『Let's Know Things』のカバーアート

Let's Know Things

Let's Know Things

著者： Colin Wright
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A calm, non-shouty, non-polemical, weekly news analysis podcast for folks of all stripes and leanings who want to know more about what's happening in the world around them. Hosted by analytic journalist Colin Wright since 2016.

letsknowthings.substack.comColin Wright 政治・政府
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  • 2026 DRC Ebola Outbreak

    2026 DRC Ebola Outbreak
    2026/05/26
    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 VellosTranscriptEbola, 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.—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 ...
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    15 分
  • Super El Niño

    Super El Niño
    2026/05/19
    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 BurgisTranscriptUnder 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.—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 ...
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    14 分
  • 2026 UK Local Elections

    2026 UK Local Elections
    2026/05/12
    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 PoolTranscriptFor 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 ...
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    14 分
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