Let's Know Things

This week we talk about the Democratic Republic of the Congo, malaria, and healthcare infrastructure.
We also discuss militants, Uganda, and the Bundibugyo virus.
Recommended Book: We Should Get Together by Kat Vellos
Transcript
Ebola, which is more formally called Ebola Virus Disease or Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever, is caused by an infection by a type of RNA virus called an orthoebolavirus.
There are six known species of orthoebolavirus, and four of them have at some point infected and caused illness in humans. Those four are the ebola virus, sometimes called the Zaire ebolavirus, which historically has been the strain responsible for the biggest, most devastating outbreaks of this disease, the Sudan virus, the Taï Forest virus, and the Bundibugyo virus, the latter three each causing a variant of the disease that carries the same name.
The other two orthoebolavirus species that we know of, the Reston virus and the Bombali virus, have been known to infect animals, but have not, at this point at least, been known to make the jump to human hosts.
Ebola symptoms vary a bit between specific viruses and between hosts and infection conditions, but in general those who are afflicted by ebola begin to experience symptoms between a few days and a few weeks after infection, and they’ll start by experiencing cold and flu-like symptoms, like fever, sore throat, headaches, and general muscle pain. Soon after that, though, they’ll start experiencing diarrhea and rashes, they’ll begin vomiting, and they’ll begin to experience liver and kidney dysfunction, and around that same time, they’ll start to bleed internally and externally.
Once infected, a person has between a 25 and 90% chance of dying, depending on the strain of ebola, and if they die, usually due to what’s called hypovolemic shock—a severe and sudden loss of bodily fluids, including blood—they usually die between 6 and 16 days after those first symptoms are reported.
What I’d like to talk about today is a new outbreak of ebola centered in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and why this one stands out from other recent outbreaks in the region.
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Ebola was first officially reported in medical literature in 1976, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, and there have been semi-regular outbreaks in that region, of various sizes ever since, and very likely before that, too.
This disease is spread through direct contact with the body fluids of someone who’s infected, and it’s thought that this is probably how the disease made the leap from animals, like primates, to human beings: locals sometimes come into close contact with local primates, either while just coexisting, or while hunting bushmeat, hunting monkeys for food.
It’s thought that fruit bats serve as hosts for the virus, long-term, and it then spreads to other animals, and then sometimes to humans, in some cases causing illness along the way in those other species, but not always; bats are not negatively afflicted by it, for instance, but humans very much are.
Despite not being an airborne pathogen, so it’s not spread by coughing or talking too close to someone, like a cold or Covid-19, ebola can still be spread person-to-person through bodily fluid contact. That means fluids like saliva and blood and semen and breast milk, and research has shown that even after someone survives and recovers from ebola, the disease can linger in their fluids for months. So if someone catches it, survives, and then breast-feeds their child, or kisses or has sex with their partner, or gets a cut and then someone else comes into contact with their blood, like a health worker, that can lead to the transmission of the disease, despite their having been well and seemingly fully recovered for weeks or months.
That lingering contagiousness is a confounding factor with this disease, as it requires that people be very careful, even to an antisocial degree, and even well after it seems like that’s no longer necessary, because they feel good and healthy again.
This also means that if someone dies of ebola, contact with their bodies can be incredibly dangerous. And past outbreaks have stemmed from or been further enflamed by locals wanting to perform community funerals and wakes, during which the body is often on display and touched by attendees, and that has led to further spread of the disease—which in many cases is difficult to tie back to that wake, because again, symptoms don’t arrive right away, and ebola symptoms are similar to what locals experience all the time from other afflictions, like colds and malaria.
This past week, in Bunia, which is located in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, locals stormed a regional hospital in an attempt to recover the body of a beloved local figure who died of ebola. In the process, the hospital’s isolation ward, which was being used to keep ebola victims separate from everyone else, to keep the disease from spreading further, that ward was burned to the ground.
There are no vaccines or treatments for the Bundibugyo Ebola species that is at the core of the outbreak, and the spread of misinformation in the area had locals believing that these health workers were trying to kill their patients, not save or isolate them so no one else caught ebola.
The man at the center of this, who died five days after being admitted to the hospital, was thought, by his family, to have malaria, which is common in the area and has very similar symptoms, at least in the early days of an ebola infection.
They demanded the hospital release his body so they could bury him, and the staff refused, saying doing so right now could lead to more ebola spread. The family gathered more locals, who threw stones at hospital workers, they broke through the gates of the hospital, police fired into the air to try to disperse the angry crowd, and the ebola ward caught fire during the melee. During that fire, five patients who were in the ward, all suspected of having ebola, fled, and they haven’t yet returned—so they are possibly out in the open, no longer isolated, suffering and maybe dying from their infection, and possibly spreading it to others, as well.
There’s a lot going on in this story, and misinformation spread by local traditional healers who don’t like the hospitals and the medical workers who tell locals medical information rather than folk healing information are part of the problem, but the local medical establishment not doing a good job of educating locals about what they’re doing and why are arguably the flip side of that same coin; more investment in that kind of information dissemination by the government would go a long way to preventing this sort of thing in the future, and health workers globally could use more resources and overall infrastructure to help protect them while they’re carrying out their work.
That said, this is just one small facet of what’s become a much larger story. As of the day I’m recording this, this new outbreak, which was first reported in the Ituri Province of the DRC, has caused 186 confirmed deaths, with 82 more confirmed cases and 836 suspected cases.
As I mentioned, it’s caused by the Bundibugyo ebolavirus, which is less common, at least at this scale, and thus typical response efforts used against the more common Zaire ebolavirus, don’t seem to map onto this strain as well as was hoped, and the World Health Organization declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on May 16, as while this is unlikely to become as significant an issue as Covid-19 or other aerosol-spread infections on a global level, regionally it’s causing a lot of damage, and its nature, and the state of international aid for this sort of thing—which is currently substantially reduced, in part because of pullbacks on such programs by the current US administration—means it could continue to flare for several more months, before eventually starting to slow, killing many, many people, in any incredibly painful and contagious manner, in the process.
This is the 17th ebola outbreak in the DRC since the disease was first recorded in the medical literature, and the third outbreak of this strain—the first of which was in the Bundibugyo District of Uganda in 2007 through 2008, that’s where it got its name, and then another in 2012 in the DRC.
This isn’t the deadliest strain of ebola, only killing between 25 and 50% of those afflicted, but because of those aforementioned issues, plus it having flared in a region where governance is complicated by the presence of several militant groups, this wave of infections has created a broad and precarious situation; lots of people have been uprooted from their homes because of conflict between these militant groups and the government, and those refugees have been spreading ebola to other areas throughout the region, making contact tracing difficult or impossible, and leading to surges of new infections in neighboring, and a few further-flung, provinces.
According to a predictive model of the outbreak published by the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, the current number of infected people could actually be well over 1000, in part because of how difficult it’s been isolating the infected, and because the early symptoms are so similar to other common local afflictions; so people are less likely to visit hospitals and get an accurate diagnosis, because they assume it’s just a bout of something else, something less deadly and contagious.
Getting resources into the area is becoming more difficult, too, as those militant groups are fairly active, one such group recently taking over a primary regional airport, which has disallowed the import of necessary medical equipment for regional hospitals.
This hasn’t had much of an impact globally, yet, though cases have been documented in neighboring Uganda—a total of five confirmed infections, as of the day I’m recording this—and the World Cup team from the DRC was ordered to isolate before entering the US to compete, forced to remain in Belgium for 21 days to confirm they aren’t carrying the disease before being allowed into the States for the competition.
Far more likely than mass global spread, though, is more regional spread, which could lead to temporary border lockdowns and similar efforts to keep those who are in currently impacted regions from scattering, understandably fleeing either the outbreak or the militants in these areas, and thus carrying the disease into different provinces or countries.
Local and international aide organizations are scrambling to prevent this, and to identify and isolate infected people where possible, but it’ll likely be a while before they have the necessary on-the-ground resources to do this correctly, and a lot more spread could occur before they’re able to do so at an effective level.
Show Notes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_African_Ebola_epidemic
https://www.cdc.gov/ebola/about/index.html
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5175058/
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/congo-ebola-outbreak-cases-are-top-iceberg-coalition-says-2026-05-21/
https://apnews.com/article/congo-ebola-outbreak-who-4e08d8df6d9c34039a9e0b8bad7a8954
https://www.wsj.com/world/africa/ebola-outbreak-explained-4ab4414f
https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2026/5/23/uganda-confirms-three-new-ebola-cases-bringing-total-to-five
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2026/may/23/dcr-world-cup-squad-isolate-ebola-outbreak-congo-united-states
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/22/world/africa/ebola-congo-clinic-burned-protests.html
https://www.npr.org/2026/05/23/nx-s1-5831963/u-s-passengers-flying-from-ebola-affected-countries-rerouted
https://www.cdc.gov/han/php/notices/han00530.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Ituri_Province_Ebola_epidemic
https://edition.cnn.com/health/maps-ebola-charts-vis
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/may/21/ebola-outbreak-public-health
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/suspected-ebola-cases-reported-rebel-held-congo-area-2026-05-21/
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/world/africa/ebola-outbreak-deaths-congo-who.html


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This week we talk about oceanic surface temperatures, trade winds, and global climate change.
We also discuss the Polar Jet Stream, hurricanes, and climate models.
Recommended Book: Kleptopia by Tom Burgis
Transcript
Under normal circumstances, the Pacific Ocean’s average surface temperature, the distribution of heat across its vast expanse, is moderated by trade winds that blow east to west along the equator, which help move warm water from South America over toward Asia.
Those winds are called trade winds because, back during the European age of Exploration, they helped ships from Europe head west toward Asia and the Americas. And these winds form in part because of the Earth’s rotation, the Coriolis effect funneling air toward the equator, where it is then more concentrated and thus potent, which is useful if you’re trying to move a ship with sails, but also serves the purpose of moving warm water from one part of the ocean to another part of the ocean.
As those warmer surface waters are shifted from the Americas to Asia, water is pulled up to the surface from lower down in the ocean as part of a process called upwelling. This process results in cooler temperatures on the surface, because lower down, oceanic water is colder, and that lower-down water is also more rich in nutrients, which has the knock-on effect of stimulating more biological activity along these cooling surface waters.
That’s the normal state of things in the Pacific Ocean.
There are sometimes deviations in this norm, however, that result in very different outcomes; these deviations are broadly called the El Niño Southern Oscillation Cycle, and that cycle consists of opposite El Niño and La Niña climate patterns.
During La Niña patterns, trade winds are more powerful than usual and they shove a lot more of that warm surface water to Asia than is typical, and that has the net impact of moving more deep-down cold, nutrient-rich, ocean water to the surface.
This, in turn, nudges the Polar Jet Stream, which is a channel of fast-moving, westerly winds that lives about 30,000 ft or just over 9000 meters up in the sky, and which crosses both warmer, mid-latitudes and far colder Arctic latitudes, further north. The Polar Jet Stream is responsible for moderating or intensifying weather patterns around the world, and like the trade winds, it’s influenced by the spin of the planet, but it’s also adjusted by surface systems, like the temperature of the Pacific. So the arrival of a La Niña pattern pushes the jet stream further north, and as a result, weather patterns change, and in North America, we tend to see drought in the southwest, heavier rains and flooding and in the Pacific Northwest and Canada, warmer winters in the South, and cooler winters in the North.
La Niñas also tend to result in more severe hurricane seasons in the Atlantic basin, while suppressing hurricane activity in the central and eastern Pacific basins.
El Niño, in contrast, results from weaker trade winds, which, because these winds don’t pack as much of a punch, means less warm water is being shoved from South America to Asia, and thus the surface temperature of that part of the Pacific is warmer, lacking that upwelling of cold water to replace the warm water that would otherwise be displaced over to Asia.
El Niño also adjusts the location of the jet stream, but in the opposite direction, pulling it south of its usual spot. That then causes more heat and dryness across the northern US and Canada, but makes the southern US and Gulf Coast a lot wetter, leading to more flooding.
What I’d like to talk about today are predictions about an anticipated upcoming El Niño climate pattern, and why some climate scientists are warning that it could be a doozy.
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Climate scientists with the US’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the NOAA, released new model forecasts in mid-May, and one of those models indicated that an El Niño pattern could form in the Pacific as soon as June.
The NOAA puts together and releases new models on a regular basis, as the variables influencing these massively complex patterns are always changing, and the trend over the past three months has been increasing certainty about the formation of this El Niño pattern, but also an increasing likelihood that this potential El Niño would be very strong, perhaps historically so.
There have been a total of 27 El Niños since 1950, when we started officially tracking such things, and we get one every three or four years, on average. The last one occurred from the summer of 2023 into spring of 2024.
The current models show that we could see another one of these systems as soon as next month, then, and there’s currently a nearly 60% chance that this particular El Niño would become strong—and that’s an official designation, by the way, a strong El Niño being one that sees an ocean surface temperature increase of between 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius—and a one-in-three chance that it could become a very strong, or super El Niño, which means it tallies an oceanic surface temperature increase of 2 degrees celsius or higher.
These so-called super El Niños are a lot rarer than the typical kind. There have only been five recorded since 1950, the last one straddling 2015 and 2016.
Some of these models suggest that this system could be historically strong, though, pushing into territory where we might need a new rank on that existing scale—it could surpass 2.5 degrees celsius above the standard oceanic surface temperature, which would make it the most, or among the most intense El Niño systems on record.
I want to note real quick here, before we get into possible implications, that these models are inherently imperfect, because of how complex these systems are, and how many variables influence them. But also that, again, it’s just some models saying this, that it’s only a 60% chance of even a strong El Niño, and that it’s still a 1 in 3 chance of a very strong one—so this isn’t at all certain, and the scientists behind all this are urging preparedness, but not panic, and are trying really hard to make it clear that this isn’t some kind of prophecy or guarantee. The reporting on this NOAA announcement has been frantic and panicky in some cases, but that’s probably not the proper response to this, and the real-deal experts here are encouraging awareness and that we recognize the potential for something wild with this pattern, but it’s definitely not the declaration of the end of the world or anything.
So, that important caveat noted, let’s talk about some potential impacts of this system, if it does indeed hit that currently unlikely, but possible, very strong designation, or higher.
In general, during El Niño patterns, hurricane seasons in the Atlantic are quieter, while hurricane seasons in the Eastern and Central Pacific are more active. This isn’t 100% the case, but it’s the overwhelming trend. So there’s a good chance we would see more and more powerful hurricanes in the Pacific during this period, should we step into super El Niño territory.
Beyond hurricane impacts, though, these systems also influence water cycles around the world; during El Niño patterns, the US south tends to be wetter, as does East Central Africa, while northern South America tends to be drier, as does Australia and Northern and Central India.
Shifting or amplifying water cycles, in one direction or the other, drier or wetter, can cause all sorts of issues, ranging from flooded homes to devastated crops. Just like with hurricanes, this usually represents a break in the normal way of things, so we tend to see things like mudslides and erosion and unplanned-for droughts that cause a lot of damage.
Another significant component of these patterns are the temperature spikes they stoke. During the last recorded normal El Niño in 2023, global temperature levels were pushed up by 1.45 degrees C above pre-industrial levels, causing global mean temperatures to peak at 1.58 degrees C between July 2023 and June 2024.
In practice, that means the earth momentarily shot past that 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial levels milestone that climate scientists have been warning about for decades, because it marks a point at which many natural systems will begin to change or fall apart, and many ecosystems will begin to collapse, leading to mass die-offs and potentially even the necessity for wide-scale human migration, away from areas that are no longer sustainably livable.
That spike was momentary, but illustrative, and there’s a chance that another one, especially one stoked by a super El Niño, could push things even further, speeding up the melting of the ice caps and other glaciers, which then, in turn, could speed up the larger, consistent increase in global temperatures because the white of the ice bounces light from the sun, and thus heat, back into space, while the comparable dark of water and land absorbs more of that light and heat.
In this way, even short-term spikes in temperature can speed up the long-term trajectory of global climate change, because the variables that are informing that change can be permanently adjusted; ice caps are just one example, there are countless such variables, some that we know about, and others that we certainly don’t, yet.
While this potential upcoming El Niño might be par for the course, in other words, it’s also arriving at a moment in which many of these variables are already being fiddled with by other forces, and that means even a not-very strong, not-super El Niño could have outsized impact, in terms of pushing the planet toward a new, unfamiliar climate regime, the implementation of which could lead to all sorts of ecological and civilization devastation and change.
Show Notes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Ni%C3%B1o%E2%80%93Southern_Oscillation
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/weather/2026/05/14/powerful-el-nino-is-taking-shape-forecast-says/90043794007/
https://weather.com/2026/05/13/news/climate/el-nino-could-form-in-june-noaa-says-and-could-become-record-strong
https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/enso_advisory/ensodisc.shtml
https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/14/weather/super-el-nino-climate
https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/article/the-chances-of-a-rare-super-el-nino-occurring-in-2026-just-got-higher-heres-how-it-could-wreak-havoc-on-the-weather-212420384.html
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/ninonina.html
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/monthly-report/global/202604
https://www.colorado.edu/today/2026/05/14/super-el-nino-coming-climate-scientists-weigh
https://theconversation.com/a-super-el-nino-why-its-too-early-to-forecast-one-with-certainty-but-not-too-soon-to-prepare-282574
https://abcnews.com/US/el-nio-expected-develop-strength-remains-uncertain/story


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit letsknowthings.substack.com/subscribe

This week we talk about Keir Starmer, Labour, and the Reform UK party.
We also discuss Tories, the Lib Dems, and two-party systems.
Recommended Book: Peak by K. Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool
Transcript
For more than 100 years, the British political system has been dominated by two parties: Labour and the Conservative Party, often called the Tories.
In practice, that means these two parties, which are center-left and center-right in their leanings, respectively, have tended to shape the direction of British politics and the Overton Window of thinkable proposals—things that might actually happen because they get the requisite support from politicians and the public.
These two parties have usually had to work with other, smaller parties in order to get anything done, because the UK has a parliamentary system that often leaves the party with the most representatives lacking enough support to run a functioning government, solo. As a consequence, the Liberal Democrats, which is a fairly centrist party, the Green Party, which focuses on environmentalism and more left-wing concerns, Plaid Cymru (plied KUM-ree), which is the Welsh nationalist party, and the Scottish National Party, which is exactly what it sounds like, have long influenced Labour and the Tories, aligning their votes with whomever gives them a seat at the table. This has given some influence to smaller groups that might otherwise lack representation, though that influence has typically been moderate to meager, at best—the folks in Labour and the Conservative party have run things in the UK, and that’s been the case for generations.
Things started to shake up a bit in the 20-teens, however, when anti-immigration and EU-skepticism in Britain led to the creation of the far-right Brexit Party, which was co-founded by politician Nigel Farage, who was the leader of the UK Independence Party in the early 2000s and 20-teens, and who was previously a Tory, and Catherine Blaiklock, a politician and hotelier who stepped down from her position as party leader the year after the Brexit Party was founded after anti-Islamic and racist comments she’d previously made online were rediscovered.
The Brexit Party existed, almost exclusively, to push for a no-agreement exit from the European Union by the UK, which was considered to be a fairly fringe ideology back then, but which gained a lot of steam as other populists began to add their support to the general concept.
Both the government and the existing political structure of the UK was then caught flat-footed, by all indications very surprised by the eventual success of that push, and the UK left the EU on January 31, 2020, after a whole lot of skepticism that it would ever happen, even after a vote in favor of Brexit took place. This represented a serious come to Jesus moment for British politicians, but also British society, and there’s been quite a lot of self-reflection and naval gazing in the years since, as the Brexit pullout from the EU has caused quite a lot of economic and diplomatic damage, while also shining a spotlight on numerous simmering issues that were previously overlooked or unaddressed, including the bubbling resentment and at times outright xenophobia felt by a significant portion of the British electorate, and persistent economic issues faced by folks at the middle and lower rungs of society.
What I’d like to talk about today is the recent 2026 UK Local Elections, and what they seem to tell us about how things are going in British politics, and what they portend for the current Labour-run administration.
—
On May 7, 2026, the UK held local elections for 5,066 councillors, 136 local authorities, and six directly elected mayors. Some of these elections were postponed in 2025 to allow for government restructuring, but most of these positions were last up for election in 2022.
This election was generally seen as an unofficial referendum on the governing Labour Party, and in particular the current Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, who has been in office for just under two years, and who stepped into the role of PM after the role was held by the Conservative Tories for 14 years; five different Prime Ministers taking the reins during that period, including David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak.
All that changing in leadership is indicative of the chaos the UK government was experiencing at the time, the May 2010 general election leading to a period of significant austerity—the government cutting tons of social programs in order to reduce spending—which then fed into more support for Brexit when some members of the party positioned the economic issues people were facing as the consequence of EU-related immigration, and shortly thereafter, the world succumbed to the Covid-19 pandemic.
There was a lot of truly significant political change from about 2010 onward, then, and a lot for the general population to be upset about. The Conservatives held onto power despite it all for those 14 years, but the shift back to Labour was the result of Starmer and his party saying, listen, we hear you, a lot has to change, and we can instigate that change. Trust us.
This new election suggests that the majority of voters in the UK feel that the Labour Party hasn’t lived up to that trust.
In Wales, Plaid Cymru has taken the most seats, 43, but failed to achieve the 49 seat majority they would require to govern, solo.
In Scotland, the SNP took the most seats, but also fell short of a majority, netting 58 seats, not the 65 required for a majority.
Both of those results are not terribly shocking, though in Wales Labour lost a lot of power, down 35 seats and holding onto just 9. The Conservatives also lost in Wales, holding onto seven seats and losing 22.
In Scotland, too, Labor lost some of their influence, losing 4 seats and retaining 17, while the Conservatives lost a whopping 19 seats, holding onto just 12.
In England, the change in seat allocation was stunning, though.
Labour lost 1406 seats, leaving them with 997, while the Conservatives lost 557 seats, holding onto just 773.
Even considering those losses, the biggest story in England is the surge in support for previously small parties, in particular a far-right party called Reform UK, previously called the Brexit Party, and run by the aforementioned proponent of the British exit from the EU, Nigel Farage.
Reform UK went from 2 seats to 1,444; a shocking outcome, and one that makes them the biggest winner in this election, by far. They also gained 17 seats, up from zero, in Scotland, putting them at an equal level there with Labour, and they went from zero to 34 in Wales, putting them in a competitive second place after Plaid Cymru, which again, claimed 43 seats.
Other, non-Labour, non-Conservative parties also gained seats in this election, though not at the level of Reform UK.
The Green Party gained two seats in Wales and six in Scotland, bringing them up to 15 there. They also gained 374 sets in England, bringing them up to 515 total seats, which leaves them in fifth place, but just 258 seats shy of the Conservatives.
The Lib Dems, which are the local Centrist party, gained 151 seats, putting them in third. And there was a small surge in independent politicians winning elections, as well, that group now controlling 199 seats, up from 27 before this vote.
In the wake of this absolute shellacking of Keir Starmer’s Labour party—which again, lost 1406 seats in England, and their opposition, and in many ways their polar opposite, the far-right Reform UK party, gained even more than Labour lost, up 1442 seats—in the wake of that, Starmer has been asked to resign, and as of the day I’m recording this, at least, he’s saying that he will not resign, and since there’s no formal challenge to his leadership, he can stay in power if he chooses.
There is a growing movement amongst Labour lawmakers to ask him to set a timetable for stepping down, however, and there’s a pretty good chance that will happen, as the British political system allows parties to change their Prime Minister mid-term without requiring a new election, so they could swap him out for someone else, making him the face of this immense electoral failure, then they could try to change course before the next election, which will happen by mid-August of 2029, during which the vote will be for the 650 seats in the House of Commons, which is currently dominated by Starmer’s Labour party.
The big takeaway here, from political analysts at least, is that what used to be a reliably two-party system, for over a century that’s been the case, is now a five-way race within a cultural context in which voters seem to be a lot less loyal to politicians and parties, and in which a whole lot of previously reliable infrastructure, social systems, and cultural expectations have been recently disrupted.
People in the UK seem to be generally unhappy about all sorts of things, and that kind of broad unhappiness often results in more populism, which means general anti-establishment stances and us-versus-them ideologies, including racial, religious, and nationalistic versions of such ideologies, and typically a lot more support for charismatic leadership over leaders who are generally qualified and will probably be good at their jobs because they’re experienced and knowledgeable.
In other words, you’re more likely to get loudmouths and celebrities running for office, successfully, in populist electoral contexts, and you’re also more likely to see parties leaning into superficial race, class, and elite-vs-everyman issues, as opposed to running on well-defined approaches to dealing with more complex issues.
In the meantime, until that 2029 election, it’s likely Farage’s Reform UK will bang the drum against the governing Labour party to gather more power in the lead up to 2029, and that other non-Labour, non-Conservative parties will attempt to do the same, newly energized by these results.
And depending on how that non-voting-year rallying goes, this could represent a foot in the door for these smaller parties. And we could consequently see more former Labour and Conservative politicians and voters leaving for Reform, for the Lib Dems, for the Greens, and for independents. All of which will make UK politics a lot more chaotic, but also probably more diverse, with power less centralized and the government’s makeup a bit less predictable.
Show Notes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_United_Kingdom_local_elections
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/08/world/europe/uk-elections-local-takeaways.html
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/05/08/world/uk-local-elections-results
https://apnews.com/article/uk-elections-starmer-labour-what-to-know-eb11ff39b1b74bbaf9f4ef6abfd60f64
https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/08/uk/uk-local-election-reform-farage-starmer-intl
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-08/how-bad-for-labour-britain-s-local-elections-in-six-charts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_the_United_Kingdom
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c1428pev1n0t#election-englan
https://www.politico.eu/article/nigel-farage-reform-uk-win-next-general-election/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_United_Kingdom_general_election
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Blaiklock
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_UK
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Farage
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brexit


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This week we talk about industrialization, antibiotics, and child mortality rates.
We also discuss corruption, instability, and progress.
Recommended Book: Empire of Silence by Christopher Ruocchio
Transcript
Demographic transition is a social sciences theory that posits, based on all sorts of modern historical data, that societies tend to change, demographically, as they transition from a largely agrarian, low-industrial society, to that of a less-agrarian, high-industrial society.
Most modern, post-hunter-gatherer societies have started out plowing the vast majority of their labor into bare subsistence, human beings spending their days, throughout their whole lives, working the land in order to produce enough food to live. All sorts of social and economic systems arose around this base-level fact, including those that tied laborers to the land, allowing for the rise of a leadership or ruling class, regional militaries, and other sorts of specialists. But until relatively recent history, the majority of people in a given society labored to produce raw essentials, and that was just the shape of things.
This began to change with the dawn of the industrial revolution, and in some areas a bit before that, as precursor technologies allowed societies to produce more food and other essentials with less manual labor and using fewer foundational resources, like land. These technologies, as they became more widely distributed, more effective and efficient, and cheaper to deploy and operate, allowed more people to do more sorts of things, leading to a ballooning of industry and commerce in industrializing regions, and that allowed said regions to invest in other things, including medical knowledge, education, and so on.
Life wasn’t exactly a cakewalk in these industrializing areas, and all sorts of new abuses and issues, including long hours at factories and problems related to pollution, arose and became common. But because these sorts of societies required professionals with new types of knowledge and know-how, and because they were able to sustain an increasing number of specialities beyond working the land to generate food and other bare necessities, keeping people alive, longer, and ensuring more people had the specialized knowledge required to do all those things, became more of a priority, and one that could actually be addressed because of the concomitant ability to feed and clothe and house and address more of the needs of more people.
There were gobs of other spiraling forces in the mix, of course, including religion, politics, and so on, but that general tendency to shift away from raw subsistence into more complex and diverse economic systems was a driving factor behind a lot of what happened from around 1800 until, well, now.
What I’d like to talk about today is a specific data point, or collection of data points, that arguably, more than any other such data points, show the benefits of the industrialized, modern society we’re living in, today, despite all the accompanying downsides.
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So most societies, at this point, have undergone significant changes as a result of our widespread application of technologies that allow human beings to get more done with the same amount of effort.
We’re able to generate more value, of all kinds, than our ancestors, and though it’s possible to criticize the change in priorities and focus on all the negative knock-on effects of these changes—and there are many such negative knock-on effects, like large-scale military conflicts and rampant pollution and climate change—it would be difficult to argue that there haven’t been some fairly significant upsides for humanity, as well.
One key upside is related to that demographic transition I mentioned. As societies shift and it becomes better for everyone if more people know how to do more things, and it thus becomes a priority for more people to live long enough to use the knowledge and know-how they acquire, it has increasingly made more sense for governments to invest in our overall longevity and survivability.
We can’t just say, I’d like everyone to live longer, and then snap our fingers and make that happen. But we can, and have, invested in technologies and systems that make longer lives more likely, and from 1800 onward that’s generally been the trend, with a huge upswing arriving in the mid-20th century, when a bunch of new tools and technologies, including things like modern antiseptics and early antibiotics, first arrived on the scene, dramatically reducing the mortality rate associated with all kinds of medical procedures.
Arguably the most significant social gain during this period, though, has been the bogglingly large reduction in child mortality rates.
Child mortality refers to the death of children under the age of five, and this figure is, today, usually expressed as the likelihood of a child under five dying, per 1000 children in an area. So you might say in India, the child death rate is 92 in 1000, which means 92 of every 1000 children resulting from live births in India die before they reach the age of five. And that was actually the real child mortality rate in India back in the year 2000.
And the story of overall global child mortality rates is actually pretty well exemplified in India’s rates, as the country has seen a dramatic drop in all-cause child deaths in recent decades.
In the year 2000, as I mentioned, it was expected that 92 out of every 1000 children would die before the age of 5 in India. As of 2024, though, that number has dropped to just 32 out of every 1000; a 68% drop. If you go back as far as 1990, the progress is even more impressive, those 2024 numbers representing a 76% drop in child mortality.
This progress has largely been the consequence of intentional, targeted health interventions by the Indian government, including institutionalized child delivery services and widespread, well-funded immunization efforts that ensured more children got vaccines and other sorts of care that was previously lacking, or which was not widely disseminated beyond wealthy families. They’ve also invested in newborn care and neonatal units at hospitals, which has increased child survival outcomes in a large radius around these facilities.
Southeast Asian nations still account for about 25% of all under-five deaths, globally, but improvements in India mirror those in China, which made rapid and sustained progress on this issue beginning in the 1950s, but really hitting their stride in the 1970s, when their child mortality rate was 143 per 1000 children; that rate dropped to just 12 per 1000 by 2020.
Globally, right now, the average child mortality rate is just under 40 per 1000, which is down from 93 per 1000 in 1990.
That’s a staggering amount of progress, but it does mean that nearly 5 million children still die each year before their 5th birthday, which adds up to something like 15,000 of such deaths per day.
At the moment, the vast majority of these deaths, about 80% of them, occur in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. The cause of these deaths varies a bit based on location, and there’s a time component to this, too, as some areas have seen much higher rates due to epidemics, but most of the causes of child death before the age of 5 are consistent, with premature birth and pneumonia, birth asphyxia or trauma, malaria, diarrhea, congenital abnormalities, and sepsis representing about 60-70% of such deaths, globally.
Almost all of these issues are preventable, and the major barrier to reducing these numbers further is access to resources and expertise that are more widely available and accessible in the wealthier world; there are huge disparities in child mortality between rich countries and poor countries, in other words, and while the number of child deaths has decreased everywhere, including in the world’s poorest countries, over the past 100 years, countries like Finland see about 2 in every 1000 children die before they reach the age of five, while countries like Niger see nearly 115 in every 1000 children die before the age of five.
This figure was previously around 500 in every 1000, globally, so about half of all children would die before the age of five, even in relatively recent history, even in the wealthiest regions, just a few hundred years ago—so again, stunning progress in this area; and looking back, in addition to families needing more hands to work the fields, before everyone started industrializing, families would tend to have as many kids as they could because it was generally just assumed that about half of them would die within the first couple of years; some cultures still have traditions of not naming their children until they’ve lived for a few years because of that earlier child mortality trend.
There’s still plenty to be done in this space, though, and the changes necessary to dramatically drop this mortality rate even further, regionally and globally, are not revolutionary in nature, it’s just a matter of more widely and equitably disseminating tools and technologies and cultural and economic infrastructure that already exists across much of the world, to the places where it doesn’t exist yet.
That’s a tall order in some locations, though, as part of why some high child mortality rate regions still have those high rates is that they’ve also had persistent government instability, which has in turn led to persistent internal conflicts and government overthrows and long histories of grift and corruption at the top-most levels of society.
In other words, it’s extremely difficult to improve these sorts of numbers when those who are in charge of a high-mortality-rate region are seemingly incapable of keeping things stable, and always seem to be enriching themselves at the expense the the country they’re meant to be governing.
That’s a much larger systemic issue, of course, made up of numerous fractal issues that each have their own distinct causes and potential solutions.
But the main takeaway here is that child mortality is already an immense success story of modernity, and even more progress is possible, but in order to achieve that kind of progress, a bunch of other problems will probably need to be solved in these still-highly-afflicted areas, first. And solving these problems will likely be a truly heavy lift, for anyone who tries to tackle them, until and unless something fundamental changes about governing norms and corruption, and the many forces that enable that kind of high-level corruption, globally.
Show Notes
https://data.unicef.org/resources/levels-and-trends-in-child-mortality-2025/
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/india/un-report-highlights-indias-79-decline-in-child-mortality-rates-a-major-contributor-to-global-child-health-advancements/articleshow/129660557.cms
https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_mortality
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041851/china-all-time-child-mortality-rate/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7138028/
https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/themes/topics/topic-details/GHO/child-mortality-and-causes-of-death
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_and_under-five_mortality_rates


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This week we talk about the Strait of Hormuz, oil, and Russia.
We also discuss Patriot missiles, expensive weapons, and peer rivals.
Recommended Book: Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Transcript
During 2025 and early 2026, about 20 million barrels of crude oil and other petroleum products was shipped through the Strait of Hormuz every day. That’s about a quarter of the world’s total seaborne oil, and essentially all of that oil, and gas, and those other energy products that pass through this strait are from Middle Eastern suppliers like Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Qatar, Kuwait, the UAE, and Iran.
Beginning at the tail-end of February 2026, however, the Iranian military has shut down the Strait by threatening to take out or capture any vessels that attempt to pass through it. This has had the practical effect of initially reducing tanker traffic through the Strait by about 70%, but in recent weeks traffic has dropped to nearly zero. As of April 2026, about 2,000 ships are stranded in the area as a result of this closure.
As a result of this shutdown, though, other energy product suppliers have seen demand for their oil and gas and the like increase, and that’s led to higher prices for these products.
Russia, for instance, which doesn’t rely on the Strait to get its oil and gas out to its customers, has seen its oil tax revenue double in April, and the price of one grade of oil that it sells increased by 73% from February, alone.
That’s a big windfall for Russia, which has had trouble selling its oil and gas at a significant profit, due in part to heavy sanctions that have resulted from its invasion of Ukraine. It’s continued to sell to countries like China and India, but those customers have been able to pay lower prices due to the lessened demand for what Russia is selling.
This increased demand has thus goosed profits for Russia at a moment in which it could really use those sorts of profits—its economy is not doing terribly well, again because of its invasion of Ukraine, which has also not been going terribly well—so while inflation caused by this gas price-spike has been near-universally not great for much of the world, because energy cost increases tend to increase the price of just about everything, Russia’s government, at least, has been pretty happy with the shutdown of the Strait, and would probably love to see it continue.
Another moderate benefactor of this shutdown has been the United States government. The US is the number one exporter of liquified natural gas, and one of the top exporters of oil and petroleum products. US export numbers are poised to hit new records with the closure of the Strait, too, because, just like with Russia, fewer products of this kind available on the global market means those who have such products to sell can charge higher prices for them.
There’s a good chance this disruption, even if it ended today, for good, will have permanently rewired at least some of the global petroleum industry, as companies and countries that have been left in the lurch have adjusted their risks analyses and determined that it makes more sense to buy from different suppliers, to sell to different customers, or, in some cases, to use fewer of these products and invest more enthusiastically in renewables, like solar and wind—so while the US and Russia and a few other players are somewhat pleased with how things are going, oil and gas price-wise at least, long term this could actually harm them, the most, as more of their customers decide to stop paying irregular prices for what they’re selling and to opt for less turbulent solar and wind power, instead.
What I’d like to talk about today is another knock-on effect of the war in Iran that could have significant international, possibly even military implications.
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Since Trump first stepped into office, winning the US presidency back in 2016, allies have openly wondered whether the US could be relied upon as a military ally, should push come to shove.
Trump has repeated said that he thinks NATO is a rip-off for the US, as the US has long provided the vast majority of funding and weapons for the alliance, and he’s pushed European NATO members to step up their own investment, lest he decide to just led Russia or whomever else attack them; he’s openly speculated that he might do exactly that.
As a result of the US’s pivot away from happily playing the role of world police and invasion deterrent, European governments have been hastily putting together contingency plans that don’t include the US: if Russia turns its attention away from Ukraine and starts attacking the Baltics or Poland, they want to be ready, and they don’t want to have to rely on the unreliable Trump administration for their survival.
Other governments that have long assumed they would be protected, at least in part, by the overwhelming force of the US military, have also been rethinking things, based on Trump’s stated, if not always practiced, isolationism.
Taiwan, for instance, which is persistently menaced by China, which considers Taiwan to be a rebel asset that it will someday reclaim, has also been investing in its own defenses, no longer certain that the US will step up and help them out at their moment of greatest need, despite historical assumptions.
Adding to that uncertainty, though, is the increasingly depleted state of the US military following its attack on Iran, which began in earnest in late February of this year.
Since February, the US has expended around 1,100 long-range stealth cruise missiles, more than a thousand Tomahawk cruise missiles, more than 1,200 Patriot interceptor missiles, and more than a thousand Precision Strike and ATACMS ground-base missiles.
For context, those Patriot missiles cost $4 million apiece, and again, 1,200 of them have been used since February, and the US military only buys about 100 Tomahawks a year, so the military has spent 10-years worth of them already during this new conflict in Iran. And those 1,100 stealth cruise missiles were built for a potential war with China, but now they’re gone.
This rapid depletion of armaments, weapons that take a long time to make and which are very expensive to procure, has required that stockpiles from elsewhere around the world be quickly packed up and shipped to the Middle East; and while the majority of what’s been fired so far by the US have been missiles, these shipments include all sorts of bombs, vehicles, and personnel equipment like guns and bullets, too, because they have to be ready for anything.
The military has also redirected assets, like missile systems and carrier strike groups, from other theaters, like the Pacific Ocean, to the Middle East, which leaves allies, like Taiwan and South Korea, less well-defended against potential incursions.
The US has refused to release any estimates as to the cost of the attack on Iran so far, but a pair of independent groups have estimated that price tag to be somewhere between $28 and $35 billion, which is about a billion dollars a day.
What’s more, it’s estimated that it will take about six years just to get armament stores back up to where they were in February, before this attack; it’s not just costly, it also takes a long time to produce that many missiles and rockets. And notably, a lot of these weapons were already considered to be in short supply before this conflict, at levels not suitable for a full-on shootout with an enemy like China, according to military experts. So six years plus whatever would be necessary to get up to more suitable levels.
This shortfall is partly the result of how the US military deals with defense contractors, and there are efforts by new military startups to remedy this sort of situation, making manufacturing a lot more nimble, while also shifting to cheaper weapons, like drones and inexpensive interceptors, to replace the pricy, conventional ones that the country has long relied on.
This expanded production hasn’t begun in earnest, though, and conventional military hardware suppliers have been slow to spin up new production because new funding hasn’t yet been confirmed by the Pentagon.
So the US military is currently low on the weapons it would need to defend its allies in Europe or the South China Sea against attacks by rival, near-peer nations, at a moment in which such nations are making big moves, like China’s persistent expansion into the South China Sea, and Russia’s adventurism in Ukraine.
What’s more, these stockpiles are unlikely to be resupplied any time soon, the capacity to produce what’s needed simply doesn’t exist, not in the US, anyway, and next-step options, like mass-scale drone production, also haven’t kicked off in earnest, yet, and might not arrive for another 5 or 10 years.
This already precarious moment has been made all the more precarious by the US government’s decision to attack Iran, then, and that decision still hasn’t been fully explained, the actual end-goal unknown. Consequently, there also doesn’t seem to be a clear end-point to aim and plan for.
Show Notes
https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/iran-war-complicates-contingency-plans-to-defend-taiwan-some-u-s-officials-say-4384f7c1
http://nytimes.com/2026/04/16/world/middleeast/iran-war-cost-congress.html
https://www.aei.org/foreign-and-defense-policy/epic-fury-costs-as-of-the-april-8-cease-fire/
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/23/us/politics/iran-war-cost-military.html
https://gulfnews.com/world/mena/is-the-iran-war-depleting-us-weapons-too-fast-1.500517800
https://www.moneycontrol.com/world/iran-war-drains-us-munitions-raises-taiwan-defence-concerns-report-article-13898019.html
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-rearms-iran-ceasefire-advanced-munitions-supplies/
https://www.ft.com/content/1a5a2502-a45a-40c1-af6f-b30ecc34bacb
https://archive.is/20260424042150/https://www.ft.com/content/1a5a2502-a45a-40c1-af6f-b30ecc34bacb
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/24/world/europe/europe-defense-nato-trump-eu.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/04/23/aircraft-carrier-bush-iran/
https://archive.md/T9tD1
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-03-31/trump-s-iran-war-is-accelerating-the-global-energy-transition
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/apr/18/fossil-fuel-trump-green-revolution-us-iran-renewable-energy
https://www.axios.com/2026/04/24/trump-oil-export-ceiling-iran-strait-hormuz


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