The Screwed-up Future of US Science; Precipitous Decline as Governmental Policy

As some of you know as a boy I was interested in science and wanted to make a career in scientific research. So I got a PhD from King’s College London in 1980 and them worked in Germany for 6 years. Where to go next? I felt I had seen British and German science and so thought about other places to try out. The most obvious place with decent labs and scientific culture was the US.
So it was logical that I then applied for and managed to get a job as assistant professor at the University of Florida (UF) in 1984. But why did I decide to go to the US? My younger self wasn’t organized enough to write down a list of reasons, but if he had I think he would have jotted, in order;

1. Good well funded labs and universities. Then as now the majority of the world’s most prestigious, best funded, successful, well-respected universities and institutes were in the US.
2. A decent scientific culture and respect for science based reality. Perhaps not universal in the population, but hell, they got to the moon.
3. Good pay and a high standard of living. The pay in a US university was better than that in the UK and Germany. And to a European, US food, gas, rent, house and land prices were at that time significantly lower.
4. Parks, better climate, natural beauty and all that. I’d been around the US a little and clearly there were some great state and national parks and a lot to see. And much of the US had a more appealing climate then that in the often cold, wet and dismal UK and Germany.
5. Multicultural melting pot. The UK and to a lesser degree Germany were also multicultural melting pots and I had no problems with Turks, Jews, Muslims, Arabs, Chinese, Indians, Pakistanis, in fact any kind of non-Anglo. So foreigners didn’t bother me at all, in fact I liked them and was interested in their cultures and food.
6. A stable democratic government with respect for the rule of law and good relations with other democracies. This was a given in those days. Of course it was clear that the US was considerably more right wing than Europe and there were occasional outbursts of craziness, but apart from Nixon and McCarthy, things looked reasonably stable. Of course there were other lesser problems, I didn’t like the then President Reagan and right wing politics much, I thought the gun and drug cultures and resulting problems were crazy and I was not impressed by the average education level, but I figured I could deal with all of that.

There were some negatives, notably the only partially functional US health care system, but I was young and healthy and had not committed to more than a few years in the US, so this was not a big issue. So I took the job in UF and I think I was pretty successful. I didn’t win a Nobel Prize but I was reasonably well known in my area of research and published quite a lot of fairly decent peer reviewed publications, IMHO. I also started a small biotech company initially with the help of UF which grew surprisingly well so that I retired rather early from UF to concentrate on running that. This company has generated jobs for me and several others, so nobody can say I am taking an American’s job, I made jobs for myself and several others. So I am a minor example of the American dream. I came to the US with basically nothing and contributed enough to benefit both me, others and the US in general.
Supposing the 1984 young me got somehow transported to that lab in Germany now and was thinking about where to go next. OK…

1, Good well funded labs and universities; is that true now? Trump hates universities as they believe in things like diversity, equity and inclusion which he doesn’t like except when applied to overweight intellectually challenged old white men like him, or white South Africans. He also has no respect of real facts and actual reality, another significant count against universities, which of course function to deal with the world as it really is. Finally “well funded” is largely dependent on federal dollars from NIH, NSF, DOD, VA and other federal agencies. The Trump regime doesn’t like those either and is firing their staff, blocking grants which have any hint of subjects he doesn’t like and making it difficult to make use of already funded grants. So the US just isn’t like it was in 1984, would I risk moving from Germany to the US under these conditions? How about;

2, A decent scientific culture and respect for actual science. Americans are taught to be very confident about expressing their opinions which would be good if it melded with respect for expertise, knowledge, facts and data, but that respect is obviously sometimes missing. This was present but mostly under control in 1984 but now science denialism is much more widespread and unfortunately a major part of the current hopelessly crap government. Stupid ideas abound. Vaccines cause autism, evolution is not real, climate change is not happening or maybe it is but is not a big threat, there are only two sexes, Covid-19 was made in a lab etc. etc, all brought to the boil by silly rubbish posted on numerous fake news generating right wing sites. There are many people in government now who believe in some or all of this stupid nonsense. Worse, the problem of doing something about climate change is going backwards due to science denial paid for by the deep pockets of the rotten corrupt evil lying fossil fuel industry. 1984 was 4 years prior to James Hansen testifying before the US senate, pointing out the likely problems from fossil fuel induced climate change. However in 1984 there were already warning signs if you were reading science journals, but at that time we thought the threat was quite distant. Now anyone with no previous bias can see the climate has got much more threatening and all predictions suggest more changes at an ever accelerating rate. So the last 10 year were the hottest 10 years on record, 2024 was the hottest single year on record, and sea levels are rising at an accelerating rate, now almost a quarter of an inch a year. I still read the best science and economics journals and all of those, universally, treat climate change as a very real and pressing issue which needs to be seriously dealt with. So it was disappointing that climate change was hardly mentioned during the last US election and was very low on voters list of important issues, which says a lot about the average voter IMHO. And of course the EPA is being defunded, sensible regulations are being removed or ignored and funding for alternate energy is being cut. Worse those crappy gas and diesel guzzling smelly inefficient rubbish ICE cars are being supported while much better and more fun electric cars are not being supported. So 2, look like a firm no also.

3. Good pay and high standard of living. That of course depends on a stable research job for me in 2025 US on which I could build a career. Bearing in mind 1 and 2, this looks pretty questionable, would I be prepared to risk it? Probably not. And general standards of living have relatively declined for most people in the US as wages have increased less quickly than prices for rents, houses, land, insurance, food etc. So while some things are still cheaper in the US, one being gasoline, most things are now pretty comparable in price or more expensive, so the financial incentive to move to the US, even if you can get a job, is now reduced. Also of course the over expensive and inefficient US health care system is now a significant disincentive. And if you planned a family good luck paying for child care and education.

4. Parks, better climate, natural beauty and all that. Well the current crappy regime is firing employees at national parks and trying to close down many of them. I suppose they will get this under control and keep the most visited ones open eventually, but who knows? And of course even the climate is not what it was. We have always had hurricanes in Florida but they are becoming more intense and damaging every year. I am forced to carefully monitor the storm potential every summer so as to prepare backup systems, buy tinned food, toilet paper, collect water etc. to be ready for likely power outages. In England and Germany power outages hardly ever happened, in Florida, due to downed power lines, the power often goes out, sometimes for days and sometimes multiple times in a hurricane season. Apart from anything else this has resulted in a metastasizing insurance crisis in Florida, California and other states at particular risk from climate change. This of course impacts homeowners and groups thinking of setting up companies. And the climate is getting more and more extreme all the time. Would the 1984 me take a job in Florida or California in 2025, always assuming one was available? Maybe I’d consider somewhere apparently less prone to climate change, Boston, New York or somewhere, though of course issues 1-3 would still be top of my mind, I would likely have already ruled the US out for the combination of those reasons.

5. A multicultural melting pot. Well the US is still a multicultural melting pot but for how long? Clearly the current government doesn’t like any kind of non-white non-male non-Christian, so interesting new immigrants and their cultures and foods won’t be coming here except in very small numbers. And non-white non-male non-Christians are clearly getting marginalized all over. While I am white and male, I have always been a fervent and devout non-Christian, so don’t fit well with the current regime. I am not gay or transgender but a rapid anti-fascist and anti-right wing billionaires, which might get me into trouble. And a lot of the US right wingers don’t like any kind of immigrant, even white males like me, I’ve seen that myself. Another reason for me to look elsewhere.

6. a stable democratic government with respect for the rule of law and good relations with other democracies. The US government has never looked more unstable and less democratic then today, with someone in charge who looks more and more unhinged every moment. And rule of law? Forget that, Trump pardoning criminals and attempting to prosecute DOJ employees who previously were just doing their jobs in investigating his numerous legal transgressions. And ignoring and boasting about ignoring the judiciary over and over again. And while in 1984 I knew that the US sometimes drifted from an ethical foreign policy, think overthrowing democratically elected Iranian and Chilean governments, the failed attempt to invade Cuba and the fiasco of Vietnam, it seemed that the US did basically at some sort of level believe in democracy and human rights. Of course none of that is true now, previous allies are adversaries, NATO is scorned even though it has guaranteed peace in most of Europe for 80 years while the Trump regime aligns with one of the worlds very worst, that evil little turdy dwarf Putin, and those other petty and evil dictators, Xi and Kim. And the US used to have good relations with many allies and generated enormous amounts of goodwill from USAID and other programs. All that is over for now anyway.

So the 1984 me would probably go back to the UK, or stay in Germany, or maybe France, Scandinavia, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, anywhere but the US. Something like this happened before. Germany was the world’s high tech center for Physics, Chemistry and other hard sciences before Hitler came along. When a country has such scientific dominance the best scientists from other countries flock there and further strengthen the science in that country. So scientists from all over the world worked in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. Of course when Hitler came into power, many of these fled or were otherwise neutralized, you know how, and the US and UK did very well out of the surviving immigrants and refugees. So the stupid racist white trash Nazi regime lost German scientists like Albert Einstein, Danes like Niels Bohr and Hungarians like Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Johnny Von Neuman and Eugene Wigner. These and many others had productive and militarily highly impactful careers in the US. In parallel the other fascist wind bag Mussolini lost Italy’s best scientists, notably Enrico Fermi who made the first nuclear reactor in Chicago, not Rome. The Soviets also lost a lot of excellent brains following their invasions of central Europe, one notable example being George Gamow. And of course the outstanding Hungarians I mentioned above had absolutely no interest in returning to Soviet occupied Hungary. These people together pioneered things like computers, nuclear energy and the atom bomb. So by being really stupid the Nazis and Fascists did a lot to aid the collapse of their own rotten regimes and the loss of talent meant that Soviets had to play catch up with the west for years after the second world war. It’s almost like totalitarianism doesn’t work isn’t it? And because at one time the Nazis looked like they might invade and occupy the UK, the Brits gifted the US their prize cutting edge technologies, notably microwave radar, jet engines and the prototype of the Manhattan project. So look it up, American radar was heavily influenced by the work of Randall and Boot, the first American jet aircraft had a British engine and the top secret “Tube Alloys” program eventually resulted in the Manhattan project. It’s almost as if foreigners can be useful. I’m not claiming that the US had no native scientists, it did, but these and other immigrants gave the country considerable advantages over the rest of the world. And how about this; the Chinese born scientist Qian Xuesen came to the US in 1935 and trained at MIT and Caltech. After working on the Manhattan project he cofounded the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab and had faculty positions at MIT and Caltech. He was regarded as being a genius, but got investigated for spying during the McCarthy era, another right wing bolus of unsubstantiated made up paranoia. So he was stripped of security clearances at the DOD where he had been a colonel even though there was no evidence that he was in fact a spy. He was subjected to house arrest for 5 years, apparently the US did not want his expertise to get to China. He finally got deported back to China in 1955, whwn he was in exchange for US pilots shot down over Korea. And guess what happened then? He was put in charge of China’s rocket program, essentially giving the Chinese the expertise to develop their own cutting edge weapons. One of his projects was the Silkworm, widely sold including to Iran who used them to attack US flagged tankers. That worked out well didn’t it? The US’s self inflicted loss was China’s gain.

To get back to the 1984 me in 2025; Perhaps I and/or he would pass for now on looking for a job in the US and check back in a few years in the hope that this nonsense regime got replaced by something more normal and sensible. But right now as outlined above, a definitive no, no, no, no, no, no and an overall are you f**king kidding me? In fact all 6 reasons for wanting to go to the US in 1984 have become 6 good reasons for not going now. All over the world there are well educated talented young people with highly marketable skills who are now probably thinking about the same as I would have done. This is a huge problem, the US has done great out of immigrants, not just the ones fleeing the Nazis, Fascists and Soviets as noted above. So Google/Alphabet cofounder Sergei Brin is Russian, Intel cofounder Andy Grove was Hungarian, Apple cofounder Steve Jobs was the son of a Syrian immigrant, Jensen Huang, founder of Nvidia is South Korean and I could mention SpaceX, Tesla, Boring, Neuralink etc. etc. founder or with some sort of roll anyway for Elon Musk who is South African. And there are many more, in fact a staggering 46% of the Fortune 500 companies had an immigrant or child of an immigrant as cofounder. The injection of this foreign talent has obviously had enormous impact on the US economy and it looks like this injection will now greatly fall or even stop all together. So that means that people who could be generating new technologies and industries in the US will just do it somewhere else. And what is the basis of current US military power? It is dependent on things like nuclear weapons, radar, computers and jet engines, sounds familiar? The US is already struggling in competition with China. In 1986 and onwards I taught academically top notch Chinese, Indian, Korean and other foreign graduate students in UF, only the very best were accepted. In fact their transcripts were way better than those of US student applicants. The immigrants got PhDs with no problems and almost all of them would then stay on in the US, adding their talents to the US pool. Now they will all either stay in China, India, Korea or wherever or go somewhere else but not the US. I know that many young American born scientists are currently wondering if they can make any kind of career in the US so that many are looking at the other places where you can do research, Canada, UK, Germany etc. etc. And the power of US science comes from the very talented researchers at places like the Howard Hughes Medical Institutes, Harvard, Janelia, the Rockefeller, UCLA, Stanford, UCSF etc. etc. The leading figures at these places are now being actively recruited by foreign institutions. So the US is not only incentivizing talented people not to come here but also incentivizing talented US scientists here now to go somewhere else. As in the past the strongest economies and war winning states are those with the best grasp of science and innovation. So how is the decimation of universities and research good for the long term future of the US?

In fact I wonder what this rubbish regime is thinking. It’s already clear that the US is losing the race for the future with China. China makes great AI, is already dominating solar panels, batteries and other alternate energy products and their electric cars will shortly eradicate most of the legacy European, Japanese and American auto makers, by the end of this decade if not before, see if I’m right. China has far more people, far more well trained engineers and scientists, better general education, a stronger work ethic, great funding for research and business set up and is clearly the only current economy competitive with the US. That economy is growing more than twice as fast as that of the US, so will overtake the US pretty soon. Going forward the inward looking US with little innovation will be overtaken by an unstoppable China and new cutting edge technologies will emerge more and more from China and other advanced countries, not the US. The denial of climate change in the US is ridiculously stupid as it slows the necessary progress away from fossil fuels which is inevitable and is happening pretty much everywhere else in the world. In a few years the US is likely to have a vast store of useless fossil fuel which nobody wants, fleets of obsolete ICE vehicles, and will have lost the ability to compete with China which will completely own all renewable technologies, not to mention AI and whatever new technologies emerge. China will have ultra clean air and so a much healthier population while Americans continue to breath in rotten dirty fossil fuel derived carcinogenic smelly smutty crap for no good reason. So the US is on a path that can only lead to rapid decline while China gets more and more powerful, not a formula for a viable US or a stable world. So why on earth is this happening? Clearly Trump is just not right in the head, but Musk is a smart guy. It now seems clear that Musk realizes that the silly DOGE thing was very poorly executed and will be highly counterproductive, so he is distancing himself from it, although the damage has now been done. Is overwork, hubris and ketamine the problem? Hopefully the rapid decline in popularity of the Trump/Musk regime will result in the republicans losing the House and Senate, which might stop and possibly reverse some of this nonsense. But I fear that the US is stuck with this regime which clearly does not believe in any version of democracy. Again history is informative, Hitler was actually elected by a minority of the population but all the same democratically. Once in power he shut down the free press and by intimidation consolidated all power in himself and the evil Nazi party, and you know how that worked out. Tell me that something like this is not happening now.

More Covid Crap

A friend sent me a link to this video, asking me of my opinion (here). IMHO this video is basically rubbish from beginning to end and I’m going to write an extensive review of all the silly crap in it. But for now;

In the video Dr. Robert Malone MD claims to have invented the mRNA vaccines and has claimed this in several other venues. Did he though? He worked as a graduate student in a PhD program in UCSD and the Salk Institute in the late 80s. He wrote one paper here showing that mRNA containing sequence encoding a reporter protein could be mixed with lipofectin, a commercial lipid product, and applied to mammalian cells grown in a dish. The cells then expressed the reporter protein. How surprising was this? Lipofectin was already widely used to introduce DNA into cells for expression studies so it wasn’t exactly stunning that with a bit of playing around with conditions you could do it with mRNA also. A step forward but hardly a breakthrough. A second paper lists Malone as second author here, and this shows that certain of his mRNA constructs and others could be injected into the muscles of mice and express encoded reporter proteins there. In this case the lipofectin was not used, the mRNA was just injected directly. Typically the first author on a paper is responsible for most of the work and second authors did some of the work but basically had a lesser role. The work was done in Madison, Wisconsin, not the Salk or UCSD, and it appeared in 1990, by which time Malone had quit the PhD program, he later went on to obtain an MD degree. On this basis he is claiming he invented the mRNA vaccines. While he may have thought that mRNA might one day be used to develop vaccines I seriously doubt that nobody else had the same thought. At the time proteins were being routinely expressed in cells using engineered DNA, and the added DNA made mRNA which made the protein. It was obvious that putting in mRNA was a more direct approach but everybody knew the problem with this; mRNA is extremely unstable. So to get anything useful you had to figure out how to stabilize the mRNA and get it into cells and you also had to figure out how to manufacture whatever you had developed in bulk. So practical mRNA vaccines did not emerge until 30 years later. Lipofectin would not work well with humans, a more advanced lipid formulation was needed and it needed to be coupled to the mRNA in a reliable way that could be scaled up for mass manufacture. These problems were solved in 2000 by Peter Cullis, Ian MacLachlan and collaborators at a company called Protiva, which developed the lipid nanoparticles and methods of manufacture used by both the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines. A problem was that the mRNA/nanoparticle complexes induced a strong inflammatory response which resulted in the mRNA being inactivated. The solution to this problem came in 2005 when Katalin Kariko, Drew Weissman and others showed that modification of certain bases of the mRNA would make the mRNA much more stable and much less inflammatory, see here. Much work was performed refining this approach, with safety, animal work and further research both in academia and industry over the next years. So everything, fortunately for the world, was fully worked out early in 2020 when Covid-19 hit. So Moderna and Pfizer could very quickly develop effective mRNA/nanoparticle based vaccines once the Chinese released the nucleic acid sequence of the virus which they did very quickly, on the 10th of January 2020. Despite all the nonsense spouted in this video, the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are safe and very effective and will save millions of lives. And you haven’t seen anything yet, the mRNA/nanoparticle approach is being investigated for treatments for a host of other diseases. So there is talk of an mRNA Nobel Prize. One of the rules of the Nobel foundation is that a maximum of three individuals can share a single prize. It seems very likely Kariko and most likely Weissman and possibly MacLachlan or Cullis will win. Numerous others who have contributed to the mRNA work one being Malone. However, look at the awards Kariko has already got on her Wikipedia page. In summary Malone made a small contribution early on but if he says he deserves full credit for inventing the mRNA vaccines he is either self delusional or dishonest.

I wrote this based on my own research which included reading the original research papers I cited. I then found that there was a commentary in Nature concerning the history behind the mRNA vaccines, see here. Although the Nature article was longer and more detailed than mine we came to same basic conclusions. Interestingly they made at least one mistake- the second Malone paper did not use lipofectin/mRNA as stated in Nature, but pure mRNA.

Covid Crap

OK here we go again, more superficial and misleading garbage on the internet. Charles Eisenstein posting on, guest what, his own site charleseisenstein.substack.com, where he can of course post any stuff that he feels like posting, nobody to factcheck or review his ramblings. See this article here. In this he claims that humans have a need to execute pariahs for some vaguely described reason. Then apparently anti-vaxxers are the latest pariahs, though he does admit nobody is suggesting executing them. But then he gets to the paragraph below;

“The science behind this portrayal is dubious. Contrary to the association of the unvaccinated with public danger, some experts contend that it is the vaccinated that are more likely to drive mutant variants through selection pressure. Just as antibiotics result in higher mutation rates and adaptive evolution in bacteria, leading to antibiotic resistance, so may vaccines push viruses to mutate. (Hence the prospect of endless “boosters” against endless new variants.) This phenomenon has been studied for decades, as this article in my favorite math science website, Quanta, describes. The mutated variants evade the vaccine-induced antibodies, in contrast to the robust immunity that, according to some scientists, those who have already been sick with Covid have to all variants (See this and this, more analysis here, compare to Dr. Fauci’s viewpoint“.

The Quanta article he cited basically makes the obvious point that viruses mutate all the time and so if you have a lot of vaccinated individuals the virus will adapt to infect them. Scientists and clinicians are well aware of this and there is not much anyone can do about it so it may ultimately be necessary to develop new vaccines. So what? The present vaccines are extremely efficacious when it comes to stopping serious disease and death, but are a little less effective against the delta variant. It may be necessary to modify booster vaccines to account for this and later variants, not surprising, a new vaccine for the flu is made each year. However suggesting that it is better not to vaccinate is stupidly wrong. Without the Covid-19 vaccines deaths in the US would now be in the millions. And viruses mutate to infect more efficiently whether or not there are vaccinated people around. Remember that the delta variant originated a few months ago in India at a time when there was essentially no pool of vaccinated individuals.

So then he links to a post by Hooman Noorchashm MD, PhD who is supposedly a physician scientist (here). Hooman lists on Linkedin as being an assistant professor 2014-2017 at Thomas Jefferson University and assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania from 2003-2006. Being an assistant professor is the first step up the academic ladder and leads to associate professor with tenure if the individual is successful as measured by peer reviewed publications, grants and other accomplishments. Dr. Noorchashm apparently failed to make that transition in either place and does not currently list an academic affiliation. He is now a practicing physician so it is a stretch to call himself a physician scientist; he did not make the cut as a scientist, twice. His article was posted on his own site noorchashm.medium.com. Of course anybody can post anything on their own web site. He goes on to contradict an article in the Wall Street Journal, just polemically, he does not cite any source for the information he claims, just mentions “the bulk of the studies on the topic of..”. Why not cite them? Obviously he did not learn much in his attempts to be a real scientist. There is nothing to suggest that the Wall Street Journal took any notice of this basically contentless tirade. Also, of course, there is money involved- he expresses his opinions, guess where, Fox News for which he presumably gets well paid.

The next thing Eisenstein cited is an article in Arutz Sheva, a journal I never heard of, see here. As with Dr Noorchashm there is no link to back up the claims in this article, so it may be totally made up rubbish for all I can tell. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt for now. They claim that 7,700 new cases of infection occurred in Israel, “in the most recent wave starting in May”, not very specific. 72 people who had been infected got reinfected, while about 40% of the new cases had been vaccinated. So the majority, more than 50% who got infected were not vaccinated, which they don’t mention. Since Israel is one of the most vaccinated countries on the planet there are now more vaccinated people than non-vaccinated, so this tells you that clearly it is better to be vaccinated. Note they don’t say how many of the vaccinated and unvaccinated got seriously sick and died, a key bit of information. They also don’t break that down for the 72 reinfected either. Other recent studies show that the vast majority of those seriously ill and dying from Covid-19 were not vaccinated. Just search for “percentage of people in ICU unvaccinated” on any search engine and you will see numerous different reports all showing that the percentage of ICU Covid-19 patients who are unvaccinated is uniformly in the high 90s. So this journal implies that natural immunity is better than vaccines; Rubbish!! How many of the infected in Israel have died from Covid-19; the number is 6,559 as of today, about 5,200 before the vaccination program started. How many more would have died without vaccines? Obviously thousands more. So just a little thought will tell that this article is sloppily put together, misleading, just the sort of crap linked to by anti-vaxxers. And what about the site, Arutz Sheva? I wasn’t surprised to find that the site and a parent journal were founded to cater to right wing religious extremists, often not reliable sources of information. Of course an online journal is subsidized by adverts so it is in their interest to post as much click bait as possible, again follow the money.

In the same article is a link to a CNN video about this pathetic dishonest fraud Joseph Mercola (here). This is supposed to be a hit piece by CNN but by my estimation Dr. Mercola fully deserved to be hit, multiple times and then some more. Then, below the link to the CNN video there was a long tirade from Mercola about how poorly treated he has been and how the British secret service is after him and similar rubbish. This has now been taken down, I think Mercola is finally feeling some heat from all this bullshit he puts out. Of course at the bottom was a link to purchase his latest book. Again he is not a scientist, only an MD with the usual ego and delusions. He is the number 1 spreader of nonsense about masks and vaccines allegedly not working, vaccines causing death, basically all that rubbish. He of course puts all his crap on his own website where you can buy lots and lots of his worthless rubbish merchandise. Follow the money- he is making a decent income off of the clueless and gullible, some of whom will needlessly get sick and die. What selfish cynicism, especially from someone who took the Hippocratic oath. See this load of total nonsense.

Finally the article goes to an article concerning Dr. Fauci, to his credit Eisenstein links to a contrary view, although he clearly thinks his previous links were reality. This link goes to Business Insider, not a vanity site but a real serious journal with high standards, see here. Unlike all the above crap this quote Fauci accurately and directly cites two articles in Science, one of the world’s most rigorously peer reviewed journals. These papers are here and here. Two other papers are cited and can be downloaded from BiorXiv and ware currently not yet peer reviewed although this is in progress, these can be downloaded from here and here. See the difference? One side either does not link anywhere or links to dubious bullshit sites which do not detail their sources of information and the other allows you to read the data on which they are making their claims. This is just total rubbish versus science, I know which I am going to rely on. You’ll also notice that Fauci is not trying to sell you anything. To get back to Eisenstein’s garbage article, he later opines,

“For these reasons, I won’t try too hard to substantiate my belief that – and I may as well say it explicitly as a gesture of goodwill to the censors, who will thus have an easier time deciding what to do with this article – the Covid vaccines are much more dangerous, less effective, and less necessary than we are told.”

He of course provides absolutely no evidence for this. And there is none. And again;

“Nor is the foregoing analysis incompatible with the theory that Covid and the vaccination agenda is a totalitarian conspiracy to surveil, track, inject, and control every human being on earth.”

Just paranoid rubbish. Science is running the response to Covid-19 in the US with, at least now, relatively little input from the government. This is as it should be. Science is the only trick that humans ever developed which can lead to any new understanding or progress. You can pray to whichever of the numerous gods you prefer and you may then feel better but apart from that you will get nowhere. You can believe misinformation on the internet if you want but that gets you worse than nowhere, it gets you making really stupid decisions. Garbage in garbage out. I also noticed that Eisenstein wants you to get a paid subscription to his great thinkings, again follow the money. He is also not a scientist or even a clinician, being apparently a journalist and speaker. So he is even less qualified than the awful dishonest and useless Mercola and Noorchashm to have any meaningful opinion about vaccines. I’m going to edit my take on Eisenstein’s rubbish article and send it to him with an admonition to STFU since he is harming innocent ignorant and misinformed people.

Yet More Rubbish

I’ve been doing still photography since I was a boy, but recently I got into video a bit. Also I got interested in invasive species since I am one. Below is a video of a group of volunteers pulling up an invasive plant in north central Florida, the infamous Caesar’s weed, which grows like Bejasus here. All thanks go to Lara Colley for organizing this. Movie is rather large so can take a while to download.

Another little movie

I made another little movie. These are coontie seedlings, which are native plants here in Florida. They are also known as indian root, since the American Indians used to eat the underground parts of them. Coonties are primitive plants belonging to the cycad group which were a major part of the flora during dinosaur times. I don’t know why they wave around like that. This was actually my first movie with sound, need to learn more clearly. It can take a while to download since it’s fairly large.

Movie

I made a movie

Election Countdown

Browser not supported. Visit www.270towin.com

The Snake Bite Story

cottonmouth So anyway one Sunday in the evening maybe about 20 years ago I was cycling in the countryside outside Gainesville, Florida with my then ~6 year old son. I saw this colorful little snake at the side of the road. So it was a summer evening and snakes come out of the vegetation at that time and lie on the road as it is still warm, I suppose, I can’t read a snakes mind, but anyway they do do that. This means they get run over a lot and I feel sorry for them since they live here and humans and their great big fat fossil burner crap vehicles are destructive invasive immigrant species. So I decided I would save this particular little snake so I started banging it with the front wheel of the bicycle. It wouldn’t move, which might have clued me in, but it didn’t at that stage. So anyway I looked at it close up, it had no rattle, it was not flat grey and it looked rather like the harmless water snakes I had seen before. In fact I saw one just like it today, image above. So I just grabbed it by the tail and flipped it off the road into the vegetation. I did notice that it bit me and put two small holes in my right index finger, so I immediately thought “oops, that was not some harmless water snake, maybe getting bitten was a somewhat fairly bad thing”.

I showed my son the bleeding holes in my finger and we carried on cycling. So as we went on the finger got to sort of hurt a bit and started swelling. About half an hour later we got home and it was clear my finger was in some trouble. So I went to my snake book and found out that baby cottonmouths and/or water moccasins are sort of stripy reddish blackish snakes just like the one that bit me. They don’t look a bit like the adults at all, which are great big fat grey things. So I had been bitten by a poisonous snake- my finger now looked like a big fat sausage and I showed it to my wife who was shocked and horrified and told me to head down to the emergency room ASAP. Good advice I thought and off I went. So I sat there and eventually they saw me, but it turned out that very unusually there was another snake bite victim there, he got done by a rattlesnake. Riding his bicycle, he fell off, landed on top of a rattlesnake which tried to strike at his face but fortunately he put his hand in the way. So he got a nasty bite in the hand, better than the face, but still not good. So we bonded and said various negative things about Florida serpents, spiders, crocodilians etc. Anyway the meds looked at my finger and marked with a ball point pen how far up my hand the swelling had gone. That’s all they did, so I got to sit in the emergency room talking to the other snake bite guy and various other people with various other interesting and challenging things wrong with them. This was before smart phones, iPads, internets, whatever, so after an hour or so I got sort of bored with that. So I started to wander around a bit and there happened to be a little departmental office or something with a lot of medical type books in it. So I parked my carcass there and read everything there was on snake bites and in a couple of hours I knew quite a lot. So guess who gets bitten by snakes? Mostly males, mostly age 15-55, mostly alcohol related, whoda thunkit? So I was in the peak demographic except in my case it was not alcohol related, no really, I hadn’t touched a drop, honest. So I had amusing thoughts about drunk men picking up snakes and throwing them around or whatever, what asses male humans are. More to the point, what can you do about snake bites? Not much actually. The only therapy was antivenin which is this crazy thing where they inject horses with rattlesnake venom (what happens to the horses?) and the horse make antibodies to the rattlesnake venom and they get that out of the horse, call it antivenin, and inject it into the snake bite victim and it is supposed to neutralize the snake venom somehow.

So anyway I know a bit about antibodies and the literature also pointed out some potential flaws in the horse antivenin approach. One is that the cottonmouth and/or water moccasin is a different kind of snake from the rattlesnake, quite a distant relative, so any antibodies against rattlesnake stuffs may or may not, in many cases likely not, work on cottonmouth and/or water moccasin venom. Another is that if you just dump a bunch of horse antibodies into a person the immune system will quickly recognize the horse proteins as foreign and neutralize them and the person may also get an allergic response, then requiring a rat hole of more treatments, anti anaphylaxis drugs, expense etc. Finally I found out that snake venom from pit vipers, the group that include rattlesnakes, copper heads and that one that bit me, is a very complex mix of all kinds of nasty junk, proteases, nucleases, lipases and various toxins which serve to paralyze and also digest the tissues of the victim. Very nasty, and I couldn’t see how the horse antibodies could possible neutralize all the different components in this stuff.

So after three hours or so hanging around the emergency room the medics come back and with a ball point pen they marked where the swelling is on my hand, by now basically all of it. They tell me that they want to give me the antivenin but I raise the issues above and say I don’t want it. Nowadays this must happen to medics all the time, the unqualified expert, what with internets and all that, but in those days they were not used to being questioned by uppity patients so they got a bit sort of annoyed. Then it’s like midnight and they now want me to stay overnight and I flat out refuse. The finger hurts, the arm is now beginning to swell up dramatically but I otherwise feel fine and I am pretty sure I am going to make it through the night so I go home. So I have to sign something saying I refused the equine treatment and if I drop dead in the night it’s my fault and off I go.

The next day I go back to the emergency room as I am still alive and the medics look at me, note my continued apparently viable existence, but don’t actually do anything. So I go off to work, it being Monday, with my right arm sort of immobile and actually swollen to about twice the normal size, it looks like a big fat pink sausage. So I must look like one of those weird crabs with one normal arm and one huge one. Everybody notices this and asks me about it and so maybe thirty times I start out “well I was cycling down the road…”. So nowadays I would put the whole thing on Facebook or somewhere which would save a lot of time.

So I recovered but it took ages. The arm stayed swollen for several days and then the lymph node in my armpit swelled up to the size of a large orange, which was quite uncomfortable. It looked like a huge ectopic breast, so I know what it feels like to have one breast anyway, but eventually it went away. The next thing was that I got these weird blood colored stripes down the side of my body on the side where I got bit. These went away after a few weeks but the site of the bites still hurt and one of the bite wounds got really infected. It basically formed a fairly large hole in the finger, as I said a lot of the stuff in snake venom digests tissues. It got so bad that I had to sit with a bowl under my finger as stuff was just continuously dripping out. Also the nail on that finger went black and fell off. After about six months I got some antibiotics which stopped the infection and it eventually healed up, but not perfectly. The nail eventually grew back but it is now growing about half the rate of the nails on my other fingers, and the finger tip never got full feeling to return, so there must have been some nerve damage.

Later I found out that baby pit vipers are actually about as dangerous as the adults. While the adults bite and inject a small amount of venom, to conserve the stuff, babies inject all they have. Some advice- If you see a snake don’t mess with it. Also if the snake is not scared of you especially leave it alone. Non poisonous snakes seem to know they are harmless so tend to take off at top speed if they see you. Cottonmouths and/or water moccasins are not scared of humans, many times I have jogged past adult ones and they just did not move away at all. As noted above the small snake that bit me was not going to move off the road merely because I hit it with my bicycle wheel. Today I saw another one on a path at a local park and this also did not move when I and other people went by. It knew it was poisonous, just like the one that bit me, so it knew that you mess with it at your peril.

I once read about George Orwell’s experiences in the Spanish civil war, particularly when he got shot through the neck by a sniper, which he stated was “quite interesting”. He thought he was going to die, you can read about that in “Homage to Catalonia”. It was quite interesting to be bitten by a poisonous snake also, not so life threatening, but, like George, I wouldn’t recommend you try it.

Proven Lab Techniques

This is basically an attempt at comedy I came up with as I was supposed to be the compere of a talent show put on by the local graduate students. So I presented it like a lecture about some experimental techniques which though widely used, they were likely not too familiar with, though in my lab we have done all of them, except the very last one, so far anyway.
Bottom or Butt Blotting	You have all heard to Northern, Southern, Western blotting techniques well, a further widely used technique is Bottom blotting, also known as Butt blotting, and comes about from leaving gels on seats and having someone sit on them. This is a technique which, though widely employed, has no known utility.
Linoleum Blotting	A related technique is Linoleum blotting, which involves dropping a gel onto the floor tiles, picking it up again and then continuing with the experiment. The linoleum gel fragmentation assay is a related technique, which involves applying the gel to the linoleum with significantly more vigor. You then pick up the pieces of the gel and try to figure out how they fit together. Another technique widely used in my lab is…
Note Book Chromatography	This technique makes use of the excellent absorbent properties of your notebook. You can apply your protein and DNA samples directly to your notebook, providing a permanent record of what you have been doing. When you see me doing an experiment you might come away with the impression that I’m a sloppy bastard, since my reagents appear to be splashing all over the place. In fact I’m making use of this powerful documentation technique.
Projectile PCR	Another powerful technique is Projectile PCR, which makes use of the fact that PCR tubes are small slimy things which slip readily out of your hand, flying across the room and typically landing behind the refrigerator. When you look behind the fridge you find several other PCR tubes all with the labels dissolved in the oil, so you have no idea which is the one you lost. Because of this feature of projectile PCR is often used in combination with the extreme rigor of triple blind analysis. A triple blind study is one in which neither you, nor your coworker, nor in fact anyone else in the world has any idea which sample is which, or even if they are in fact PCR samples. If your hypothesis is still tenable after that kind of rigorous analysis it must have been really good.
Desk top concentration	This consists of spilling your sample on the bench top and then returning it to the vessel from which you spilled it. Since you only ever get about half of it back, I estimate that this procedure might give you a rapid, one step, 50% concentration, though I must admit I haven’t actually quantitated the method in detail.
Protocol step excision	One of the real problems of science at the graduate student level is that it interferes with your social life, but there are fortunately several techniques to get round this. One widely used technique is protocol step excision. It frequently happens that you have a very long protocol to follow and you want to go to a movie or get laid or something, so you look through it and it has 12 steps. Choose the two or three steps that look the most boring and time consuming and simply skip them, allowing you to get finished on time. Your mentor probably won’t notice, since he or she probably didn’t read the protocol and probably figured it wouldn’t work anyway.
Protocol length extension	A complementary technique useful in many cases is protocol length extension, in which you typically change all 15-minute steps to 1 hour and all 30-minute steps to 2 hours. This has the advantage that you can honestly tell your mentor that you’re doing whatever the procedure is and still have time to go shopping in the mall, get your hair done, etc.
Extended overnight incubation	When protocol length extension gets out of hand it frequently develops into Extended overnight incubation. Many protocols conveniently allow you to put stuff at –20°C overnight, and extended overnight incubation merely takes this to the logical conclusion, so you can keep the stuff it in the fridge for several days, weeks, months or even years. By then your mentor will probably have forgotten all about the experiment.
Vehicular Biology	Another way to avoid messing up your social life is to use the techniques of molecular biology combined with motor vehicles, hence vehicular biology, a technique I invented when I was a postdoc. I wanted to go to this party, but I also wanted to get a gel run. So I got the gel, powerpack, bottle of buffer, staining solution and destain, loaded them up into my car, and went off to the party and set up the stuff to run the gel in the spare room. Unfortunately then I forgot all about it and the protein ran off the bottom of the gel, but at least I didn’t miss the party. This technique can probably be applied to most routine and time consuming lab procedures such as PCR, column chromatography and electrophysiology.
Losing stuff	A further big scientific problem is loosing stuff in the fridge, darkroom or wherever you are experimenting. There are numerous variations on this technique such as out of situ hybridization, total loss protein purification, immunoerradication, gene misplacement therapy, and so on.
Polymerase Drain Reaction (PDR)	Control experiments are very important in science, and one good one is the Polymerase drain reaction. This is basically a PCR in which you forget one of the vital components, and of course if you forget accurately there should be no product. However if you forget things in a way which lacks experimental rigor, you will get some bizarre product telling you that you need to forget things more carefully in future.
Sink Filtration	The PDR reaction product ends up, as its name suggests, in the drain. This is a general approach applied to many experimental paradigms, usually called sink filtration, which is one of the most basic and frequently performed procedures for the elimination of experimental results.
Bad Smells	Another problem in biology is using old reagents which have gone off. Since many of these smell bad this has generated a lot of techniques such as immunoflatulance, affinity putrefaction, restriction fragment stench polymorphism and Mouldy-TOF. The basic take home message from all these techniques is if it smells bad you probably screwed it up.
Total Laboratory Pyrolysis	So finally if despite trying all of these techniques you still have spent several years as a graduate student without generating any useful data there is one technique of last resort. This is total laboratory pyrolysis, which involves burning down the lab and erasing all record of your misadventures and incompetence over the years.

Qatar and Cape Town and back

So anyway there was this meeting in Cape Town in February 2016 which I could with some marginal justification. This is the International Neurotrauma Society meeting, where lots of good scientists and medics go to discuss brain and spinal cord damage stuffs. My company can pay for it, I will meet some interesting and marginally important people and I’ll get to see a bit of the world for a short while which I would not otherwise do, at least not without using my own money. Also some collaborators are going to the meeting so I can talk to them about future work and so on. I leave it a bit late to decide to go and so I don’t plan it very well, as usual, but I find a quite cheap ticket which will cost only $1,300 for Gainesville > Miami > Doha in Qatar > Cape Town and back. This is suspiciously cheap as the last time I went to London it cost about $1,500 for less than half the distance. So one Friday afternoon I set off from my company and I am back by Sunday evening the next week. The meeting is three days in downtown Cape Town so I have a day and half before and a day and a half after and spend pretty much all of two weekends in rather grueling travel. Here is what happened.

The airplane leaves Gainesville about 5 p.m. on a Friday and I get to Miami without problems, where I hang out, beer, burger etc., til the Qatar airplane boards for Doha, Qatar. Never been there before.

We set out for a very long flight, over 12 hours. The computer screen thing keeps flipping between English and Arabic and points out various things on the map. So one thing it shows is where the Titanic sank in Arabic in 1912 (see below). I expect when the Titanic sank in English it was probably pretty close to that. There are various other dates with names of sunken ships in the Atlantic, flipping between Arabic and English, and I wonder why they don’t also highlight the sites of plane crashes too. Perhaps that would frighten people a bit, or maybe they are subtly suggesting that ships are not safe? Anyway the airplane does a great circle route right across the Atlantic to pass directly to France, over an Alp or two, the Mediterranean, a bit of Egypt, the tip of the Sinai, then over Saudi Arabia and finally to Doha in Qatar. It’s a twin engine Boeing effort, and I remember at one time they would only let four engine airplanes do a route like that as if one engine on a two engine craps out the plane would be in the ocean, but anyway there is no apparent problem I guess engines are pretty reliable nowadays. Everybody is asleep pretty much but I can NEVER sleep on an airplane, though I did try. Consequently I amuse myself most to the time by looking at movies (notably Bridge of Spies, Tom Hanks, pretty good) or reading my iPad Kindle books or doing Soduku, which I have been getting somewhat good at.

In the Doha airport, which is huge, there is a giant rather poorly put together teddy bear in the terminal, apparently by some famous artist, but in this particular case the guy was clearly not trying very hard but no doubt extracted an enormous amount of money from Qatar. Bamboozled them IMHO, but, well, it is a notable and memorable bit of nonsense. I think I could have come up with a gigantic rubbery wombat, mongoose or prawn of something for a tenth the price. There are ladies in Moslem gear and men in white Jelabas or whatever they are, with sort of hoods on with black cord around them, looks all very stylish. Lots of slobby looking westerners also, this is clearly a major hub airport. So the I wander around a bit. I had wanted to look at downtown Doha as I have 8 hours to kill and it is still daylight. I had tried to get information about going to downtown Doha through the internets, but the Qatar Airlines site, like most things on the internets, is not well designed but I do figure that I can order a visa but several days are need to process it (WHY??, and for course it is too late by the time I get round to it) and I have to stay in a hotel in Doha (WHY!!, I’m only there for 8 hours). Anyway I wander around the airport and ask the information booth guy about going to downtown Doha and he politely says go over somewhere else and speak to some immigrant place or something, up some stairs, so I wander off there and this other guy tells me to go down some stairs to a small table at the entrance of terminal B and I can get onto a free bus trip of downtown Doha, courtesy Qatar Air, so I wander off there, wondering why the polite information guy couldn’t tell me that. Anyway, the bus leaves at 7 p.m. and so I sign up and wander around a bit more as this would be in like 45 minutes. I see a Victoria’s Secret store, much like the ones everywhere else except that no prominent and interesting female bulges of any kind, either mammary or pubic, are visible, just the clothes. Obviously Qatari men (or women? I dunno) cannot be trusted with such images. There also does not seem to be any booze on sale anywhere, no bars, except there is a duty free, so I wonder what would happen if I buy a big bottle of whiskey and get blind drunk in one of the coffee bars or restaurants. I had told friends in the US that I was a bit worried about the Doha part of my trip as I could get into big trouble for any or all of alcohol, drugs, blasphemy or sex, a list of verboten items which includes some of my favorite things. Anyway I make it to 7:00 pm without getting imprisoned and/or beheaded, so I head for the bus. They give me a free visa without problems but then a crowd of us have to wait for maybe 45 minutes in line to get through the customs and all that bullshit, so a significant part of the three hour trip is that. I start talking to a Japanese lady and an Australian guy and we three sort of bond a bit. The guy is an engineer of some sort and is interested in brain science so I go on about that a bit. The ladies English is not very good so it is a lot harder to have a useful conversation with her. There are three tall thin absolutely type casted Dutch maybe 20 year old males who sit at the back of the bus and babble away constantly and riotously in their strange coughing and hacking language. They have extremely tight pants just like the teddy boys used to wear when I was a youth so I wonder 1a. how do they ever get these on? 1b. or off? 2. are they getting back in fashion again? Never throw old clothes out, there are only so many ways you can cover a butt, a leg or an arm, so every possible fashion has to be repeated every so often. So the bus drives out of the airport and we see Doha a bit. A lot of fancy looking cars, SUVs that kind of thing and the first stop is a parking lot which is directly opposite the standard view of Doha, all those great big buildings in a row across the sea. So I make this big collage picture as below, which I later try to sell at an artshow, but I get no takers.

Doha It is now night so I take the pictures in the dark, including one of the three Dutch fuggers babbling away in Dutchese constantly as before. It is rather cold as the Qatari government decided that this time of year would be winter so I am a little challenged in my Florida Tea shirt and several people comment on how I must be freezing. However my Anglo-Irish metabolism kicks into overdrive so I am doing fine, it’s still significantly warmer than England or Ireland gets most of the time. Then they take us to the souk, the market in Doha and they let us loose for an hour. There are Arabic looking people everywhere and the souk is pretty much like the ones I have seen in Istanbul, Cairo, Jerusalem and Tunis, these Arabs really like their spices. There is a strong and pleasant smell of I don’t know what, peppers and stuff I suppose, which brings back memories. The only real difference from other souks is that the spices are usually in square plastic containers, not round wicker baskets and the containers have plastic sheets over them. I walk around with the Aussi guy and we don’t get bothered by anyone, which would not have been the case in Egypt or Tunisia. So I conclude that Qataris are in general pretty well off and don’t need to beg off of tourists.

We wander more or less randomly around the town, there is some concert going on and the streets are full. At one point a rather porky Qatari lady comes up to me and says I look exactly like her father, which is something I never had to deal with before. Her brother or husband or whoever he is seems to agree, but neither them or me really know where to go with this, as there is really no chance that we are somehow related. Or possibly my actual father had a more interesting life then the family was led to believe, but I seriously doubt it. So I am wondering how I could look like a Qatari or how a Qatari could look like me and don’t really come up with anything much. So we separate slightly embarrassed with each other. I opine to that Aussi guy “that was weird”. Anyway it all appeared to be genuine, I never got the feeling that they were trying to con me out money, lure me into a backstreet or something, which of course would be the first thought in the UK or US.

I have a coffee with the Aussi guy and then they take us back to the airport, quite interesting trip. At the airport I buy a coffee in one of the (non alcoholic) coffee bars and bullshit with the Aussi guy a bit more. Then we go our separate ways, he flying to Perth, me to Cape Town, never to meet again? He said he would friend me on Facebook. Later he did send me email so who knows? May meet up again some time.

I, of course, also go to the toilet, something I do periodically. This is always interesting as different countries have surprisingly different ways of dealing with human poop and pee. So in Doha the toilets have a very sensible thing, a sort of hose you can use to wash your butt if you want to or wash poop off of the toilet if you made a big mess. In England or America if you left a big sticky poop stuck to the toilet you would have to leave it for the next person to deal with, as there is no brush or anything to clean it up. In England or America you can’t leave a brush in there as it would immediately get stolen. Of course you could rub it off with toilet paper but who is going to do that? So this hose thing is a very sensible solution to this problem.

So Doha has a very large and fantastic airport and clearly a very impressive downtown area, also lots of fancy cars and people seem to be well off. So I did some research. Basically, like Saudi Arabia, the country is a theocracy with a king and all that royal bullshit and actually has the highest per capita income of anywhere in the world. All due to oil, it turns out there is a huge oilfield under Qatar and the sea next to it, so all the Qataris have to do is pump it out and sell it. If you are a Qatari citizen you have it made, free just about everything and you can buy and own property. If you are not a citizen you can’t own property and there is no way for you to become a citizen, even if you marry one. If you do marry one, your kids will not be Qatari citizens either, since they are polluted by your non-citizenness. So only about one quarter of the people living in Qatar are citizens and of course they own all the property which they rent out to the other three quarters, who do the actual work, so that that one quarter gets very rich. Without the oil all this would collapse because, like Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Russia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and a few other oil rich craptoceries, they don’t actually make anything else the world would want to buy. This means that they can pretend to be big shots on the world stage without investing in education, start-up companies or anything which might make them competitive really. So at the time I am in Doha a barrel of oil costs about $30 while a mere year ago it was more like $130. The price plunge is basically because the Saudis are pumping like crazy because they want to stop the crappy fracking boom from shale oil in the US. Fracking oil is more expensive to produce so the US industry is OK if oil costs $130 a barrel but is not economically viable at $30 a barrel. And in fact these US companies are slowly one by one going under, too much debt and no way out from sales. I wonder about buying a barrel of Qatari oil and taking it back with me as a souvenir as I can easily afford $30, but figure it would be heavy, messy and difficult to fit into my hand luggage so I decide not. Also, while they sell a lot of stuff in the airport, I don’t see a shop selling barrels of oil, odd that you can’t buy the only significant export the country has. Clearly as electric cars become more of a mainstream thing oil will get less relevant so the price will go down due to lack of demand. And of course the world is, maybe, trying hard to get off of this fossil crap nonsense. So I wonder if the price will go back up much before it goes down again. There are now 400,000 fully electric cars in the US, and the number will increase dramatically from now on, even with low gas prices. And you, who were paying up to $4.00 a gallon at one point during the useless GWBush junta, how do you feel knowing that Saudi and Qatari oil actually only costs them a few dollars, some estimates are less than $5 a barrel? But until recently they were selling this noxious crap for $130 a barrel? If you have a ridiculous laughably pathetic fossil burning car they (literally) have had you over a barrel.

But I digress, so I get on the airplane to Cape Town. This time I am in the window seat, where I will be for the next 10 hours, as I thought I might like to look at the scenery. I get some nice pictures of clouds somewhere over North Africa and deciding that they are just clouds, put a bunch of random figures on them, including a Bernie Sanders supporter. I don’t know why I did this.

Shaw-7

So I did not drink much as I do not want to bother the neighbors by having to urinate all over the place. As usual I cannot sleep so I look at the entertainment, read some stuff etc. The map thing shows the plane going around and not over Somalia maybe as there is a war on, then down the African coast most of the way, then inland over the desert to Cape Town. The lady next to me falls fast asleep and stays asleep for hours and hours. I wonder if she will ever move, and I’m thinking I will want to go the bathroom eventually. Anyway, after 8 hours or so, they put on the lights and she is still immobile. Finally she wakes up and eats breakfast, still immobile. I am getting sort of anxious, but don’t want to bother her, but this immobility sort of gets on my nerves and I look repeatedly at this sleeping and then gobbling face, wondering about how anyone can not move for so long. Finally after all the food is served and plates etc. collected, which is probably nine hours into the trip she does finally, slowly, move and I use this as an opportunity to go to the bathroom.

I meet her traveling companion standing at the bathroom, nice German lady doing some training course in South Africa which she does twice a year, for a month each time. She tells me what to do in SA and says that it is a great time to go as the exchange rate is very good versus the Euro and Dollar. I ask why that is, is there an economic crisis, and she says yes and a tall thin Dutch looking guy, my actual real first Afrikaans, butts in and says yes, the economy is crumbling. I talk to him a bit and he tells me to go to Camps bay, apparently a nice part of Cape Town. Of course I wonder if this is some gay bar resort and the guy is gay and for some reason fancies me or whatever, but I later find out it is just a normal bay and there don’t appear to be any gay people there at all, in fact everybody looks quite heterosexual. I wander through the airport do passports, baggage claim and say goodbye to the nice German lady, the immobile German lady and the lanky Afrikaans guy.

Now fully baggaged I wonder how I am to get to the hotel. No train, no underground, clearly a third world country or like La Guardia. Maybe I need cash so I change some money and get notes with Nelson Mandela on them, which is sort of cool.

I wander around the airport which has pictures of Nelson Mandela and that rugby player guy from the movie “Invictus” and so on. In the picture they have some other guy playing Matt Damon though. It is extremely hot as the South African government has mandated, in contrast to Doha, that February would be high summer, so my Florida clothes are now a bit more appropriate again. Anyway there does not seem to be a train or obvious bus connection to the city so I head off to the taxi rank, where there is only one taxi with a black guy. I ask him if he can take me into the hotel and he says something I don’t understand. While I am wondering what to do two other travelers come along, obvious Brits, man and wife I suppose. They are both short, he a little overweight, maybe 50 pounds plus and she fairly enormous, approaching spherical, and they are both very ebullient and friendly people as is often the case with the seriously overweight. It turns out they are going to the same hotel as me so we pile into another taxi which just showed up. The driver is an oldish white guy, an Afrikaans, who of course speaks excellent English, like they all do. We bullshit on about SA on the trip to the hotel, maybe 25 minutes drive. We go past a township. This is a fenced in area on the side of the road behind which there a jumble of shacks apparently mostly made of shipping material and corrugated iron. The driver says these places are the countries shame, and says the blacks live in these places illegally, so they don’t pay rent, but it can’t be totally illegal, as when they move in they have to pay utilities and trash pickup and so on. Odd. As we drive down the road we come in behind a big garbage truck which apparently is not closed up properly at the back so a stream of paper and other garbages continuously flies out. The driver makes various comments about this as it reflects on the country as the truck progressively and efficiently dumps trash all along the SA interstate. The Brit couple have been to SA before and say it is great, lot of great and cheap food and stuff to do. I of course had already deduced that they liked food, cheap or otherwise, quite a lot. The driver indicates that the economy is going downhill fast due to corruption and inefficiency, and says he has grandchildren in England, which he thinks is a great country where he might want to live one day. I’d heard that SA can be a bit dangerous for tourists so I ask about that. He says that the downtown area is totally safe, but then goes on about how I should keep my hands in my pockets to make sure I have control over my wallet and cell phone. These get stolen quite a lot, and he says people will bang into you apparently clumsily and use the contact to distract you from the fact that they are lifting something from your pocket. So this is sort of not too encouraging as I always like to wander around cities I am visiting for the first time, but of course useful information. Anyway get to the hotel, split the taxi fair with the bouncy Brit couple and head to the room.

Arrive at hotel about 10 a.m. and apparently I am a day late, I suppose when I booked I did not realize that the trip was going to take basically two whole days, another tribute to my brilliant last minute planing. Anyway I go to the room and have a much needed shower. By the time I’m done with that I do some emails after I get on the hotel internets, which I am annoyed to have to pay for. WiFi should of course be a basic human right like beer and french fries. By then it is around noon so I go for a walk. I head into the town carrying a back pack containing two cameras and odd lenses in case I see something interesting. The downtown area looks OK, very hilly, some trash in the streets, not a huge amount of traffic, but it is a Sunday so it is more empty than usual. I just randomly go north, as I had bumped into the Brit guy co-taxi person and he told me the government buildings are in that direction which might be marginally interesting. Actually they were some fairly interesting buildings, museums etc. but I headed off in the wrong direction for them. Anyway as I head northish it occurs to me that the really interesting government buildings I had seen on the internet in SA are in Pretoria, which is the capital, not Cape Town, but so what, I just want to get a feel for the place. So having no especial goal is something I usually do in a foreign city. There are not too many people walking around, and I sort of head out of the down town area a bit and see a sign to the “noon gun” so I decide I might as well go there. Anyway I follow signs round a few turns in the road. I see a fence behind which are buildings made of corrugated iron and packaging material and I realize I am walking past one of the settlements. A young black boy in the street sees me and immediately runs into the settlement. Shortly after two blacks, a man and a woman come out and ask me if I have any coins. Some of the money I got at the airport was coins which I have not even looked at, so I give them a few. They glom onto me and I decide I’m not really all that interested in the noon gun, whatever that is, so I head back to town. They keep asking me for money, saying that it is for their children who are starving. They keep calling me father, which is bit odd and tell me how god will reward me if I give them more money. I seriously doubt that since as far as I can tell there is no such person. Anyway I want to get rid of them so I give them a 20 Rand note, which is about $1.50, basically nothing for me. They see I have some 50 and 100 Rand notes and they of course now want one or more of those too. But I am getting a bit annoyed so I tell them no more, that’s enough. I am always in two minds about what to do when I meet poor people in poor countries like this. You can’t give money to all of them and you can’t know if they will spend the money on food or booze or drugs or what. So anyway I talk with them a little. The lady tells me I should put my camera, which I am carrying in my hand, in my backpack, or at least put the strap diagonally over my shoulder. And I should put the backpack on with both straps over my shoulders, as people grab cameras and backpacks if they are not well secured. She then says I should be careful of people who pretend to be measuring my shoes, odd, I guess bending down and at the same time sticking their hands in my pocket. She seems to know a lot about all this, I wonder how she knows all that. Anyway useful advice and I guess she is being sort of nice since I did actually give them some cash. Anyway I have had my hand on my phone and wallet the whole time, I’ve been places like this before, and I already got some advice from the taxi driver. So I am being firm about not giving them any more money so she heads back to the settlement, but the guy stays with me. I ask how to get to the Table mountain, the famous mountain right next to Cape Town, so the guy tells me and I head off in that direction. He keeps coming with me, carrying an empty water bottle for some reason. Anyway I ask him to go away, say bye bye to him, but he ignores me and keeps on walking with me, talking to me about god and all that stuff again which creeps me out a bit. Realizing I might be getting myself into a bit of trouble I decide not to walk to the Table mountain, as that would be several miles anyway, so I head back into the town center. After all, if they knew, I not only have reasonable amount of cash on me but something approaching $10,000 worth of camera gear in my backpack. The guy still walks with me and suddenly the woman appears again with another tall thin black guy, maybe her father I don’t know. He has no teeth and mumbles something which I don’t get. Now I am thinking that things may get really pear shaped soon so I tell them loudly and angrily to leave me alone. They lady says something to the two guys in some non English lingo and I guess she did a cost benefit analysis and decided I am not worth the bother so they finally leave me alone. I wonder what would have happened if I was smaller and/or female and/or a bit further away from the city center. Although nothing bad actually happened I learned you should be a bit careful in Cape Town, particularly outside the city center.

So I walked on downtown, going past a motorcycle hire place I had seen on the internets. This is Cape Bike Rentals and it turns out to be a few blocks from my hotel, on Bree Street, obviously a very cheesy location. Clearly I am fated to hire a bike there. I remember that there was a bike hire place right next to the hotel when I stayed in Melbourne a few years ago, and I was fated to hire a number of BMWs there, so history repeats itself. I then wander off to the sea shore, the harbor where there are all sorts or tourist shops. I walk past various outside bars and restaurants as I go past the harbor and I listen to random conversations. Most are English conversations by people with obvious English or Scottish accents. Only a few are speaking Afrikaans. I figure that a lot of Brits came here to escape the dreary British winter and the harbor would tend to have a lot of the richer people with fancy yachts and speed boats and all that, and presumably a lot of these would be Brits also. I also go past some shop which is full of Union Jack stuff, clearly some segment of SA still identifies with the old country.

Anyway back to hotel at about 6:00 p.m, quite tired, of course I did not sleep for two nights so I have a good excuse. I am not at all hungry as boredom forced me to eat everything possible on the airplanes. Anyway I watch some CNN and BBC stuffs about the Iowa caucus, which is about to happen, with people opining about Cruz, Trump, Rubio, Clinton, Saunders et al. This is the first actual time when a few Americans get to actually express an opinion about the crazies running for president this time around. Not very important, the daft US system means that anyone who actually wins Iowa is usually done for, so why do they bother?

Go to bar and have three beers as I cruise the web. This introduces me to the excellent Castle lager with which I will have much to do over the next week. Nothing much going on in the bar, so I get back to the room and sleep for the first time in three days.

Next day I get up at about 6 being jet lagged as the SA government mandate a 7 hour time difference form the eastern US sea bored. It being free, I eat a big breakfast, sausages, potatoes, baked beans (the British type, not the sugary crap American type), bread, cheeses, fruity things etc, good food here and then head off into the streets. I get to the bike shop and see a load of BMW GS bikes, the big twin boxers and the smaller 700s and 650s. I ask about getting a motorcycle, the guy says they don’t have any. I ask about later in the week, and he says a bunch of Dutchmen came in and hired a whole load of BMWs to do a two week trip round SA, so he has none all week. Then he thinks a bit and says he has a Harley, an old Sportster. It is a single seater which is fine, but has no carrier, so I would have to use my backpack. No problem. I think the guy did not give me the bike initially as it needs some work. He points out that the neutral light does not come on, which is a nuisance, but not a big problem. So I get it for the day, pretty expensive at about $100, but that is a lot less then you would pay in the US, this is real motorcycle country and when I ever going to get a chance to blast round SA on a bike? In SA they drive on the left side of the road, due to being part of the old British Empire and therefore never conquered by the Bonaparte, who is the reason why most of Europe and the poncy frenchyfied US drive on the wrong side of the road. But I am ambidextrous when it comes to that, I have no problem adjusting to either side of the road, mostly, so off I blast, on the right (i.e. left) side of the road for a change. The bike is a typically Harley, noisy, crude and heavy, a great fat pig of a machine, but fun all the same. Some wiring is messed up as not only does the neutral light not work, but the fuel reserve light is on even though the tank is full. Oh well. It’s Monday morning so a lot more traffic than the previous day, but really not too bad. Cape Town is very hilly and with winding roads, so speed is not high and someone not knowing where they are going, like me, is therefore at less risk then they would be in like Dallas, Houston or Atlanta, where everybody is way over the speed limit all the time, they know exactly where they are going and are constantly on your ass since you are not going fast enough. I randomly drive around and find myself heading for the Table mountain. I find that you have to park and go up a cable car to the top, so I decide to do that after the meeting. So then I bike up Signal hill, a smaller hill next to the table mountain. At the top there is a great view of the town, and there are people paragliding, looks amazing. I see signs telling you not to wander off on your own, one sign says walk around in groups of three or more, another saying four or more, again raising my awareness about being careful.

I then head off to the beaches, very nice white sands, including Camps bay which the lanky Afrikaans on the airplane told me about. Everybody appears to be heterosexual, though this is not something I care about very much. Homo, hetero, bi, all fine as long as they leave me alone.

So I go to a mall, initially with the thought of seeing what kind of shops they have, just curious. They have Wimpys, a burgery restauranty place I used to go to in the UK when I was a shrub, but extinct there now, but apparently still going strong in SA. Since I am in a mall I then think about buying some toothpaste which I forgot to pack, but I then forget that (again) as I wander around looking at people and shops. I decide to get my hair cut, as I have the Bernie Sanders look right now, and I might do better at the meeting if I don’t look like I was dragged through a hedge backwards. I had shaved my head a few months previously and then totally neglected my head since then. The hairdresser has only women in it, so I ask if they do men, and they do, so one of the ladies, a young slim attractive blond Afrikaans lady deals with me. She asks if she can wash my hair, it would make her job easier, so I say yes. So she starts massaging my head for several minutes which seems sort of unnecessary but it’s nice so I don’t mind. Then she gets me to sit in another seat to get the hair actually cut so I ask her how she likes South Africa telling her it is my first full day there. She is quite interesting, going on about how the country is falling apart because the ANC is screwing everything up. I had heard that in neighboring Zimbabwe the government had basically kicked out the white farmers, some of whom had been there for generations, this was Rhodesia after all. A lot of them were murdered in very brutal ways and many of the farms seemed to have become a lot less functional with them gone, which can’t have been good for the Zimbabwean economy. She tells me that apparently the ANC made some deal with Zimbabwe to share electricity under unknown conditions, meaning regular power cuts in Cape Town, which is bad if you are running a business in a mall, as suddenly it goes totally dark. Now there is some power back up though. She says the blacks all hate the Boers like her and want them to leave. I ask if they hate the British (like me) and she says that as far as they are concerned all whites are Boers, so yes they would. She has no plans to bail out to Holland or somewhere and is not afraid to die, but does not want to get tortured or raped, which seems an odd and rather pessimistic sentiment. She also bemoans the low value of the Rand making if difficult for her to travel, and she has never in fact been outside SA. I comment I have been all over the world and she says she is so jealous. So I say my goodbyes, hoping that things improve for her. This all sounds a bit like the right wing stuff you would get from a lot of people in the US, and I wonder how much I can conclude from an n of 1. But she seemed rational enough, not a Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin type. Anyway I then go into a book shop in the mall to look around and there is a book “Is this the end of South Africa?”. I read the back and this was apparently originally a book written about the old South Africa, before the ANC took over. The problem then was the sanctions and the fact that, because of apartheid, SA was an international pariah. The same author used the same title for a new very recent book to look into the future after 20 years of ANC rule, which apparently has not been a great success. The summary on the cover gives a pretty bleak prognosis so from this and the hairdresser I get the impression that SA might be heading for a big crisis fairly soon.

I bike down a long road, Chapman way, round the coast which is extremely scenic, and I have to pay 26 Rands either way, but worth it, especially as this is actually less than 2 dollars. I stop several times to look at things, take pictures. I think that this is likely the most scenic coastline I have ever seen, and I take a bunch of panoramic pictures. At one stopping point I meet an old Afrikaans lady who is dancing around with a meerkat. She holds it around the neck and says it bites a bit, which is the reason she holds it round the neck. She has 7 of them and they follow her around apparently. She flips between English and Afrikaans, which is basically Dutch, which is somewhat similar to German which I can usually understand, so I can more or less guess what she is saying. I take a few pictures of her which might be interesting, she is clearly unusual looking.

Having done with her I see two guys standing by the Harley. For some reason they are impressed by this old piece of American junk and I tell them it is not mine but hired. One old Afrikaans guy maybe 70s, has one clear lens and one dark lens in his glasses for some reason and he tells me he had a Matchless, an old English now extinct brand. He goes on about how Harley registered the “ton” of the engines. I guess he means the “tone”, “ton” would be German and I guess Africaans for sound, that thumping din the ridiculous old Harley makes and I give him my opinion that there are much better bikes than Harleys around now, but he does not seem to be interested in that. So I head off back to Cape Town with the Harley making it’s ridiculous din, valves clanking on top of the noise of large and very inefficient explosions in the two big old Otto motors and the wheels or drive belt or something make a constant din. Anyway, the turns on the roads in Cape Town are interesting, sharp and with steep climbs and inclines, so I have to pitch the bike over quite a lot when cornering. The Harley is not built for this kind of riding and so I ground the foot pegs several times, making sparking trails down the road, which annoys me although it does not seem to be dangerous, as I don’t fall off or anything.

I get back to the bike shop and give the bike back after gassing it up. At the gas station there is no self service so I park and a very large and well built black guy comes up to me and I tell him to filerup. This seems to take a while and as he is doing this some other black guy goes past in a truck and says something to him in not English. He laughs and says something back in not English. I ask him what language that is and he says Shona. I ask where that is from and he says Zim. I say where is that and he says Zimbabwe, the neighboring country, was Rhodesia, and so I say uhuh kind of thing, I might have guessed Zim was Zimbabwe, but I didn’t. I go into the inconvenience store by the gas station and there are pies, British type pies! More evidence for the continuing influence of the British Empire, will have to try some before I leave.

Anyway, I have done well over 100 miles, and I had a little range anxiety, as I don’t know how big the gas tank is and as I said the warning lite is always on. I don’t want to run out of gas in the middle of nowhere. Anyway no problems and I hand the bike back. I tell the guy at the bike shop about the gas warning lite and he says the bike needs some work. More to be a pain than anything I ask if the gas warning light, on when you have plenty of gas, goes out if you get to reserve as that would actually be useful. This might happen if the bike was wired up backwards or something. The guy either doesn’t understand or thinks I am a stupid asshole so just changes the subject. So I wander off back to the hotel. Then I look for the first session of the meeting I am supposed to be at, supposed to be that evening, and I find it is not at my hotel. I somehow figure out that I might be in the wrong hotel, as the hotel company has another location in town, so I ask about where the other one is, just a few blocks away. It is now dark so I am told it is not safe to walk there. I could get a taxi there and back, but decide to miss that, its just some introductory nonsense anyway, so I decide to just sit in the bar and do emails and whatnot instead. So several Castle lagers later I stagger off to my room.

The actual meeting

The next day I finally figure out where the meeting is taking place, it was not in the other hotel as I had thought but in the convention center which I should have guessed. I am not the most organized person, but anyway I make it there it is in fact in the next block, get registered, badged and off to the races. I immediately run into my Italian friend/collaborator Stefania, brilliant lady, but she more or less immediately rushes off to some session. I go into some of the sessions and learn about various traumatic brain injury related problems and issues, as that is the topic of the meeting. The movie “Concussion” is just coming out in Europe, a not quite accurate retelling of the Bennet Omalu story, the discovery, sort of, of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. Although it is not quite accurate, it is actually pretty good, as usually Hollywood makes a complete balls of actual reality. This is the only movie in which immunostaining of brain sections is an integral part of the plot. Since immunostaining of brain sections has been a significant part of my life I have a special bond with this movie, which I will have to buy or steal sometime. Anyway I run into various other people I know and do some blah blah with them. So the meeting is basically three days, pretty intense with talks all the time pretty much from 8-6 every day, sometimes three talks going on at the same time, with poster sessions, exhibits and some other stuff also. I diligently go to talks, some of which I have no recollection of now, or even in fact 5 minutes after they ended, but a few which I thought were pretty interesting. A sad thing these days is that science got very competitive so scientists only mostly talk about stuff they already published, so you tend to not learn too much from the talks. Talking to people is more valuable as you can get a feel for what people think is important and what they might actually really be doing.

These kind of meetings are sort of an interesting human behavior phenomena. A lot of very well known people show up and also a lot of also rans, who may be less successful scientists, or younger scientists who have not yet made a mark, or people still in training which would be postdocs and students. So ambitious individuals try very hard to be noticed. This means they will introduce themselves to the top guys, and they are mostly guys, though there are some top girls also. Then you have to impress them with something you said or did, and the whole thing very much favors extroverts. Being seen with the right people is important, and the organizers of the meeting or the big scientists usually have people almost fighting to talk to them, sit by them, go to bars with them etc. Humans are just a hierarchical species with younger members trying to become top dogs, deposing the present top dogs.

There is a party the last evening of the meeting in some very fancy down hall place in Cape Town. There is a lot of booze and dancing, and I dance for a bit like a hippopotamus as usual but so what. Below are pictures of Stefania, my Italian collaborator and two other well known scientists, a Povlishock and and a Diaz-Arrastia. So I bullshit away with people, eat and drink too much and probably do and say a lot of things I would later regret if I could remember them. Being rather drunk I wander unsteadily back to hotel, walking through the dark streets at around midnight, but apparently I managed it with wallet, cell phone and camera intact, as I still had them all in the morning.

Last day of the meeting

I go to the last day of the meeting and meet some more great scientists. One is Dalton Dietrich, head of the spinal cord project in Miami. I sort of know about him and I think he sort of knows about me, so I go up to him and I say that I am not sure if we ever met. He says we have, but if we have I don’t remember it, of course I may have been drunk at some meeting, which as you can see tends to happen and means nothing really. Anyway we talk about generally doing scientificy things together in some version of the future without getting very specific. I later bump into Stefania and she asks me what we talked about and she says she wants more specifics, as she wants to be involved in whatever it was, so we go and talk to Dalton again.

Anyway, by about 3:00 I have had enough of the meeting, it finishes at 4:00 so I didn’t miss much. In my humble opinion a lot of the talks were pretty bad and many were about how you treat brain or spinal cord injury patients. Of course that is extremely important issue, but I am a PhD, not an MD, so this is not what I ever have or have wanted to deal with, so I am not all that interested. I’m more interested in the scientific aspects of what is going on and how you could use an understanding of the science to help people, so I might do something useful for patients without ever really seeing any of them. So I wander off into other parts of the down town area. I get to a fantastic garden which was where the Brit governor used to live, full of very large and interesting trees, bushes and actually rats, several of which are running around in typical ratty fashion. There is a big statue of Cecil Rhodes, who named Rhodesia after himself, and it’s sort of interesting he has a Hitleresque arm raising thing, another Brit thing. Of course there was a lot of Dutch stuff also, but I know less about them. The only one I heard of was Jan Smuts, and there are several statues to him. Others, like Johan Van Riebeeck I don’t think I ever heard of.

Then back to the hotel and the mandatory Castle lager in hotel bar while I catch up with emails and all that.

Last full day IN SA

I eat a huge breakfast and head off the bike place. Again they only have a Harley, this time a huge porky great Electra Glide, the fattest ass Harley. Natural selection at work, all the smaller and more sensible BMWs and even the crappy sportster were out, so this was scrapping the bottom of the barrel. Having no other option I get it, and off I set. I set off and go round the Chapman highway again for 26 Rands again, and have to stop after a couple of miles to show that I paid full price as apparently you can pay less then 26 Rands, but then you have to turn round and go back. So I stop the bike by a neatly uniformed bIack, and struggle to find the ticket which I had stuffed in one of my pockets but I forget which one as I thought I did not need it. The fat pig of a Harley starts rolling backwards as we are on a slight incline. I try to put the foot brake on but can’t as the bike is leaning to the right, so I need by right leg to stop it falling over, and I can’t use the hand brake as if I do that I can’t find the ticket. The ticket checker guy grabs the hand brake obligingly so I can find the ticket which I manage to find and show him. He gives me brilliant smile with what may be the whitest teeth I have ever seen, and he says “have a good day”, and I put he pig in gear and off I go. I want to go to a famous botanical garden, and have a vague idea where it is so I set off. Typical Shaw cockup, the cell phone GPS don’t work, and so I don’t initially head in even the right direction. Then I find that the Harley has a GPS! New to me, I thought Harley was still stuck firmly in the last century. So I try to find the garden, but I have forgotten how to spell it exactly. It was actually the famous Kirstenbosch botanical gardens, which I might be forgiven for forgetting if I did not know about the place before I went to SA, as I am interested in cycads, interesting old plants many varieties of which live in SA, and many of which are in the park. So anyway I put in “garden” and the crappy GPS finds that and will take me there if I add this as a waystation to some route already in the system. So I set off and it soon becomes clear that the GPS will take me back to a gas station in Cape Town, a route somebody else put in, and then to this garden with is stupid since the garden is maybe 2 miles away but Cape Town is maybe 30 miles away. So then I figure it out and off I go. In homing in on the gardens I happen to pass one to the townships and I see close up the fences topped with very nasty looking razor wire and I wonder what the point of that is as the gates appear to be open and why would anyone want to climb the fence in either direction? Inside the fence are some small houses in some parts with normal looking residential streets but in other places there is just a maze of small shacks spaced very close together and apparently made out of shipping materials. Everywhere there are lots of people, all black, hanging out in the streets, presumably unemployed as this is a Friday. As I drive down the road parallel to the township I see people, mostly men, sitting at the side of the road, alone or in small groups and spaced apart every 50 yards or so. I don’t know what that is for, possibly they are hoping to get picked up for some work. As I bike past I am pretty sure a lot of these guys are looking at me carefully and so I don’t slow down just drive on past. The township is pretty big, the side I drove past was at least a mile, so I am thankful I didn’t have to stop anywhere. Am I a pussy? Maybe, or maybe I just want to avoid avoidable trouble.

Anyway I visit the gardens and it is pretty amazing, loads of cycads and other plants about which I am fairly clueless about including some crazy Welwitschia plants. The picture above is not one of those though, as the pictures I took of the Welwitshia looked sort of crap. On these trips you always learn new stuffs. Below is a picture of the pig/motor cycle and the back drop at the botanical gardens, pretty spectacular.

An Africaans lady looks at my head and says I am burning in the sun and she says “you don’t have a hat, why not?” With the “why not” bit very high pitched and aggravated. Good question. Anyway I am fine since I covered myself with sun screen. Another Africaans shows me two fat owls sitting in a tree so I take a bunch pictures of them.

Then I had heard that there is this famous beach with a load of penguins on it, so off I head there. I park the bike and some suspicious Asian guy tells me it will be very safe so of course I don’t let it out of my sight for very long. There are in fact penguins everywhere and I take pictures of them, and pictures of people taking pictures of penguins and pictures of a pretty Africaans girls looking at penguins.

On the way back I am in traffic and a black face appears out of the window, and a guy says “are you having a good day?”. I say yes, and I am greeted again with a black face, a huge smile and some really great white teeth. There are clearly good dentists in SA, or maybe good diets, I dunno. So I stop at the same gas station as before and you are clearly not supposed to pump gas yourself. A different black guy fills up the bike than the Zim/Shona guy and does not seem to speak English so not much to report here. I take the bike back relieved to be shot of it as it is just way two big and clumsy for the challenging terrain. I say as much to the bike guy and he smiles and agrees. On my way back to hotel I buy a bottle of Castle lager, excellent stuff, and also go the the railway station where I buy a steak and kidney pie which is good. I like these, junk food though they be, and so when I get a chance to eat one I do. Back to the hotel where I do emails, look at news sites and so on, then go down to bar. I drink more Castle lagers and by about 10 I go off to the room. I lie down on the bed with the TV on and fall asleep, waking up at like 2 in the morning. This happens sometimes.

Last Morning

I get up at 6:00 have breakfast and head off for a final walk around Cape Town. So I go down town take picture everywhere. I find a monument to the Scott expedition to Antarctica, one of the British Empires great propaganda points and/or screw ups. So there is a statue to him in the center of Cape Town, though as far as I can tell he had no connection to the place. Go to some areas I had not been before and in 2 hours got asked for money no less than 5 times. I’m getting sort of annoyed about this so I just ignore them now. Selfish of me? I don’t know, if I give them any money they just want more and I can’t give all of them money, so maybe it makes sense to not give it to any of them. I do notice quite a few people are living in the streets so it appears there is a lot of genuine poverty. I wonder if you can blame the people in a country for the way the country is- maybe if they had a decent government things would be a lot better. So in a democracy you get the government you deserve? If everybody was well educated and informed this might happen, but then the government has to be responsible at some level for the education, so it all gets a bit circular. If the government does not pay to educate people you get crap people who then select a crap government, which is what might happen in the US soon. I decide that all this is not very useful and wonder if there is another less corrupt party or a coalition that could kick out the ANC at the next election. Either that or they find another Nelson Mandela to replace Jacob Zuma. Oh well, not really my immediate problem as I am heading out. So I spend about 3 hours just wandering around, sad to be leaving as it is all quite interesting here.

Anyway check out of the hotel at about 10 am and get a taxi to the airport. The taxi driver is a guy from Malaysia and a Moslem. Tall, well built, neat beard with intelligent looking eyes. Also a friendly guy who lives in one of the townships, which he says are very dangerous. If I went in one he says I would loose everything down to my shoes and glasses in 5 minutes or less. I ask him about the apartheid era, which he can remember being I would guess about 30-35. He says it was crazy, not only blacks but also Asians, like him, were discriminated against, not allowed on white buses and so on. Funny how the Dutch are so tolerant in Holland while the ruling elite in South Africa, basically also Dutch, was anything but. We talk about Trump in the US who does not want to let Moslems into the US and he says he is shocked at that and that in South Africa there is no religious intolerance, every body prays to the same god he says. I say that I don’t think Trump can get elected but that you can’t rule it out, after all they voted for GWB twice (or possibly just once), and he was totally unqualified also. He says that SA needs a new government, Jacob Zuma apparently has no clue about how to run a country but is quite good at enriching himself and his cronies. I ask if a white man or woman might win an election in SA and he says he does not think so. Nice guy so I give him some extra Rands which are not too much use to me now. Sorry to be leaving and wondering if I will ever get back.

On the way back I realize another reason why the ticket was so cheap. I get into Doha at like 8 in the evening and the flight out is like 12 hours later, in the next morning. Next time I will have to look at the itinerary a bit more carefully, but of course I likely won’t. So I decide it might be good to check into the hotel at the airport. All booked up. Too late to go downtown, and anyway I don’t want to mess with all that visa stuff again. Fortunately the internet wifi works so I can deal with various crises in Florida and so on. But that only takes a few hours. I try to sleep on a bench but of course can’t. I go to some of the stores having nothing else to do. There are loads of people in neat suites attending each and every store, even though it is late at night with not too many actual potential customers, which immediately suggests a job creation scheme. So I ask one of the guys if I can buy a barrel of oil, a young thin bearded and handsome guy in a black suit. Of course I am not serious, but I am curious what he will say. He says no they don’t sell it. I ask where could I get one from, he says he does not know, maybe the oil ministry? I am thinking of asking him why his country does not sell directly the only thing from Qatar that anyone wants, but then I think that is too confrontational, and anyway none of this is his fault. So I say I will check the oil industry on the internet and wander off and attempt to sleep but of course fail.

The trip back

The trip back is similar to the way out, movies, soduku, toilets, people, but the way back is always an anticlimax compared to the way out. After all, you just did this already, and for whatever reason I had enough with blah blah with people, and I’m really not interested in what the US might be like as I been there before so I mostly keep to myself. And I was tired so I just want to get home. Back in Gainesville in the evening of the Sunday a week after the Friday I left, tired but a lot of new experiences and interesting interactions.

Conclusion

Cape Town has to be one of the most spectacularly situated cities on the planet. There is a lot of Britishness about it, pies, driving left, cars with L plates, statues of Brits and so on, and there is also a lot of Dutch and Afrikaans influence. A lot of very tall thin often blond people walking around, road signs and town and village names in Dutch. Interesting vegetation, fantastic scenery, great food, very cheap. The only problem for a tourist is that you never feel quite safe. It would be smart to go with a group of people, perhaps four or so. And possibly soon, if I am right about possible big trouble in the near future.