DOOM, The Politics of Catastrophe

Niall Ferguson 2021 Beaverton Lib. 362.1962 FER

I mis-remember Niall Ferguson as a lucid writer. My memory failed me. This book seems to be British conservative virtue signalling. Some random notes:

• 04 "As I write (in late October 2020), the COVID-19 pandemic is far from over." 26 million cases, (underestimate) death toll 1.2 million ...

  • as I write this in March 2023, there have been 677 million confirmed cases, and up to 28 million estimated deaths.

• 04 Lord Rees: "bioterror or bioerror will lead to one million casualties in a single event within a six month period starting no later than Dec 31 2020". Lord Rees lost his bet, the cause is species-exterminating Chinese zoophagy.

As I write this 2023 Mar 24, it appears that COVID-19 is zoonotic and emerged from raccoon dogs sold at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan.

• 08 black swans dragon kings Didier Sornette "Dragon Kings, Black Swans and the Prediction of Crises" 2009

• 08 Keith Thomas Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England

• 09 Failure to learn from history, Failure of imagination, Tendency to fight the last war or crisis, Threat underestimation, Procrastination, or waiting for a certainty that never comes
• 23 "The Immanent Eschaton" downplays COVID-19, "in the first half of 2020 excess US mortality was 11%" ... however p4 "cumulative body count continues to rise globally at a rate of more than 3.5% per week" would mean (1.035^26) = 2.18x increase in six months, 4.77x per year. By the time the increase reaches the Ferguson Pain Threshold (he's in the hospital parking lot, waiting for a COVID bed), "Failure of imagination" would have killed him. Fortunately, the rest of us have better imaginations and took precautions seriously, and yes, delayed economic growth.

• 30 Eric Voegelin The New Science of Politics, 1952

• 47 Peter Turchin War and Peace and War p163 Ultimately the collapse of social order results in civil war; imperial decline is then inevitable.

• 75 "Luck is probability taken personally" misattributed to Penn Jillette actually Daniel W. "Chip" Denman

• 75 Edward Lorenz butterfly effect Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow 1963

• 77 Nassim Taleb narrative fallacy post hoc, ergo propter hoc

• 83 Mount Taupō Hatepe eruption eruption around 232 CE, probably most destructive during Roman Era.

• 85 Five worst Tokugawa era famines, William S. Atwell, "Volcanism and Short-Term Climatic Change in East Asian and World History, c. 1200-1699" 1782-1788 Great Tenmei famine

• 85 Little Ice Age(?) caused by North American depopulation and forest reversion? no, claims The European colonization of the Americas as an explanation of the Little Ice Age, Alberto Boretti

• 90 Japanese Imperial Earthquake Investigation Committee ,Fusakichi Omori gap between earthquakes next, Akitsune Imamura predicts 1923 Great Kantō earthquake

• 91 1995 Great Hanshin earthquake Whatever Happened to Earthquake Prediction? by Christopher Scholz

• 95 Great Peshtigo fire 1871 firestorm, 1182 dead or missing out of 1749 inhabitants, 1.2 to 1.8 million acres burned, 16 other communities destroyed Pernin, Peter. "The Great Peshtigo Fire: An Eyewitness Account"

• 98 1965 Hurricane Betsy swamps New Orleans, President Johnson and Army Corps of Engineers Lake Ponchartrain Hurricane Barrier "halted by an environmental group's lawsuit" says N.F.

  • The Lawsuit That Sank New Orleans - David Schoenbrod (paywalled) cites A Barrier That Could Have Been 2995 Sept 9 LA Times History News Network response

• about here I lost interest in the flubs and the N.F. view of the world, scattershot index-driven sampling after that
• 141-174 Chapter 5 "The Science Delusion" (a common "humanities" delusion)

  • cite 9 One of history's worst epidemics may have been caused by a common microbe, Angus Chen 2018 Jan 16, 16th Century Aztec epidemic, perhaps salmonella (no citations yet)

• 214 1957-1958 Asian Flu epidemic "it looks more like the COVID-19 pandemic of our own time than the 1918-19 pandemic" oh, I wish it did

  • 1918-1920 "Spanish" flu 25–50 million / / 1957-1958 Flu 1-4 million / / 2019-???? Covid-19 16.6–28.3 million estimated, still active and killing people
  • 380 more of the same
• 285-318 Chapter 9 The Plagues

  • cite 93 https://danielabell.com/2020/04/21/did-the-chinese-government-deliberately-export-covid-19-to-the-rest-of-the-world/

• Conclusion Future Shocks
• cite 19

  Expert warns China's Three Gorges Dam in danger of collapse 2020/06/22, Breaking News, Taiwan journalists disparage PRC