The case for making voting compulsory in America, as it is in Australia: Voting is a “public responsibility of all citizens, no less important than jury duty”. Compulsory voting improves the quality of democracy by making election outcomes more representative. It protects voting rights from erosion.

— E.J. Dionne Jr. & Miles Rapoport, via Literary Hub

Of course, the real goal is partisan, and is to forcefully counter the “national scandal” of rightwing voter suppression (“civic duty voting would end the cycle of exclusion…”), which is precisely why it stands no chance.The authors opine that “the representativeness of our elections would increase”, but there are a lot of people in the US who would not have that. Even if it were the law of the land, what is to say that people resenting their obligation would vote with any semblance of responsibility or thoughtfulness? The article is long on the principles involved, with which I of course agree, but devoid of a realistic appraisal of how we might even begin to get there. 

Time to start ‘thinking the unthinkable’ again?

‘“Left of boom” is a military idiom adopted by US forces during the Iraq War that originally referred to efforts to disrupt insurgents before they planted improvised explosive devices (IED) that could kill American troops; in other words, before the IED went boom.

It has since grown to become an all-purpose corporate buzzword, in everything from cybersecurity to disaster planning, for actions that can be taken to anticipate and prevent a catastrophe before it happens.

There’s a (literal) flip side to this concept: “right of boom,” which covers everything that can be done to mitigate the effects and enhance resilience after disaster strikes. While “left of boom” strategies in their original meaning involved everything from better intelligence of insurgents’ movements to plotting out safer patrol routes, “right of boom” meant hardening armor, improving medical care, and even boosting psychological resilience.

If “left of boom” is meant to prevent the worst from happening, “right of boom” is meant to prevent what happens from becoming the worst.

Thinking about nuclear war has been dominated by “left of boom” concepts. Deterrence, arms control treaties, nonproliferation — they all aim to prevent that ultimate boom from ever occurring. And so far, the world has largely been successful. Since the US dropped the 21-kiloton “Fat Man” atomic bomb on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, killing as many as 70,000 people, no nuclear weapon has been used in war, though there have been enough close calls to fill a book.

While the early days of the Cold War saw Strangelovian thinkers like RAND’s Herman Kahn theorize about “tragic but distinguishable postwar states” — galaxy brain-sized ways to fight, survive, and win a nuclear war — the idea of preparing for a nuclear war seemed increasingly ludicrous as arsenals grew to tens of thousands of warheads and studies raised the prospects of a “nuclear winter” post-conflict. When the Cold War ended and warheads were decommissioned by the thousands, the fear — and the need to take that fear seriously — wound down like the hands of the Doomsday Clock.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the tacit threat of nuclear weapons lurking in the background of any conflict between Moscow and the US and its NATO allies, has changed all that. In European countries, which sit closer to the battlefield, fear of a nuclear catastrophe has led to a rush on fallout shelters and anti-radiation potassium iodide pills.

A recent post on the Effective Altruism forum — a site that hosts posters interested in effective altruism and averting existential risks — examined a number of forecasts and put the aggregate chance of death in a nuclear explosion in London over the next month at 24 in a million, with probabilities 1.5x to 2x less in more distant San Francisco.

That’s a “low baseline risk,” as the authors put it, and the chance of nuclear weapons being used purposefully remains highly unlikely. But it’s clearly a baseline risk that has increased, and as UN Secretary General António Guterres warned this past week, “the prospect of nuclear war is now back within the realm of possibility.” As the existential risk expert Seth Baum wrote recently, it’s “a prospect worth taking extremely seriously.”

Taking that prospect seriously requires some “right of boom” thinking, to try to do what we can to mitigate the harms and improve human resilience if the worst of the worst does occur, all the while walking a careful tightrope between being alert and being alarmist….’

— via Vox

‘The decentralized hacktivist group Anonymous does not take kindly to Marjorie Taylor Greene’s stupidity. When they call her “one of the dumbest politicians ever,” they are most likely referring to everything from her anti-vax/mask/science stance to her anti-Ukraine rhetoric to the Q-injected drivel that comes out of her mouth (or thumbs) every single day. “Russian asset Marjorie Taylor Greene will go down in history as one of the dumbest politicians ever,” Anonymous tweeted yesterday. “History will not be kind to you, nor will we.”…’

— via Boing Boing

‘As Ukraine’s president addressed U.S. lawmakers about his nation’s deepening crisis, a Boston cardiologist engaged in his own direct diplomacy, delivering a stark message about the specter of nuclear war to a group of Russian physicians and scientists.

In uncensored remarks Wednesday, Dr. James Muller, a Brigham and Women’s Hospital doctor and co-founder of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), warned the Russian invasion of Ukraine had raised the threat of a nuclear war whose “damage is beyond our imagination.”

“While the death and destruction in the Ukraine is a nightmare, an even greater disaster is nearby,” Muller said in Russian during his 15-minute speech to members of the prestigious Russian Academy of Science.

“Nuclear weapons have been put on high alert, which threatens to expand the tragedy from the death of thousands to the deaths of hundreds of millions,” he added. “While many discount the possibility that any rational person would launch nuclear weapons, the current high alert status increases the odds of a nuclear war beginning by accident, miscalculation or terrorist attack.”

The IPPNW won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 for bringing attention to the medical consequences of using nuclear weapons.

On Wednesday, Muller delivered his speech in an online video stream that was also broadcast on a Russian scientific channel. In it, he referenced a 1960s medical account written by his colleague, the late Dr. Bernard Lown, of what a potential nuclear attack on Boston would look like. Muller explained it like this:

Multiple nuclear warheads, each more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, would strike the city. In the center, near the Charles River, there would be a fireball with intense temperatures that would kill hundreds of thousands instantly. Around the center the heat and blast forces would kill and injure hundreds of thousands more. The total deaths in Boston would be 3 million. There would be fierce winds and radioactive fallout. Medical care, even pain relief, would be unavailable because most hospitals, including the Brigham and Women’s where I work, would be destroyed and most health professionals would be killed or injured.

After his speech, Muller said a silence fell between the audience of more than 100 scientists and physicians. Now, he said there are talks about whether the Russian Academy will issue a statement with a U.S. partner calling on world leaders to establish peace in Ukraine and avoid further escalation of the conflict….’

— via WBUR News

‘When it comes to averting a threat with the potential to kill billions, $47.7 million a year just isn’t very much. And the pool is shrinking. Experts in the field told me there’s been a long decline in support since the end of the Cold War. Then, last year, the MacArthur Foundation (famous for its “genius grants”) announced that it was going to transition away from nuclear issues.

That decision hit the nuclear community like a punch in the gut. In 2018, before the change, 45 percent of all funding for nuclear issues came from MacArthur. That means funding could drop by nearly half with MacArthur’s ultimate exit in 2023.

And this isn’t the first such shock the nuclear community has faced: The Hewlett Foundation poured $24.7 million into its Nuclear Security Initiative from 2007 to 2015 before exiting the field.

Delegates representing 47 nations convene at the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, DC, in 2010. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
The MacArthur announcement also came shortly after the nuclear research group N Square released a major report built out of interviews with 72 nuclear threat reduction practitioners in Washington, DC. Its conclusions were bracing. Interviewees described a field dominated by figures (mostly white men) toward the end of their working lives, where progress early in a practitioner’s career was difficult; where different organizations don’t work effectively with each other; where compensation lagged relative to other fields; and where an “intensely critical and sometimes biting culture” could feel toxic and push good people away….’

— via Vox

’For decades, being a student in Tokyo meant you had to look a certain way. Under the public school system’s dress code, all students had to dye their hair black, certain hairstyles were prohibited and even their underwear had to be a designated color. But these rules, which have recently come under scrutiny and been criticized as outdated, will now be abolished, the city’s authorities announced this week.…’

— via CNN Style

’…one of the closest things we have to time travel…

And while some ghost towns—like Bodie, California, which is now a state historic park—are well-known tourist destinations, others are harder to find (sometimes because they’re quite literally off the beaten path). There’s also the possibility that there’s a nearby ghost town you never even knew existed.

Fortunately, there are various interactive maps that can point explorers in the right direction. Here are a few examples.…’

— via Lifehacker

‘The radius of the universe is about 46 billion light years. Now let me ask a different question: How many digits of pi would we need to calculate the circumference of a circle with a radius of 46 billion light years to an accuracy equal to the diameter of a hydrogen atom (the simplest atom)? The answer is that you would need 39 or 40 decimal places….’

— via NASA/JPL Edu

I’m a sucker for those websites promising the best photos, especially nature photos, of the year, but I usually come away from viewing the collection saying “Meh”. This bunch, in contrast, took my breath away. 

— via The Atlantic

‘A new — and surprising — bipartisan coalition is taking shape around one of the country’s most controversial issues….’

— via Vox

Have they had enough of the hypocrisy of being “pro-life” and pro-death penalty?

‘The defunct site of the infamous 1986 meltdown has lost power two weeks after it was seized by Russian forces. Experts fear another nuclear disaster looms.

Two weeks ago, Russian forces seized control of the defunct Chernobyl, once the site of the world’s worst nuclear meltdown, and Zaporizhzhia, Europe’s biggest active nuclear power plant, raising concerns of nuclear risks in the middle of a war zone. 

Although Chernobyl’s last reactor went offline in 2000, the site now serves as a nuclear waste storage facility—and a highly contaminated one. The situation there is deteriorating; the facility lost power on Wednesday, and backup diesel generators have only enough fuel for two days. The 210 technical personnel and guards have not been allowed to rotate out to rest. The UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, which promotes the peaceful use of nuclear energy and prevents nuclear weapon proliferation, says it lost contact with Chernobyl’s radiation monitoring systems on Tuesday. Unless officials can restore power, experts fear Chernobyl could once again become the site of a nuclear calamity.

“To have a long-term loss of power is certainly a concern,” says Ed Lyman, a senior global security scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists and coauthor of the book Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster. Some of Chernobyl’s waste has been transferred into dry casks, but considerable quantities of fuel rods remain in a pool that requires cooling. That’s where the biggest risks currently are. “Without electrical power to the cooling pumps, the spent fuel pool will start heating up,” Lyman says. Water will gradually evaporate or boil away, exposing the fuel rods and releasing radioactive gasses….’

— via WIRED

‘While a few big events like the US’ 2016 election and the UK’s Brexit helped bring this meddling to light, many remained unaware or unwilling to accept that Putin’s disinformation machine was influencing them on a wide range of issues. Small groups of determined activists tried to convince the world that the Kremlin had infiltrated and manipulated the economies, politics, and psychology of much of the globe; these warnings were mostly met with silence or even ridicule.

All that changed the moment Russian boots touched Ukrainian soil. Almost overnight, the Western world became overwhelmingly aware of the Kremlin’s activities in these fields, shattering the illusions that allowed Putin’s alternative, Kremlin-controlled information ecosystem to exist outside its borders. As a result, the sophisticated disinformation machinery Putin spent decades cultivating collapsed within days….’

— via WIRED