It had to be ants. We’re no Indiana Jones but ants are our snakes. So over a month ago when we noticed some congregating by the thermostat in the hobby house in our backyard (long time readers will remember we turned It into a gentleman’s cave, full of books for the mind, music for the soul and exercise equipment for the body) we acted quickly. We bought ant traps with poison in them that the ants are supposed to take back to the nest where they feed and inadvertently kill the queen. Many weeks later and there were more ants. Now no longer merely up on the thermostat but also on the floor. This was puzzling since there is no food in this structure, nothing to attract your everyday ants. But we’re beginning to fear these are no ordinary creatures.
Undaunted we bought Combat ant poison whose active ingredient is fipronil. It comes in a syringe and we placed a large goop at the baseboard where most of the ants were busily walking back and forth busily doing what we have no idea. Surely this big batch of poison would do the trick. But a week later the poison was gone, seemingly eaten by the ants and now there were armies of them marching all through the floors of our beloved gentleman’s cave. So we called in the professionals and a man who looked not too much different than the Bill Murray character in Caddyshack arrived, a dangling cross earring in his right lobe, took one look inside the hobby house and said, “Man this is an infestation.” He assured me he would take care of it, grabbed tool boxes of poison and sent me into our house.
Afterwards he said give it a week but feel free over the coming days to mop up the dead ants since their pheromones could attract other animals. So two days later we went into the structure and there were indeed many dead ants…but many live ones too. Again undaunted, we took a Swiffer and began to mop up the ants. The Swiffer rag was black as night with hundreds of tiny carcasses stuck to it. And so as we dial up the best mental health therapist we can find, we have Georgia on our mind, report good news on air pollution and spy on China’s spies. It’s this week’s International Need to Know, shuddering with international information, itchy with global data.
Without further ado, here’s what you need to know.
Georgia On My MInd
We are not an expert on Georgia, neither the country nor the state, though we once had a wonderful meal at a Georgian restaurant in Khabarovsk, but we feel compelled to note that last week, as Francesco Nicoli wrote, “15 percent of the population was in the streets protesting against Russia.” Specifically, the people in the streets are upset about a “foreign agents bill….the bill, which passed its second reading in parliament this month, has been called ‘the Russian law’ by critics who liken it to legislation adopted by Moscow in 2012 and then tightened in 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.” Many Georgians are worried about being Russiafied, that is to become an authoritarian state like the one Putin lords over. The ruling Georgian Dream Party first introduced this bill last year but put it aside under pressure. Is 15 percent enough pressure this time?
Clearing The Air
The invaluable Hannah Ritchie, whose book, Not The End of the World, we’ll soon begin reading, posits that we may have passed peak air pollution. She’s not referring to greenhouse gases but rather “specifically about emissions of harmful local air pollutants: gases like nitrogen oxides (NOx), sulphur dioxide which causes acid rain, carbon monoxide, black carbon, organic carbon, non-methane volatile organic compounds.” This is important because as we’ve written about before, air pollution is really bad for you in a host of different ways including affecting cognition. You can see in her first graph below that except for ammonia, emissions of air pollutants are all starting to go down. Importantly it’s not just in the rich countries where air pollution is going down but also in China, India, Indonesia and Vietnam. As these countries develop, emissions “fall once a country gets rich enough to impose pollution standards and limits without infringing on development and the move away from energy poverty.” This is another example of how degrowthers get it all wrong.
China Corner: Spies, Lies and Defectors
Earlier this week, the Australian TV program Four Corners did a report about a Chinese spy who fled to Australia and is detailing his spying operations in the country. According to Four Corners, “The spy — who goes by the name Eric — worked as an undercover agent for a unit within China’s federal police and security agency, the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) between 2008 and early 2023.” This follows upon arrests of Chinese spies in the U.K. and stories last year about PRC police stations in foreign countries that were used to keep tabs on dissidents. That China is spying around the world, and even its heavy handed extraterritorial approach, is not surprising. What we found interesting about the “Eric” case is he is a defector. Defectors were not uncommon during the Cold War with the Soviet Union but at least so far one does not see as many with China in the current, if not Cold War, then ideological battle. We wonder, with China under Xi even more oppressive of its people, and now that its economy is okay but not booming, whether there will be more defectors in the future.
