I would like to explain my long absence from writing my blog offerings for those who might be checking it out now and then. There aren’t many of you, but it seems like the polite thing to do.

Back in July my wife had an “event” that landed her in the emergency room at a local hospital, followed by a few days in intensive care. She had a period of seizures with no apparent cause. The hospital did all of the expected tests but found no cause other than possibly a late onset epilepsy. After a few days of total incapacitation, she woke up one morning “cured” and we went home. When she had the event, I decided to drop my focus on everything except for her well being.

Three weeks went by uneventfully, so I decided I could travel to Cincinnati to attend a conference, and she would stay with our daughter just in case something came up again. I was in Cincinnati two days when I got a call from my daughter that my wife had another event and was back in the emergency room. I got a ticket home as soon as I was able, and was at her side that evening. They symptoms were similar, but this time the MRI showed many “shadows” indicting cancer. A biopsy confirmed that it was advanced brain cancer that because it was disbursed was inoperable. At that point I totally re-focused on only her. Thus the hiatus on my blogging. She started a regime of 6 weeks of radiation treatment 5 days a week coupled with chemo therapy 7 days a week.

She once again “got better” and things were almost back to normal for a couple of weeks, then back to the ER, followed by another “recovery”. Things were apparently going as hoped for up until the beginning of week six. Starting at about week four of the treatments she became very tired and slept a lot, but that was expected. Then when it would have been the last week of therapy she had another event, but this time it was vastly worse. She went into a coma for a few days, and then died.

That was about six weeks ago and I am just now recovering from the shock enough to write this short blog. I am still deeply in a state of shock and grief, but am finally starting to have a few hours where I can think about doing other things, such as this. I am not expecting a quick improvement, but at least hope to begin the process of moving along with my life.

One of my plans is to pick up on my blogs again, but perhaps maybe a bit more like some sort of diary where I write about important events or experiences in my journal toward some sort of “normalcy”. I decided to take some time to stop “planning” my days, but instead just go along with them to see what happens and develops. Interesting, and perhaps important, events seem to happen almost daily. Some are probably only interesting to me, but I will share them just in case anyone else finds them worth considering.

Of course, my blog has almost no “followers”, those that do visit seems to only do so once or possibly twice before the go on. I suspect they are searching for “hoes” (as in whores) looking for porn and are quite disappointed by finding that “Hoes” in my family name, not a description of the content. However, I refuse to change my name, and refuse to change the name of my website, so I will just keep doing what I am doing – knowing that I am unlikely to get much of a following. I am mainly just writing to hear myself think, so I don’t suppose it matters.

I was sitting outside in my hot tub (“spa”) this morning enjoying the splendid view of my favorite constellation friends; Orion, Taurus, The Pleiades, Gemini, Canis Major, Cassiopeia, Perseus, and a few others. The weather was perfect for star gazing with a moonless morning; 55F, no wind, clear skies and quiet. I like to lay my head back and just watch – today I saw 5 meteors (I suppose they might represent an early start on the Orionids which are leftover pieces of Halley’s comet). I usually spot 10 to 15 satellites and perhaps one or two meteors during my 15 to 30 minute morning soak. I didn’t see any satellites this morning – perhaps I was too early in the day for them.

In any case, while semi-dozing and watching the stars I got to thinking about where it all came from. The current theory is that it all started with a big bang – and then things just happened after that. The “just happened after that” part is the job of “science” to describe. Once the bang happened it seems that the rules of physics came along for the ride, resulting in all there is. Things just are because they are. Perhaps a different bang would have resulted in different rules – or not.

The mystery for me isn’t so much about how the universe evolved following the bang, but instead – what banged??? If the universe is something and the pre-universe isn’t that, then does that mean it is nothing (no thing)? How could nothing bang into existence? Or are we just some sort of fluctuation around zero so that from the BIG picture point of view there is still nothing. Not only did this big bang apparently happen, but the scales (energy, mass, distances, time) involved are unimaginably huge. “How very odd” is about as far as I can get along this line of thought. The story seems to be that there was (perhaps is) nothing at all, no anything, no energy, no waves, no ….. nothing. Then “it” (nothing) got really bored and turned into everything – all at once! This didn’t even happen in a flash because it was so dense that nothing could flash. It is more like the universe was vomited into being. Maybe “it” rolled over in bed.

Once the change happened, then the physics geniuses can play their favorite math games and describe how it evolved into atoms, and molecules, and galaxies, and stars, and eventually “us” – but they can say nothing about the transition, or before the transition. Interestingly, apparently there was no “before the transition” because there was no time and time is necessary for a “before”. This odd state of affairs turns the entire discussion into a pseudo-discussion because there was actually nothing to discuss.

The results of this pondering was a simple, “huh??” Not being ready to give up on useless pondering, as the trees become visible in the pre-dawn light I got to wondering about the nature of life on earth. I have already discussed my revelation that all existing life has always been alive and thus was never “born” or created except when it all started 3 billion or so years ago. Of course a lot of things have died since that time, but none of the things that are alive now have died yet. The thread of life is continuous, and apparently arising from the same event all those billions of years ago. We (every current life form) are all “cousins”.

But I wonder if that is actually true. It appears to be true, but I keep wondering about two other possibilities. One possibility is that there were initially many different starts of life, but only one survived to the present. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence of this happening, but it certainly seems like a reasonable possibility. However, to me the more mysterious question has to with whether it all started with a single molecule randomly achieving the kind of self-replication that resulted in the ability to replicate, mutate and diverge into the splendid diversity we enjoy, or did it start with a lot of pools of gunk (molecules) all of which acquired the necessarily characteristics.

A thought experiment might help clarify my question. Consider a lab experiment where a bunch of precursor molecules were mixed in a vat (or a test tube) in such a way that “the beginning” life molecule was formed. Would we have billions of “the beginning” molecules that then go on to create billions of new threads of life (albeit all of them identical, or nearly so), or would only one such molecule form creating just one thread of life? If it is the former, then my idea that life all goes back to a single beginning is false – it goes back to billions and billions of single beginnings. If so, then life comes from billions of beginnings, and we are not cousins at all. We are all based upon complex crystals (DNA and RNA) formed by the reaction of similar chemicals like two grains of salt – very similar because of the chemistry involved, but not related to or sharing a very long chain of reactions. If this is the case, then I wonder when and how often life has started afresh.

I was once again left with “huh?” – not even knowing if there is a sensible question to be asked. Am I once again pondering another “pseudo-question”?

For the few of you that read my blog, I apologize for the long delay. My wife had a seizure at the end of July that ended up with a few days in the hospital. There was no diagnosis at that time. We went home, things were stable for a couple of weeks – and I went to Cincinnati to attend a conference. While I was at the conference, there was a repeat causing me to find a flight home ASAP. This time there was a diagnosi of inoperable brain cancer. That was another stint in the hospital followed by about 10 days in a rehab center. Then home again for a couple of weeks, and then another “event” and another week in the hospital.

I spent much of the time in the hospital with her, going home late at night to get a few winks and take care of pressing things on the home from. It was exhausting to say the least. During all of this I was unable to find the time, or the brain power, to do much of anything except take care of the things that needed immediate attention – mostly my wife’s adventures. We are finally home once again, wondering when this will all repeat. She is getting daily radiation treatments and chemotherapy, which really makes her exhausted. It is still very difficult, but right now a little calmer (partly because she is so exhausted).

This week we are trying a new process of hiring a care giver to be with her for the mornings, giving me time to catch up on other things – including writing this blog. I finally had time to dig through the pile of papers that have been growing on my desk and see a number of past due bills and things like that. Hopefully I will be able to get to some of those tomorrow or the next day. It seems like there isn’t much going on, but the day is full of things to do – video appointments with doctors, two hour trips to get radiation therapy, meals, once a week in-home visits from the physical therapist, the occupation therapist, the speech therapist, a nurse, trips to get weekly lab tests, difficult and time consuming medication taking because she can barely swallow the many pills each day, visits from friends and neighbors (wonderful, but exhausting for her and time consuming). We have action packed, full days of doing nothing.

I am beginning to write a short paper on the system safety aspects of the hospitals that I noticed while hanging out with my wife for hours and days at a time. This paper is going to be published in the next issue of The Journal of the System Safety Society – I’ll post is here also for those that might find it interesting. I write a short (2 or 3 page) article for each issue of the journal. The topic varies depending upon what has caught my attention at the time – this time it has to do with some problems that I identified with the hospital system(s).

Mainly I am writing this blog just to let people know I am back (perhaps – depending upon the future events concerning my wife’s illness).

I just read The Genesis Machine by Amy Webb and Andrew Hessel. I found it one of the most difficult reads that I can recall. I don’t mean that it is poorly written, it is not. I don’t mean that it is hard to understand, it is only mildly difficult to comprehend. What I mean is that I can’t stand the topic and the implications. Reading the book felt a little like watching a horror movie where you know that it is just going to keep getting worse and worse, finally ending in total disaster. Unfortunately, the disaster that seems to be at the end of the story involves the human race.

The book discusses the wonderful things that gene editing (via CRISPR and other tools) is accomplishing with regard to medical and agricultural advances. Truly amazing things are being done in the benefit of mankind (such as Golden Rice that was created by inserting chrysanthemum genes into rice dna to create rice that is high in vitamin A) – but with that amazing power for good comes an equally amazing risks. Not only are these tools being used to create new vaccines, to prevent genetic diseases before birth, “cure” a vast array of genetically related diseases but it is being used to create new organisms that would never come to pass through “normal” breeding processes because genes are being introduced from other species that would never be in the gene pool.

There is an amazing amount of “mix-and-matching” between species being done in laboratories around the world, and many new traits being introduced into species germ lines of species (including humans) that will propagate and mutate into the distant future. Brand new organisms are being created using artificial intelligence techniques putting together entirely new sequences of genetic codes – not cobbling together parts from difference species, but starting from scratch and making new life. Currently, all life seems to come from a common ancestor from billions of years ago. Now scientists are starting all over again, with a new man-made germ line. What could possibly go wrong?

Throughout the book there are comments along the lines of “this is great as long as it isn’t released into the wild”, or “we know the potential risks well enough to understand the cost/benefit assessments”, and “great harm could be done so we have to have regulations to keep people from doing these sorts of things.”

What could go wrong with something that has great power (including devastating bio-weapons)? All that there is between catastrophe and amazing benefits is people’s willingness to “play by the rules” instead of achieving great wealth and/or power, with the understanding that this all has to be error free with people never making any mistakes. The history of humanity isn’t very good with regard to abusing power, understanding all of the implications of a new development, and working error free. Over the past decade, there have already been many abuses, poor decisions, and mistakes with regard to gene editing activities. They will continue – there is zero chance of controlling them.

So now that we have let that particular genie out of the bottle, we can only wait to find out just how bad things can become when “what could go wrong” – does. I see no possible path around multiple catastrophes at an ever-increasing frequency. It is easy to predict some of the “what could go wrong” scenarios (such as release of a new super-covid type pandemic), the accidental destruction of entire species that turn out to have important beneficial roles in the environment, and many others. However, there are also many unknown unknowns that we will discover – with the disclaimer of “who would have thought of that?”, or “nobody would do a thing like that.” We are going to learn a lot of new lessons – I really hope it works out for our descendants, but I think they have yet another earth shattering set of problems to attempt to solve.

These kinds of true stories really leave me in a gloomy state of mind. What idiots people are. The list of mankind’s insanity just keeps getting longer as we get technologically more “advanced”.

I recently purchased a new “golf cart” (actually a low speed vehicle for transportation, not golf). It is kind of fun to drive around in, fun for us oldsters and grandchildren alike. However, the first thing that I noticed is that it comes with an absolutely obnoxious, and unnecessary, back up alarm like you hear on construction sites. It is really, really load – totally ruining the quiet riding experience for me and anyone in the neighborhood.

Because it is so obnoxious I decided to disable it. That sounds easy enough, it must have a couple of wires that can be disconnected – assuming you can find the speaker. So I went on a hunt for a very load speaker on a very small vehicle. This was far from easy because I could not determine where the noise was coming from, there was no directional cues whatsoever. I couldn’t tell which end of the cart it was coming from, couldn’t even tell if it was from the overhead canopy or perhaps under the vehicle.

I thought I must be getting really bad hearing, so I asked my wife to come listen to it and help me know which end of the cart I should be looking to find it. She had no clue either. Others tried to help, but nobody could just distance or direction. I finally looked it up on the internet and found that it was under the passenger seat. As I expected, it was simple to unplug it to shut it up.

However, as a safety engineer this made me really wonder about all of those backup alarms used on construction sites and elsewhere. It appears that the particular sound frequency and volume that they selected for this function makes many (perhaps all?) people unable to judge distance or direction, meaning while they can hear that there is a danger somewhere in the vicinity, they can’t judge whether or not THEY are in danger. Given that there are often many alarms going on at the same time, and that all of the alarms sound the same, I am pretty certain that they just get ignored. They irritate, but my guess is that they don’t do much good as “safety devices”. I suspect that they become just another annoyance to be ignored.

I have seen some advances where people ware warning devices that tell them when they are in a danger zone – specifically for them, and specifically when there is actually danger near by. This sounds much better, but I don’t know enough about the details to be able to judge. Mainly I was just surprised how difficult it was to track the direction of that alarm – clearly it has something to do with the way that the human ear works. Figuring out how to make jobs safer is MUCH more difficult than it seems like it would be because there are so many of these kinds of unexpected situations. Testing in laboratory and field use is key, and those tests have to actually test safety – not the functioning of device that is assumed to be safer.

Today’s Jan 06 hearing was rather terrifying in many ways and made me wonder what it is about people that cause them to blindly follow along with the group. Perhaps the scariest part to me was the short testimony by the guy that got wrapped up in the event and barged into the capital building. He said that he is a “normal” American citizen with a job and family doing normal things with family and friends, but that he had become a “social media” junky. He was comfortable with what he found there, and found no reason to disbelieve Trump’s statements – so when Trump asked him (along with millions of others) to “come on down” to the Jan 06 demonstration in support of patriotism and Trump, he got all fired up and headed out at the last minute with some friends.

When asked if he believed all of the lies at the time, he said he did and really hadn’t considered any other option. Asked if he still believes them, he said he no longer does because he had done a little independent research and realized that they were not only lies, but essentially impossible. In summary, he said that he had been living with blinders on and that he hopes that others will find it within themselves to take them off and look around – it isn’t what they are being told. Perhaps it should be that we should look around because it isn’t what we are being told. I think he represented a million or so people that either don’t want to, or don’t know that they can, remove their blinders and look around. This is extremely scary to me because we have many historical examples of what happens in that situation – very few of them good.

Letting that be for a minute — last night I watched the first episode of the documentary about Patagonia on CNN. It was pretty cool, nice photos, interesting discussion – but what caught my attention was the bit about the sea lions and their harems. The big boy sat in the middle of a circle of his “ladies”, just sort of luxuriating in his domain. All the ladies seemed quite content with the situation, perhaps being protected. Then a challenger came along and there was a big fight, which the challenger lost so he slunk away – leaving the family group as before. However, had the challenger won, the “girls” would have been just as content with the new guy. It wasn’t about the personality of the “boss”, loyalty or love – it was about something else, more about an inherited way of acting. Elk herds do a similar thing, with the possible exception that apparently few of the offspring from the harem are children of the main guy- there is a lot of “hanky panky” going on beyond the fringes of the group.

The juxtaposition of the documentary and the testimony at the hearing were striking. Is there something going on here that is “built in” to people through our millions of years of evolution? Is there something built into us that in certain situations forces us to put on our blinders and follow like a herd of sheep? Some relatively recent examples are of course Hitler, maybe Kennedy, and now Trump. Is it possible that there is something about these people that is almost irresistible to us?

When I was in college during the “hippy days” I took a “speech” course to meet my general education requirements. It turned out that the class was not a normal speech class but instead a class on interpersonal communications. This was much better than what I had expected because we didn’t have to write speeches and present them in front of people, we just had to talk to each other (while paying attention to what was going on). I excelled at this, so much so that I was allowed to assist the Dr. Dennis Winters in future interpersonal communication classes. I don’t recall any money for doing this, I guess it was just for fun. In retrospect, this arrangement was kind of odd for a physics major.

This particular teacher was the campus superstar, speaking at large “peace/anti-war” rallies and all kinds of things like that. He was always in demand for most anything that required a charismatic speaker, everyone that I knew was sort of in awe of him. All of a sudden I was connected to a widely popular guy – and made “important” because I was his aid. I never came under his influence, but it was interesting to be a tiny bit popular with the transferred adulation. It didn’t hurt that all of a sudden I was “something” with a lot of cute girls that would normally have ignored me.

The thing that I found most interesting was his teaching me how to be that kind of a charismatic speaker. I failed at picking up the skills, but remember the story about how he did it. He grew up in Butte Montana, making friends with Evel Knievel and Jesse Jackson. Dennis told me stories about the three of them hanging around together, discussing how to make a “big” hit in the world, especially how to be positive influences in the world In retrospect, I am not sure how it worked out for them but Evel and Jesse certainly made a name for themselves. I haven’t heard much about Dennis. According to Dennis, they spent a lot of time analyzing the details of what movements, facial expressions, voice modulations, etc makes a speaker irresistible. Basically, what do you have to do in order to become charismatic! If this is true, all three of them exceeded in doing so.

Dennis offered to share his findings with me, so that I too could become a charismatic public speaker. Being the independent type, I unfortunately declined the offer – assuming that if I were destined to be a charismatic “leader” it would happen naturally. Of course that never happened, so I continue to stumble along the best that I can when I am unable to weasel out of speaking to a group. What I found interesting was that he claimed that this is something that you can learn to do – and if his popularity is a result of that, he succeeded. Jesse Jackson also became an iconic, and important, liberal leader. He is an example of the good a person can do with the power of smarts, dedication, compassion and charisma.

So now back to my original thoughts – do people with this kind of “magnetic” charisma tie into something that is deeply embedded in us from millions of years of evolution? Can we put on faces, expressions, body movements and other physical attributes to “connect” with this hardwired instincts, sort of like a peacock spreading its splendid tail feathers? Is this something that we can learn to do? (Dennis Winters claimed that he had, and that I could too.) If that is the case, is there something here that we can take advantage of in the quest for making the world a better place, one that is not ruled by people such as Hitler, Trump, and a long list of other leaders that are followed blindly, everyone with their blinders on?

I wonder if perhaps if we clearly understand that we are responding to wired in instincts instead of “truth” perhaps we can learn to take off the blinders and look around. As usual, I offer no solutions here, just something that I find curious. Maybe if we can learn to identify the triggers we can also learn to look beyond them.

I came upon an interesting “fact” when reading the book “Wild Nights Out – The magic of Exploring the Outdoors after Dark” by Chris Salisbury. I don’t know if it is actually a scientific “fact”, but Mr. Salisbury made the following statement; “In the pre-industrial era, and across the world, it was the common habit to have ‘two sleeps’ during the night, interrupted by a brief passage of time in the middle, for all sorts of nocturnal activity. Our assumption of the need for a continuous night of sleep, it appears, is a more modern phenomenon.”

I found this idea to be interesting for a number of reason, not the least is that I have been doing that for many years. My nightly habit is to go to bed early sleep for a few hours, wake and do things until I am fully awake, then head back to bed for another few hours – getting up again in the pre-dawn hours. My wife does the same, usually “shifted” from my schedule by an hour or so. It is not unusual to get up and get a glass of milk and a bite to eat, perhaps read for awhile or possibly write things such as this blog. Sometimes I go outside to check out the weather and such. I am thinking that perhaps I should set up my small telescope so it is easy to do a bit of star gazing. After a half-hour to an hour I am sleepy again, ready to finish the night – waking early to start another day.

I noticed a similar behavior in a small Australian aboriginal village I visited a few years ago. The Natives Australians slept outside using their houses to store stuff – but not to live in, while the rest of us slept inside of our houses. The town would be abuzz with chatter and kids playing until around 9:00 pm, and then become quiet until around 1:00 am, at which point I could hear small groups of people chanting, singing, and drumming – it seemed to be a quiet “mystical/spiritual” time for some of the adults. I never got up to go see what was actually going on, but the singing and chanting was a nightly event. Soon all was quiet again until around sunrise when the town began to wake up with the usual daytime chatter and activities.

I am heartened to hear that my nighttime activities are perhaps “normal” for some cultures. Modern medicine keeps saying that I “should” get eight hours of uninterrupted sleep a night, or more. I haven’t done that since I was perhaps forty years old. I wonder if the “two sleep” approach isn’t perhaps hardwired into our genetics. A story I made up that I find amusing (and interesting) is that perhaps the two-sleeps pattern is an important element of our survival stemming from when a real and constant danger might be being eaten by a large predator. In that environment it would be most advantageous to make sure that someone is always on watch, keeping the fire going and being ready to sound the alarm if need be.

My fantasy about this is that young children go to bed early and sleep through the night because it isn’t safe for them to be roaming around after dark – far better that they are silent and asleep. Once children reach adolescence they seem to like to stay up late into the night, thus keeping an eye out for danger (or perhaps creating it themselves in the tradition of “kids will be kids”) while the older folks get their first sleep of the night. When the adolescents finally go to sleep it is time for the old folks to wake and begin their middle-of-the-night activities, perhaps solo or in groups – taking their shift at guarding the group. The oldsters, such as myself, awaken from their second sleep in the pre-dawn hours (I get up around 4:30 am) to quietly begin to do things to start the day – in my case I meditate, check out the weather and things outside, perhaps start the coffee and take a shower as the rest of the family slowly begin their day.

I like this story (even if it is mostly false) because it reminds me that we are just animals, and that as animals we have built-in actions and biological rhythms (such as the 24 hour circadian rhythm). It reminds me that perhaps it is best to pay attention to what our body wants to do “naturally” instead of trying to force it into a mode of operation based upon artificial needs such as when the factory shift begins or the bus arrives. Of course, this is all much easier to do now that I am retired and have few artificial time constraints. For example, one of my favorite things to do is to take a nap – especially one starting at around 9:00 am. A morning nap is a very delicious thing.

This blog discussion requires a rather long introduction to put the rest into perspective. Sorry about that. The part that I am most interested in has to do with how the news media is being misused to “brain wash” many of those on the “weird right” (believers in obviously fake news). I happened to chase the story of DEF down the rabbit hole, but the same approach to falsifying news without adding lies is being widely used for a great many topics. I hope that if you hang in there you will find this as interesting as I do.

A couple of nights ago I was having dinner at a Northern California bar and grill style restaurant when I got into a discussion with a guy who was complaining that the high price of diesel was putting him out of business. It turned out that he is in the tow truck business (he sounded like an owner of a tow truck business, but might have just been a driver). He said that his fuel costs when from about $600 a month to $1100 a month during the past few months because of the sharp increase in the cost of diesel. Similar stories are common, so I accepted his story as true and hoped he would continue – which he did. He told me that he friends that owned and operated logging trucks who already quit because of fuel costs, as that many long-haul truckers are going out of business as well.

That sounded true, and was a sad situation. Then he opened up and “explained” why the prices were increasing so dramatically – it is because the government forced the shippers to stop shipping sufficient DEF for their trucks. His idea is that this created a shortage of DEF, which resulted in truckers not being able to obtain this for their trucks, meaning they couldn’t purchase enough diesel, resulting in sky-high fuel prices. He said that there is actually plenty of diesel and DEF, but that Biden’s regulations on the shipment of DEF created an artificial shortage and hence the increase fuel prices. He pointed out that without DEF and without some specific chemicals used in engine oil the trucking industry would grind to a halt (as if there was some sort of concern that this might happen). He then pointed out that all of this is caused by unnecessary regulations to protect the environment. None of this made much sense to me, so I told him that it sounded like “fake news” to me, and that thanked him for the information, promising to “check it out” further. His parting comment was to not use “Google” to do my research because the truth can’t be found there.

A bit of background might help here. DEF (sometimes sold under the name of AdBlue) is a mixture of 1/3 urea and 2/3 water (with a bit of blue coloring) that creates a catalytic reactions when sprayed into the exhaust diesel engines. It reduces the amount of nitrogen oxides (NO_x) in emitted by the vehicle – resulting in less air pollution. In 2007 the EPA required a significant reduction in emissions from diesel engines. Many diesel engine manufacturers met the new regulations by adding a requirement for the use of DEF in the exhaust system. Prior to the introduction of DEF they met the EPA requirements by adjusting the fuel-air mixtures to the engines, which lowered fuel mileage. The use of DEF allowed them to re-adjust the engines, getting even better fuel mileage than before the introduction of the EPA requirements.

In order to meet the EPA requirements, truck manufacturers added “features” that limit the speed of the truck to 5 MPH when the DEF tank is empty, and shut off the engine entirely after a short distance. Basically, while the trucks run fine without DEF (because it is just added to the exhaust), they don’t run at all without it. (I don’t know what keeps truckers from adding water to their DEF tanks and heading down the road – perhaps nothing except “good will” keeps them from doing that?)

It takes about 2 gallons of DEF to treat 100 gallons of diesel, and costs about $10.00 per gallon, thus adding about $0.20 per gallon for diesel fuel – but saves more than that in increased mileage. The resent increase in the price of DEF has increased the price from about $9/gallon to about $13/gallon adding an additional $0.08 to the price of fuel. This is a long ways from the tow truck driver’s claim of doubling the price of diesel – and probably isn’t putting anyone out of business.

It turns out that the tow truck driver was correct, there is no shortage of DEF at the supply end (sort of), but there is a restriction to shipping urea from the manufacturing plant to the plants that turn the urea into fertilizer and DEF (along with a few other products). However, the restriction isn’t caused by the government, it was created by Union Pacific (railroad) limiting the number of privately owned rail cars they are willing to haul because they found themselves under staffed and short of locomotives due to the impacts of covid. In order to meet their contracts they decided to limit the number of private rails cars they would haul – a reduction to 80% of what they were doing. The urea companies use their own rail tankers, so found themselves with a 20% reduction in supply. This did not result in a reduction in the production of DEF, but did result in a reduction in the production of fertilizer – impacting farmers across the the country. So yes, there is a short term reduction in urea availability while the rail situation gets straightened out, and no there is not a shortage of DEF resulting in anyone not being able to run their trucks.

So now I can finally get to what I consider the interesting part of the story.

I searched online for topics about DEF shortages and found an interesting selection of items. I first found a lot about diesel engines, the EPA requirements, and urea sources and uses. Just standard “facts” with nothing specific about shortages. An item that I didn’t mention above is that Russia is the world’s biggest exporter of urea, followed closely by China. The USA is a big importer of urea. It is main component of fertilizer, many explosives, DEF, and is a feedstock for wide variety of chemicals.

I then found a lot of interesting articles concerning the shipping induced shortages of urea in the United States (the main subject of the tow truck driver’s discussion). I found many articles that contained the same quoted materials, but with many different spins. I think I found the original source in a New York Times article that discussed the importance of urea for the agricultural and trucking industries, noting that urea in the form of DEF is used to control pollution and that a shortages of this or other chemicals used in diesel engine oil could cripple the users of diesel powered trucks. The article discussed the fact that Union Pacific put a limit on the number of private cars that is would haul, limiting the availability of urea to many industries, particularly the fertilizer manufactures. It didn’t say that there is a shortage for use as DEF, just pointed out that they are critical to keeping things moving. This article then went on to talk about the causes of the shortage, noting that there was an on-going union dispute that is resulting in worker shortages, short staffing because of covid, an increase in shipping demand in part caused by covid, and the fact that a reduction in train transportation during the past decade had caused them to reduce their rolling stock. All of that combined at the same time resulted in delays, bottle necks and many shipping problems. In an attempt to straighten that out Union Pacific brought 50 more locomotives on line, hired a bunch of new employees, and managed the flow of business on their lines – including limiting the number of privately owned rail cars that they accepted.

This long and seemingly true story was reproduced in part by a number of other publications, including Newsweek. However, these other publications didn’t reprint the entire article, just the part about DEF (and other chemicals) being critical for transportation, and that Union Pacific is limited shipping of urea (it is the company doing this, not the government). Some of these derivative articles included a discussion pointing out that the cost of DEF has risen by close to 150% during the past few months (without indicating that this amounts to an increase of less than 2% <about $0.10 per gallon> in the increased cost of diesel fuel).

And then the magic happened! These basically true, but incomplete, articles were picked up and reprinted by many “fact challenged” publications. While most of them accurately reprinted the entire NewsWeek version, they added a few things such as introductions implying that the “shortage” of DEF has caused the increase in fuel costs to the present $7/gallon (not true), or that the “shortage” has stopped trucks from operating (not true), or that the reduction in shipping was ordered by Biden (not true), and many more. These are introduced as just comments along the lines of “perhaps these things are happening”, not “facts.” In addition to distracting introductions, they break up the original story into many small parts interspersed with Tweets on various topics about how horrible Biden is, how wonderful Trump is, how all kinds of things spouting hate and lies – but they are clearly not part of “the article” – they are just things that perhaps somebody somewhere might have said. The real article is there, but it is quite difficult to find because you have to keep skipping over all of the injected material.

It is clear that these inserts are read by many as part of, and of the same value, as the main body of the article. I say that because the tow truck driver was very good and accurate about telling me many of these false and nasty claims, giving them as much value and “truth” as the other parts. There is no “filter” operating for these folks – nothing to sort out what they would like to hear (but is false) from what they might not like to hear (but is true). They don’t seem to know how to step back and realize that there are various sources of various quality at work in the things that they use to “study” a problem.