When Science Fails: Surrogate endpoints and wrong conclusions

 

Galileo Galilei and Anthony Fauci are linked to each other by a chain of events that started at the beginning of modern science, during the 17th century. But the Science that Fauci claimed to represent is very different from that of Galileo. While Galileo studied simple linear systems, modern science attempts to study complex, multi-parameter systems, where the rigid Galilean method just cannot work. The problem is that, while it is obvious that we can measure only what we can measure, that's not necessarily what we want, or need, to measure. Tests based on "surrogate endpoints" may well be the best we can do in medicine and other fields, but we should understand that the results are not, and cannot be, a source of absolute scientific truth.

The Scientific Method

Galileo Galilei is correctly remembered as the father of modern science because he invented what we call today the "scientific method," sometimes still called the "Galilean method." It is supposed to be the basis of modern science; the feature that makes it able to be called "Science" with a capital first letter, as we were told over and over during the Covid pandemic. But what is really this scientific method that's supposed to lead us to the truth? 

Galileo's paradigmatic idea was an experiment about the speed of falling objects. It is said that he took two solid metal balls of different weights and dropped them from the top of the Pisa Tower. He then noted that they arrived at the ground at about the same time. That allowed him to lampoon an ancient authority such as Aristotle for having said that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones (*). There followed an avalanche of insults to Aristotle that continues to this day. Even Bertrand Russel fell into the trap of poking fun at Aristotle, accused of having said that women have fewer teeth than men. Too bad that he never said anything like that.

It may well be that Galileo was not the first to perform this experiment, and it is not even clear that he actually performed it, but that's a detail. The point is that the result was evident, clear-cut, and irrefutable. Later, Newton started from this result to arrive to the assumption that the same force that acted on an apple falling from a tree in his garden was acting on the Moon and the planets. From then on, science was supposed to be largely based on laboratory experiments or, anyway, experiments performed in tightly controlled conditions. It was a major change of paradigm: the basis of the scientific method as we understood it today.

The Pisa Tower experiment succeeded in separating the two parameters that affect a falling body: the force of gravity and the air drag. That was relatively easy, but what about systems that have many parameters affecting each other? Here, let me start with the case of health care, which is supposed to be a scientific field, but where the problem of separating the parameters is nearly impossible to overcome.

The surrogate endpoint in medicine

How can you apply the scientific method in medicine? Dropping a sick person and a healthy one from the top of the Pisa Tower won't help you so much. The problem is the large number of parameters that affect the nebulous entity called "health" and the fact that they all strongly interact with each other. 

So, imagine you were sick, and then you feel much better. Why exactly? Was it because you took some pills? Or would you have recovered anyway? And can you say that you wouldn't have recovered faster hadn't you taken the pill? A lot of quackery in medicine arises from these basic uncertainties: how do you determine what is the specific cause of a certain effect? In other words, is a certain medical treatment really curing people, or is it just their imagination that makes them think so?

Medical researchers have worked hard at developing reliable methods for drug testing, and you probably know that the "gold standard" in medicine is the "Randomized Controlled Test" (RCT). The idea of RCTs is that you test a drug or a treatment by keeping all the parameters constant except one: taking or not taking the drug. It is designed to avoid the effect called "placebo" (the patient gets better because she believes that the drug works, even though she is not receiving it) and the one called "nocebo" (the patient gets worse because he believes that the drug is harmful, even though he is not receiving it). 

An RCT involves a complex procedure that starts with separating the patients into two similar groups, making sure that none of them knows to which group she belongs (the test is "blinded"). Then, the members of one of the two groups are given the drug, say, in the form of a pill. The others are given a sugar pill (the "placebo"). After a certain time, it is possible to examine if the treatment group did better than the control group. There are statistical methods used to determine whether the observed differences are significant or not. Then, if they are, and if you did everything well, you know if the treatment is effective, or does nothing, or maybe it causes bad effects.  

For limited purposes, the RCT approach works, but it has enormous problems. A correctly performed RCT is expensive and complex, its results are often uncertain and, sometimes, turn out to be plain wrong. Do you remember the case of "Thalidomide"? It was tested, found to work as a tranquilizer, and approved for general use in the 1960s in Europe. It was later discovered that it had teratogenic effects on fetuses, and some 10.000 babies in Europe were born without arms and legs before the drug was removed from the market. Tests on animals would have shown the problem, but they were not performed or were not performed correctly. 

Of course, the rules have been considerably tightened after the Thalidomide disaster and, nowadays, testing on animals is required before a new drug is tested on humans. But let's note, in passing, that in the case of the mRNA Covid vaccines, tests on animals were performed in parallel (and not before) testing on humans. This procedure exposed volunteers to risks that normally would not be considered acceptable with drug testing. Fortunately, it does not appear that mRNA vaccines have teratogenic effects. 

Even assuming that the tests are complete, and performed according to the rules, there is another gigantic problem with RCT: What do you measure during the test?  Ideally, drugs are aimed at improving people's health, but how do you quantify "health"? There are definitions of health in terms of indices called QALY (quality-adjusted life years) or QoL (quality of life). But both are difficult to measure and, if you want long-term data, you have to wait for a long time. So, in practice, "surrogate endpoints" are used in drug testing.  

A surrogate endpoint aims at defining measurable parameters that approximate the true endpoint -- a patient's health. A typical surrogate endpoint is, for instance, blood pressure as an indicator of cardiovascular health. The problem is that a surrogate endpoint is not necessarily related to a person's health and that you always face the possibility of negative effects. In the case of drugs used to treat hypertension, negative effects exist and are well known, but it is normally believed that the positive effects of the drug on the patient's health overcome the negative ones. But that's not always the case. A recent example is how, in 2008, the drug bevacizumab was approved in the US by FDA for the treatment of breast cancer on the basis of surrogate endpoint testing. It was withdrawn in 2011, when it was discovered that it was toxic and that it didn't lead to improvements in cancer progression (you can read the whole story in "Malignant" by Vinayak Prasad).  

Consider now another basic problem. Not only the number of parameters affecting people's health are many, but they strongly interact with each other, as is typical of complex systems. The problem may take the form called "polydrug use," and it especially affects old people who accumulate drugs on their bedstands, just like old cars accumulate dents on their bodies. An RCT test that evaluates one drug is already expensive and lengthy; evaluating all the possible combinations of several drugs is a nightmare. If you have two drugs, A and B, you have to go through at least three tests: A alone, B alone, and the combination of A+B. If you have three drugs, you have seven tests to do (A, B, C, AB, BC, AC and ABC). And the numbers grow rapidly. In practice, nobody knows the effects of these multiple drug uses, and, likely, nobody ever will. But a common observation is that when the elderly reduce the number of medicines they take, their health immediately improves (this effect is not validated by RCTs, but that does not mean it is not true. I noted it for my mother-in-law who died at 101). 

The case of Face Masks 

Some medical interventions have specific problems that make RCTs especially difficult. An example is that of face masks to prevent the spreading of an airborne pathogen. Evidently, there is no way to perform a blind test with face masks, but the real problem is what to use as a surrogate end-point. At the beginning of the Covid pandemic, several studies were performed using cameras to detect liquid droplets emitted by people breathing or sneezing with or without face masks. That was a typical "Galilean," laboratory approach, but what does it demonstrate? Assuming that you can determine if and how much a mask reduces the emission of droplets, is this relevant in terms of stopping the transmission of an airborne pathogen? As a surrogate endpoint, droplets are at best poor, at worst misleading.  

A much better endpoint is the PCR (polymerase chain reaction) test that can directly detect an infection. But even here, there are many problems. As an example, consider an often touted study performed in Pakistan that claimed to have demonstrated the effectiveness of face masks. Let's assume that the results of the study are statistically significant (really?) and that nobody tampered with the data (and we can never be sure of that in such a heavily politicized matter). Then, the best you can say is that if you live in a village in Pakistan, if there is a Covid wave ongoing, if the PCR tests are reliable, if the people who wore masks behave exactly like those who don't, and if random noise didn't affect the study too much, then by wearing a mask you can delay being infected for some time, and maybe even avoid infection altogether. Does the same result apply to you if you live in New York? Maybe. Is it valid for different conditions of viral diffusion and epidemic intensity? Almost certainly not. Does it ensure that you don't suffer adverse effects from wearing face masks? Duh! Would that make you healthier in the long run? We have no idea.

The Pakistan study is just one example of a series of studies on face masks that were found to be ill-conceived, poorly performed, inconclusive, or useless in a recent rigorous review published in the Cochrane Network. The final result is that no one has been able to detect a significant effect of face masks on the diffusion of an airborne disease, although we cannot say that the effect is actually zero. 

The confusion about face masks reached stellar levels during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, Tony Fauci, director of the NIAID, first advised against wearing masks, then he reversed his position and publicly declared that face masks are effective and even that two masks are better than just one. Additionally, he declared that the effectiveness of masks is "science" and, therefore, cannot be doubted. But, nowadays, Fauci has reversed his position, at least in terms of mask effectiveness at the population level. He still maintains that they can be useful for an individual "who religiously wears a mask." Now, imagine an RCT dedicated to demonstrating the different results of "religiously" and "non-religiously" wearing a mask. So much for science as a pillar of certainty. 

Surrogate endpoints everywhere

Medicine is a field that may be defined as "science" since it is based (or should be based) on data and measurements. But you see how difficult it is to apply the scientific method to it. Other fields of science suffer from similar problems. Climate science, ecosystem science, biological evolution, economics, management, policies, and others are cases in which you cannot reproduce the main features of the system in a laboratory and, at the same time, involve a large number of parameters interacting with each other in a non-linear manner. You could say, for instance, that the purpose of politics is to improve people's well-being. But how could that be measured? In general, it is believed that the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is a measure of the well-being of the economy and, hence, of all citizens. Then, it is concluded that economic growth is always good, and that it should be stimulated by all possible interventions. But is it true? GDP growth is another kind of surrogate endpoint used simply because we know how to measure it. But people's well-being is something that we don't know how to measure. 

Is a non-Galilean science possible? We have to start considering this possibility without turning to discard the need for good data and good measurements. But, for complex systems, we have to move away from the rigid Galilean method and use dynamic models. We are moving in that direction, but we still have to learn a lot about how to use models and, incidentally, the Covid19 pandemic showed us how models can be misused and lead to various kinds of disasters. But we need to move on, and I'll discuss this matter in detail in an upcoming post. 

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(*) Aristotle's "Physics" (Book VIII, chapter 10) where he discusses the relationship between the weight of an object and its speed of fall:

"Heavier things fall more quickly than lighter ones if they are not hindered, and this is natural, since they have a greater tendency towards the place that is natural to them. For the whole expanse that surrounds the earth is full of air, and all heavy things are borne up by the air because they are surrounded and pressed upon by it. But the air is not able to support a weight equal to itself, and therefore the heavier bodies, as having a greater proportion of weight, press more strongly upon and sink more quickly through the air than do the lighter bodies."

  

Another Epochal Failure of Humankind. How people are losing interest in the things that threaten them the most.

 

In 2018, I published on my "Cassandra's Legacy" blog a post titled, "Why, in a Few Years, Nobody Will be Talking About Climate Change Anymore." It turned out to be remarkably prophetic. 

From Gallup News, April 17, 2023

The percentages of Americans expressing a great deal of worry about air pollution and the loss of tropical rain forests have each fallen seven points since 2022, while worry about extinction of plant and animal species has declined five points, and the pollution of natural waterways and global warming or climate change are down four points each. Meanwhile, last year’s 57% high-level worry about polluted drinking water is statistically similar to this year’s 55%. Each of the current readings is at or tied for its lowest point since 2015 or 2016.

People are losing interest in the things that threaten them the most. This Gallup report is not the only evidence. News and comments about climate change, pollution, resource depletion, and the like have disappeared from the major news channels, as I had predicted in a post published four years ago, in 2018, 

Sometimes, I am scared of my own predictions, but this one requires some corrections to my interpretation. When I published my post, in 2018, I was convinced that the decline in interest in environmental matters was mostly created by governments applying the propaganda technique called "deception by omission." That is, governments actively intervened to keep these issues away from the news. 

Nowadays, I think that active omission is just one of the causes of the trend. Another one, probably more important, is the current economic situation. People's everyday life is becoming more and more difficult in terms of money, health, safety, and sheer survival. Most of us are unable to link our individual troubles with large-scale planetary problems. And, even if we were able to, it would be correct to conclude that there is nothing we can do about these problems. So, why worry about things we can't change? 

That generates a negative loop: if a subject is not interesting to people, then the media tend to ignore it. If the media ignore a subject, then it becomes less and less interesting. So, when Gallup goes interviewing people, they answer that they don't see the big problems as worrisome. There is little need for governments to intervene to keep some problems hidden, they tend to disappear from the news by themselves. 

The apathy of the public is just one of the facets of the way the perception of global problems has evolved. An even worse side of the problem is how the collapse of the prestige of science during the Covid epidemic has led to a disastrous loss of trust in anything that has to do with science. It is true that science has become corrupt, biased, elitist, unable to innovate, a tool for scaring people, and more of the like. But it is still a shock to see people whom I esteemed as intelligent and competent in their fields going into a full-spectrum refusal of anything that has to do with "official" science. 

Plenty of people I know refuse to accept even simple things that could help them in their everyday life. Insulate my apartment? It is part of a plan to dispossess the middle class of their homes. Install PV panels on my roof? They require more energy than they will produce. Replace my gas stove with an induction one? They want us to starve!  Reduce traffic pollution? It is a trick to take our cars away from us. Saving energy? It is because they want to enslave us!

To say nothing about those who went full bonkers with the idea that the Moon landing never happened, chemtrails are real, climate change is a hoax, the virus does not exist, oil and gas are infinite, and it is all a plot to exterminate humankind. This kind of things. 

Depressing? Of course, it is depressing. The term "depressing," alone, may not be adequate. (click here for 307 synonyms of "depressing" according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary). Call it the way you like, but the fact is that in three years of Covid panic, we lost 50 years of efforts to convince people to do something about keeping this poor planet (and us, living on its surface) in decent conditions. 

Perhaps it was unavoidable, but the question is,

Why we Can't Change Anything Before it is Too Late.

 

Yours truly, Ugo Bardi, in a recent interview on a local TV station. note the "Limits to Growth" t-shirt and, as a lapel pin, the ASPO-Italy logo. 

A few days ago, I was invited to an interview on a local TV about the energy transition. I prepared myself by collecting data. I was planning to bring to the attention of viewers a few recent studies that showed how urgent and necessary it is to move away from conventional engines, including a recent paper by Roberto Cazzolla-Gatti(*) that shows how the combustion of fossil fuels is one of the main causes of tumors in Italy. 

And then I had a minor epiphany in my mind. 

I saw myself from the other side of the camera, appearing on the screen in someone's living room. I saw myself as one more of those white-haired professors who tell viewers, "look, there is a grave danger ahead. You must do as I say, or disaster will ensue."

No way. 

I could see myself appearing to people as more or less the same as one of the many TV virologists who had terrorized people with the Covid story during the past three years. "There is a grave danger caused by a mysterious virus. If you don't do as I say, disaster will ensue." 

It scared people a lot, but only for a while. And now the poor performance of TV virologists, Tony Fauci and the others, cast a shade over the general validity of science. As a result, we now see a wave of anti-science sweeping the discussion while carrying along the flotsam of decades of legends. Fake lunar landings, earthquakes as weapons, how Greenland was green at the time of Erik the Red, and don't you know that climate has always been changing? Besides, Greta Thumberg is a bitch.

But it is not so much a fault of the TV virologists, although they have done their part in creating the damage. It is the human decisional system that works in a perverse way. More or less, it works like this:

1. Scientists identify a grave problem and try to warn people about it. 
2. The scientists are first demonized, then ignored.
3. Nothing is done about the problem.
4. When it is discovered that the warning was correct, it is too late. 

Do you remember the story of the boy who cried "wolf"? Yes, it works exactly like that in the real world. One of the first modern cases in real history was that of "The Limits to Growth" in 1972. 

1. A group of scientists sponsored by the Club of Rome discovered that unrestrained growth of the global economic system would lead to its collapse.
2. The scientists and the Club of Rome were demonized, then ignored.
3. Nothing was done about the problem.
4. Now that we are discovering that the scientists were right, collapse is already starting.

More recently, we saw how, 

1. Scientists tried to alert people about the dangers of climate change.
2. Scientists were demonized and then ignored.
3. Nothing was done about climate change.
4. When it was discovered that the warning was correct, it was too late. (it is).

There are many more examples, but it almost always works like this. Conversely, when, for some reason, people take heed of the warning, the results may be even worse, as we saw with the Covid epidemic. In that case, you can add a 1b line to the list that says, "people become scared and do things that worsen the problem." After a while, line 2 (scientists are demonized) takes over, and the cycle goes on.  

So, what are the conclusions? The main one, I'd say, is: 

Avoid being a white-haired scientist issuing warnings about grave dangers from a TV screen. 

Then, what should you say when you appear on TV (and you happen to be a white-haired scientist)? Good question. My idea for that TV interview was to present change as an opportunity rather than an obligation. I was prepared to explain how there are many possible ways to improve the quality of our life by moving away from fossil fuels. 

How did it go? It was one of the best examples that I experienced in my life of the general validity of the principle that says, "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy." The interview turned out to be a typical TV ambush in which the host accused me of wanting to beggar people by taking away their cars and their gas stoves, of trying to poison the planet with lithium batteries, and of promoting the exploitation of the 3rd world poor with coltan mines. I didn't take that meekly, as you may imagine. 

The interview became confrontational, and it quickly degenerated into a verbal brawl. I am not linking to the interview; it is not so interesting. Besides, it was all in Italian. But you can get some idea of how these things go from a similar ambush against Matt Taibbi on MSNBC. What did the viewers think? Hopefully, they switched channels. 

In the end. I am only sure that if something has to happen, it will. 

(*) The paper by Roberto Cazzolla-Gatti on the carcinogenic effects of combustion is truly impressive. Do read it, even if you are not a catastrophist. You'll learn a lot. 

(**) CJ Hopkins offers some suggestions on how to behave when you are subjected to this kind of attack. He says that you should refuse to answer some questions, answer with more questions, avoid taking the interviewer seriously, and things like that. It is surely better than trying to just defend oneself, but it is extremely difficult. It was not the first time that I faced this kind of ambush, and when you are in the crossfire you have little or no chances to avoid a memetic defeat. 

The Worst Model in History: How the Curve was not Flattened

"Flattening the Curve" was an incredibly successful meme during the early stages of the Covid epidemic. Unfortunately, it was based on a model that we can describe as the worst ever proposed in history (or maybe the second worst, after the one that assured Napoleon that invading Russia in Winter was a good idea). Here, I explain why the model was so bad, and I also include a discussion on whether climate change models might suffer from the same problems.  

You may have heard the quote, "all models are wrong, but some can be useful." It is true. But it is also true that wrong models can be misleading, and some can be lethal. In history, some of these lethal models were fully believed ("let's invade Russia, what could go wrong?), while the lethal consequences of following some current models are still not understood by everyone ("economic growth can continue forever, why not?"). Other models are telling us of the lethal consequences of not following them; it is the case with climate models. There are many kinds of models, but you can't deny that they are important in determining human actions. 

In this post, I'll discuss the model that gave rise to the concept of "Flattening the Curve" at the beginning of the Covid-19 epidemic. It was based on the idea that "non-pharmaceutical measures" (NPIs) would slow down the diffusion of the virus and avoid overloading the healthcare system. It was one of those models that looked good at the beginning, but that turned out to be a disaster. Among other things, it gives us a chance for a critical examination of climate models: could they suffer from the same problems? 

About the "Flattening the Curve" story, this idea of slowing down the diffusion of a viral infection was not wrong in itself. For millennia, people had noted that many illnesses were transmitted from person to person and that staying away from sick people could reduce the chances of infection. But country-wide lockdowns, universal masking, and the like had never been tried before. So how would you know that they could have a significant effect? 

Indeed, before the great Covid scare, the general opinion among practitioners and experts was that quarantines and other drastic measures were counter-productive, if not completely useless. Then, in early 2020, a new concept burst into the scene and took the memesphere by storm: "Flattening the Curve." It was expressed in the form of a graph that appeared over and over on the media in slightly different forms, but always showing the same concept. Here is an example among the many.

Image from "The New York Times," 2020,

Let's start by noting that the model is based on the typical shape of the curves describing an epidemic cycle. It occurs when something grows (e.g., a virus) by exploiting a resource (e.g., human beings). If the resource is limited, as is the case for the number of people that can be infected, then the growth of the infection will start slowing down, reach a maximum, and then decline. The result will be a "bell-shaped" curve, a behavior that has been known from the time of the Great Plague of London in the mid-17th century. (note, incidentally, that epidemic curves do not normally show the "Seneca Effect," that a faster decline in comparison to growth. It is because the system is relatively simple, and viruses are not affected by "pollution"). 

So, the "Flattening the Curve" model was based on something real; nevertheless, it had enormous problems. Take a careful look at the figure above. The model implies no less than two separate miracles. The first is that the "zero" of the x-axis is supposed to coincide with the "first case." It implies that, miraculously, the government would be so farsighted to decide to lock down a whole country on the basis of a single observed case or just a few. Such a government never existed, and you may argue that it cannot exist in the real world. In practice, NPIs were mandated only when the epidemic was well on its way and fast growing. Note also how the "Protective Measures" curve touches exactly the limit of the healthcare system's capacity without overcoming it. How the measures could be calibrated so precisely is another miracle. 

The need for two miracles is bad enough for a single model, but there is a much worse problem with it: the model shows two curves with the same shape; they differ only in scale, a parameter that cannot be reliably determined in the early phases of an epidemic cycle. Then, of course, in the real world, the epidemic will follow only one of the two curves, and how do you know which one? In other words, how do you know if the measures are having any effect? Remarkably, the question was almost never publicly asked during the epidemic. The "flattening the curve" model soon became a political issue and, in politics, there are questions that you are not allowed to ask. 

So, let me try to step out of politics and use science to ask a forbidden question: how would the curve react to the "measures" applied while the curve has already started to grow? Everybody expected an effect, of course, and, obviously, a strong effect if it had to be worth the effort. Tomas Pueyo correctly used the term "the hammer" to describe the expected effects of NPIs (one of the very few correct observations he ever made). And if you hit something with a hammer,  you do expect some immediate effect. But what kind of effect, exactly? 

In a previous post, I described a simple SIR (sane, infected, removed) epidemic model, not a sophisticated model but several steps higher on the scientific scale than a purely qualitative two-curve diagram. The model can be easily tweaked to show the effects of a sudden reduction in the transmission factor (Rt) of the infection as a result of NPIs (note that it doesn't apply to vaccines, which can only be introduced gradually). Below, you see a typical result of my calculations. 

The vertical axis is the infected fraction of the population (the "prevalence"), which should be proportional to the number of measured positive cases. The horizontal scale is the time; a typical epidemic cycle lasts a few months. The graph is roughly modeled on the Italian case in early 2020, and it assumes that the "measures" are mandated on the 20th day of the start of an infection cycle that lasts a few months. The model assumes that the NPIs reduce the infectivity (Rt) of the virus by 50% (as it was commonly expected to happen). 

The result is that the slope of the prevalence curve changes when the NPIs are put in place. You can play with the parameters in different ways, but, for a significant decrease in the virus transmission rate, you will always see a discontinuity in the curves in correspondence to the start of the measures. NOte also that there is a certain latency time before a contact with an infected person will lead to a positive result to a PCR test, but for Covid this latency is estimated as of a few days, no more than five. The effect of the latency time will be to smooth the transition, but the change of slope should remain detectable. Overall, this is what the real "flattening the curve" should look like.

Of course, there exist much more sophisticated epidemiological models, but good modelers know (or should know) that complicated models are not necessarily better than simple ones. Here I don't want to enter into the academic debate on the effect of NPIs (it never reached policymakers and the public, anyway). Just as a quick note, you may wish to take a look at this 2020 paper. It was published by the group led by Neil Ferguson at the Imperial College in London, who was one of the main proponents of lockdowns. The authors argue that lockdowns were effective, but, if you examine the paper carefully, for instance, looking at fig. 2 of the extended results, you'll see that their own results do not support their conclusions. (and I am not the only one who noted the problem).

But rather than going into the details of complicated models, let's just use common sense. The NPIs are a sudden change in the parameters of the system. When the government orders people to stay locked at home, most of them do that immediately. So, you do expect an immediate effect on the shape of the epidemic curve. The problem is that you don't see anything like that in real-world data. Below, the case of Italy in 2020. NPIs were enacted on March 9th, when the curve had reached about 25% of the peak. The curve continued to grow along the same trajectory for 19 days more. 

Italy is just one case. Maybe, if you are a real first-class sleuth, you might find some cases where you can evidence a discontinuity in an epidemic curve in correspondence with the NPIs being enacted. But we have hundreds, probably thousands, of examples, and they are almost always smooth, except for the unavoidable random noise. The conclusion can only be that if the NPIs had an effect, it was very small. Incidentally, these observations are consistent with the recent Cochrane Review that used different methods to examine the effectiveness of face masks and other NPIs in slowing down the diffusion of viruses. No detectable effects were found. 

In the end, more than two years of "measures" were imposed on citizens on the basis of a model that implied miracles and didn't include methods to verify the effect of the recommended actions. The damage done to society was enormous in psychological, economic, and human terms, all for effects that turned out to be so small not to be measurable. We are still reeling from the disaster, and it may take several more years before we completely recover -- if we'll ever recover. 

The question, then, becomes how it could be that almost everyone in the world was completely overtaken by such a bad model -- possibly the worst one ever developed in history? It is a story related to the military implications of epidemics as bioweapons, but I'll tell it in a future post. 

Are the Evil Gods Returning? Or is Evil is Inside us?

 

Benito Mussolini in 1922: is this the face of evil? Maybe, but Mussolini was not worshiping evil deities, he was not eating babies, he was not making human sacrifices. He wasn't even indulging in bouts of satanic laughter, as evil characters are supposed to do. There was nothing behind the mask. Mussolini was just a victim of his own propaganda.  

As a devoted reader of H.P. Lovecraft's stories, I have always found the idea of evil deities fascinating. The existence of supernatural entities that somehow control people's minds could explain a lot of things that otherwise would seem impossible to understand. But Lovecraft's horror stories are so over the top that they are not really scary. His evil Gods are comic book characters, clumsy creatures haunting dark and desolate places. Not even the mighty Cthulhu and his minions ever directly intervened in human political decisions. 

Yet, sometimes you have the sensation that something truly evil is moving in the world. Naomi Wolf expressed the idea most clearly in a recent post of hers.   

I could not explain the way the Western world simply switched from being based at least overtly on values of human rights and decency, to values of death, exclusion and hatred, overnight, en masse — without reference to some metaphysical evil that goes above and beyond fallible, blundering human agency. ...

What we have lived through since 2020 is so sophisticated, so massive, so evil, and executed in such inhumane unison, that it cannot be accounted for without venturing into metaphysics. Something else, something metaphysical, must have done that. And I speak as a devoted rationalist.

Lately, I've been thinking along similar lines. I even argued that worshiping the evil deity Baphomet could be a good idea for really nasty people who want to dominate the world. Overall, though, I think it is not the right explanation. No matter how inexplicable the rise of evil can look, it is still something that comes from inside us, not from the outside. Evil is us, eventually.

The recent release of the "Lockdown Files" in Britain supports this idea. These files contain the messages sent and received by Matt Hancock, the British Secretary of State for Health and Social Care during the lockdown period in Britain. In these messages, Hancock doesn't sound evil. He just writes as if he cared only about himself and his personal prestige. He wanted to "own the exit," and he didn't care about the British people, whom he evidently considered a band of morons. We were mistreated by dumb bureaucrats, not by the minions of evil deities.

Now, I have a stated policy that I call the "Grokking Strategy" that consists in listening to everyone and trusting no one. So, I am perfectly willing to consider the hypothesis that the Hancock files are a psyop designed to divert the public's attention away from the hidden forces that governed the reaction to the pandemic. On the whole, though, I think these files are genuine. They make sense, and they also match other examples of the same kind. For instance, we recently saw similar leaks of messages sent and received by the Italian equivalent of Hancock, Mr. Roberto Speranza, Minister of Health of the Italian government during the lockdown period. We can't swear on the authenticity of these leaked messages, but they fit with the personality of Mr. Speranza. Like Hancock, he was clearly trying to "own the exit." In late 2020, he published an autobiographical book designed to show how he had been valiantly fighting the virus and eventually had succeeded in squashing it. The book was quietly removed from the market when it turned out that the pandemic was not over. Now a printed copy is a rare collector's item.

Speranza and Hancock are just examples of the attitude of many people who reach the top. They are psychopaths, caring only about themselves, unable to feel anything for other people. They have zero or nearly zero empathy. Hannah Arendt describes this attitude for Adolf Eichmann, the German war criminal executed in 1962. 

“What he said was always the same, expressed in the same words. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.”

We find another example of this attitude with Benito Mussolini, who ruled Italy from 1922 to 1943, and part of it up to 1945. For him, we have the equivalent of the leaked messages by Hancock and Speranza in the diary kept by his son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano, who acted as foreign minister up to 1943. In a post of mine I described how the diary tells us of a man who had lost all contact with reality. Mussolini had no friends, just lackeys. He wasn't listening to anyone; he was giving orders. He was not asking questions; he had all the answers. He was not learning from his mistakes; they were always someone else's fault. Worst of all, he had no respect for the life of the people he was supposed to rule. Just as an example, during a cold wave in winter, he was rejoicing because "the weak die, and the race becomes stronger." In 1943, Mussolini ordered the execution of his son-in-law. He didn't care even about the members of his own family. 

Was Mussolini pursuing an evil plan of his own creation? No, he never had structured ideas or plans. You may have some hints of his thoughts from his 1911 novel: "The Lover of the Cardinal." About it. I wrote:

.... I was curious about the possibility of gathering some hints about Mussolini's personality. Maybe his dreams, his goals as a young man, his ideals, this kind of things. But there is nothing like that in the novel. The author comes out of it as shallow as his characters. Which I think is what Mussolini probably was. A shallow character, of modest culture, with no real ideals, and with just a few ideas, but confused. 

Yet, a whole nation followed this man into doing whatever he thought was to be done. Let's skip the many disastrous strategic mistakes he made, and let's just focus on one that was pure evil: the persecution of the Italian Jews. It started in the mid-1930s, and it was a crescendo of harassment and mistreatment. The "racial laws" were enacted in 1938, and the Jews saw themselves fired from their jobs, forbidden to work, and, in many cases, forced to exile. Jews could not be administrators or doorkeepers of houses inhabited by Aryans, dealers in valuables, photographers, sellers of books, children's items, playing cards, and stationery. Jews were also forbidden to be licensed as amateur fishermen, to publish mortuary announcements, to include their names in telephone directories, to own and sell radios, and to join sports or recreational societies. They were forbidden to play chess in chess clubs. Even the Italian "Science" was compact in condemning Jews as an inferior race based on what was presented as a certain and undisputable set of data. See in the image the front cover of a 1938 Italian magazine: it is self-explanatory ("La difesa della razza" means "the defense of the race").

Now, picture yourself in Italy in the 1930s. Why this avalanche of hate against a group of Italian citizens? Many of them had fought for Italy during the Great War, and many were intellectuals, professionals, industrialists, and active elements of the Italian economy. They were indistinguishable from the "normal" Italians, except for their religious beliefs, But even that was not the point, because even those Jews who had converted to Christianity were targeted by the racial laws. You were just subjected to a wave of hate against Jews that pervaded the media of the time: mainly radio and the press.

Who exactly was masterminding this campaign? Obviously, it was created and controlled by members of the Fascist party or by government officials (the two things had mostly merged into a single entity in the 1930s). And, of course, once the story started, there were people or groups of people who directly benefitted from the persecution. Non-Jews took over the positions left free by Jews. For instance, university professors seem to have been more than happy to see their Jewish colleagues fired. At least, no non-Jewish professors protested against the mistreatment of their Jewish colleagues. Others profited from the confiscation of Jews' goods and property. Then, the military industry had everything to gain from a wave of hate that was clearly leading to war. But the surprising point is how the hate percolated through all sectors of society when most Italians had nothing to gain from the persecution. Mussolini himself had no obvious interest in taking an anti-semitic stance. He had taken over the Italian Government in 1922 without the need to demonize Jews, and in 1938 he was safe and secure in his position after the success of the Ethiopian campaign (*). I would surmise that he was a victim of his own propaganda.

Wouldn't you think that some evil deities were at work in causing this disaster? But the Italian Fascists were not the minions of an evil cult. And we don't have evidence that Mussolini himself was a puppet of supernatural entities or of human lobbies. The British secret services may have pushed him to make some of his many strategic mistakes, but there is no evidence that they had a role in the anti-semitic campaign. Evil didn't originate from Mussolini, nor from evil deities behind him. It was generated by ordinary people, just like you and me, who fell into the trap of propaganda. It is easy: you know that the road to Hell is smooth and easy. 

I think there the persecution of Jews in Italy is one of the best examples in history of the phenomenon that Mattias Desmet calls "Mass Formation." It was a self-reinforcing phenomenon: the Italian press started telling people that Jews were evil, people were believing what they were told, and that led the press to step up their accusations, convincing people even more.  And that went on, unchecked: a spiral of evil growing on itself. Soon, nobody, not even the Catholic Church, dared to say a word to defend their fellow Italian citizens so unfairly discriminated against. All the self-reinforcing phenomena tend to grow rapidly, even exponentially. And that was what happened with the anti-semitic campaign in Italy. It grew to the point when concentration camps started being built for the Jews, then these camps became extermination camps. Fortunately, the whole thing crashed with the defeat of Italy in WWII before it could reach the level of the parallel German extermination program. It was a perfect example of a Seneca Cliff -- even evil is subjected to slow growth and fast collapse. 

During the past three years, the whole world has been walking along a dangerous and slippery road toward Hell. In Italy, the Covid policies didn't arrive at the creation of concentration camps, but we got very close to that. They were actually created in Australia. Then, miraculously, something happened that defused the whole thing. Now the story seems to be over, and most people just want to forget about that, just like Italians want to forget the mistreatment that their grandparents and great-grandparents inflicted on Jews. But the elements that created these waves of hate are all in place, and we are all subjected to being affected by a propaganda campaign designed to demonize someone. Who will be the next victims?

 

(*) I have an idea about what could have been going on in Mussolini's head. It goes like this. First, there is no evidence that Mussolini had anti-semitic ideas for most of his political career. He never wrote anything about Jews, and even in his 1911 novel, the Cardinal's lover, there is no trace of anti-semitism. Mussolini even had a Jewish mistress, Margherita Sarfatti (1880-1961), an intellectual, artist, and writer, from when they met in Milano in 1911. But, in 1933, Mussolini took a younger woman as mistress, unceremoniously dumping the older Sarfatti. From then on, Mussolini started to encourage anti-semitism, becoming a rabid anti-semite himself. Was the whole idea of persecuting the Jews a result of Mussolini's personal dislike of his former Jewish lover? Who can say? If a butterfly can start a hurricane by flapping its wings, some of the mass murders of WWII might have started from a bedroom quarrel. But we will never know. 

The Age of Exterminations: How to Kill a Few Billion People

Bill Gates has been accused of having publicly declared (*) his intention to exterminate billions of people in order to reduce overpopulation. It is not true; Gates never said anything like that. Unfortunately, though, that doesn't mean we can rule out that some powerful elites are actually planning mass exterminations. It has already happened in the past, there is no reason to think that it won't happen again. The problem is not with overpopulation itself, but with the concept of "utilitarianism" that empowers the elites to take action without being bound to moral principles. We saw it happening with the Covid pandemic. We must rethink our implicit assumptions if we want to avoid even worse disasters in the future. 

With 8 billion people alive on Earth, it is reasonable to believe that the planet is becoming a little crowded and that life would be better for everyone if there weren't so many people around. But we should not neglect the opposite opinion: that we have resources and technologies sufficient to keep 8 billion people alive and reasonably happy, and perhaps even more. Neither position can be proven, nor disproven. The future will tell us who was right but, in the meantime, it is perfectly legitimate to discuss this subject.

The problem is that we don't have a discussion on population: we have a clash of absolutes. The position that sees overpopulation as a problem has been thoroughly demonized over the past decades and, still today, you cannot even mention the subject without being immediately branded as a would-be exterminator. It happened to Bill Gates, to the Club of Rome, and to many others who dared mention the forbidden term "overpopulation." 

The demonization is, of course, a knee-jerk reaction: the people who propose population planning would be simply horrified at being accused of supporting mass exterminations. But note that there is a real problem, here. Exterminations DID happen in the recent past, and they were carried out largely on the basis of a perceived overpopulation problem. During the Nazi era in Germany, the idea that Europe was overpopulated was common and it was widely believed that the "Lebensraum, the "living space," available was insufficient for the German people. The result was a series of exterminations correctly considered the most heinous crimes in human history. 

How was that possible? The Germans of that time were the grandfathers of the Germans of today, who are horrified at thinking of what their grandparents did or at least did not oppose. But, for the Germans of those times, killing the Untermenschen, the inferior races, seemed to be the right thing to do, given the vision of the world that was proposed to them and that they had accepted. The Germans fell into a trap called "utilitarianism." It is one of those principles that are so embedded in our way of thinking that we don't even realize that it exists. But it does, and it causes enormous damage. 

In principle, utilitarianism wouldn't seem to be such a bad idea. It is a rational calculation of the consequences of taking or not taking a certain action based on generating the maximum good for the maximum number of people. So defined, it looks both sensible and harmless. But that's the theory. What we have is a good illustration of the age-old principle that "in theory, theory and practice are the same thing. In practice, they are not." 

For a good illustration of the problems with utilitarianism in our current society, you can read an excellent post by Simon Sheridan. A typical example of the basic feature of utilitarianism is the diagram in the figure. 

In this case, the choice looks obvious. You act on the lever to direct the trolley to the track where it causes a smaller number of victims. Easy? Not at all. The example is misleading because it assumes you know the future with absolute certainty. In the real world, there is no such thing as certainty. There exists such a thing as a "fog of life," akin to the "fog of war." Just like no battle plan survives contact with the enemy, no Gannt chart survives contact with a real calendar. And, if you made a mistake in your evaluation, you may direct the trolley along the wrong path.

A good example of the damage caused by utilitarianism is the recent Covid pandemic. To refresh your memory, take a look at this 2020 post by Tomas Pueyo, which was one of the starting points of the disastrous ideas of "flattening the curve" and "Covid zero." On the basis of models that predicted millions of victims caused by the virus, a series of measures were proposed and then implemented. They were supposed to be both short-lived and harmless, at most a minor inconvenience: lockdowns, social distancing, face masks, and the like.  

I don't have to tell you that all the assumptions at the basis of these ideas turned out to be wildly off the mark. The pandemic was much less deadly than the models said it would be. The "flattening of the curve" just didn't happen despite the measures lasting more than two years instead of two weeks. "Covid zero" turned out to be not just a dream but a nightmare. Finally, the measures were far from harmless (for instance face masks positively harm health). The psychological damage was immense, especially to children, with people deprived of their jobs, their social life, and even the possibility of comforting their sick relatives. And people died as a result of depression and lack of proper medical care. Just as an example, Sheridan reports that "two infants in South Australia needed to be flown interstate for life saving surgery but were denied because the borders were closed due to covid. They died." This was real damage done to avoid possible damage. A classic case of misfiring utilitarianism: the trolley was directed along the wrong path. 

Now, back to overpopulation, we are in a similar situation but more dramatic. We have models telling us that a combination of resource depletion and pollution (especially in the form of climate change) could lead not just to millions of victims, but billions. If the models are right, what do we do? Unfortunately, if you really believe that billions are going to die if nothing is done, then you could make the case that killing a few billion people now would save more billions later. It is the same logic of the trolley dilemma, aka, "we had to destroy the village in order to save it."

Would you bet that, today, nobody in the higher spheres of power is thinking about something like that? That is, can you rule out that someone is planning to exterminate a few billion people in order to "save humankind?" Go back to the history of the exterminations planned and carried out by the German Nazi government and you'll see that this idea is not so farfetched. During the pandemic, the "anti-vaxxers" were singled out, insulted, isolated, demonized, fired from their jobs, and more. Just like the German Jews in the 1930s. Fortunately, the animosity against the anti-vaxxers seems to have fizzled out before it could evolve into a mass extermination. But it was clearly heading in that direction, and we don't know whether it could pick up steam again in the future. 

The problem is not whether the models are right or wrong. Models can be extremely useful if you understand their limitations. But if you use models as oracles, then doom is guaranteed. That's exactly what happened with the Covid pandemic. Is it the same for the world models that predict humankind's doom. Are they right or wrong? The answer is simply "we cannot be sure." They might be completely wrong or perfectly right, or even too optimistic. But you should never ignore the models. They are not oracles, they are maps of the future. A good map tells you about the roads that lead you where you want to go, but it is up to you to choose the one to follow.

So, how do you avoid misusing the models? You need to approach them differently. There is an alternative to utilitarianism. It is called "personalism." It is both a religious and a philosophic stance that sees the human person as sacred, the basic value, not exchangeable with anything else. It is the principle of "First do no Harm" ("primum, non nocere") that we derive from the Hippocratic Oath. 

Personalism doesn't mean that you can do nothing against emergencies, but blind faith in science must be tempered with moral sense and the capability of understanding the value of the human person. If you are in a condition of uncertainty, then try at least not to worsen the situation by taking hurried and unproven measures. It is a point forcefully made by Dr. Malcolm Kendrick in a post titled, "Don't just do something, stand there!" His point is that physicians are often overtreating their patients in their hurry to "do something." And they may do more harm than good. 

In his post, Kendrick proposes to apply to medicine the OODA principle: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. It is not philosophy. it is "a practical concept designed to function as the foundation of rational thinking in confusing or chaotic situations". It was developed by the Air Force Colonel, John Boyd. It means that you refrain from acting until you have at least a certain degree of understanding of what happens. It is the military equivalent of the medical principle "do no harm." OODA is a good idea, but it can be interpreted in various ways. It is the same problem we have with the "Precautionary Principle" -- it may be interpreted in terms of avoiding rash decisions, but also in the opposite way (**). Personalism, instead, has a deeper relevance and is less ambiguous. If you say that life is sacred, then it is. 

Applied to the Covid pandemic,  the approach based on personalism (and maybe on OODA as well) would have avoided drastic and harmful actions taken in a moment of great uncertainty. Sick people would have been cured, but those who were not sick would have been left in peace. Vaccination would have been recommended, but not made mandatory. It was done in Sweden, which didn't suffer more damage from the virus than countries that, instead, took a drastic approach to the pandemic. 

How about climate change? In this case, the risk is not just millions of victims, it is truly "existential." That is, the climate tipping points might well kill us all. Even without tipping points, we have plenty of negative effects ongoing. Droughts, sea acidification, seawater rise, melting ice, extreme weather, and more. This said, it is also clear that the system we are modeling is hugely complex and hard to predict. We have no idea of when, where, and how fast, a climate tipping point could manifest itself, despite the dull certainty of people who define themselves as believers of the "near-term extinction" concept. Humans may well go extinct in a non-remote future, but there is no reason to hurry up in that direction.

In a personalistic framework, we deal with climate change by applying the "do no harm" principle. It means first of all avoiding panic. There are hasty actions against climate change whose consequences are unknown and could cause more harm than good. Apart from mass exterminations (obviously!), geoengineering or CO2 capture and storage are good examples of potentially disastrous "solutions" which might not be such. Then, "do no harm" does not mean "do nothing." It means taking actions that we believe are effective, but also that we are reasonably sure are not harmful. 

For instance, assuming (as it is very probable) that fossil fuels are an important factor causing climate change, we should make sure that phasing them out doesn't harm people. A lot of people, everywhere, are living at the edge of survival, and forcing them to stop using fossil fuels without offering substitutes is tantamount to killing them. They need alternatives: efficiency, PV panels, wind turbines, and the like. Think also of "degrowth," is it a good idea? Not for those living at the edge of survival: asking them to degrow means, again, killing them. (***)

So, should we also do something to reduce population growth? Why not, as long as we don't harm anyone? The Chinese government did that with the "one-child" policy. You may argue that it was not a good idea, and also that it didn't work. But it is also true that nobody was killed and nobody was harmed. The policy may have been the main factor that contained the Chinese population to manageable levels. (I told the story in some detail in a previous post). Population planning at the world level could be a good way to stunt the action of those evil people who may be planning to obtain the same results by means of mass exterminations. 

Unfortunately, given the way the pandemic was managed, it is perfectly possible that we will soon go into "panic mode" about climate change. That may well lead humankind to make truly horrible mistakes. But this is the way humans are. Maybe one day we will learn, but that will take time.  

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An excerpt from Sheridan's post about utilitarianism and its disasters. Read the whole post on his blog.

Many people could recite the most basic formula of Utilitarianism: the greatest good for the greatest number. Utilitarianism is a form of what is sometimes called consequentialism which just means that the ethical value of actions should be judged by their consequences. If you, purely by accident, blundered your way into creating the greatest good for the greatest number, your action is deemed of higher value than if, with the best of intentions, you failed to create anything good.

Now, of course, Utilitarianism is a big topic and there are numerous sub-variants which are attempts to answer the objections made to the doctrine. Probably the main objection has always been that Utilitarianism implies that killing an innocent is justified if it saves the lives of others. This is one of those classic arguments that always seems confined to university faculties at universities and can usually be counted on to draw the cynical response that it’s “just semantics” and “nobody would ever have to make that decision in real life.”

Well, during the last three years, exactly these kinds of decisions were made. To take just one of the more egregious examples, here in Australia two infants in South Australia needed to be flown interstate for life saving surgery but were denied because the borders were closed due to covid. They died. The justification given, not just by politicians but by everyday people on social media, was the utilitarian one: we couldn’t risk the lives of multiple other people who might get infected with a virus. The greatest good for the greatest number.

(This raises the other main objection to Utilitarianism which is that it must rely on speculative reasoning. We can only predict more people will die based on some model. But we can never know for sure because, despite what many people apparently believe, we are not God and we do not control the future).

The death of those children was a low point even for the corona hysteria and is, in my opinion, one of the lowest points in this nation’s history. Combined with the countless other episodes of people being denied urgent medical care, the elderly residents of nursing homes left without care for days because one of the staff tested positive and all the staff were placed in quarantine, the people unable to be at the side of loved ones who were on their death bed, the daily cases of police brutality, or any of the other innumerable indignities and absurdities, for the first time ever I found myself being ashamed to call myself an Australian.

(*) Publicly expressing one's evil plans is a typical trope of modern fiction. It is called the "badass boast." It shouldn't be needed to say that this is not something that happens in the real world but, strangely, many people seem to believe that it does. For instance, Osama bin Laden is commonly believed to have confessed his role in the 9/11 attacks in New York in a videotape.

(**) About how the precautionary principle could have been correctly applied to the Covid pandemic, there is an interesting paper by Vianna Franco et al. -- highly suggested.  

(***) That degrowth or "zero-growth" is not a good idea was clearly understood by Aurelio Peccei, the founder of the Club of Rome, already in the 1970s, See this post on the subject on "Cassandra's Legacy."

What is the Next Thing that Will hit us? Brace for it, Because it may be Huge

 

Despite having ancient seers (the "haruspices") as ancestors, I don't claim to be able to predict the future. But I think I can propose scenarios for the future. So, what could be the next big thing that will hit us? I suggest it will be the disruption of the oil market caused by the recent measure of a price cap on  Russian oil.

Do you remember how many things changed during the past 2-3 years, and changed so unbelievably fast? There was a pattern in these changes: one element was that we were told they were just temporary, another was that they were done for our sake. We were told that we needed "Two weeks to flatten the curve," and that "the sanctions will cause the Russian economy to collapse in two weeks," and many more things. Then, our problems will be solved and the world will return to normal. But that didn't happen. Instead, the result was a "new normal," not at all like the old one. 

Now, the obvious question is "what next?" More exactly, "what are they going to hit us with, next time?" There is this idea that there may be a new pandemic, a new virus, or the old one returning. But, no. They are smarter than that -- so far they have always been one step, maybe two, ahead of us. They are masters of propaganda, they know that propaganda is all based on memes and that memes have a finite lifetime. Old memes are like old newspapers, they are not interesting anymore. A particular bugaboo can't scare people for too long, and the idea of scaring us with a pandemic virus is past its usefulness stage. They may have probed us with the "monkeypox" pandemic, and they saw that it didn't work. It was obvious anyway. So, now what?

Let me suggest one possible new way to hit us. You may have heard of it but, so far, it was supposed to be something marginal, not designed to create another "new normal." But it may. It is huge, it is gigantic, it is arriving. It is the price cap on Russian oil. The idea is that a cartel of countries, mainly Western ones, will agree on prohibiting the import of Russian oil unless it is priced at less than $60 per barrel. It will also make it more difficult for Russia to export oil abroad, even to countries that do not subscribe to the agreement. 

This idea is, as usual, promoted as a way to help us. Not only it will harm the evil Putin, but it will reduce oil prices, so everyone in the West should be happy. But will it actually work? Unlikely, to say the least, and it is probable that the promoters know that very well. 

Think about that: it never happened during the past hundred years that a cartel of countries had intervened to force a certain oil price worldwide. Even during the "Oil Crisis" of the 1970s, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) never did what it is often accused of having done, fixing a high oil price. OPEC can only set production quotas or sanction certain countries, but it has no power, and never had power, on prices, which are set by the international market. 

When governments meddle with prices, the results are always bad. Typically, prices of goods are set too low, and that has two effects: the rising of a black market and the disappearance of the goods from the official market. It was a typical feature of the Soviet economy, where prices were often set at low levels to give the impression that certain goods were affordable to everyone. But it wasn't so: theoretically, most Soviet citizens could afford caviar sold at government-established prices. In practice, this caviar almost never existed in shops. But, of course, it was possible to find it in the black market if one could pay exorbitant prices for it.

Today, intervening to set a price for Russian oil is equivalent to throwing a wrench into the gears of a huge machine. Nobody knows exactly how the global oil market is going to react. The only sure thing is that the Russians are refusing to sell their oil to countries subscribing to the agreement. The overall result of having removed a major producer from the market can only be one: increasing oil prices. Exactly the opposite of what the price cap is supposed to do. But this is the very minimum that can happen: the effects of the cap are unpredictable on a market that's already unstable and subject to wild price oscillations. Europe might lose access to oil completely, and go dark. Famines have been a staple event in European history, they could come again. Things like that -- not small changes, huge changes. 

Why did the Western countries engage in this apparently counterproductive idea? Well, there may be some method in this madness. I can think of a few possible explanations: 

1. Western Governments are in the hands of idiots who act according to the principle known as "I ran naked into a cactus. Why? Because it looked like a good idea." They put into practice ideas that look good ("harming Putin"), without worrying about the consequences (destroying the European economy). 

2. The price cap has the specific purpose of raising oil prices. It will force consumer countries to switch from the relatively cheap Russian oil to the more expensive American oil, which will become even more expensive in a near-monopoly regime. This will bring huge profits to American producers. Don't forget that the American elites are convinced that the US oil resources are infinite, or nearly so. 

3. The price cap is thought of as a way to save the US tight oil industry. So far, tight oil has been almost a miracle, bringing back the US to a position of dominance among oil producers. But it is now facing difficulties with oil prices declining in the world market. With higher oil prices, Europe will finance a new round of tight oil extraction in the US, while the profits will remain in the US. It sounds diabolical, and maybe it is. Let me add that there may be a reason why the tight oil industry was recently declared "dead" in the mainstream media. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but this article on "Oilprice.com" may have had the purpose of scaring the US producers and making them accept the risky measure of forbidding Russian oil from entering the Western market. 

4. There may exist a "hidden force," somewhere, that's acting with a plan at the global level. The plan involves a forced reduction of fossil fuel production and consumption to mitigate the damage generated by global warming or, perhaps more likely, to leave energy for the elites while taking it away from commoners. The recent events, the Covid crisis, and the Russian crisis, both have the effect of impoverishing some of the major consumers of fossil fuels, Western middle-class citizens, and so reducing overall consumption. The price cap on Russian oil may be just the first step of a new plan that will force Westerners to abandon for good their addiction to fossil fuels, whether they like it or not. This may not be a bad idea for several reason, but it is a kind of global medicine equivalent to lobotomy or radical mastectomy for single humans. Let's say, a bit heavy-handed. 

It may be that all four of these factors are at work. In any case, it is a powerful convergence of interests that is materializing, likely to be successful in pushing the cap on Russian oil to worldwide acceptance. Considering how easily European citizens have been led to believe the most absurd things during the past two years, it is unlikely that they will understand what's being done to them (and let me not use the appropriate words for the concept). Not that the American citizens will fare much better: the huge transfer of wealth from Europe to the US will go all into the pockets of the American oligarchs. As for the European governments, they are the structures that should oppose this giant wealth transfer, but they are staffed by traitors, idiots, or both; so they will enthusiastically adhere to the idea. 

Is this what the crystal ball shows? Not necessarily. Let's just say that there are reasons to think that what I just described is a likely scenario. Then, the best-laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley. There is a limit to how hard you can push something before it goes to pieces or bites you back. Will European citizens continue forever to be happy to be economically raped by the US? The future is always full of surprises, but the crystal ball always shows the same thing: the world goes where the money is. 

 

The Rise of the Key Opinion Leaders: the End of Politics as we Know it?

 

In ancient Japan, a "kagemusha" (shadow warrior) was an impersonator who took the aspect and the role of the actual leader. It was simply a decoy to be used in battle but, in our times, the problem for leaders is not so much to avoid bullets but to avoid the much more powerful propaganda techniques that may destroy them. The result is the rise of a new kind of kagemusha, the KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders). The KOLs do not impersonate the true leaders, but express their ideas and plans in public, taking the blame for the failures and the mistakes that may result. The real leaders, instead, remain in the shadows. The KOLs operate in many fields, not just in politics. For instance, they are popular in science. But, their presence in politics is becoming more and more evident. 

I met a top-level KOL (key opinion leader) for the first time in 2005 when I was organizing a conference on energy. The Tuscan Regional Government was sponsoring the conference, and they wanted a high-profile speaker. So, they insisted on inviting Jeremy Rifkin, the author of "The Hydrogen Based Economy" (2001). I disagreed, but they were those who paid for the conference, so we had to invite him. Rifkin wanted $10,000 as a fee, a first-class plane ticket, and VIP treatment. He got all that in exchange for a talk of about 45 minutes, in which he said nothing new or especially interesting. He took no more than a few questions, giving vague answers, then he disappeared, leaving for another conference. He didn't even stay for the speakers' dinner.   

That was at a time when the KOLs were still relatively rare -- I think the acronym didn't even exist. But, over the years, the term is becoming common, even though the term "influencer" remains more frequent. Normally, the term KOL is applied to fashion and performing arts. You see in the image a typical example.

There also exists a line of KOLs operating in science. Carl Sagan (1934–1996) was an early incarnation of the KOL scientist. He started his career as a first-class scientist, but he was among the first to suffer from what was later called the "Sagan Effect." It describes how scientists who move into popularization soon become "celebrity scientists" and tend to neglect or abandon real scientific research. Emil Kirkegaard calls them "the Kardashians of Science." Another example is Neil deGrasse Tyson.  (*) 

Both Sagan and Tyson did a good service to science with their popularization efforts, but that is not always the case. The KOLs may well distort or falsify the results of scientific research, depending on who are their sponsors. It is, simply, corruption. The scientist who takes a few steps into the media, soon discovers that there is good money to be made there. Much more money than what an average scientist can even dream of. Then, they discover that the more time they can dedicate to the media, the more money they can make. Soon, the (former) scientist starts to operate in the "pieceworker mode." They move from one conference to another, from an interview to another, trying to cram as many of them per day as possible. 

How much are the KOLs of science paid? Of course, that depends on rank. I already told you about the fee that Jeremy Rifkin mustered in 2005, today it must be much more for top-level KOLs. I could give you the names of scientists who ask fees of the order of Eur 20,000-30,000 for participating in a conference, and they are not the top stars in their fields. In Italy, the fee of a middle-level virologist during the pandemic, Ilaria Capua, was reported to be $2000 for ten minutes of a TV interview. More famous virologists surely make more. But of course, much of the money provided by the industry for the KOLs is shrouded in consultancies, teaching fees, honoraria, and various perks (conferences in fashionable resort places, for instance). There are also plain salaries that can be very high. As an example, for years, Tony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was the highest-paid government employee in the United States with more than $400,000 per year. And he surely had additional sources of income. 

As you can imagine, the corruption problem is especially bad in medicine, where a lot of money can be made by promoting specific products. On this, you may read the book by Peter C. Goetsche "Deadly Medicine and Organized Crimes." (2013). Goetsche is a somewhat controversial figure for his radical stance on several subjects, but his description of the behavior of the KOLs in medicine is both stunning and realistic. Formerly, they may have been good scientists but, at some moment, they switched to the dark side, being paid to promote the products that the industry sells. They are in for the money, there is little else that matters to them.

Now, stop for a moment and think of what all this means. Imagine yourself interviewed on TV: you are paid $200 per minute (could be much more) for just a few minutes. What are you going to say? Chances are that what you'll say will be a concise, clear, and unequivocal version of what you are expected to say by those who pay you. No time for subtleties, no time for describing alternatives, and no time for mentioning uncertainties. If you have more time, say, you give a talk at a scientific meeting, you are also paid much more. Then, will you want to say anything that displeases your sponsors?

All that is bad enough by itself. But science is not independent of politics, as you know, and that may well make things worse. During the COVID crisis that started in 2020, the public was suddenly exposed to a complex and difficult topic that they had never seen before: they were told about statistical data, such things as mortality, lethality, herd immunity, and much more. In the great confusion, they tended to rely on familiar figures that looked trustworthy. Tony Fauci was by far the most visible of them in the US, followed at some distance by figures such as Rochelle Walensky and Francis Collins. They justified and promoted whatever the government thought was a good idea to do. The government, in turn, acted following the advice of these and other KOLs, who were promoting the products of the pharmaceutical industry. Science, KOLs, and money became an unholy mix that created immense damage. But so goes the world. 

The KOLs may now be spilling into politics. The first actor to become a high-rank politician was Ronald Reagan, but he was far from being a "puppet president", although he profited from his experience as an actor to manage his public image. In recent times, though, we are seeing actors becoming frontmen for figures who remain backstage. A good example is Vladimir Zelensky, president of Ukraine. Independently of what you think of what's happening in Ukraine, Zelensky is clearly a modern kagemusha: an actor playing the role of the president. The way he dresses, the short beard, the posture, all are part of a character that could have starred in a movie, except that the war in Ukraine is all too real. Because of the dangers involved in the current situation, it is understandable that the Ukrainian powers that be much prefer a kagemusha as president rather than to appear themselves on stage. In the picture, you see also the French President, Emmanuel Macron, who may have tried to copy Zelensky's warlike style. 

So far, Zelensky remains a relatively isolated case. But it is possible that the KOL fashion will spread to other countries and other leaders. As an example, I can cite Mr. Matteo Salvini in Italy. As the leader of the League, he became deputy prime minister in 2018, and he is still a member of parliament. Salvini is popularly known in Italy as "Captain Nutella," owing to his penchant to present a public image of himself while eating junk food. He was never an actor, but he started his career as a participant in a TV game show, and he does not have much more than that in his professional CV (**). Incidentally, I have the impression that Zelensky took Salvini as a model; the same beard, the same style of dressing in sweatshirts, the same populist rhetoric. Not the Nutella, though. 

I would not be surprised if Salvini, or some other equally shallow kagemusha-style character, will soon take the job of the prime minister of Italy. This winter we are going to see a serious crisis in which many Italians will find themselves without heating at home and with no fuel, no electric power, and no jobs. At that point, the Nutella will hit the fan, as they say. I don't envy the person who will find him or herself in the role of the prime minister at that moment. The job could become as dangerous in Italy as it is in Ukraine now and, as you know, in Italy we already had a case of a prime minister hanged upside-down. Surely, during the coming hard times, the really powerful people will prefer to take a low-profile role. 

So, are we going to have KOLs as leaders everywhere?  The trend is surely visible. But, if you are worried about the end of politics, I can reassure you. In my personal experience, and I have personally known several high-ranking politicians in Italy, they are not actors playing the role of the evil character. They are really evil! And, KOLs or no KOLs, they'll continue ruling us. 

 

(*) On a personal note, my career as KOL was nipped in the bud when I was invited to speak about nuclear energy in a debate on a national channel in 2010. It was a time when the Italian government had big plans for new nuclear plants. The people who had invited me had noted that I was involved in peak oil studies and, from that, they must have deduced that, since I was against fossil fuels, I had to be favorable to nuclear energy. During the debate, I mentioned the problems of the availability of mineral uranium, and I mentioned the "uranium peak." Immediately, they cut me off. Just like that: I disappeared from the screen and the debate went on without me. And they never invited me again. Had I been a little smarter, I could have made some money by becoming a nuclear KOL, but so it goes.

(**) The populist image that Salvini proposes to his constituency doesn't mean that he is dumb. Not at all. On the contrary, he is a smart guy, perfectly able to catch opportunities when they appear. I think he would be better than many others as Prime Minister in Italy.