Tilting at Windmills

Lützerath, SARS-CoV-2 booster effectiveness, Greenwald leaves Substack

My motorbike, close to the edge of the Garzweiler above-ground lignite mine in the Rheinische Braunkohlerevier last summer (you can see the heads of the huge diggers in the background)

I hope you’re having a good start to your year 2023! As I am sitting in my office this morning, looking out over snowy streets here in Germany, I’m trying to decide how to find back into the rhythm of writing regular newsletters. Due to other commitments on my part, doing so hasn’t been possible for the first few weeks of the year and it won’t be possible in the coming week either, but by the beginning of February, I want to get back into the habit. In the meantime, I’ve decided to at least address some stories that have been crossing my radar lately and deliver an newsletter with some commentary today. I also have a half-written, one-off issue laying around, that I wrote after watching Netflix’ Glass Onion, and which I also intend to publish at some point. I first need to find the time to finish it, though.

Before I get into some new commentary, here’s a short overview of what I’ve been up to since you heard from me last: I’ve spent a lot of times pouring over further Twitter Files releases and I’m currently writing a comprehensive story about them in German for my blog. While working on that, I’ve released another podcast episode (in English) on the Twitter Files and, speaking of the podcast, I’ve also redesigned its webpage and decided to shift its focus a bit for the new year. In an episode of the show released this week, I provided more details on the LastPass breach, as well as giving some tips for people who want to switch to alternative password managers in the wake of it. Other things I’ve been doing that I can talk about publicly include hosting an online programming course and some work on my novel.

A digital drawing of my novel’s main character, which I finished last week

Some of the new Twitter Files revelations will have to be addressed for this newsletter as well, but I will probably spin those discussions off into separate issues again. In this issue, I want to write about some other things that I’ve been thinking on in the last few weeks.

Do Multiple Boosters Degrade the Immune Response to SARS-CoV-2?

In the last few weeks, a number of peer-reviewed papers have been published in respected journals which point to the possibility that mRNA vaccines might degrade the body’s immune response to SARS-CoV-2 after a number of booster shots. Two of these papers are from German researchers out of Erlangen and Lübeck:

• Class switch towards non-inflammatory, spike-specific IgG4 antibodies after repeated SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccination, Irrgang, Winkler, Tenbusch et al., Science Immunology

• mRNA vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 induce comparably low long-term IgG Fc galactosylation and sialylation levels but increasing long-term IgG4 responses compared to an adenovirus-based vaccine, Buhre, Pongracz, Wuhrer, Ehlers et al., Frontiers in Immunology

These papers basically suggest that with added mRNA vaccine shots, the body’s immune response to the vaccines (and presumably live SARS-CoV-2 as well) degrades, because it switches to a type of antibody that is less effective. Interestingly, a similar switch is responsible for beekeepers developing a resistance to bee stings.

There’s also a third, Chinese paper, from a more obscure journal, which suggests that mice which received more than four SARS-CoV-2 vaccinations experience a significant reduction in their immune system’s ability to fight the virus. This study did not use an mRNA vaccine; the Chinese researchers studied the effect of a spike protein receptor-binding domain (RBD) vaccine. Both vaccines are similar in that they concentrate on the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, to the exclusion of other parts of the virus, to build the body’s immune response, though.

• Extended SARS-CoV-2 RBD booster vaccination induces humoral and cellular immune tolerance in mice, Feng-Xia, Wang, Ai-Shun et al., iScience

Additionally, some French researchers report, in an as-yet unreviewed paper, that they’ve noted that vaccine effectiveness decreases with a second mRNA booster.

I have no idea if these findings are significant, all I know is that this could be a possible explanation for the resurgence in SARS-CoV-2 deaths in countries that are largely populated by vaccinated and boostered people. This trend is evident in the healthcare data from several countries and has been reported by a number of epidemiological studies.

SARS-CoV-2-related deaths over time in Australia, Denmark and Japan (Source: Google)

Far be it from me to suggest if somebody should or shouldn’t get vaccinated or boostered. I don’t believe it is my job as a journalist to give people advice like this either way. That’s what doctors are for. I’m here to give people information. And I think this is information that should definitely be looked at.

I noted that the Frontiers paper was edited by someone from Pfizer, which I found a peculiar choice, given that this company has made billions of dollars of profit over the last two years from mRNA vaccines. You’d think that would be a bit of a conflict of interest. But given the results of this and other studies and the suggestion that these vaccines are losing their effectiveness, the companies manufacturing these drugs should definitely start looking into this research. As should governments who are now in the business of mandating these vaccinations for their citizens.

Fallout: The Rhineland

I live in Düsseldorf, just across the river Rhine from the Rheinische Braunkohlerevier. I was born in this area and lived around here a significant chunk of my life. I was actually born right over an old coal mine. As such, I’ve been somewhat bewildered at the sudden international interest in the above-ground lignite mines of Garzweiler, Hambach and Inden. Industrial mining of this area goes back to the 19th century and lignite from these fields has powered much of the German industrial, and societal, resurgence after the Second World War. At the turn of the 21st century, about a fourth of all electric power consumed in Germany was generated by coal from these fields. I’ve joked for years that the Teslas you see on the streets of Düsseldorf and Cologne are not very green, as the power to run them invariably comes from the huge smokestacks across the Rhine, powered by lignite. And so does the power to run my outrageously expensive graphics card. Which is why I don’t understand why this power has suddenly become several times more expensive, since the cost of producing it by burning lignite hasn’t changed drastically. But that is another story for another day.

Today, I want to focus on the Greta-Thunberg-fortified protesters who over the last few days tried to stop the demolition of Lützerath, the last village to be dug up in the lignite mining operation. Villages in the mining area west of Cologne have been demolished and re-settled elsewhere since the early 1950s. The destruction of villages in the area reached its peak in the late ‘80s and has been a continued process in the last 70 years. Huge areas of land have been dug up and refilled. Many villages, roads and even several large motorways were torn down and rebuilt in other places. This was always a very contentious topic. It has been a focus of local news for most of a century now. Renewed protests against the mining over the last ten years and the mining stop declared by the current government when it came to power have all been well covered by the German news media. So imagine my surprise when this topic was suddenly discovered by the international press, gracing the pages of The New York Times and other big publications around the world.

Why did this happen? What makes a tiny German ghost village that nobody outside the country can even pronounce the name of suddenly this interesting? The only thing I can think of is that the story fits the current agenda. The merciless destruction of a quaint German countryside village by the evil coal industry and the heroic protesters fighting it has been positioned as the perfect metaphor for the fight against climate change.

Except that it’s all bullshit. I’ve been to Lützerath and the neighbouring villages on several occasions. These places are ghost towns that make you think of locations from Fallout: New Vegas or similar games. And they have been for years. No sane person would want to live there. The protesters are tilting at windmills, fighting decisions the German government has made decades ago. And with the German Green party equally campaigning for decades to shut down nuclear plants, Germany reaching the limit of what can be done with renewable energies, and the government insisting on sanctions against Russia that have a catastrophic effect on critical energy imports, the continued reliance of Germany on lignite seems to be all but assured. No matter what the protesters say or do. The government even thought about opening the coal mines in my birthplace in the Ruhr back up, which is idiotic, because there hasn’t been any newly trained miners in decades and all of the tunnels have been filled in or flooded, so it would take decades to restart that industry.

I am very conflicted on this topic. On one hand, I have long believed that it shouldn’t be allowed for the state to forcefully remove people’s homes to secure its energy needs. On the other hand, everyone in Germany has benefitted to an incredible amount from the meteoric economic rise of the country in the last seventy years — powered to a significant extend by lignite from these mining operations. On one hand, I understand for people to be attached to their birthplace, but at the same time, I don’t understand people staying in their birthplace when it’s clearly a shithole and the government is offering them much better options. Whatever your opinion about the decision to move these villages to excavate the lignite fields however, this ship has long sailed. The decision concerning the villages we are talking about was made in the ‘70s and ‘80s. The latest it would have make sense to reverse course were the early ‘90s. Even if they’d stopped tearing down Lützerath last week, the place would still have been an abandoned ghost town. It would have achieved nothing, except for Thunberg’s followers to prove a point.

If we want to stop burning coal, we need an alternative first. Maybe not rushing headlong into sanctions that hurt us more than the Russians would have been a start. The alternative can’t be to simply use less power. That would ruin the economy and thus condemn our social welfare state to collapse. We live in a high-energy civilisation. We can’t change that and nor should we. Especially the young people protesting in the fields of Lützerath should realise this, as they organise their protests on mobile phones that only work because of huge data centres somewhere. Maybe these people think these cloud computers are in some actual cloud somewhere in the sky? Someone should tell them that the cloud is just other people’s computers. And those computers need power.

Last year, Michael Shellenberger argued that people like Thunberg and the German Minister of Economy and Climate, Robert Habeck, are anti-civilisationists, because their demands are impossible to realise if we want to keep our society working as it does. When I read the current headlines about Lützerath and the war in Ukraine, I would tend to agree. These days, Shellenberger is also advancing the theory that Germans are so irrational about their energy policy because we are trying to save the planet out of guilt for nearly having destroyed it with two world wars. There might be something to this actually; it definitely bears thinking about.

Irrational Guilt Behind Germany’s Return To Coal

Glenn Greenwald Leaves Substack, ChatGPT Joe

In other news, I’ve noted with sadness that Glenn Greenwald is leaving Substack, a move for which he seems to have received quite some pushback. I am mostly sad because Greenwald seems to be concentrating on his new video show on Rumble, which obviously is leaving him a lot less time for written journalism. And I will miss that written journalism. That said, his System Update show has been quite good. I especially liked the episode where he took apart the misconceptions people have to this day about the January 6 protests at the Capitol in 2021 because corporate media outlets did such a biased, piss-poor job for months in reporting on it.

Something else I listened to recently that made me think was an episode of Matt Taibbi’s and Walter Kirn’s podcast America This Week. Not only did Walter Kirn, in the process of talking about a news story about his home state of Montana, turn me on to the excellent TV show Yellowstone — which I inexplicably had never heard about before but which is right down my alley — but he also came up with an idea that cracked me up. He basically invented the idea of ChatGPT Joe, i.e.. the concept that Joe Biden would run again in 2024 but that his increasing mental confusion would mean he’d just act as a talking head for answers generated by asking an AI algorithm.

I think Joe could run as long as he’s alive and able to speak as the AI candidate and say, “it’s been brought to me that I have no memory left. I don’t know what I have in my garage. I’m not aware of my surroundings, but I am very good at repeating what comes into my earpiece. And what comes into my earpiece is state-of-the-art AI opinion and policy. And so I’m going to do that and may the best creature win.”

Episode 21: "America This Week," with Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn

I thought that was a really neat idea. And not even that farfetched, these days… Alright, that’s it from me for now. This newsletter will return to a more regular schedule in a week or two. Until then, please keep your feedback coming and keep sending me interesting stories you come across or things I should investigate.