Just The Caffeine Talking

Endgames

We're all following the progress of the war in Ukraine, bouncing around between hope, fear, and utter bafflement. I'd like to take a step back and think about what the results of this conflict are likely to be. I see five paths, and only one of them is not terrible.

Russian Victory: supposing the Russians solve their logistical and command problems, unleash the full strength of their air force, call in more troops, and grind down the Ukrainians by sheer weight of force. Possibly even nuclear force. What then? Russia remains a pariah state, isolated from the global economy and global society. Ukraine will be a bloody open wound for a generation, drawing in a steady flow of Russian troops and sending home body bags, while Putin's security services revert to the worst Soviet methods on a large scale. Paranoid but protected by its nuclear arsenal, Russia would export terror and subversion to its neighbors. We get a new Cold War, as tense and vicious as the old one.

Ukraine Buys Peace: this, to me, is the most likely outcome but it's not a good one. We have a negotiated settlement which gives Russia control of a big chunk of eastern Ukraine, and possibly puts limits on Ukraine's defenses in the future. Ukraine survives but pays a heavy cost, and Vladimir Putin can claim victory and continue in power. What result? Most of the economic sanctions on Russia remain in place, though there will be more room for countries like China to find loopholes to exploit. Again, we get a reborn Cold War, and Russia continues its campaigns of corruption and subversion in Ukraine and elsewhere.

Ukraine and Putin Hold: the Ukrainians throw back the Russian invasion and Putin decides to cut his losses and accept some fig-leaf settlement. Putin proves better at murdering potential rivals than at planning foreign invasions, and remains in power despite the obvious military defeat. Again, this leads to a revived Cold War, Russia as a pariah, and more low-level meddling. The good news is that Ukraine becomes the bastion of Europe, integrated into the European Union and NATO. The bad news is that we go back to 1980s levels of military expenditure and diplomatic infighting.

Putin Falls: the Russian Duma (we hope) or some ambitious general (we fear) take direct steps to remove Putin from power and call the troops home. Everything gets blamed on the late Vlad, Russia's new leadership promise to behave, and the sanctions get relaxed in stages. Essentially a repeat of the Yeltsin years. This is probably the best possible outcome, so my sincerest best wishes to any Russian leaders reading this. Go for it, dude!

Russia Falls: whoever decides to remove Putin sets off a cascade of coups and power grabs by generals, regional governors, and organized crime bosses. This is basically the situation we all felt lucky to avoid in 1991 — a nuclear-armed superpower descending into chaos. The best result of this scenario is a nasty counter-insurgency campaign by international forces to keep order and secure the missile silos, a perpetually unstable Russian government, lots of small-time strongmen, and China quietly annexes everything east of the Urals. The worst result is terrorists and rogue states getting and using Russian nuclear weapons.

If anyone can come up with another optimistic scenario, I'd love to hear it.

 

Victory Conditions

One of the most baffling things about Russia's invasion of Ukraine, to Westerners, is that it seems impossible to succeed. If the Russian army gets badly mauled and driven out, Putin gets forced from power and probably shot in the back of the head. If the Russians somehow manage to occupy the entire vast expanse of Ukraine, then they spend the next decade or more dealing with an insurgency that would make 1980s Afghanistan look like Disney World. And either way the economic sanctions have completely wrecked the Russian economy. 

But . . . that's looking at things from our perspective. From a Western, democratic, free-market, classical liberal perspective. Vladimir Putin is none of those things. He grew up, thrived, and prospered in the Communist Soviet Union. When he took power he tried to combine old Soviet elements with even older traditional Russian nationalist strains. He is not, and has never been a "Westernizer." 

Which means that, from his point of view, Russia as a pariah state, a hermit empire, disconnected from the global economy and isolated from world society . . . is a good thing. Far from being a deterrent to his aggression in Ukraine, it's a fringe benefit.

This is a man who grew up immersed in Soviet teachings about "capitalist decadence" as well as the older Russian suspicion of merchants and outsiders. Like another European political figure, he probably sees himself battling against "international money and finance conspirators." If he can grab Ukraine, eliminate anyone who opposes him, and sweep away three decades of "Western capitalist corruption," leaving Russia poorer, meaner — but purified and authentically Russian once more, he will call it a victory.

We'll see if other Russians agree with him. 

Orwell on Putin

Well, not Putin, actually. Another political leader noted for aggression in Eastern Europe. Orwell reviewed a book written by that leader and speculated on the reasons for his political success:

"[That guy], because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades."

I'm posting this quote because it seems to me that once again Western leaders (and everyone else) are making their characteristic mistake of assuming every other leader (and every other population) want what they want. Right now you see endless Tweets, headlines, and pundits calling Putin "mad."

Nope. He's no more mad than [That guy] was. He just doesn't share our motivations. For all our professed love of diversity and tolerance we are abysmally bad at actually understanding people who don't share our Enlightenment-era Anglosphere way of thinking. We've seen this in the Middle East, we've seen it in Asia, we've seen it in Latin America, we've seen it in Africa.

Sanctions and speeches and hashtags and Facebook banners aren't going to stop this. We need to help Ukraine with tangible, physical aid — or admit to ourselves that this is just a lot of feel-good posturing to compensate for our impotence.

Oh, and keep an eye on the Taiwan Strait . . .

Which War?

At the end of this month the people of Deerfield, Massachusetts will observe the 318th anniversary of the 1704 Raid on Deerfield. This was not the first attack on the town in its early decades, nor the last, but it was definitely the most devastating.

But nowadays people are a little vague about why it happened.

Often it's attributed to the "French and Indian War." Right enemies, but wrong war. That one was in 1754-1763, part of the global Seven Years' War. The Deerfield Raid was half a century earlier, part of a different conflict waged across Europe and the colonies.

That war was known as Queen Anne's War, and lasted from 1702 to 1713. It was basically a sideshow of the War of the Spanish Succession, which started a year earlier and ended a year later.

The cause of the war was, basically, Habsburg inbreeding. The Habsburg dynasty ruled a huge chunk of the world: Austria, Hungary, northern Italy, various bits of Germany, Belgium, Spain, parts of Italy, Mexico, Peru, other parts of South America, some pieces of Africa, the Philippines — and far too many minor duchies, islands, and colonies to list. They divided it all up among different branches of the family, but the clan remained closely allied against their two primary enemies: the Bourbon dynasty of France, and the loose coalition of Protestant kingdoms in northern Europe led by the British.

To keep their vast dominions together, the Habsburgs married within the family, making heavy use of their political clout to get special dispensations from the Pope to allow unions which otherwise would be illegal.

The end result of all that was King Charles II of Spain. His parents were uncle and niece, and their parents were all first cousins. Any geneticist will tell you this is a terrible idea, and a look at the official portrait of the King bears that out. The poor man couldn't chew his food properly because his Habsburg chin was so exaggerated. He had a whole raft of other chronic health problems, and it's not really surprising that he was unable to produce an heir. Nor did he have any brothers or sisters to inherit the Spanish empire.

Actually, the problem wasn't enough heirs, it was too many. Without an immediate blood relative to inherit, the line of succession got hopelessly tangled up in a mass of claimants — Habsburgs, Bourbons (because when they weren't fighting wars they were swapping princesses to keep the peace), and various minor royalty across Europe. 

When Charles died, he left the entire Kingdom of Spain and all its dominions to Philip of Anjou, who was the grandson of Louis XIV of France. A Bourbon, and in the line of succession to the throne of France. This was of course intolerable to the other Habsburgs and the British. Spain plus France would dominate Europe. Alliances quickly reshuffled and a global brawl broke out.

The French side included France and Spain, plus their extensive colonial empires (including Canada and Louisiana). Their allies at the start of the war included Bavaria, Savoy (in northwest Italy), the Spanish-ruled Kingdom of Naples, the Spanish Netherlands (modern Belgium) — and a number of Native American groups including the Abenaki Confederacy, some Mohawk bands, the Choctaws, the Natchez, and some smaller groupings.

On the other side were England, the Austrian Empire, the Dutch Republic, the Kingdom of Prussia, Portugal, and all of their colonies and allied tribes. Including, of course, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, with Deerfield sitting all by itself at the northwestern frontier.

The war lasted 13 years, involving battles across Europe, in North America, in India and elsewhere in Asia, and lots of "privateering" at sea. And, of course, the Raid on Deerfield. Several countries switched sides during the conflict, or dropped out when the expense got too great.

When all the dust cleared in 1714, Philip of Anjou remained as Philip V of Spain. France had turned one of its most dangerous enemies into a family-run ally, though the price was that France and Spain could never have the same monarch. Spain kept her colonial empire but had to hand off all her dependencies in Europe to Habsburg Austria. France lost her colonies in Acadia and Newfoundland, and many of the French settlers there migrated to Louisiana. Britain also gained control of Gibraltar, and access to trade with Spain's colonial empire. Oh, and John Churchill got to be Duke of Marlborough for winning a lot of battles.

In short, fifty people in Deerfield got killed and a hundred taken off to Canada as prisoners because too many Habsburgs married their cousins.

Auction Action!

Today the Friends of Deerfield are launching an online auction to raise funds for Deerfield's 350th anniversary celebration in 2023. Items for sale include antiques, sports memorabilia, gift cards, and artworks. But my readers may be especially interested in the books.

We've got signed collections of first editions by Western Massachusetts SF and fantasy authors: Elizabeth Bear, me, John Crowley, Paul Park, and Allen Steele. If any of you are collectors, this is a gold mine. Note that all of the authors have asked to not be told how much their books fetch at auction. (I probably won't be able to avoid seeing it myself.)

The auction ends November 15, so keep checking the page to see how the bidding is going. I've heard that the last few hours can get really exciting. Here's the link again.

Let the bidding begin!

The Day of Gold

Fall in New England is famous for its beauty. People come here from all over the country to go "leaf-peeping" in the countryside. In Deerfield we're ready for them with scented candles, artisanal baked goods, microbrews, maple candy, fossils, crafts, and restaurants.

But when does Fall begin? On September 22 I heard a radio host announcing the "official" beginning of Fall, as that day is the autumnal equinox — the time when the Earth's tilted axis is side-on to the Sun, so that all over the world the days and nights are of equal length. In the northern hemisphere the nights are going to get longer, in the southern hemisphere they're going to get shorter, but in late September we all have the same amount of daylight. It's the start of astronomical autumn, which lasts until the winter solstice in late December.

However, that's only one definition. Other dates for the start of autumn are the beginning of the grain harvest season, which in pre-modern Europe was August 1; or Labor Day, when summer vacation ends and well-dressed people switch to winter styles. In warm climates, where Fall is a fairly abstract concept anyway, the season is simply the months of September through November.

For me, Fall in New England starts with the Day of Gold, which isn't marked on any calendar. It's the day that the ferns and the birch trees on my land have lost their summer green, but haven't yet withered to brown. For just a little while, everything is golden wherever I look. Then I know that Fall has really arrived.

AlbaCon 2021!

It takes more than an endemic to keep Albany's long-running SF convention down. AlbaCon 2021 is going on tonight and through this weekend, but only in virtual form.

I'll be there, participating in four events:

At 10:00 a.m. on Saturday the 18th I'll be part of a panel discussing "No One Goes to Space Anymore." Given that we just watched four private passengers launch into orbit, I'm going to be questioning the premises of that topic.

At 11:00 a.m. I'll be talking about "Why the DCU and the MCU Are So Different."

After a short break for lunch I'm doing a reading from The Godel Operation at 1:30. 

And then from 2-6 p.m. I'm running an online Weird War 1 game, "The Black Khan."

Afterward, drinks in the hotel bar. First round's on me.

 

A Chilling Analysis

This article, "The Good Death — Cancel Culture and the Logic of Torture," by Christopher Van Eecke takes a look at the phenomenon of online Twitter mobs and their fetish for destroying lives and inflicting public humiliation on people. He finds a useful — and disturbing — parallel in the public torture and executions of past centuries. The fact that the worst excesses of "cancel culture" come from people who loudly praise themselves for their empathy and compassion is particularly grotesque.

Bari Weiss has a personal account by academic Peter Boghossian of his experiences as the target of a Twitter mob. What's particularly awful in his story is the way he was abandoned by his institution and his colleagues. I don't know if it's cowardice or malice, but this will only end when people running large institutions like academia, government, and corporations stop going along with these witch-hunts and lynch mobs.

It must end soon, because our society will not survive if it doesn't.

The Endemic

Note: I haven't put up any new blog posts for several weeks, and this one is the reason. I've been thinking about this piece for a while, but was reluctant to post it because I didn't want to feed the endless anger. Nevertheless, I think it's important, so here we go.

The definition of an epidemic is "An outbreak of disease that spreads quickly and affects many individuals at the same time."

A pandemic is "An outbreak of a disease that occurs over a wide geographic area . . . and typically affects a significant proportion of the population."

These two word have become excessively familiar to all of us over the past couple of years, but I'm afraid we need to get accustomed to a third term: endemic means "Characteristic of or prevalent in a particular field, area, or environment."

During the COVID-19 pandemic there has been a sense among people — both the general public and those in charge of making policies to deal with the disease — that it is temporary. That if we can just get enough people vaccinated, or lock down gatherings, or seal the borders, or get everyone masked up all the time, then it will go away and everything will return to normal.

I'm afraid that's not going to happen. The COVID-19 virus isn't going away. It will never go away, not completely. This is no brushfire pandemic that sweeps the world and then vanishes. No, this disease is now endemic to the entire world. It will be with us for decades, possibly forever.

Some diseases, like smallpox, are transmitted only from human to human, and can't reinfect people who are immune. We were able to literally drive smallpox to extinction. Polio is spread by contaminated food and water, and also only affects humans. By vaccinating and improving sanitation, we have gotten the number of cases down to just a few dozen worldwide. AIDS is spread by sharing body fluids, and even though there is no vaccine, education about safe sex practices and the development of antiviral drugs has drastically reduced the number of cases.

But COVID-19 isn't like those diseases. It isn't easy to stop and it will never be eliminated.

First of all, it has already spread throughout the entire world. It can't be confined to a "hot zone" where it will burn itself out. The Chinese government failed to do that, and denied there was a problem until it was far too late to prevent COVID-19 from breaking out of Wuhan and spanning the globe. No sub-group is more at risk of catching it than anyone else. No simple measures will prevent its spread.

Second, vaccination isn't the "firewall" for COVID-19 that it is for, say, smallpox. Even after vaccination, people can catch it. Their cases tend to be much less severe, which is very good — but by the same token that implies a large number of vaccinated people can have mild or asymptomatic cases without realizing it. This means that even if everyone is vaccinated, the virus will survive. And if it survives it can continue to mutate, brewing up new variant strains. It's likely that some of those variants will slip past the antibodies of vaccinated individuals, setting off new rounds of infection and transmission. We can't exterminate this virus.

Third, we're pretty sure the original virus came from an animal host, most likely bats. There are a lot of bats in the world. A lot of them live in and around human-occupied structures, so that people get exposed to their urine and feces. We don't know about other possible animal reservoirs. Other primates might be susceptible, too. All this means that the COVID-19 virus and its variants have a reservoir apart from the human population, where the virus can survive and mutate. We can't eradicate bats (nor would we wish to), so there's no way to get rid of COVID-19 in the wild.

It's not going away. It's never going away. We will never reach zero cases.

Am I just counseling despair, here? No. Quite the reverse, in fact. I think we should stop treating COVID-19 as a crisis. It's an ongoing, endemic problem, part of the world from now on, and we must face it on those terms.

Treatment should become the focus of medical research and public policy. If we're not going to be able to stop people from catching it, then we should be working to stop them from dying from it. Instead of tracking case numbers we should be watching the death rate. We should be working on antiviral drugs with the same fervor we developed vaccines, and investigating ways to mitigate or prevent the lingering side effects of the virus.

Another useful step would be to tone down the social division and anger. This disease isn't going away, which means that there's no point in scapegoating the unvaccinated. They'll get the shot, or get the disease, and they'll either live or die. The virus will remain. Screaming at people and moral posturing won't change that.

Finally, the crisis must end. Arbitrary and contradictory rules, economic damage and travel restrictions, censorship and scapegoating all need to stop. They're making us all insane. Nobody wants those things to go on indefinitely, they aren't going to make the disease disappear, so end them. Reduce the stress, reduce the panic, reduce the anger, reduce the fear.

I expect getting each year's COVID variant vaccine will become as routine and uninteresting as getting a flu shot. We'll probably adopt the habit of wearing masks if you think you're contagious. People will get sick from the disease and recover, just as they do with the flu, mono, walking pneumonia, shingles, and other endemic diseases. And as with those diseases, some of the infected will die. Nobody can prevent that.

The good news is that diseases mellow out over time. The strains that kill their victims don't survive as well as the milder ones. Combine that with better treatment, better medicines, and the immune response boost from vaccinations, and in a few years nobody will worry. We've gone through far more deadly epidemics. It's going to be all right.

For more on this subject, check out these articles from The Atlantic (sorry about the paywall).

Ed Yong on the Pandemic Endgame.

Sarah Zhang: The Coronavirus Is Here Forever.

Wood

I grew up in an old house with a fireplace, in a city where it is a news-worthy event when the temperature gets below freezing on a winter night. My father would sometimes light a fire, but it was entirely an aesthetic experience. I never paid attention, but I'll bet the gas heater ran more when the fireplace was in use than when it wasn't. Our woodpile consisted of just a few dozen segments of tree limbs, pruned from the trees around the house or scavenged from where city workers were trimming the live oaks on St. Charles Avenue.

When I moved to my current house in Deerfield, it had a fireplace — and about four acres of trees. The woods are mostly maple, gradually being replaced by oak, with fast-growing birches at the edges and a few big old pines. Naturally, I wanted to use the fireplace, so I had to learn to cut and split wood. For several years I used a handsaw to cut fallen trees, and an axe someone gave me to split the cut segments.

We rapidly discovered that in a modern insulated house, burning wood in the fireplace is a good way to cool the place off in winter. The fire sucks in air from the outside through cracks and under doors, and shoots most of the warm air straight up the chimney. For a time we could only have fires when the temperature was above sixty degrees, which definitely ruins the appeal of a blazing fire on a snowy night.

So a few years later we got a fireplace insert. I had been advocating for a free-standing wood stove (more efficient) but my wife pointed out that 1.) it would eat up a big slice of floor space we couldn't really spare in the living room, and 2.) we had small children. So I got an insert, which is basically a wood stove that fits into the fireplace and has a little fan to circulate air around it.

That worked far better than I would have believed. With just wood burning in the fireplace I can keep my house comfortable even if the temperature outside is down to freezing. Below freezing the gas-powered baseboard radiators have to take up some of the load. I suspect that if the fireplace was located in the center of the house, rather than on an exterior wall, we might be able to manage in even colder weather.

Having a fireplace that wasn't a cooling system meant that we burned a lot more wood. Which led my wife to buy me a chainsaw for my birthday, as sawing through tree trunks by hand was just too inefficient. Around the same time I also bought myself a proper splitting maul, and then a sledgehammer and iron wedge for the really tough pieces.

I've been cutting and splitting my own wood for a decade now, and I've learned quite a bit. One of those things is a tremendous appreciation for the men of the pioneer era who did all their wood-cutting with axes.

Felling a tree and cutting it into segments with a chainsaw is sweaty work, about the same way mowing a lawn with a power mower is hard work. But cutting a tree with an axe is about a hundred times more difficult, and that's not hyperbole. Each swing of the axe cuts a little chip, the width of the blade and maybe a quarter-inch thick. Chopping through even a modest-sized tree with a foot-wide trunk takes a couple of hundred swings.

Everything in the colonial era depended on cutting wood. If you wanted to grow food, you had to cut down all the trees on the land you wanted to farm. And those weren't the piddly little third-growth trees you'll see on my land today. Those were massive old-growth elms, oaks, and chestnut trees with trunks a yard wide. Clearing a field meant days of back-breaking work to cut them down, then more work to uproot the stumps. The air must have been full of the sound of axes year-round.

And it was a good thing you had all those cut trees, because you'd need the wood to build your house. More wood to make barrels and buckets. You'd save the especially straight limbs of oak and hickory to make new handles for your axe, because all that chopping would wear out handles in just a few weeks.

All those demands were dwarfed by the need for firewood. Every house had a fire burning all the time. Wood powered cooking, wood powered clothes-drying when there wasn't sunshine (i.e. nine months of the year). And burning wood kept the house warm enough to keep the inhabitants from freezing to death. Barely.

Every bit of that wood was cut and split by someone with an axe. The sheer amount of calories needed for that work was immense. There's a reason why early Americans in portraits and old photos look so lean and rawboned. They were burning calories at a rate matched nowadays only by professional athletes in training. Until the arrival of the railroad made it possible to buy wood or coal for home use, I doubt there were any overweight people in Deerfield, simply from the work needed to keep their fireplaces and stoves burning.

(This post also appears at the Friends of Deerfield Facebook page. Check it out for more on the town of Deerfield, its history and wildlife, and the upcoming 350th Anniversary celebration!)