Just when you think things are looking grim in the US, a cop decides it’s OK to kneel on an African-American man’s neck until he dies. In fact, he cares so little that it doesn’t even bother him that people are filming him doing it. Black lives just don’t matter to him. The resulting protests, and riots, have been doing on for almost a week now.

Once the rioting starts, so does the tut-tutting, with people wondering why ‘they’ don’t protest peacefully, forgetting the abuse Colin Kaepernick got when he took a knee during the national anthem before NFL games. TIME Magazine has a piece in which a local activist points out that Minneapolis has been a powder keg for a while, and has shown no interest in responding to protests around previous killings or reforming their police force or doing anything about inequality in the city.

When the Black Lives Matter movement took hold nationally after Eric Garner and Michael Brown died at the hands of police in 2014, solidarity protests also broke out in Minnesota. Demonstrators occupied the Mall of America, a major regional attraction, and shut down major highways. The next year, protests erupted again after police shot and killed Jamar Clark, an unarmed black man, in North Minneapolis, and in 2016, after a police officer shot and killed Philando Castile, whose girlfriend live streamed part of the incident in a Minneapolis suburb. In both cases, there was no police conviction.

Former NBA star, Karim Abdul-Jabar has a powerful piece in the Los Angeles Times outlining what it means to be African-American in the US today.

I don’t want to see stores looted or even buildings burn. But African Americans have been living in a burning building for many years, choking on the smoke as the flames burn closer and closer. Racism in America is like dust in the air. It seems invisible — even if you’re choking on it — until you let the sun in. Then you see it’s everywhere.

Barack Obama wrote a well-reasoned piece exhorting people to show up at the voting booth and vote for change, particularly at local elections where there is more oversight of individual police departments and judges, which makes perfect sense. However, as Professor Ibram X. Kendi, director at the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University points out, the first response of even progressive officials is often to protect the police:

It’s one thing to say that one of the ways in which you should channel your anger is through seeking to vote into power antiracist elected officials. And it’s yet another thing to say that in reaction to people who are protesting or demonstrating against police violence in Atlanta. And instead of Atlanta’s officials immediately making policy changes that have the capacity to reduce police violence against people, instead, those Atlanta officials make immediate policy changes to stem violence against property and police and then simultaneously say to those very people, “Well, you need to channel your energy into electing people like me.” But those very people who are elected officials actually have the power in that moment to make changes. And they’re not doing it. So you can’t simultaneously not use your power to make change and then tell people, “You should be electing people like me and then change will come.”

When Australia put its head above the parapet to advocate for an international inquiry into the origins of C19 and what mistakes were made, China was quick to tell us to get back in our box, and, as our biggest trading partner, they have plenty of say.

That has now escalated to unofficial trade sanctions, with random obstacles being placed in front of our beef and barley imports. A shot across the bow if you will.

Over at the Financial Times, they have an in-depth look at Trump’s inadequate response to C19 which includes this gem…

Both the US and China have spread outlandish rumours about the other. Some Chinese officials have circulated the groundless conspiracy theory that the US army planted the virus in Wuhan at an athletics event last year. Trump administration officials, including Pompeo, have repeatedly suggested Covid-19 originated from a bat-to-human transmission in Wuhan’s virology lab.

Last month, Australia called for an international inquiry into the disease’s origins. “Australia’s goal was to defuse conspiracy theories in both China and America,” says Michael Fullilove, head of the Lowy Institute, Australia’s largest think-tank.

Days later, Australia’s Daily Telegraph, a tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch, ran an apparent scoop that the “five eyes” – the intelligence agencies of the US, the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand – had concluded the disease came from the Wuhan lab, whether by accident or design. It appears the story had no substance. Fauci and other scientists say the pathogen almost certainly came from a wet market in Wuhan. No “five eyes” dossier existed.

According to a five eye senior intelligence officer and a figure close to Australia’s government, the Daily Telegraph story probably came from the US embassy in Canberra. There was no chance after its publication that Beijing would agree to an international probe. The report damaged Australia’s hopes of defusing US-China tensions. “We used to think of America as the world’s leading power, not as the epicentre of disease,” says Fullilove, who is an ardent pro-American. “We increasingly feel caught between a reckless China and a feckless America that no longer seems to care about its allies.”

Cheers, mate.

In The Beginning

Der Speigel has an investigation into the early days of C19, attempting to figure out who knew what when. While it’s clear the Wuhan/Hubei authorities downplayed the severity so as not to affect their People’s Congress and also tried to hide information from Beijing, at this stage it’s less clear which delays originated in Beijing with the intent of keeping the world in the dark.

The most important political events of the year, after all, were imminent. On Jan. 6, a session of the city parliament was set to begin, and the People’s Congress for the Hubei province was to convene on Jan. 11. And it was now that the provincial government also issued an order that entries into the national disease tracking system be made “cautiously.” Entries were to be coordinated not just with the local health authorities, but also with the city and provincial governments.

The authorities were doing all they could to keep both the public and the central government in the dark about the true extent of the epidemic – likely to prevent the disruption of the two parliamentary sessions. It could, however, also have been because they simply didn’t want to spread bad news – especially not to Beijing.

Wasting Time

ABC News reports on the fact that the US Intelligence community was reporting on what became C19 as early as late November, almost a month before the first patient showed up in a Wuhan hospital.

The report was the result of analysis of wire and computer intercepts, coupled with satellite images. It raised alarms because an out-of-control disease would pose a serious threat to U.S. forces in Asia – forces that depend on the NCMI’s work. And it paints a picture of an American government that could have ramped up mitigation and containment efforts far earlier to prepare for a crisis poised to come home.

Despite Trump’s efforts to blame China for everything, it’s pretty clear that he was aware of a potential issue for almost three months before he bothered pretending to do anything about it.

Velociraptors

Jurassic Park is reopening, despite the velociraptors still being loose… ;-)

Now, I understand why some people might be skeptical about reopening an amusement park when there are still blindingly fast, 180-pound predators roaming around. But the fact of the matter is, velociraptors are intelligent, shifty creatures that are not going to be contained any time soon, so we might as well just start getting used to them killing a few people every now and then. Some might argue that we should follow the example of other parks that have successfully dealt with velociraptor escapes. But here at Jurassic Park, we’ve never been ones to listen to the recommendations of scientists, or safety experts, or bioethicists, so why would we start now?

US Liberties

When you’ve fully bought in to the neoliberal “there’s no such thing as society” mantra, it’s not a great surprise that a good chunk of your population insist on doing whatever they like regardless of the consequences for others.

“We keep losing 1,000 to 2,000 a day to coronavirus. People get used to it. We get less vigilant as it very slowly spreads. By December we’re close to normal, but still losing 1,500 a day, and as we tick past 300,000 dead, most people aren’t concerned.”

China Ascendant

With the US response to C19 being a complete shambles on its own soil, and non-existent internationally, China is making the most of the vacuum to enhance its global power.

Are we witnessing a shift in global power relations? Beijing is seizing the moment to increase its influence, particularly in the South China Sea, where China – to the annoyance of the U.S. and many neighboring countries – is becoming increasingly bold and cementing its territorial claims. A confidential situation report from the German Defense Ministry states: “The U.S. Navy assumes the Chinese navy will make use of the, albeit temporary, COVID-19-related absence of all U.S. aircraft carriers in the Pacific to deliberately increase military pressure on countries in the entire region.” The report is apparently referring to the USS Theodore Roosevelt, which has experienced an outbreak of the coronavirus infecting nearly 1,000 crew members.

The fact that China is finally managing to become a superpower – not just economically, but also geopolitically – during the tenure of U.S. President Donald Trump is not without irony. After all, it was Trump who promised during the election campaign that he would put China in its place.

Carbon Emissions Drop

Despite the World’s economies going into a semi-coordinated hibernation, CO² emissions have only dropped around 8%. Sounds great, but, if we’re to stay under 1.5C, our emissions need to drop by that amount every year (plus, stay down!) So, where are all the emissions coming from?

So where are all those emissions coming from? For one thing, utilities are still generating roughly the same amount of electricity — even if more of it’s going to houses instead of workplaces. Electricity and heating combined account for over 40 percent of global emissions. Many people around the world rely on wood, coal, and natural gas to keep their homes warm and cook their food — and in most places, electricity isn’t so green either.

Even with a bigger proportion of the world working from home, people still need the grid to keep the lights on and connect to the internet. “There’s a shift from offices to homes, but the power hasn’t been turned off, and that power is still being generated largely by fossil fuels,” Schmidt said. In the United States, 60 percent of electricity generation still comes from coal, oil, and natural gas.

Australia has some of the biggest natural gas reserves in the world, so when looking around for something to juice the post-C19 economy, what better solution than to push gas as the best option, despite the fact that it’s not a climate friendly as people think.

Both Woodside and Santos have resisted the push, and argued that gas is a “clean” fuel and part of the climate solution. Like Taylor, they claim Australian gas exports are an environmental good as they reduce coal in Asia. Neither the government nor industry have provided evidence to back this up, and officials have acknowledged the competition in Japan – still Australia’s biggest gas market – is increasingly with zero emissions nuclear and renewable generation.

Andrew Grant, head of oil, gas and mining with London-based financial thinktank Carbon Tracker, says the global view of gas has flipped from it being seen as a cleaner fuel than coal, to it being the second-least desirable source of electricity.

Apparently it’s the future, though that’s not supported by any evidence - it’s just a useful way of trying to force fracking upon the states against their populations’ will.

A grasshopper on my garden fence.

That dot above they second set of legs is its tympanum - basically its ear.

A Hibiscus Harlequin Bug apparently. Landed on my finger at Wilsons Outlook Reserve last weekend.

Mutation Tracking

Interesting article from the New York Times on tracking the spread of C19 by looking at genetic mutations in samples from various places.

That combination of old and new mutations suggested that the student did not acquire the coronavirus from someone who had recently arrived from another country. Instead, the coronavirus was probably circulating undetected in the Seattle area for about five weeks, since mid-January.

Since then, viruses with a genetic link to the Washington cluster have now appeared in at least 14 states and several countries around the world, as well as nine cases on the Grand Princess cruise ship.

Mobile Positioning

With various countries rolling out apps to assist with contact tracing, here’s a look at the various ways to determine position from a mobile phone and why Bluetooth makes the most sense for those apps.

This tells you not much – if anything at all about absolute location, but it does tell you about proximity with high confidence and decent precision and isn’t as creepy as RRLPing the planet. That sounds like what we’re after and there’s a good reason the Singaporean health ministry, NHSX, the Apple/Google joint project, and a bunch of others have converged on solutions that use BLE plus public-key cryptography. It does have some problems – notably, as Ross Anderson points out, it’s still radio and it doesn’t care if you were on opposite sides of double glazing, and there are complicated platform restrictions in Apple iOS to stop you being creepy and weird with it.

Humanity

Finally, Tim Harford has a nice reminder that despite all the stories of bad behaviour, the vast majority of people are actually well-behaved in a crisis

…a mere 3 per cent of shoppers had bought “extraordinary amounts” of pasta. Most of us were merely adjusting our habits to life spent away from restaurants, sandwich bars and offices with their own loo paper. We all went shopping a bit more often, and when we did, spent a little more. No cause for collective shame, but it was enough to strain supermarket supply chains.

What about those who ignore pleas to keep their distance? Again, the misdeeds are exaggerated. Lambeth council grumpily closed Brockwell Park in south London, complaining of 3,000 visitors in a single day — not mentioning that the park might easily see 10 times that number on a normal sunny Saturday, nor that taking exercise in a park is perfectly permissible.

General Nutters

The nut jobs are out in force with various fanciful theories related to C19, mostly designed to deflect criticism of Dear Leader Trump’s inept response and idiotic press statements. Bill Gates is a recent target.

Mr. Gates, 64, the Microsoft co-founder turned philanthropist, has now become the star of an explosion of conspiracy theories about the coronavirus outbreak. In posts on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, he is being falsely portrayed as the creator of Covid-19, as a profiteer from a virus vaccine, and as part of a dastardly plot to use the illness to cull or surveil the global population.

Apparently the fact that he gave a TED talk a few years ago is reason enough to have nutters foaming at the mouth.

How long more?

Der Speigel has an interesting interview with Dr. Gabriel Leung, Hong Kong epidemiologist, going over his thoughts on how we start coming out of lockdown - balancing the economic impact against the ongoing impact of the virus.

The baseline is: Every year, the flu kills a lot of people in Europe, thousands, even tens of thousands. But you don’t get a riot every year. So, it seems to be acceptable to people to deal with that level of morbidity and mortality. Nobody likes it, but it is tolerated. Nobody asks for zero flu deaths. But if you exceed the capacity of your ICUs, then you would be breaching a very red line. So, somewhere between what people tolerate by implication every year and having completely overwhelmed ICUs like in New York City, somewhere between these extremes lie your tolerance levels.

Contact Tracing Apps

Governments are busy building apps to help with contact tracing via Bluetooth, which are hampered by the phone’s privacy protections. Normally we do not want to be tracked, so iOS in particular places sever restrictions on how an app can use Bluetooth in the background, rendering most contact-tracing apps useless.

But the policies, unveiled last week, apply only to apps that don’t result in the creation of a centralised database of contacts. That means that if the NHS goes ahead with its original plans, its app would face severe limitations on its operation.

The app would not work if the phone’s screen was turned off or if an app other than the contact tracer was being used at the same time. It would require the screen to be active all the time, rapidly running down battery life, and would leave users’ personal data at risk if their phone was lost or stolen while the app was in use.

Australia launched its app yesterday despite the above issues. It doesn’t work on iPhones unless it’s on screen. Apple and Google are working on their own interoperable changes to allow contact tracing apps to work in the background, but only in a strictly anonymised mode, so will be interesting to see how that fits in with various Governments’ plans.

Today’s biology lesson answers the question Why Do We Keep Getting Diseases from Bats? with a look at the differences between our respective immune systems.

…bat cells just continually assume they’re under attack and never stop fighting viruses, regardless of whether they’ve detected any. This is surprising. Interferon is a really powerful molecule, and continually producing it should have the same effect on a cell as continually putting a factory on red alert. It should make the cell run much worse, and cause a lot of collateral damage.

After all, when this sort of immune system overreaction happens in humans, humans get serious disorders, like Multiple Sclerosis and Lupus. Bats do not tend to get these. In fact, many bat species live around 20 years on average, which is not only way longer than it should have with its overactive immune system, but is exceptionally long for such a small animal. To give a comparison, rats live a year or two, as do rabbits.

There’s lots more, explaining how bats can live such relatively long lives with an “always-on” immune system, and also why their immune system evolved to be that way.

As an aside, I wasn’t aware that we had Natural Killer (NK) cells…

NK cells are as heavy duty as their name implies; while their cousins, T cells, kill any cell that displays signs of being infected, NK cells kill any cells that don’t display signs of being not infected. Viruses will frequently prevent cells from indicating that they’re infected, so NK cells just kill any cell that looks like it’s hiding something.

No messing around there!