Green Humanist

Blaise Pascal and the First Public Transit System

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), is famous for many achievements in his relatively short life. Many math students have been exposed to the triangle of coefficients known as Pascal’s Triangle. This mathematician and philosopher is also known for Pascal’s wager, the idea that the risks of not believing in God and being denied entrance into heaven are much greater than the risks of believing in God when he does not exist. Therefore, the rational choice is to believe in God. The Pascal unit of pressure is named in his honor, as he experimented with air pressure.

But Pascal also can claim a lesser-known but still intriguing claim: the invention of modern public transportation.

The setting is Paris in the 1600s, where this modern metropolis was a bustling and growing city of around 500,000. Paris was filled with narrow and winding streets that didn’t exactly lend themselves to efficient transportation. It was possible to hire a carriage to avoid walking on the filthy and congested streets, but this was a privilege only affordable to the rich.

Pascal put forth the idea that there should be carriages that consistently ran on the same routes at the same times each day. The company established to carry out this mission wasn’t founded until 1661, when Pascal was nearing the end of his life (likely because of some combination of stomach cancer and tuberculosis).

A few months before Pascal’s death in 1662, the “carosses a cinq sous” began making its rounds. The price of travel for Parisians was 5 sous, the currency used at the time. The transportation service had 5 different routes that linked the various quarters of the city, and each carriage had the capacity for 8 passengers.

The operation was granted monopoly rights by King Louis XIV, and in the initial months of its operation seemed quite successful. Accounts vary as to why the carosses a cinq sous ran for at most only 15 years.

First, it is possible that Parisians only rode in the carriages as a form of amusement. After the first few months, the novelty wore off and people no longer felt like paying for a trip around the city.

The King also put some restrictions on who could ride in the carriages so that the gentry would not have to encounter the poors in their journeys around town, so the major market of regular people may have been closed off.

Finally, the fair eventually increased from five to six sous, which also could have led to the decline of the operation. The latest date that the carriages rolled around town was likely 1687.

Perhaps Pascal’s idea was simply too far ahead of its time. In fact, public transport would not return to France after the demise of the carosses a cinq sous for almost two hundred years. In 1826, the city of Nantes, France saw the rise of the Omnibus: horse-drawn carriages that could carry between 12-20 passengers. The Omnibus system had much more comprehensive routes and fare systems for these various paths, setting us on the journey to the public transport systems we know today.

Meta to Switch to Community Notes

Earlier this week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that his company will end fact-checking policies on Facebook and replace it with a community notes feature that is similar to X. This change is just another turning point in social media policy away from censorship and towards freedom of speech.

In recent months, Zuckerberg has admitted that his platform was wrong to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story, where emails from the president’s son’s laptop showed corrupt dealings of the Biden family with officials from a Ukrainian energy company. Imagine if X had censored a similar story about one of Trump’s children right before the 2024 election. Then everyone would be calling it “election interference,” and rightfully so. Zuckerberg has also described how the US government pressured his company to censor inconvenient covid information, showing a pattern on what information gets suppressed on the platform.

Zuckerberg cited a cultural tipping point that has sparked these changes after the US election, and he is right on this observation. The extreme censorious policies on social media that the government has been pushing for years are now falling out of favour, with some important caveats that will be discussed later.

Among the changes that will affect Instagram and Facebook are that political content will no longer be suppressed in people’s feeds, and the censoring of topics such as gender and immigration is no longer supposed to occur.

Zuckerberg’s comments included the admission that many people have known for years: fact checkers have their own political biases. They tend to overwhelmingly identify with one political party and hold a very specific ideology. Who fact-checks the fact checkers and decides that their decisions on what is true and false is correct?

Author and journalist Christopher Hitchens once prompted people to think more carefully about censorship by asking them if they knew even one person that they could entrust to decide what they could and could not see on the Internet. Since the likely answer for most people is “no one,” why trust the government or social media companies to do the same thing?

Instead of censoring people talking about controversial political issues, the moderation team of Meta is now supposed to focus on what Zuckerberg calls “high severity violations” such as child exploitation and terrorism. The content moderation team will be moved from California to Texas.

While these policies as they have been expressed are a win for free speech on social media, the question remains of whether the freedom of speech rule will apply to all topics. “Freedom of speech absolutist” Elon Musk’s X is known for censoring Palestinian activists exposing the genocide of their people, and Meta has been just as bad at removing content that exposes these heinous crimes. Will censorship of Palestinian activists continue under these new rules?

Community notes may not be perfect, but they are more transparent and balanced than professional “fact checkers.” In addition, will the turn towards freedom of speech affect YouTube as well? It will be interesting whether these policies spread to other platforms.

RIP Thomas & Friends Creator Britt Allcroft

Yesterday, the news broke that Britt Allcroft, the woman responsible for making the Thomas & Friends TV show possible, had died on Christmas day of 2024 at the age of 81. To the Thomas community, this is a big loss. We are talking about Thomas the Tank Engine, for those not in the know.

Britt met the writer of the Railway Series, Reverend Wilbert Awdry, when she was working on a documentary about steam trains in 1979. The reverend was the original creator of the characters we know today, such as Thomas, Henry, and James. She was instantly captivated with the characters in this book series that had started in the 40s.

She suggested that these characters by brought to life in a new way through a TV show, but Awdry was skeptical. A 1953 pilot episode of a TV show using his characters had ended in disaster, with model trains derailing in the middle of the live broadcast. Yet she convinced him that a quality TV rendition of his work could be made.

In 1980, Britt founded Britt Allcroft Railway Productions and over the next four years raised enough money to pay for the first 26 episode of Thomas & Friends. She was able to get Ringo Starr as the show’s first narrator, and the show ended up being immensely successful in the UK. The success resulted in Britt also working on an American spinoff that used Thomas & Friends episodes in a 30-minute timeframe: Shining Time Station.

She also co-created Magic Adventures of Mumfie in 1994 and was also involved with the reboot in 2014. Although this series does not have the following of Thomas & Friends, it was still well-received among critics and beloved among fans.

Elements of Thomas & Friends and Shining Time Station would be combined in the 2000 film Thomas & the Magic Railroad, which Britt wrote in 2000. It is…a film that exists. It is known for being bad, but many kids, including myself, loved it.

Thomas & Friends has continued for many seasons and eventually switched from models to CGI. The original series ended in 2021, and the reboot shall not be named here. The series that Brit worked so hard to create has gone on to entertain generations of children and adults everywhere, and there is a fiercely devoted fandom of Thomas & Friends.

Britt probably never suspected that her campaign to bring Thomas & Friends to TVs across the UK would result in a character that is still known around the world more than 40 years later. She created something that truly has brought joy to millions. She is an example of a single life that has had an impressive and positive impact on the world. Thomas & Friends, particularly the model series that she was most involved in, will continue to live on.

Money for WWIII But Not for Thee

In late September, Hurricane Helene devastated many areas of central America, the Caribbean, and the southeast US. In the state of North Carolina, many residents saw their homes destroyed by severe flooding, and at least 879,000 people were left without power in the wake of the storm. Helen caused a minimum of $53 billion in damage in North Carolina alone.

The storm also devastated the water utilities in the state. The larger city of Asheville was just recently given the clear signal that the water is once again potable, but this is not the case across the entire state. Many schools and homeowners have had to shell out their own money renting port-a-potties because the sewer system is destroyed. People across North Carolina are sleeping in tents or gyms because they have nowhere to go. The state saw its first snowfall last week, making conditions even more miserable for residents.

On 20 November, NC Senator Thom Tillis said during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing that “The media’s moved on. But the damage — it is impossible to conceive, even with what I’m saying today, without being there. And I would invite any of you to come there and see it.” Some communities might not have their power fully restored until next year. Arkansas Governor Sara Huckabee Sanders recently authorized $750K from the Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC) to go to North Carolina and Florida, but this is a small fraction of what is needed to address the devastation.

Some residents have tried calling the U.S. Small Business Administration Disaster Loan program after losing everything. These individuals received an automated message saying that “Due to a lapse in Congressional funds, new loan applications will be delayed until Congress provides additional funding for the disaster loan program.”

A program that benefits regular people running out of funding? Who could have seen that coming?

Many of North Carolina’s communities have joined the ranks of people from Flint, Michigan; East Palestine, Ohio; and Lahaina, Hawaii. Long after the media moved on from the initial disaster coverage, people in these areas continue to suffer, forgotten by their government. There is never enough money given to restore these communities and preserve the wellbeing of their inhabitants.

At the same time as Hurricane Helene was making landfall, Biden greenlit $8 billion to give to Ukraine so that NATO’s fight against Russia can be sustained. Money is raked out in the billions when it comes to Ukraine and Israel, but aid programs in the US always run dry and no one is around to reauthorize their funding.

The US government makes a conscious choice each day to continue to draw the world closer to a nuclear war. The Biden administration furthers its attempts to provoke a conflict with another major nuclear power, a profoundly vile act that many Americans have been propagandized to cheer on. Somehow the weapons fund never runs dry, yet obtaining funding to help disaster-ridden areas of the US is an unrelenting struggle.

Advances in Artificial Photosynthesis

Across the world, countless trees, shrubs, and algae perform photosynthesis, where sunlight, carbon dioxide, and water are turned into organic matter by a series of complex chemical reactions. Perhaps you had to memorize some of the steps for a high school biology class.

As a process that takes CO₂ out of the air and can turn it into fuel, photosynthesis is of great interest to some scientists. Photosynthesis has the potential to create a supply of energy-dense fuel to power all sorts of vehicles – if humans can replicate the process in a lab and scale it up.

A semi-conductor device that used light to split water into hydrogen and oxygen was fist demonstrated in 1983, but making an “artificial leaf” that consistently and effectively can use light to split water has been an enormous challenge.

Collecting the sunlight isn’t the hard part: it is the splitting of water that is the challenge. It takes energy to split a water molecule, and a catalyst is needed to start this process. In the last decade, scientists have found that manganese and cobalt oxide are some of the better catalysts for initiating artificial photosynthesis.

But scaling up the reaction is difficult. Plants use manganese as a photosynthesis catalyst in a highly efficient manner. It has taken scientists many attempts to use manganese in a way that is a fraction as efficient as nature. It can also be difficult to replicate the exact geometry of the chemicals plants use in photosynthesis in an artificial setting.

Another challenge is the stability of the artificial photosynthesis system: it degrades rapidly and becomes useless in a short amount of time. Scientists have not managed to replicate the long-lasting and stable chloroplasts that conduct photosynthesis in plant or algal cells.

Yet there have been some advancements in the past few years. In 2022, a research team from the University of Chicago created an artificial photosynthetic system that was ten times more efficient than other lab-made systems. The researchers used amino acids to create a photosynthetic system that produced methane as a byproduct. The addition of the amino acids was the key factor that dramatically increased the efficiency of the reaction. The scientists say that the idea of adding amino acids could be used for crating relatively small amounts of other chemicals in industrial processes.

Earlier this month, a research study from the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology described another breakthrough in artificial photosynthesis. Scientists at the university developed a hydrogel that produces hydrogen fuel from sunlight. The hydrogel is carefully structured to try to mimic the intricacy of a natural chloroplast.

The network the researchers devised prevents the molecules from clumping together and slowing or impeding the reaction over time. The hydrogen obtained from the process would be an entirely clean fuel, although using hydrogen fuel to power our society is a challenge in itself.

The U Chicago team has said that commercial artificial photosynthesis is still 10 years in the future. Perhaps this technology will be similar to nuclear fusion in that it is always a decade or two in the future. But the recent research cited above has brought us one step further in figuring out how to deploy it.

Researchers Create Foster Care for Macaw Chicks

Macaws are large parrots found in central and South America that can live up to 60 years in the wild or 80 years in captivity. Most species of macaws that exist are endangered or under threat of endangerment. The main threats to the birds are habitat destruction and being captured for the international bird trade.

Research Centers such as The Macaw Center at Texas A&M University College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences focus on ways to increase macaw populations in the wild. A recent paper published by researchers from the Macaw Society demonstrates a potential way to increase the survival of macaw chicks: by facilitating a foster care system among the birds.

Parrots in captivity form loving bonds with their humans and can often seem quite human to their owners. But the wild is a cruel and brutal place, and scarlet macaws have parenting strategies that in the human world would be utterly psychopathic.

Regardless of the resources available to macaw parents, they typically neglect the youngest chicks in the nest, and these younger chicks are far more likely to die of starvation than their older siblings. The more days pass in between the hatching of the first egg and the subsequent ones, the more likely the parents are to simply stop feeding the younger chicks. Although macaws might lay up to four eggs at a time, only 1-2 chicks will typically leave the nest.

Yet researchers from The Macaw Center had an ingenious solution: what if the younger chicks were redistributed to macaw parents who did not currently have chicks or who had lost theirs to disease, predation, or poaching?

In a study area in Peru, researchers collected chicks that had hatched more than four days after the first one in a nest. These chicks were raised by humans in a center for 22 days. Then, the chick was delivered to an empty nest or a nest with other parrots of a similar level of development. Over the course of the study, the researchers put 28 chicks into new nests, and every one of these chicks was accepted by the foster parents. Despite the cruelty that macaw parents can show, they also seem very ready to take care of a chick that is not their own.

The researchers hope that this method can be used to prevent fewer macaw chick deaths in the future. Obviously, one barrier to implementing the plan on a larger scale is that it is very labor-intensive. Workers must climb trees, raise baby parrots, and climb more trees to put the slightly older babies in another nest. How these research results will be used in the future is uncertain, but these methods could potentially be applied to increase the survival rates of other endangered birds.

The Inherent Pessimism of New Optimism

To counter rhetoric of an increasingly precarious existence for humans all around the globe, the philosophy of New Optimism has arisen in recent years, endorsed by individuals such as Bill Gates and Hans Rosling. The book that best illustrates this ideology is Steven Pinker’s “Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.”

“If you think the world is coming to an end,” an online blurb about the book reads, “think again: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science.”

New Optimists chastise those who see dire trends in their own countries and across the world and those that believe that radical changes are necessary to solve these problems. Furthermore, many New Optimists also claim that the progress the world has seen in the past few hundred years has always been driven by free-market capitalism.

To criticize New Optimism is not necessarily to say that nothing in the world has become better in the 1700s. Indeed, in many countries across the world, levels of all sorts of violence has declined. In fact, I am a fan of one of Pinker’s other books, “Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.” The author explains how several trends have made violence less tolerable. The spread of the novel and literacy in the 1800s, for instance, helped people understand other’s points of view and that other people were also living, thinking beings. Pinker talks about the tireless work of Civil Rights and feminist leaders who gradually brought about a decrease in acceptance of violence towards people of color and women. Celebrating how far humans have come is not bad in itself.

But New Optimism takes the idea of championing the progress we have made too far and instead seeks to preserve a status quo that benefits the small sliver of humanity at the top of the global income distribution.

One central argument of New Optimism is that the current international economic system is working quite well for the world because poverty has decreased precipitously in recent years. This “dramatic reduction” in poverty is contingent upon using a poverty line of $1.90USD/day for the world. Yet even for those living just above that level, malnutrition, early death, and high infant mortality are a part of life.

Jason Hickel, an anthropologist who has written extensively about global inequality, argues against $1.90 being a reasonable poverty line. $1.90 in the poorest countries on Earth is not the same as the equivalent amount of money in a slightly wealthier but still poor nation.

“In fact,” Hickel writes in an article written for New Internationalist, “even the World Bank has repeatedly stated that the $1.90 line is too low to be used in any but the very poorest countries, and should not be used to inform policy. In 2016, the Atkinson Report on Global Poverty delivered a trenchant critique of the $1.90 line, and the Bank was forced to respond by creating new thresholds for lower middle-income countries ($3.20/day) and upper middle-income countries ($5.50/day). At these more realistic lines, some 2.4 billion people are in poverty today – more than three times higher than the New Optimists would have people believe.”

Although the situation poor citizens of developed countries like the US is different than that of the Global South, poverty is not just absolute, but relative. Arguments such as “poor people now have cell phones, a technology unimaginable 100 years ago” or “not many Americans actually lack sufficient calories” do not support the idea that US policies would be fine if they were just tweaked a little at the edges.

In fact, by many metrics, quality of life in the United States has been declining. Social mobility has decreased with every successive generation after WWII, and stagnant wages are one major factor. If the minimum wage had kept up with economic growth over the past 50 years, it would now be $26, not $7.25 (I acknowledge that some areas of the US have a $15 minimum wage).

Life expectancy is also on the decline in the US. Despite spending more per capita on healthcare than any other country, the US ranks 48^th in life expectancy among the nations of the world. Drug use and continuously rising rates of chronic diseases are taking years off the average life expectancy. In addition, this decline hits some populations more than others. Alaska Native and American Indian populations have experienced the greatest decline in life expectancy compared to other ethnic groups. According to data from Harvard Medical School, these individuals now have the same life expectancy that they would have had in 1944.

Those who critique New Optimism are interested not in measuring progress by seeing how much conditions have improved compared to the past, but in measuring the distance between our current world and a just one.

If someone believes that the current world is really the best one we can achieve at the moment given our technology and wealth, then that person is the true pessimist. Someone who is optimistic about human nature, however, believes that we are capable of so much more. A better world is possible, but it will not be achieved by making little adjustments to the international political-economic order. Instead, sweeping changes that threaten powerful actors across the globe are needed. That is not to say that achieving the just world many believe is possible will be easy. It is a brutal and unforgiving uphill battle. For such an ambitious plan, the phrase “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” is apt.

Sembrando Vida: Mexico’s Agroforestry Incentive Program

Agroforestry is the practice of planting trees or shrubs along with crops in a single field. This practice reduces soil erosion and can provide shade for crops. Furthermore, agroforestry can preserve the fertility of soil by mimicking a natural ecosystem instead of a monocrop field. The need for pesticides and fertilizers is likewise reduced on a more biodiverse field.

The downsides of agroforestry are that it is more labor-intensive to establish and maintain than a monocrop operation. The overall amount of crops harvested from the plots of land will be less.

For the past 5 years, Mexico has been trialing a program meant to encourage reforestation across the country. In 2019, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s administration began a program called Sembrando Vida (Sowing Life) that provides incentives for small farmers to plant trees on their property. The program is meant to reduce rural poverty and achieve better forest cover in the country.

The program provides around $400USD/month for participating farmers, and the government has spent $13 billion USD on it so far. These funds are for compensation of planting 2500 trees on 2.5 hectares of land. The government also provides technical support for farmers as they engage in agroforestry. The trees that farmers are supposed to plant are guided by a list of timber, fruit, and nature varieties, with participants having some flexibility on what they can plant and still receive the payment.

Based on a 2022 study from the Global Land Programme, 450,000 individuals had taken part in the program since its inception in that year. Although the study said that Sembrando Vida was set to meet its poverty reduction objective in absolute terms, the researchers found that the poorest regions of the country were not the ones participating most often in the program. In addition, although trees were being planted, participation in the program was skewed towards less biodiverse areas, hampering the program’s mission of preserving biodiversity.

A 2023 study investigated participants’ perceptions of Sembrando Vida, and although participants found the immediate financial benefits of the project to be very useful, they worried about the future of the program. In Mexico, government programs are often eliminated and completely recrafted from administration to administration, which can cause problems for programs that only see benefits in the long run. Since trees take a long time to grow and establish themselves, Sembrando Vida is not meant to only last for the 6-year cycle of a Mexican presidential administration. Because the same party has won the latest election, the program will continue. Nevertheless, knowledge that Sembrando Vida is a long-term option would make participation more attractive for farmers.

Another barrier to long-term participation in the program might be the difficulty in some areas of commercializing the agroforestry plots. Some villages with participants in the program do not have paved roads, making it difficult for them to transport their products to the national, let along the international market.

Given the relatively short amount of time that the program has been operating, further work is needed to understand the long-term impact of Sembrando Vida on poverty and tree cover in rural Mexico. Nevertheless, the program offers a prototype for a national initiative to promote agroforestry and equip farmers with the funds and expertise they need to engage in this type of agriculture.

Today: Peace and Freedom Rally in Kingston, NY

Today at 2 PM ET, a rally against endless war and the quashing of Americans’ rights in the name of imperialism wil occur in Kingston, New York, a city located about an hour and a half away from NYC. This protest involves actors from all across the political spectrum who are against the US government’s efforts to maintain wars in many areas of the globe.

The array of speakers reflects the ideological diversity of actors who took part in the Peace and Freedom Rally. Judge Andrew Napolitano, Scott Ritter, Max Blumenthal, Anya Parampil and Gerald Celente are among the featured speakers at the event.

The anti-war protest is intended to draw attention to the US-backed conflicts in Israel and Ukraine in particular and make more Americans aware of the egregious killing of civilians in the former and the dire risk of nuclear catastrophe in the latter.

After a long period of dormancy, anti-war protests in the US have increased in the past year. Across college campuses across the nation, countless students have taken part in protests and rallies in solidarity with the Palestinian people.

How this growing consciousness will affect the upcoming election is much less certain. “Lesser of two evils” thinking continues to prevail, despite the fact that there is little difference among the two major political parties when it comes to foreign policy.

Comedian George Carlin once said that “The word bipartisan usually means some larger-than-usual deception is being carried out.” The sentence continues to accurately describe the supposedly warring factions of the Republicans and Democrats who are in lock step when it comes to advancing the goals of the military industrial complex abroad. Just because something is bipartisan doesn’t mean it’s a good thing!

Every protest and rally against these efforts is another opportunity to draw attention to the US’ reckless and dangerous foreign policy agenda. Occupy Peace and Freedom’s rally today is an example of how opposition to this evil can be a force that unites Americans in a time when we hear that the country is hopelessly divided.

Boeing Workers on Strike

On 12 September, 33,000 union machinists for Boeing – members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) voted to go on strike. The workers rejected a contract that would have increased their pay by 25% and are aiming to secure a deal that would raise their wages by 40% and restore the company’s pension system that was eliminated ten years ago.

Boeing has received quite a lot of bad publicity in the past few months. The DOJ recently gave Boeing a plea deal connected to events from early 2021, when Boeing entered into a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA – where amnesty for the crime is granted in return for fulfilling the prosecutor’s requirements) after being charged following two crashes where 346 people died. Yet in May of this year, Boeing was found to be in violation of that agreement when a door plug flew off one of its planes when the craft was in the air.

Leaving aside the issue of the two Boeing whistleblowers that “died unexpectedly” this year, reports in the past few months have shown that Boeing knew about defective parts and serious safety violations at the company and ignored or in some cases concealed them. Witnesses in the April Congressional hearings confirmed that rather than focusing on safety, Boeing was focused on cutting costs while increasing output.

This strike of Boeing workers is the first one since 2008, and could cost the company $1 billion per week, particularly since many of these union members are in charge of producing the company’s bestselling airplanes. Considering the serious safety issues that have been reported by whistleblowers, these workers are doing the American public a favour by pausing the construction of aircrafts at sub-par safety levels.

Striking workers report that over the past two decades, they have made many concessions to Boeing during lean times but have not seen the same benefits reinstated when profitability returned to normal levels.

Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg released a note last Friday saying that the company is “very committed to reaching an agreement as soon as possible.”

Meanwhile, IAM’s president Brian Bryant has said that the workers “are ready to fight this as long as they have to, to get the contract that they deserve.” The conflict could cause a downgrade in Boeing’s credit rating, and considering the significant weekly cost of a continued strike, the company’s hand may be forced to accept union demands.