Weekend Literary Supplement: The Climate Trials, Part Nine

In this week's instalment of The Climate Trials, Mir Shah introduces Mikhial to the practical reality of what the Old Ones want him to do.

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After Mikhail’s first meeting with Mir Shah he was told to meet him at another address. This was a small suite in an industrial mall---sandwiched between a vacuum repair and an electronics supply stores. The only sign on the windows was a real estate “For Lease” one with a diagonal “Leased” sticker over top. It had been up for a while---.

Mikhi pushed the door buzzer button, and Mir let him in.

The windows had been dirty, but the space was clean. There was an empty, poorly lit show room. Empty shelves lined the walls and an empty counter blocked off a back door that was obscured by a bead curtain. “Come on back. This front is just for inquisitive eyes. We want anyone “casing out the joint” to think that this is just an empty store with nothing inside worth stealing.” He led the way.

Behind the beads there was a steel door with a digital lock. And beyond that, a brightly lit area with some computers, cameras, a green screen, a small sound-proof room with glass walls, etc. It was much bigger than expected. Obviously a lot of money and effort had gone into setting up this studio.

Mir explained: “This is something of an ideal location for our work. This industrial mall has a fair number of private research and technical service businesses. For example, a couple of units to the right there’s a private forensics lab that does work for police forces from all over the world. And on the other side there’s a video studio that does public service ads for municipalities that they then post on YouTube. There’s also a glass blower who specializes in creating one-of-a-kind pieces for scientific research. And a machinist who does prototypes for engineers. There’s also a 3D print shop that makes individual plastic, ceramic, and, metal parts on demand. We fit right in here and even if we are noticed, whoever did would never suspect that we are a little more than just another high-tech entrepreneur trying to become the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.”

He walked Mikhi through the different parts of the lab. “What we’ve done is create a decentralized studio where almost every aspect of what we produce is being controlled by someone else off-site in real time through high speed connectivity. More importantly, we are also connected in real time to focus groups around the world who are being monitored through sensors attached to both their sympathetic and parasympathetic nerve systems.”

“In effect, what we are trying to do is the same thing the consultants did for that one-off Congressional testimony by the Kuwaiti ambassador’s daughter on the eve of the First Gulf War---only on a much more ambitious scale. They needed to find one perfect mental image, that they could project to one type of person (Congress people), that dealt with one specific moment in time (the vote). What we are trying to do is appeal to a broad swath of the public, about an extremely complex issue, and, make the effects “stick” over a large period of time.”

“We have some advantages. First we have modern technology. Secondly, we have almost unlimited resources---both in terms of finances and in terms of human capital. The Old Ones have the support of a pool of some of the most brilliant, self-conscious members of the human race. This isn’t because they have all, or even the most truly smart people---but because we have the largest pool of self-aware, emotionally stable people who aren’t dominated by petty ambition for wealth or power. These sorts of folks can be a real force to reckon with.”

“Just as importantly, we have the facts and morality on our side. There is a degree of accuracy to the aphorism that ‘a lie is half way around the world by the time truth has put its boots on’. But it is balanced by ‘the truth will out’. We know that the Climate Emergency will become obvious to 100% of the human population eventually, we just want to speed this up so we can avoid some of the worst problems and mitigate the rest with a minimal amount of suffering.”

Mir directed Mikhi to a stool in the middle of the set in front of the green screen. He put pointed towards a teleprompter that was set up in front of tripod-mounted camera. Then he told him to put the head phones over his ears. “On the final set we’ll have hidden ear buds, but this will do for a first simulation. The camera shoots through the prompter to limit the visual cues that you are reading.”

“The important thing to understand is that while we will be scripting what you say, we are also going to be making edits on the fly due to the physiological responses of the focus group. This means that the words will change on the prompter as we hone in on the most effective emotional cuing. You will be given a certain amount of direction over the earphones, which you will also have to respond to. I understand that this is tremendously complicated and it will cause problems with your ability to seem relaxed and responsive. Don’t worry about that, we have extremely sophisticated editors and software that will be able to clean up the final product and make it look much better. And there is going to be a great deal of practice before we are able to go on air.”

“From now on, this is going to be your full time job. If you need financial or other assistance to find the time to do this work, just ask. The Old Ones have both the money and manpower to deal with all your personal needs. Just remember that you are absolutely key to pulling off this project. You are going to be the lead representative for the Trials. Everyone else---and there will be a great many others involved---can be edited in and out of the final product. Your job is add the emotional continuity and stability that ties everything together and allows ordinary viewers to engage with the project. If this ever seems somewhat overwhelming, just remember that the Old Ones have specifically chosen you from a myriad of others because they believe that you are the right person, for the right job, at the right time. And I have found that they are never wrong in these sort of assessments.”

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

Addictions Series Finale: Lots of Types of Addictions

      Morgan Dandie Hannah          

I've gone through six different articles that looked at the opioid epidemic from lots of different angles. My introduction to the issue was Morgan Dandie Hannah, who talked to me about her understanding based on personal and work experience. I then went on to research different aspects of ideas she introduced me to, condensed them, and, tried to present an easily digested synopsis to my readers. This last piece is going to be my conclusions based upon what I've learned writing this series.

One of the things that Hannah emphasized is that there are many different types of addictions. This was really brought home to me in my article about problem gamblers. This got me thinking about the nature of addiction. 

I've been addicted to drugs. I probably still am. I was a smoker and I had a hard time quitting. I woke up in the morning and had a hard time breathing until I had the first cigarette of the day. When I tried to stop "cold turkey" this unpleasant experience kept on all day long. This lasted for about three months. This was nowhere near as bad as having "crank bugs" or "dope sickness"---but it was bad enough. I think that this was my "detox" phase.

After that, I spent years relapsing and tapering down by switching to cigars and a pipe. I finally was able to quit completely once I had the realization that I kept going back to smoking when I "had the blues" and believed that there was no real sense to my life. When I felt optimistic and enthusiastic, I wanted to quit again. Armed with this insight, I tried to "reprogram myself" to have a positive worldview. Among other things, through this process I learned that there's no such thing as "self-discipline"---but that it is possible to construct good habits. This was my "therapy phase". I was no doubt helped by the years I spent studying philosophy, training under various meditation masters, and, visiting a therapist weekly to deal with my PTSD.

Later on I learned that I was (and still am) addicted to caffeine. I found this out when I had a job travelling on the road for the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food, and, Rural Affairs (OMAFRA). I got sick of drinking crappy coffee at Tim Horton's so I decided to quit doing "cold turkey". The result was absolutely mind-bending headaches. I don't remember if I completed the detox or if I just relapsed after a few days. Now I live with a very hard-core coffee "pusher" who delivers super-high-test product right to my easy chair or desk several times a day. So I've definitely got that monkey on my back right now.

Some readers might dismiss the above as being "only trivially true". But I think they'd be wrong. As I pointed out in one of the previous articles on this subject, it's clear that the worst elements of addiction are not intrinsic to the actual drug---they are socially constructed by how society treats the people who are dependent on them. People die of overdoses because we have made it impossible for them to find a safe, dependable source. People also become prostitutes, dealers, and, thieves because of the inflated prices that criminals charge. These aren't the result of the drug and people's dependency on it, they are the result of criminalizing these specific addictions.    

In researching another article, I realized that the COVID-19 pandemic hasn't created problems in places like Long Term Care Facilities---it's just pointed out the places where our society simply doesn't work very well. That's why the death rate in private long term care homes is generally so much higher than in not-for-profit and government facilities. It's the same thing with regard to addiction. Like me, there are lots of people who are addicted to various legal substances. This often causes problems---ranging from insomnia to lung cancer. But if we tried to stamp out the use of these substances the same way we do heroin, we'd have people turning tricks and stealing bicycles for cigarettes.

It's true that lots of people don't get addicted in the first place or are able to get off the drugs on their own. But addicts are generally folks who have other significant long-term problems. And these people are poorly served by our catastrophic lack of willingness to properly fund our social safety net and mental health facilities. Drug addiction is like a giant sieve that sorts out a lot of the broken people in our society and tosses them into the "discard" pile. Indeed, I once heard a police chief from Alberta talking about this. He said the overwhelming majority of people that his officers deal with over substance abuse issues are "self-medicating" for one problem or another. 

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There is a lot of "behind the scenes" work putting out this blog that readers might not know about. For example, the gif below of a guy losing his marbles over having to wear a mask was taken from a Youtube video (perfectly legally, using the "Fair Use" provision), but I had to find a "work around" because lawyers had threatened "Git Hub" with a lawsuit if they didn't remove a sub-program that allows people to download videos. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawyers went after Youtube, and that allowed Git Hub to put it back on---but not before the good people at Linux Mint had removed it from the latest update of my computer. As a result, I did about an hour's research to find a "work around" that I could use to download the video. Then I had to edit it into a much shorter version. Then I had to refresh my memory about how how to use a command line program to convert this clipped version into a gif. I suppose lots of folks could do this in their sleep---but could they research and write this blog too?

Just a new way to sing the old song. This blog takes a lot of work to put out. So why not support it if you can? You don't even have to subscribe (easy to do, through Patreon), as there is the option of a one-time payment through PayPal if you don't want to lock yourself in. (Thanks Peter for being so awesome!)

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The above points are relatively trivial observations. I'm certainly not the first person to give voice to them. But they needed mentioning before I dig a little deeper to talk about what I really want to blather on about in this post. 

I've spent decades of my life practising the internal martial art called taijiquan. For those of you who don't know about these things (I assume most of you), an internal art is one where you don't use brute strength to defend yourself but rather a sophisticated understanding of how the human body operates. Here's a video advert for a book that illustrates (at least in part) what I'm talking about. 

What the teacher is doing is using the geometry of his student's body to control his centre of gravity. The result is that the student then has to spend all his awareness and strength just to remain vertical and protect the joint that has been locked from being broken. This effectively neutralizes him as an opponent. 

The only way to develop the skill necessary to do this is through years of careful, thoughtful, applied practice. I don't mean mindless "muscle twitching" of the sort that we all had to suffer through in school phys ed classes.  I'm talking about careful, meditative, body awareness. To get good at the internal arts, one has to dissect their body with their minds. That's how you learn to do those subtle ways of manipulating another person that the teacher is showing in the above video. 

And when you start walking down that path you learn that you have to dissect your consciousness too. That's because once you really get into doing this, you learn that your (for want of a better term) "state of mind" is tremendously important. For example, if you are angry the natural tendency is to tense up, which renders all of the techniques you want to use for self defence pretty much worthless. As a result, you have to learn to get into a specific type of consciousness when you practice if you want to do it right. 

This type of training is something of a meditative practice all on it's own, which is why when you start out learning the internal martial art of taijiquan you end up spending long periods of time doing slow forms training that looks like a weird dance routine. It looks silly to people who don't understand what is going on, but you simply cannot get any good at internal martial arts without doing this sort of thing.

Here's a video of a very good taijiquan teacher (Paul Compton) practising this sort of thing while the audio consists of someone explaining---through the use of two translated old Chinese texts---what needs to go on in your head when you practice the solo form properly.

At this point I suspect that lots of readers are asking themselves "Why is Bill telling us about this?" Well, I'm trying to point out that if you develop a certain sensitivity to how your body and mind operate (that "dissecting your body with your mind" thing), you begin to realize how many people's attitudes and beliefs are influenced by the way certain hormones flow through their bodies. 

When I get angry, I can feel the subtle changes. When I'm afraid, I feel other changes. And so on. That makes me aware of the way these chemical reactions influence my beliefs and behaviour. And, ultimately, that sort of thing is what governs all addictions. When people take opioids they do so because specific parts of the chemicals they ingest fit into specific parts of their bodies called "receptors". Scientists have found these things and described them using modern chemical models. Here's rendering of one particular opioid receptor. (Don't ask me what each part means---by now I've already maxed-out my understanding of neuro-chemistry.) 

An animated view of the PDB 4DJH structure showing the human k-opioid receptor in complex with the JDTic ligand. By Dcirovic, c/o Wikimedia Commons

 

Those receptors in your body weren't created to plug alien chemicals into, that's only an accident---like finding out that a random part from some other machine just happens to fit into a slot on your computer and does strange things. 

Instead, those receptors were meant to react to a chemical that your own body creates. That's what happens when I get angry---one part of my body releases a chemical that flows through the entire body and then sticks into receptors that---among other things---makes my muscles tense, and, my heart beat faster. These are counter-productive to the technique of internal martial arts, so part of my training has involved learning how to consciously counter-act those instinctive reactions. (And that's how I became aware of all this stuff in the first place.)

In turn, this helps me understand how something like gambling addictions work. The body creates its own "fix" and to a certain extent people can create it internally instead of having to go down the street corner and buy it. That's what is going on when gambling addicts "get into the zone". Even more revealing is the fact that game designers can---using trial and error based on data collected by electronic gaming machines---create specific experiences that will addict a significant fraction of the public to shovelling their life's savings into the coffers of casinos.

Now let me expand on the issue based on my personal experience gleaned from a lifetime of self-observation from studying meditation and internal martial arts. Human beings do a lot of things in pursuit of creating internal chemicals to fit into their receptors so they can feel a specific internal "high". Let's reel off some obvious examples:

• sexual arousal and orgasms
• exercise---such as the runner's "high"
• rhythmic activity where you "lose yourself", like dancing
• religious services where you do things like "speak in tongues"
• spiritual practices like formal meditation, yoga, taijiquan, chanting, prayer

Now let's get into some less obvious, but just as important examples. People often "groove" on the feeling of the chemicals coursing through their bodies and jamming into their receptors from much more mundane experiences. These include:

• cheering on a sports team
• being scared witless by a suspense or horror movie
• having a "good cry" while reading a sad novel
  
• laughing until they feel exhausted at a comedy show
  
• getting enraged by the injustice you learn about in a news article

OK. If you are still with me, now what about the following things that some people watch over and over again?

• "Doomer porn", that says crazy things like the Climate Emergency is going make all multi-cellular life on earth extinct within 30 years?
• Animal rights posts that show positively horrific footage of grotesque animal abuse?
• Ludicrous conspiracy theories like Q-anon that say that the leaders of the Democratic party kidnap and torture hordes of children so they can harvest their blood to make anti-aging drugs?
• Political propaganda that says that refugees crossing the boarder (following the UN refugee rules) are in some mysterious sense "illegal" and that the government gives them all sorts of money that our veterans aren't entitled to receive? 
• Whack-a-doodle videos that state that George Soros and Bill Gates are involved in an enormous conspiracy aimed at "micro-chipping" the entire human race so we can be controlled in some sort enormous Stalinist world tyranny.
• The conservative propaganda that says that opposition to the tar sands is being artificially-created by foreign charitable foundations that channel outside money into Canada.
  

It seems clear to me that the people who compulsively pursue and repeat the above stories also seem to addicted to some sort internal chemical "rush". If you don't know what I'm talking about, consider the following gif I created from a Youtube video of an anti-masker at a city council meeting in Florida.

I can tell you from personal experience that the guy in the above gif was "main-lining" a lot of very serious "rage hormones". IMHO, the people who created the propaganda that whipped him into this frenzy are "pushers" just like guys who sell crystal meth in dark alleys.

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When I was young there was recent research that showed that you could stimulate a part of an animal's brain to evoke a response that would motivate it to immediately push a button to cause another stimulation. That's classic addiction behaviour and rats would literally keep pushing the button until they died of dehydration or starvation because they wouldn't even stop to drink or eat. (Does this remind you of the some people in casinos? Check out this subReddit to read some first-hand stories if you don't know what I'm talking about.)

Writers of all sorts had a field day with this subject. One particular example I can remember being deeply disturbed by was a pulp fiction crime novel (I think by John D. MacDonald) who had a villain who had lobotomized a woman and attached her brain to an apparatus similar to the one above (albeit wirelessly) and used the reward system to get her to compulsively exercise until she became a super strong killer. I don't think we've quite gotten to this point in our collective journey to absolute perdition, but in a way, I think we're pretty close.

Social media, electronic gaming machines, and, political fundraising don't involve inserting an electrode directly into people's brains. Instead, they communicate through traditional intermediate means: pictures, written texts, flashing lights, music, video, etc. But what is new is the fact that people's responses are being reduced to a number and carefully tracked in order to constantly "sort out" the fraction of the public who are most receptive to the given message. This statistical analysis is also being used to refine the message sent so it creates stronger and stronger responses. 

Let's zero in on how this emergent technology works with political propaganda. It's true that most people don't get "hooked" by the populist message. But that's exactly the same as both drug and gambling addictions, which only catch a small fraction of the population. But a small fraction isn't the same as an insignificant one. There are enough gambling addicts to fund an enormous financial sector. And much the same thing can be said about illicit drugs. Similarly, a majority is never going to believe that Hillary Clinton tortures children so she can drink their adrenaline-saturated blood. But even a tiny number can create a huge amount of chaos if they grab a rifle and head out to support a call by Q-anon to fight the good fight.

 

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And on that cheery note, I will leave you dear readers. Be nice to the people around you. Hug your significant other, cat, dog, rabbit, or, whatever. Eat right. Take your vitamins. Exercise. Wear a mask and keep your distance. AND REMEMBER THAT THIS TOO SHALL PASS!

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

Weekend Literary Supplement: The Climate Trials, Part Eight

In this instalment of The Climate Trials we see another "take" on the Youtube trial of conservative Christianity. It comes from a paper in an academic journal of philosophy.

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Excerpt from the article, Para Legal Implications of the Climate Trials, in Philosophical Transactions, Vol 12, Issue 5. By Fred Penner, Phd., from Xanadu University, Washington State, USA.

Mikhial Bookchin had selected an obscure pastor from a small, inner-city church to lead the prosecution. While it might seem odd for a member of the clergy to prosecute the role of religion in the Climate Emergency, Lex Ploughrite proved to have an ability to identify and articulate the core issues at stake. The defence was presented by another obscure, yet talented individual. Kase Hugerman was a rural, small town news blogger who had what seemed to be an encyclopedic understanding of all religions. Watching the two work was less a battle or a debate than a simple “division of labour” as each helped the audience understand all the complex issues at play.

Lex began by setting out in great detail the paper trail that showed beyond a doubt that the theological opposition had been created by public relations agencies hired by fossil fuel companies rather than any sort of dispute among serious theologians. Kase responded by suggesting that it doesn’t really matter where an idea comes from if the body of Christ accepts it. God chooses leaders from all walks of life---indeed the term “Messiah” while it refers to Jesus himself in the Gospels, is used to describe many different types of individuals in the Old Testament ---including a non-Jew, Cyrus the Great of Persia. Is it that hard to believe that an advertising executive working for Exxon Mobile could also for a brief period of time be a “Messiah” anointed by God to spread his word? After all, the God of the Bible expresses himself in a myriad of different, seemingly absurd ways: through the mouth of Balaam’s Ass, through the hand writing on the wall of Belshazzar’s court, etc. The key issue isn’t the source of a theological notion, it is whether or not it is accepted by the body of Christ after praying over it.

Ploughrite then responded by asking about the much-vaunted belief in the “fundamental”, inerrancy of the Bible in this point of view. If people can pick and choose what they believe in based on their own judgment, then what is the difference between fundamentalist and liberal denominations? Hugerman said that the term “fundamentalism” is abusive and used by people who dislike Christianity. Instead, he suggested that the court use “evangelical”. By that term he used the “Bebbington” definition---emphasizing the need to be “born again”, a special emphasis on the Bible, to express belief through action, and, the fundamental importance of Christ’s crucifixion.

As Hugerman explained it, the psychological experience of being “born again” totally removes reason and evidence from epistemological preeminence in the life of the individual and replaces it with faith. From this starting point, the Bible ceases to be just one text among others that can be checked using academic criteria, but instead becomes a living, breathing document that enters into a dialogue with the person of faith when he approaches it prayerfully. That’s why someone from the outside looking in can’t understand why an evangelical Christian seems to have no problem with the many contradictions and hard-to-justify parts of the Bible. They simply don’t have the psychological viewpoint that comes with being born again and gaining the ability to use prayerful discernment to pick and choose which parts to emphasize and which to ignore.

While it is true that Christians are supposed to have an inner voice called “the Holy Spirit”, which is supposed to help them discern truth from falsity---evangelicals believe that this needs to be tamed by faith and by being a member of a church. The congregation and ecclesiastic hierarchy---which is known as “the Body of Christ”---adds another dimension that is missing when academics and non-Christians read the Bible.

This is why evangelicals dismiss the idea that someone can be “spiritual without being religious”. Being a Christian isn’t just a “belief system”, it’s a “belief culture” where someone builds their whole life around not just the Bible, but also the Bible as understood by those members of his community who are more experienced in its message. Hugerman explained that this speaks to the issue of the church leadership following the lead of the fossil fuel companies and the Republican party. Evangelicals believe that “faith without deeds” is empty, which is why they felt that they had to take an active part in politics, and were primed to follow the lead of the Church leadership, who were better able to discern the will of God---which meant supporting the Republicans.

At this point Ploughrite thanked Hugerman for what he thought was a remarkably clear and lucid description that made a lot of sense to him---as a description of the minds of evangelical Christians leading up to the Climate Emergency. But he then asked the following questions:

“Would you like your surgeon to think like this? Do you think it would be better if the man who designed this building thought this way? If you fly in an airplane, would you desire the people who built it to “prayerfully discern” the way to build the engines? Or would you rather that they calculated the stresses involved and experimented in a wind tunnel to see if their original hypotheses were correct?”

“I have no doubt at all about your description of the thought processes of the evangelical church members. But that leaves the underlying question: ‘Should people still be using this sort of thought process in the modern age?’”

“Doesn’t it make people vulnerable to control by hierarchical institutions that take advantage of their inability to think clearly and logically? And if a majority---or even an influential minority---of the population have been taught and trained to think this way, how can we expect them to respond to the increasing problems that have resulted from modern science and technology?”

Hugerman made an interesting response. He suggested that democracy is ultimately a non-Christian concept:

“Democracy is based on the pagan assertion that ‘man is the measure of all things’. But being a Christian is ultimately about submitting to the will of God. Those two visions of humanity are fundamentally at odds with one another.”

“Look at the theological history of Christianity. Human beings fell from their ‘natural state of grace’ in the Garden of Eden not because they harmed anyone else---but because they disobeyed God. Similarly, Satan was cast out of Heaven because he dared to think for himself and not do what he was told.”

“Liberals are often stunned by the hypocrisy of evangelical leadership---who often get caught doing exactly the opposite of what they preach in their ministries. Think about pastors who fight against gay rights but get caught in bed with gay prostitutes. But where the liberal sees “hypocrisy”, the evangelical sees “the spirit was willing but the flesh was weak” and evidence of humanity’s “fallen state”. That’s why they continue to support their leadership, simply because they ‘love the sinner but hate the sin’. What evangelical Christianity hates isn’t hypocrisy, it’s rebellion. The fundamental core of rebellion is thinking for yourself---and that’s also the core of democracy.”

“From the outside looking in, people often accuse the religion of Christianity of boiling down to not much more than ‘shut up and do what you are told’. But as the saying goes, for many believers ‘that’s not a bug, it’s a feature!’. People need to understand exactly what people are looking for when they get involved in an evangelical community. They generally aren’t seeking freedom, or spiritual growth---instead they are generally fearful of change, or they are recovering from making very bad personal life choices, or they are looking for some sort of social stability. Indeed, many people come to so-called “mega churches” simply because they are the only ‘social safety net’ left after decades of the ‘neo-liberal consensus’ has ripped their communities to pieces. These people aren’t looking for freedom---they want security. And security comes from a strong man on a white horse---not an argument in the public square.”

This is exactly the same point that Karen Armstrong makes in her book The Battle for God. Fundamentalism is driven not by theology per se, but rather by fear of modernity. And, unfortunately, conservatives have read an attempt to build a post-fossil fuel society as an attempt to rip away the existing economic and social order and replace it with something they fear will be far, far worse.

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Furthermore I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

An Interview With Morgan Dandie Hannah: Part Six, the Portuguese Model

In my last post on this subject, I cited a short clip from Morgan where we discussed legalizing addictive drugs in order to deal with overdoses and the crushing cost of addiction. Since then, there's been a general election in the USA and the state of Oregon passed a popular referendum that decriminalizes all forms of street drugs. There's a nuance to this new legal framework that I think readers should understand. Decriminalizing all drugs isn't the same thing as legalizing them. It just means that people no longer get anything more than a fine if they get caught with them. This doesn't lower the cost of the drugs addicts can buy, nor does it ensure consistency in the potency and safety of what they inject into their arms. 

Nor, oddly enough, does it necessarily cut down on the number of people in jail. I can remember hearing a cannabis activist describe the paradoxical effect that decriminalization had in Australia. According to him, it turned out that when several states reduced cannabis possession from a criminal to an administrative sanction (ie: jail to fine), the result was an increase in the incarceration rate of native (aboriginal) Australians. The way it worked was that many police had been of the opinion that the paperwork and court time involved in charging someone for cannabis possession wasn't worth the hassle. So they just tossed the drugs and sent people on their way. (This happened here to friends of mine during prohibition.) But since all they had to do after decriminalization was to write a ticket they tended to intervene more often. For middle-class people this was annoying. But for the really poor (predominantly native Australians) they were beyond their means to pay. This meant that they ended up doing time in jail for unpaid fines. 

I see the above example as a salutary tale that should make people think very carefully about the subtle nuances involved in any sort of change to drug policy.

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Hannah ended up by citing the Portuguese model as an example of how to really help addicts. She isn't the only one, so I'm going to do a quick run-through of how it works. 

First, I think it's tremendously important to understand historical context of its introduction. That's because I suspect that it really isn't all that revolutionary to most experts on drug treatment. What is amazing is that it managed to get introduced and supported long enough to show results. My suspicion is the problem isn't that experts don't know what should be done, it's there are always powerful interests in society that block any real attempt to do so.

In 1933 Portugal became a Fascist dictatorship after a military coup d'etat. This continued until 1974 when a leftist military coup plus a popular uprising (the "Carnation Revolution"), brought in a liberal democracy more in keeping with modern European traditions. In addition, between 1961 and 1975 Portugal was involved in battles with other nations (India, 1961) and popular insurgencies (Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique). This was just as traumatic to the nation as the Vietnam War was to the USA. It created large numbers of dispirited, traumatized veterans, many who suffered from serious wounds---just the sort of people who are vulnerable to addiction. Moreover---because of Portugal's close proximity to Africa plus it's numerous trade and cultural connections to Asia, Africa, and, South America---the country has always lots of opportunities for smugglers.

All of this created something of a "perfect storm" for heroin use that culminated with very high levels of addiction. To illustrate this, take a look at the following bar graph that I got from a Cato Institute report written by Glenn Greenwald. It shows the rapid increase of drug-related deaths (overdoses?) in Portugal over 12 years.

Just to put these deaths into a context, Portugal's total population was something like 10 million during the time span of this graph. That means that the 1999 drug deaths of 400 comes to something like one person out of 25,000. Last year Canada had a population of 38 million and 3822 people died of overdoses, or, one person out of 9900. So, as per opioid deaths Portugal at the height of its drug epidemic had nothing on Canada.  

Where Portugal did have a big problem was in the transmission of HIV through injected drug use. The problem was those colonial wars in Africa. One of the areas of conflict, Guinea-Bissau, appears to have been the origin area of HIV-2. (There are various different strains of HIV. The main culprit for AIDS is HIV-1, but the second strain, HIV-2, also causes the disease. It is key to the Portuguese part of the pandemic.) As a result, there were high rates of HIV in both Portuguese soldiers (through both blood transfusions and sexual contact) and refugees from the conflict who ended up in Portugal. This "base line" of infection created a reservoir of the disease that then spread through the use of shared needles among injection drug users. As a result, Portugal ended up with (and still has) the highest rates of HIV infection in Europe. 

At the time the Portuguese drug model was created (2001), they were in the middle of a rapidly-spreading epidemic of HIV (tuberculosis and hepatitis too!) and they found that 50% of the spread was coming through addicts sharing needles. Since the drug model came about---which brought in a great many harm-reduction tactics, such as needle-exchanges---the country has managed to almost eliminate this mode of transmission. To illustrate this, consider the following 2019 graphic from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).

Click on the image to get a bigger, more easy to see version.

 

As you can see, now Portugal has almost no transmission of HIV by way of needle-sharing---unlike other countries like the Baltic states where it is still quite common. 

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This was a brutal pig of an article to research. There were lots of things on the web that talked about how groovy the Portugal response to drug addiction really is, but the details were kinda hard to find. Moreover, there wasn't an awful lot I could find that brought it together into a whole. So I had to wade through microscopic detailed policy papers, "feel good" stories that didn't have any detail at all, and, shiny, graphic-heavy "factoid cards" that had obviously been written by European Union public relations departments. Perhaps if I could read Portuguese it would have helped---.

Either way, the above whining is just my way of saying that writing these articles really is hard work. And as a general rule I think that if someone does hard, useful work they should get paid for it. If you can afford it, therefore, why not subscribe? It's easy to do through Patreon and Pay Pal.  

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I've started off this discussion with the origins of the Portuguese model because I am really interested in understanding how it came about and whether or not these provide insights into what barriers Canadians might have if they tried to bring something similar here. As I see it, there were two key elements:

The conservative elements in society had been totally discredited because of generations of Fascist rule plus a catastrophic colonial war that went on for far, far too long. I suspect that after the Carnation Revolution a "breathing space" opened up and more liberal elements of society were given a breathing space to attempt science-based public policy free from sabotage by people ideologically opposed to it.

I also suspect that because of the rapid spread of HIV---and the real terror people had of it---the government was so afraid of the disease getting out of control that it "swallowed" any repugnance it might have had towards addicts. This would explain why they were willing to do almost anything to cut the spread of the disease---including treating addicts with dignity and humanity.

(Please be aware that this is me "reading between the lines" of a totally different culture. But one thing I've learned over the years is that scientists won't make value judgments in their reports and politicians won't say anything that makes them look bad. The result is a "sanitized" version of history becomes the public record. I'm just looking at the facts I see before me, adding in the results of my personal experience, and, hypothesizing about what seems to be the most plausible conclusion. If someone can direct me towards evidence that would suggest otherwise, please do so I can correct this part of the article.)

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The way the Portuguese Model works is fairly simple. Ultimately, it involves treating addicts like sick people with a social/physical ailment that needs treatment instead of as criminals that require punishment. Moreover, the government decided that it would actually provide the resources to actually help people instead of just mouthing platitudes. 

The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction published a monograph titled Drug Policy Profiles: Portugal that describes the key elements of the policy.

The first part was that even though the possession of drugs is still illegal, the principle of punishment was totally removed. Instead, the only emphasis is on rehabilitation. As quoted from the above document, the preamble to the law states:

‘the drug user is sanctioned ... in a quasi-symbolic manner, in which the contact with the formal justice system is designed to encourage him or her to seek treatment’

This difference is a key part of how Portugal defines their decision to "decriminalize" the use of all drugs. I mentioned how "decriminalization" resulted in an increase of native Australians being incarcerated for Cannabis possession. That's because of the "mindset" that accompanied this change. The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction did a nice job of spelling out the intricacies of the definition in a statement that was quoted by Glenn Greenwald's report.

“Decriminalisation” comprises removal of a conduct or activity from the sphere of criminal law. Prohibition remains the rule, but sanctions for use (and its preparatory acts) no longer fall within the framework of the criminal law.

[By contrast],“depenalization” means relation of the penal sanction provided for by law. In the case of drugs, and cannabis in particular, depenalization generally signifies the elimination of custodial penalties.

Understanding the distinction and using the European language, one would see that Oregon and Australian "depenalized" drugs, but they didn't "decriminalize" them. This is absolutely key to understanding the system.  

Portuguese police can and do issue citations to people caught in possession. But the citations that they issue aren't about appearing before a judge. Instead, they are to go before something that would drive most "law-and-order types" into fits of hysteria: "Dissuasion Commissions". These are tribunals that consist of one person appointed by the Ministry of Justice plus two jointly appointed by the Ministry of Health and the government co-ordinator of health policy. One needs to have a legal background and at least one of the others should have a background in medicine or social work. As a general rule, most Commissions have all three. 

By mandate and actual practice, these tribunals have nothing at all in common with courts. Instead, they operate more like social work "teams" who's primary mandate is to help the offender instead of protect society. To that end, their authority is tremendously limited. When a police officer finds someone using illegal drugs all they can do is issue a summons that requires the person to show up before the Dissuasion Commission within 72 hours. Once a person comes before the body, they make a quick decision whether or not there is reason to believe that drug trafficking is taking place. If so, the case is then sent to a regular court.

For the majority of cases they take over at this point and the judicial system is no longer involved. As the title of the tribunal suggests, it's key job is to dissuade people from being drug addicts and offer the ones who seek it, effective treatment. The law provides some "sticks" for them to use---such as social sanctions plus a provision to issue fines of between 25 euros and the minimum wage, but in fact these are rarely levied. Indeed, the law states that if there is no evidence of actual addiction or repeated offences, the fine can only be used as a suspended sentence.

The tribunals don't use threats to get people to enter rehab or detox programs. The individuals have to want the treatment. Indeed, even if a tribunal did try to order someone to go into a program under the law it is not a criminal act to ignore the decision of a Dissuasion Commission. Instead, it is the job of the tribunal to help the addict find the services they want in order to kick their habit. To that end, they have the authority to send anyone who wants it to a detox, treatment, or, drug replacement (methadone) clinic. Moreover, the government has actually funded the creation of this support infrastructure. This means that people who want treatment can actually receive it when they need it, instead of having to wait long times for a space to open up (like we do in Canada). 

After reading the previous articles I've written I hope readers can identify the key points of interest:

1. The lack of sanctions by the Commission mean that they cannot force anyone to go to treatment who doesn't want to go---this means that they don't disrupt the people who do want to be there.
2. The decision to fully fund the different types of treatment mean that the option is always there---even for poor people.
3. Removing the criminal justice system from the process means that there is minimal social stigma and no long-term penalty (ie: a criminal record) that will hold-back a person from reintegrating with society.

Hannah also said that she had no interest in legalizing drugs because she saw the people who sold drugs to addicts as being totally indefensible. I tend to agree with her about the "king pins" who sell really nasty stuff to people---like heroin, fentanil and carfentanil. She did say that the police shouldn't be going after people who sell small amounts so they can afford their habit. The fact that users go before the tribunals and they decide whether or not they should be treated as traffickers strikes me as a useful "firewall" that protects people from the tendency of police departments to only go after the "easy" criminals instead of the difficult ones. 

 

Indeed, according to the Drug Policy Profiles: Portugal paper that I mentioned above,

In 1993, a new drug law was adopted and remains today the primary Portuguese law on supply reduction (see box, page 13). This law transposed the recommendations of the 1988 UN Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, focusing on drug money laundering and control of drug precursors. It maintained the criminalisation of drug use but developed a specific approach to it.

In other words, police policy is to not focus on street level drug sales, but instead to focus on the drug "king pins" who produce and import the drugs, and, the banks that launder the profits. 

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Could Canada Adopt the Portuguese Model?

This is the big question and answering it requires some head-scratching on my part. There does appear to be a real appetite on the part of different parts of Canadian society to deal with our drug epidemic in a new way. It's hard to argue with the obvious success of Portugal. But IMHO there are big, big, big barriers that stand in the way of adopting it here. 

 

First of all, unlike Portugal, right-wing ideology still has a great deal of support in this country. And it doesn't like harm reduction. Instead, it believes in PUNISHMENT. It might not make any sense, but politics often isn't about developing good public policy---it's about whipping people into a frenzy in order to get them to give you donations and vote for you. There are conservative politicians who were trying get people to vote for them in the last few elections because other parties were in favour of legalizing cannabis. You can imagine the uproar they would create if they could use the "Dissuasion Commissions" as a stick to beat their rivals with. 

Secondly, in the short run it won't be cheap to build enough detox and treatment centres. In the long run the government will actually will save if you cut down on the prison population, avoid all the medical costs, petty crime, etc. But while it might be true that all the money comes from the same tax payers, it still goes into different department budgets. And, the fact of the matter is that there will be a transitional period where the government will have to spend real coin to get the system up and running. As a result, the "all taxes are theft" crowd would be screaming, wailing, and, gnashing their teeth with a vengeance. 

Third, there are a lot of folks with a vested interest in the War on Drugs. It might be that the Chiefs of Police are in favour of something like the Portugal model, but I bet that there would be a lot of officers who've build their careers in the drug squad who would freak at the thought of having their budget slashed. I also suspect that a lot of lawyers would have heart attacks at the idea that an incredibly informal process like the Dissuasion tribunals would take most drug cases away from the courts---not for financial reasons, but because they have a strong personal investment in the ideals of the current adversarial system.

 

Moreover, I think it will be a very cold day in Hell before the government gets serious about going after the source of drugs coming into Canada. Most fentanyl and carfentanil comes from China. We're already in a huge mess over our arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou and it looks like another is ginning up because  our UN Ambassador, Bob Rae, is trying to defend the Uyghurs (and quite rightly, too!). 

 

As for money laundering, there is the intrinsic problem that most of it is done through the following:

• offshore tax havens
• real estate
• banks
• casinos

It is really, really hard to get the government to scrutinize these with anything like a serious attempt to reign in criminal behaviour. That's because any significant move against drug kingpins with regard to the first three will really piss off a lot of very wealthy, very powerful people. That's not that I believe that most wealthy people are involved in the opioid business, but because the same laws and procedures that protect big crime when it launders money also protects the just plain wealthy when it comes to tax avoidance. 

To understand this point, consider an analogy. Have you ever wondered why it is that the government never gets around to passing laws against puppy mills? It's because any animal welfare law that really did protect dogs from this sort of sleaze would also make it illegal to have a modern factory farm. There's no way to write a law in our legal tradition that says it is cruel and evil to mistreat dogs without also raising concerns about how we treat pigs and chickens. As a result, people get upset---but we still have puppy mills. (Truly, we shouldn't have factory farms either, but that's just a little too far for most people to go right now.)  

As for casinos, the people who's oxen would get gored would be governments. As I pointed out in the article about gambling addictions, both provincial and First Nation's governments are dependent on the revenue that they extract from problem gamblers. They probably also benefit from whatever money laundering goes on within our casinos. This means that there would be a very strong conflict of interest between governments and law enforcement with regard to casino money laundering. (For those of you who don't know this, there is currently something called The Cullen Commission going on in British Columbia that is aimed at this very issue.) 

 

And the very, very last issue is constitutional. Portugal is a unitary state of only 10 million citizens. In contrast, Canada is a federation with significant police, health, and, financial powers decentralized to the provinces. And one thing that I've learned from my years in politics is that elected leaders NEVER GIVE UP AN IOTA OF POWER WITHOUT FIGHTING TOOTH AND NAIL. That means that there would be huge battles between Ottawa and the provincial governments about who gets to make what decision involved in changing our patchwork of enforcement, treatment, and, financial regulations. Canada doesn't have the sort of national consensus that gets built up by rebelling against 40 years of Fascist dictatorship, fighting a ridiculous "forever war" against half of Africa, and, staring down an epidemic that potentially made COVID-19 look like a case of the sniffles.   

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Sorry to be such a "Debbie downer", but putting out this blog has educated me into why so many journalists have drinking problems. It seems that every time I look into a problem in some detail I find that things are worse than I ever imagined. I'm planning on doing one more story on this subject and then it's on to some more positive stuff. 

I hope you are keeping your distance and wearing your mask. I am.

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

Weekend Literary Supplement: The Climate Trials, Part Seven

In this part of The Climate Trials we read an excerpt from a book of academic theology written by an Anglican priest who is reflecting on the part of the proceedings where conservative Christianity was put on trial for it's support of conservative political factions who sabotaged humanity's attempts to head off an ecological disaster.

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(A quote from The Very Reverend Digger Nielson’s Faith, Ecology, and, Despair.)

The part of the Climate Trials dealing with religion needs to be understood as dealing not with religion per se, but rather as being about a specific form of modern organized religion. It might be hard to believe now, but in 20^th century America a type of anti-intellectual religiosity had become a dominant force in society. It asserted its influence not because of it’s many followers, but rather because of the specific type of behaviour it encouraged. I’m talking about that unholy alliance between the old Republican Party and conservative Christianity.

Conservative politics in the USA has throughout it’s history been focused on fear of “the Other” (to use Edmund Husserl’s term). That is to say, a key part of the identity that this type of Christian had constructed for themselves involved being in opposition to people that they had expressly rejected as being “lessor”---for one reason or another. People of colour (sometimes pejoratively dismissed as “mud people”) were feared due to projected imaginings about their impact on what they chauvinistically called “real Americans”, like themselves. Paradoxically, this fear seemed to consist of a contradictory melange of ideas about how these people were “parasites” who lived off the hard work of middle-class whites (also called “job creators”), or, who drove down wages of working people (especially Asians and Hispanics). They were viewed as destroyers of community because their physical presence was deemed enough to destroy the value of one’s home. (The fact that this had become a self-fulfilling prophecy just because people believed it to be true never occurred to them.)

This opposition to the Other expanded dramatically since the 1960s as more and more categories were added to the old racial ones. Feminists, gays, environmentalists, antifa, scientists, and, socialists became new categories of unknown and profoundly misunderstood “boogiemen” that the churches were able to draw upon in order to create the feeling that parishioners were under siege by dark forces who wished to drive religion out of society, outlaw Christmas, and, brainwash their children into atheism.

As a scholar of the Gospels, who self-identifies as a follower of Jesus Christ, I find this type of thinking irreconcilaby discordant with our Saviour’s teachings. That’s because if there is one message in the New Testament, it is that the “Other” is welcome at the feast of love. God always has a place for the outsider at the table of the Lord. The Jesus of The Gospels did not hide in fear from people who were outside the pale or who were “unclean”---he socialized and ate with prostitutes, non-Jews, and, people who served the occupying power.

The point that the Climate Trials raised when they put conservative Christianity on the docket, was that it was far more conservative than it was Christian. I couldn’t agree more. When Fundamentalists read the Gospels they specifically did so like lawyers---trying to find any loophole that would allow them to continue living the life they’d always lived instead of changing it to be in harmony with the Good News.

The biggest “lesson” that people in these churches learned wasn’t to “love your enemy”, “help the poor and oppressed”, or, “turn the cheek”, but rather “do what you are told”. And what they were usually told was “vote Republican”, and, “be afraid of the Other”.

As the advocates arguing for the environment pointed out during the Climate Trials, these hidden commandments of “do what you are told” and “fear those who are different” allowed these churches---who never commanded much more than between 10 and 20% of the population---to “punch above their weight” in electoral politics. The congregants of these denominations could be relied upon to donate, volunteer, and, vote for whomever their clergy endorsed in the election. And those pastors could be reliably depended upon to support Republicans. In contrast, more liberal denominations were headed by people who actually believed in the division between Caesar and God. Those ministers not only believed that they had no right to tell people how to vote, they also knew that if they attempted to do so, they’d alienate large fractions of their flocks. The type of theology that denominations supported made their societal influence asymmetrical.

Compounding this problem was the existence of the so-called “Bible belt” in the rural South. When people thought about this area, they naively believed that there was something specific about the rural Southern USA in terms of fundamentalist religion. But in actual fact---as the advocates in the Climate Trials pointed out---conservative religious belief was at that time equal all over the continental USA’s rural areas. What was different in the South, however, was that Gerrymandering and the relative lack of large urban cities had resulted in the weight given to votes in Southern rural areas being much greater than in urban ones.

In any given electoral district a seat in the House, Senate, or Electoral College was only loosely based on the specific number of voters who lived in that district. If the population of one district was half that of another and both had equal numbers of representatives, that meant that the individual votes cast by the population in the former were twice as powerful as those in the latter.

In the United States---especially in the South---rural voters tended to have far more influence per capita than urban ones. Moreover, even if a rural voter was more power than an urban one, if the number of urban voters was sufficiently larger than that of rural ones, this disparity could be overwhelmed. In the Southern parts of the USA successful governments had allowed the disparity between urban and rural vote power to grow far more than in the North. Moreover, most of the largest cities in America aren’t in the South, but rather the North and the two coasts. This meant that the fundamentalist church---which was mostly concentrated in rural areas---had an added benefit in the South which allowed it to dominate electoral politics far more than their numbers would suggest they should have.

The worst part of this problem was the fact that the very powerful Senate was elected on the basis of two members per state, with no account being given to the population. This meant that a rural state like Wyoming (population 580,000) had the same influence as an urban state like New York (population 19.5 million). Any organization---like a fundamentalist church---that was disproportionately rural and whose members were also disproportionately willing to follow centralized political direction was bound to benefit from an electoral system that allowed this type of wild disparity to exist.

But having pointed out the above, the question still arises “Why did the fundamentalists churches become so invested in fighting against any attempt to deal with the Climate Emergency?” This gets to the theological issue that really is at the heart of this book. The Gospels, and the entire Bible for that matter, really doesn’t have much to say about the environment. At the time they were written nature could, by-and-large, pretty much take care of itself without any conscious effort by human society to protect it. Yes, there were problems such as the deforestation of the Mediterranean Basin, but there was nothing like the Climate Emergency. Even if such macro problems had emerged, there wasn’t the scientific knowledge needed to understand them. When you look at the sacred texts to find an answer about ecology, all you get is a vacuum.

There has been some talk in liberal theology about calls for people to be “stewards” of the earth. This hearkens back to Genesis 1:28’s

“And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

The problem with this position---for fundamentalists---is that there is an enormous difference between subduing and having dominion over the earth, and, the attitude of humility that the science of ecology brings to the subject, and, the reverence for nature that sustains the commitment of most environmental activists. For evangelicals, the feelings of humility and reverence may only be directed towards God---anything else smacks of paganism. And this was a key charge against the environmental movement in general: that it was fundamentally anti-Christian and neo-pagan. (Certainly there could be no room for humility and reverence for nature in the theology of “shut up and do what you are told”.)

Finding a significant void in God’s omniscience and filling this void with paganism are pretty scary prospects for fundamentalists. That’s because if you are going to live your life around an infallible sacred text, isn’t part of the infallibility it’s exhaustiveness? If you are facing an existential crisis and God doesn’t have anything to say about it, could it be that God didn’t even know about it? Liberal churches don’t face this dilemma. They see both the Bible and the Gospels as a collection of divinely inspired, but ultimately human-created texts. As such, they suffer from the same limitations inherent in any book. When something new comes along---like the Climate Emergency---it is just something new that people need to pray over and let the Holy Spirit help guide human reason (ie: science) in addressing. (Which is why they had no problem in creating and embracing a new theology around environmental “stewardship”.)

Modern science is at odds with fundamentalism of any sort. And the Climate Emergency is something that people simply can’t ignore like paleontology or cosmology. If it exists, it intrudes on people’s lives---either directly through local disasters like floods and droughts, or, indirectly through government regulations like restrictions on fossil fuel use and extraction. This requires individuals to come up with novel theological formulations---but the whole point of fundamentalism is to not think for yourself. Instead, it seeks the inerrant guidance of God as revealed in holy text and interpreted by the local ecclesiastic authority.

“Luckily” for the fundamentalist Christians, their Republican overlords had been co-opted by the fossil fuel industry who spread the message that the Climate Emergency wasn’t real. Instead, they said that it was a pseudo crisis cooked up by pagan city dwellers who wanted to destroy rural people’s way of life---which presumably consisted mostly of destroying nature in order to extract fossil fuels. This was justified theologically on the strange basis of suggesting that it is arrogant to believe that God would allow the human race to destroy the planet. They extended this viewpoint to the point where they felt that there was no sense trying to limit the filth we spread on it because that seemed to imply lack of faith in God’s ability to clean up the mess. If this sounds like a wild slander, consider the parallels between this idea and the denominations opposed to vaccinations (Dutch Calvinists), blood transfusion (Jehovah’s Witnesses), or, even modern medicine in general (Christian Science). Each of these seem to boil down to the idea that using modern medicine shows a lack of faith in God’s ability to heal any illness. The parallels in reasoning are obvious---at least to this author.

I suppose you could say that this point of view is the logical extension of fundamentalism---it goes beyond the idea that humans should thinking for themselves about issues of morality and God’s existence to the point where they should stop thinking about how to be human at all.

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I always ask for money in these posts because I think it's tremendously important that the people who can afford to pay for news and art should be reminded to do so. I love the new world of information that comes from the World Wide Web, but I think it's important to remember that the obscene amounts of money it creates for the big tech companies has to some extent been taken away from people like musicians, journalists, and, so on. These were never very well paid jobs, but an entire generation of people have had to give up their passions and find something else to do because of the "economic disruption" that professors of economics blandly describe as being "useful destruction". 

Anyway, I'm not going to ask for readers to buy a subscription today. (Although feel free to do so if you want.) Instead, I'd like everyone to think about telling others about the blog. I promote it through Face Book, Twitter, Linked In, and, Instagram, but I think I've plateaued using those sites. I can only promote this thing through word of mouth, and it's important to expand my readership base if I'm going to ever make this into a viable enterprise. So if you are in some sort of discussion group---a sub-Reddit, email exchange, etc---where you think others might be interested in a post, please stick a link to the blog with a statement like "I thought this article really spoke to this issue---you might be interested too". This sort of thing dramatically increases readership. 

As any salesperson will tell you, "word of mouth" is the absolute best advertisement.

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!