Quotulatiousness

February 9, 2010

This week’s silly health panic: third-hand smoke.

Filed under: Environment, Health — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:48

Don’t worry, anti-smoking campaigners! Even though the evil smoking empire is in retreat, and smokers get worse press than child molesters and people who talk at the theatre, there’s a new moral front opening up: third-hand smoke! The war isn’t over yet:

Lingering residue from tobacco smoke which clings to upholstery, clothing and the skin releases cancer-causing agents, work in PNAS journal shows.

Berkeley scientists in the US ran lab tests and found “substantial levels” of toxins on smoke-exposed material.

They say while banishing smokers to outdoors cuts second-hand smoke, residues will follow them back inside and this “third-hand smoke” may harm.

Efforts are currently underway to determine if there’s a strong media response to this “new threat”. If so, funding will be sought to research the possibility of “fourth-hand smoke” and possibly even “fifth-hand smoke”.

Scandal hits Toronto mayoral candidate

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:35

It’s early for this kind of media-friendly scandal to break, which makes it unlikely to actually affect the outcome of the election (that is, it’s a self-inflicted wound, no partisan assistance required). Adam Giambrone gets to try to finesse his way out of an “inappropriate relationship with a young woman.”

Giambrone, who currently lives with long-time partner Sarah McQuarrie, admitted to the relationship with university student Kristen Lucas after she forwarded a series of text messages to the Toronto Star. Lucas said she had been in a relationship with Giambrone for about a year.

Andrew Coyne has been sending lots of twitter updates on the matter:

I can’t decide whether this Adam Giambrone business is funnier than it is creepy, or creepier than it is funny.
As always, the issue isn’t the sex — that’s the funny part — it’s the multiple, multiple lies.
Was he lying when he told his teenage paramour the “live-in partner” at his mayoral launch was just “someone political… for the campaign”?
Or is he lying to us when he publicly apologizes to the “partner,” as if she were anything more than a flag of convenience?
Did he lie to her too? Or did he tell her I need you to pretend to be my lover, but don’t worry I’ll be shtupping a teenager the whole time?
[. . .]
And best of all: the “threatening email” he showed the Star, purportedly from her, in which she misspells her own name.
So the question for Toronto voters is not, do you want a serial liar for mayor, but do you want an incompetent one?
As for me, I’m sticking with my initial reaction: What a maroon.

QotD: “Environmentalism [is] like an intrusive state religion”

Filed under: Economics, Education, Environment, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:46

I’d heard some of this from my daughter before and had gotten used to the idea that she needed a little deprogramming from time to time. But as I listened to the rote repetition of a political agenda from children not old enough to read, I decided it was time for a word with the teacher. She wanted to know which specific points in the catechism I found objectionable. I declined to answer. As environmentalism becomes increasingly like an intrusive state religion, we dissenters become increasingly prickly about suggestions that we suffer from some kind of aberration.

The naive environmentalism of my daughter’s preschool is a force-fed potpourri of myth, superstition, and ritual that has much in common with the least reputable varieties of religious Fundamentalism. The antidote to bad religion is good science. The antidote to astrology is the scientific method, the antidote to naive creationism is evolutionary biology, and the antidote to naive environmentalism is economics.

Economics is the science of competing preferences. Environmentalism goes beyond science when it elevates matters of preference to matters of morality. A proposal to pave a wilderness and put up a parking lot is an occasion for conflict between those who prefer wilderness and those who prefer convenient parking. In the ensuing struggle, each side attempts to impose its preferences by manipulating the political and economic systems. Because one side must win and one side must lose, the battle is hard-fought and sometimes bitter. All of this is to be expected.

But in the 25 years since the first Earth Day, a new and ugly element has emerged in the form of one side’s conviction that its preferences are Right and the other side’s are Wrong. The science of economics shuns such moral posturing; the religion of environmentalism embraces it.

Steven E. Landsburg, “Why I Am Not An Environmentalist: The Science of Economics Versus the Religion of Ecology”, excerpt from The Armchair Economist: Economics & Everyday Life.

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