wide range of climate change scenarios. Pg. 4-6

A report by the Potsdam Institute concluded that climate change *policies* were more likely to hurt food production and worsen rural poverty than climate change itself. A political science professor at Univ of CO in Boulder convened 32 of the world’s leading experts to discuss climate change impacts. The consensus was that more people and property in harm’s way explained the rising cost of natural disasters, not worsening disasters. While Florida experienced 18 major hurricanes between 1900 and 1959, it experienced just 11 from 1960 to 2018. There is scant evidence to indicate that hurricanes, floods, tornadoes or drought have become more frequent or intense in the US or globally. Pp. 12-14

Anyone who believes climate change could kill billions of people [as is claimed by “Extinction Rebellion climate activists] and cause civilizations to collapse might be surprised to discover that none of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports contain a single apocalyptic scenario. Pg. 15

In August 2019, Leo DiCaprio and the NY Times claimed that the “lungs of the earth are in flames” regarding slash and burn activity in the Amazon rainforest. That the Amazon produces 20% of the world’s oxygen. A lead author of the ICPP report, when asked if it’s true that the Amazon was a major source of the Earth’s oxygen supply, stated that such a claim is “bullshit. There’s no science behind that. The Amazon produces a lot of oxygen, but it uses the same amount of oxygen through respiration, so it’s a wash.” Pg 27, 30.

Globally, forests are returning and fires are declining. A 25 percent decrease in the annual area burned globally from 1998 to 2015, thanks mainly to economic growth. New forest growth globally has increased by the size of Texas and Alaska combined. Greta Thunberg’s Sweden has seen the area covered by forest double over the past century. Pg. 32.

Greenpeace advocates policies that have fragmented the Amazon rainforest. Pp 38-41.

The European farmers most opposed to cheaper Brazilian food products entering their country are in France and Ireland. Many therefore claim it is not a coincidence that these are the two European nations most opposed to deforestation and fires in Brazilian rainforests. A strong case can be made that the opposition is a smokescreen for economic protectionism. Pp. 41-42.

Cities concentrate human population and leave more countryside to wildlife. Cities cover just more than half a percent of ice-free surface of the earth. Less than half a percent of Earth is covered by pavement or buildings. As farms become more productive, grasslands, forests and wildlife are returning. Humankind’s use of wood has peaked and could soon decline significantly. And humankind’s use of land for agriculture is likely near its peak and capable of decline soon. While land used for agriculture has increased 8% since 1961, the amount of food produced has increased 300%. Pastureland has shrunk since 2000. Water pollution is declining in relative terms per unit of production, and in absolute terms in some nations. The use of water per unit of agricultural production has been declining. In the US, soil erosion has declined 40 percent between 1982 and 1997. Pp. 90-92.

From 1981 to 2015, the population of humans living in extreme poverty plummeted from 44% to 10%. Cities and manufacturing bring other positive benefits. Human population growth rate peaked in the early 60s. Total population will peak soon. The share of humans who are malnourished declined from 20 percent in 1990 to 11 percent today. Rising prosperity strongly correlates with rising freedom, reduced violence against, and greater tolerance for, women, racial and religious minorities, and gays and lesbians. Pp. 94-95.

Developed nations have seen major improvements in air quality. Between 1980 and 2018, US carbon monoxide levels decreased by 83%, lead by 99%, nitrogen dioxide by 61%, ozone by 31%, and sulfur dioxide by 91%. Pg. 102.

If you want to minimize carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in 2070, you might want to accelerate the burning of coal in India today, said MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel. Coal is terrible for carbon. But it’s by burning a lot of coal that they make themselves wealthier, and by making themselves wealthier they have less children. You therefore don’t have as many people burning carbon. Pg. 105.

Whaling peaked in 1962, thirteen years before Greenpeace’s heavily publicized action in Vancouver, and declined dramatically during the next decade. It was vegetable oil, not an international treaty, that saved the whales. Ninety-nine percent of all whales killed in the 20^th Century had occurred by the time the International Whaling Commission (IWC) got around to imposing a moratorium in 1982. Regulation was not important in stabilizing populations. Rising prosperity created the demand for the substitutes that saved the whales. People saved the whales by no longer needing them, and they no longer needed them because they had created more abundant, cheaper, and better alternatives.  Today, the populations of blue whales, humpback whales, and bowheads, three species for which there is great concern, are all recovering. Not a single whale species is at risk of extinction. Nations today harvest 97% less whales than in 1960. Pp. 114-5.

Climate activists massively outspend climate skeptics. The two largest US environmental organizations, EDF and NRDC, have a combined annual budget of about $384 million compared to $13 million of the two largest climate skeptic groups. The activist money is significantly more than all the money Exxon gave to climate-skeptical organizations for two decades. Pg. 206.

In some Judeo-Christian traditions, priests play the role of interpreting God’s will or laws, including discerning right from wrong. In the apocalyptic environmentalist tradition, scientists play that role. “I want you to listen to the scientists,” Thunberg and others repeat. Because Judeo-Christian myths and morals are prevalent in our culture, environmentalists know them subconsciously and repeat them unintentionally, albeit in the ostensibly secular language of science and nature. Having first experienced and then studied the phenomenon for 15 years, I believe that secular people are attracted to apocalyptic environmentalism because it meets some of the same psychological and spiritual needs as Judeo-Christianity and other religions. Apocalyptic environmentalism gives people a purpose: to save the world from climate change, or some other environmental disaster. It provides people with a story that casts them as heroes, which some scholars…believe we need in order to find meaning our lives.

At the same time, apocalyptic environmentalism does all of this while retaining the illusion among its adherents that they are people of science and reason, not superstition and fantasy.

The trouble with the new environmental religion is that it has become increasingly apocalyptic, destructive, and self-defeating. It leads its adherents to demonize their opponents, often hypocritically. Pp. 264-5.

Negativity has triumphed over positivity. In place of love, forgiveness, kindness, and the kingdom of heaven, today’s apocalyptic environmentalism offers fear, anger, and the narrow prospects of avoiding extinction. Pg. 267

“It’s too late to do anything. There is no future anymore. We’re basically doomed. We should give up.” 

Twenty years ago, I discovered that the more apocalyptic environmentalist books and articles I read, the sadder and more anxious I felt. This was in sharp contrast to how I felt after reading histories of the civil rights movement, whose leaders were committed to an ethos, and politics, of love, not anger.

Conventional air pollution peaked 50 years ago in developed nations and carbon emissions have peaked or will soon peak in most others. The amount of land we use for meat production is declining. Forests in rich nations are growing back and wildlife is returning. Cruelty to animals in meat production has decline and should continue to decline, and, if we embrace technology, habitats available for endangered species, including for gorillas, and penguins, should keep growing in size.

None of that means there isn’t work to do. There is plenty. But much if not most of it has to do with accelerating those existing, positive trends, not trying to reverse them in a bid to return to low-energy agrarian societies.

The answer from many rational environmentalists, including myself, who are alarmed by the religious fanaticism of apocalyptic environmentalism, has been that we need to better maintain the divide between science and religion, just as scientists need to maintain the divide between their personal values and the facts they study. Pg. 275-6