Hey there,
Welcome to the latest edition of Weekly Crystallizations, a weekly newsletter where I highlight tweets (and occasional Telegram messages) from people making sense of what’s going on in the world today!
COVID
SARS-CoV-2 origins
Alex and team come out with a pre-print investigating the origins of SARS-CoV-2 and conclude it's likely lab-derived. This thread is a nice human-readable sumamry.
European crisis
A list of agricultural produce that farmers are no longer able to plant in the fall due to nitrogen concerns. Earlier in the thread there's a a clip of a Dutch farmer bemoaning this list as it all but eliminates the options they have, forcing the Dutch to import in the future many of the things on this list.
Michael Shellenberger on a tear.
Censorship
"The Biden administration is reportedly considering opening a national security review of Elon Musk's business ventures which could see the plutocrat's purchase of Twitter blocked by the White House, in part because Musk is perceived as having an "increasingly Russia-friendly stance."
Vaccine harms
Russo-Ukrainian War
"What matters in this story is not that Musk was told off, but rather, that a Twitter hive mind is using the same intolerant cancellation tactics that they use to shut down debate on domestic political issues in order to shape U.S. policy toward Ukraine. They are doing so by demonizing dissent, defaming opponents, and closing off as ideologically unacceptable any path to peace or even deescalation."
Interesting discussion between Judge Napolitano and former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter. Scott's position is that the Ukrainian army capabilities are now slowly crumbling as Russia's is getting stronger.
Financial reset
Reminder: inflation is an invisible tax
Misc
Excess deaths
Multiple countries are reporting cumulative excess deaths compared to historical averages. It doesn't seem like vaccination campaigns are the culprit, or even the main culprit, because certain high vaxxed countries still have low excess deaths. It seems it might have something to do with the negative implications of COVID policies but it still seems unclear.
Excess deaths by country as reported by the Economist. Sweden here is notable for not being an outlier in excess deaths despite being an outlier in COVID policy.
Persistent excess deaths in Australia.
Persistent excess deaths in the Netherlands
Unconfirmed
Interesting hypotheses in the replies ranging from vaccines, to COVID policies, to AirPods.
Misc
This is an interesting finding as it coincides (more or less) with the point in time which Professor Jonathan Haidt identifies with the introduction of the like/retweet buttons on social media and a precipitous increase in (among other things) teen depression. Perhaps the way media learned to deal with the new social media algorithms (around 2012) was by pulling your emotional levers.
AI
This tweet and its comments prompted me to start using github copilot, which is an AI assistant for programmers. So far I'm moderately impressed. It seems AI tools are now appearing everywhere.