Quotulatiousness

June 8, 2021

The utter failure of political leadership in most countries during the pandemic

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Health, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Jay Currie runs through some of the many reasons our political leadership and their “expert class” advisors in most western countries were utter shit almost from the starting gun of the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic:

“Covid 19 Masks” by baldeaglebluff is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

The first response of most of our political class was to doggedly claim to be following the science, turn day to day decision making over to “public health experts”, follow the guidance of the WHO and the CDC – guidance which was, to be charitable, inconsistent – and to largely avoid questioning the experts. (Trump seemed to make some attempt to raise questions but made little headway in the face of his own public health bureaucracy.)

“Wipe everything” (which the CDC now concedes is pointless because the virus is rarely, if ever, transmitted by contact, “wash your hands” (good advice at any time), “social distance” (hilarious when in effect outdoors where there is next to no transmission), “walk this way” in the essential grocery and liquor stores, “wear a mask”, “wear two masks”, “stay home” (logical for two weeks, insane for six months), “curfew” (no known benefit, Quebec ended up being under curfew for five months), “no indoor dining” (despite next to no evidence that restaurants were significant sources of infection), “don’t travel” (with a vast list of exceptions), “don’t gather outdoors (unless BLM protest)” (ignoring entirely that the virus rarely spreads outdoors): it was all COVID theatre and, to paraphrase Dr. Bonnie Henry, “There’s no science to it.”

What the politicians did was simply to panic. They abdicated their responsibility to lead to “experts” who seemed to all be reading from the same “mass lockdown, masks everywhere, hang on for the vaccine, there is no treatment” script.

The key political failure was the acceptance of the “there is no treatment” story. Back in February/March 2020 there were suggestions that there might well be treatments of some sort. HCQ was trotted out and, partially because Trump mentioned it and partially because of very badly designed studies, dismissed. The very idea of a COVID treatment regime was, essentially, made illegal in Canada and much of the United States.

The idea of boosting immunity with things like Vitamin D and C and a good long walk every day did not come up at most of the Public Health Officer’s briefings across Canada. And, again, not very well done studies were cited showing that “Vitamin D does not cure COVID”. A claim which was not being made. A healthy immune system, to which Vitamin D can contribute, most certainly does cure COVID in the vast majority of cases.

Citing privacy concerns, public health officials were unwilling to give many details as to who was dying of or with COVID. Age, co-morbidities, race, and the socio-economic status of the dying were disclosed reluctantly and long after the fact.

I don’t think most of this can be blamed on the public health officials. They had their jobs to do and, to a greater or lesser degree, managed to do them. They are hired to apply current best practices – often mandated on a world wide basis by the WHO – to the situation before them. Public Health officials are not expected to be imaginative nor innovative.

Imagination, leadership, thinking outside the proverbial box is what we elect politicians for.

But, hey! Doesn’t Justin wear cool socks? Totally worth flushing decades of economic growth down the toilet for those nice socks! Canada’s back! (Back to 1974, approximately.)

May 26, 2021

The Line refutes arguments recently posted in … The Line

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Recently the editors at The Line accepted an article from the astroturf “advocacy” group Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, pushing the establishment line that all of us peons and useless idiots in the blogosphere and even a few undisciplined malcontents among the actual mainstream media are totally misunderstanding and misrepresenting what the government is trying to do with their “tax the web giants” initiative. Peter Menzies responds to the latest bullshit propaganda offensive:

[Mouthpiece for Friends of Canadian Broadcasting Daniel] Bernhard makes a great case for the regulation of tech giants, pointing to some truly dreadful things such as the New Zealand massacre streamed on Facebook, and exploitive content uploaded to Montreal’s PornHub.

To the best of my knowledge, none of the people listed above disagree with the Friends on this point. In fact, many have made the case that Bill C-10 is an unnecessary diversion from more serious online industry problems — some of which are addressed in another bill (C-11).

The big matters that need to be addressed by the government involve algorithms, data collection, privacy protection, and anti-competitive practices — not the facility of the Netflix search tool, nor whether the search term “Canadian” should pop up as a default selection.

My main point of disagreement to Bernhard’s piece is that the Internet is no more broadcasting than a cow is a caribou. Further, it’s ridiculous to think that an outmoded relic such as the 1991(!) Broadcasting Act is the proper tool to use to govern communications in the 21st Century (for those inclined, there is a complete policy paper available here that fleshes that out.)

In terms of the sections 2.1 vs 4.1 legal arguments, I’m pretty certain I will lose most of The Line readers if I delve into those details. I’m more than comfortable deferring to my fellow “militants” such as law professors Laidlaw and Geist, whose arguments have been so overwhelming that not even Attorney General David Lametti attempted to refute them in the defence of Guilbeault, who has now established himself as the most regressive Heritage Minister in the history of that ministry.

All readers really need to know is that, yes, Bill C-10 makes it legal for the CRTC to regulate your video or audio uploads if they are posted to “social media”, the definition of which will be left entirely up to the nine government-appointed CRTC commissioners. Who knows what they’ll come up with. There are no minutes of their meetings, so it’s impossible to know what they might be thinking.

I mean, if it was easy to define social media you’d think the government would have just done it, right? Similarly, if the legislation is aimed only at the bad behaviour of the “Web Giants” — the pejorative term Guilbeault has engaged — the bill ought to simply say that. But it doesn’t.

And as for the government-approved Canadian Content industry’s argument that it didn’t want to regulate/suppress the user generated content produced by the rest of us . . .

Oh Yes They Did.

May 15, 2021

Adventures in military procurement

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Back in September, Matt Gurney wrote about the generations-long travesty that is the Canadian government’s procurement system for the Canadian Armed Forces. I missed it at the time, but — this is a shock, I know — it’s still fully accurate and up-to-date, because the government hasn’t done anything to address the blatant failings of the “system”:

Browning High Power 9mm, the standard side-arm of the Canadian army since WW2.

Some history first: during the Second World War, Canada manufactured hundreds of thousands of Browning “Hi-Power” 9mm pistols. The pistols were originally made by Belgian manufacturer FN, but Belgium, of course, was overrun by the Nazis early in the war. The schematics and part diagrams were evacuated before the Germans arrived and the pistol saw service in numerous allied militaries. The Canadian army ended up acquiring 60,000 of them, all built in 1944 and 1945. And here’s where things get bonkers: we’ve never replaced them. Some Canadian military units have used more modern pistols, acquired in smaller batches, but the standard sidearm of the Canadian Armed Forces, today, isn’t just the same kind of pistol we used in the Second World War. It’s literally the same pistols.

Reliability issues with the pistols are a chronic problem. I mean, they’re 75 years old, and they’ve been in use continuously. Our military weapons technicians do what they can, and they’ve been stripping some pistols for spare parts to put into other pistols for decades. But the Hi-Powers are in desperate need of a replacement. They’re a generation overdue for replacement. But in keeping with the finest traditions of Canadian military procurement, we can’t get it done. It’s beyond our ability.

We’ve tried, sort of. At the start of 2017, the military began work on a replacement program that would have procured up to 25,000 new 9mm semi-automatic pistols for the Canadian Armed Forces. The military gave itself 10 years to get this accomplished and budgeted $50 million. It’s hard to overstate how crazy that is. Pistols aren’t complicated. If you have a credit card and a firearms licence, you can walk into a store and buy one. A lot of what the military needs is super complex and custom-made. Pistols are easy. There are factories all over the world that are already producing proven, reliable, affordable designs. Buying new pistols has got to be about the simplest procurement any military is ever going to face. And we still thought we’d need 10 years to do it. A decade.

The amazing thing is, by total fluke, in 2016, the British also decided they needed new pistols. And they also decided they needed 25,000 of them. This is entirely coincidental, but it’s a fantastically convenient coincidence: it’s a rare apples-to-apples comparison of two national procurement systems. And how’d it go?

Well, the Brits selected a type of pistol, purchased 25,000 of them and issued them to their military units by 2018. They wrapped the whole thing up in two years. The total cost was $15,000,000.

In Canada, we set a 10-year goal for the same thing, budgeted more than three times as much … but never got it off the ground. No progress was made.

So now, the military is trying again.

When I was in the militia in the late 1970s, we trained with the Browning, although even then we were told it was slated to be replaced within a few years. After thirty-some years of heavy use, the guns were still going strong, but definitely showing significant signs of wear and were probably already at the point they should have been retired even then.

May 9, 2021

“The PMO and senior defence officials knew [about the sexual assault allegations]. For three years. … No one cared.”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Media, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The federal government collectively and individually (in the person of Justin Trudeau’s chief of staff) continues to do their vastly unconvincing Sergeant Schultz imitation, “I see nothing! I hear nothing! I know nothing!”

John Banner as Sergeant Schultz in Hogan’s Heroes, 1965.
CBS Television promotional photo via Wikimedia Commons.

We at The Line ended a long week staring agog and aghast at Katie Telford, the prime minister’s chief of staff, who was interviewed by members of the Standing Committee on National Defence over her knowledge (such as it was) of the sexual misconduct allegations made against now-retired Army general Jonathan Vance.

Vance, until recently the chief of the defence staff, the highest position in the Canadian Armed Forces, was accused of sexual misconduct by a female subordinate in 2018, but nothing came of it because, well, hey, Telford explained. Life is complicated. Right?

We don’t really have the emotional wherewithal to summarize the entire proceeding at length. Suffice it to say that nothing new was learned. Telford’s defence continues to be the same as the ones offered by other Liberal officials — they knew there was an allegation of some kind, but not what the allegation was. And they were clearly content to leave it that way for three years. The problem for Telford, of course, is that Global News already obtained documents showing internal emails among senior staff openly discussing “sexual harassment” allegations against Vance. We accept that Telford and other high mucky-mucks didn’t know the details of the allegations, but if they didn’t know that they were related to sexual misconduct, their ignorance was a product of a deliberate, sustained multi-year effort.

Our official opposition wasn’t exactly draping itself in glory either, alas, which might explain why they remain a distant second in the polls. The Tory MPs on the committee clearly had their battle plan, and they were sticking to it: they wanted to know why Telford hadn’t told the PM that there had been allegations of some kind against Gen. Vance, or who had made that decision, if not her. We know that they wanted to know this because they asked her this 50 or so fucking times. And each time she just declined to answer, offering up some word salad instead. Yet the Tory MPs just kept going in again and again, like infantry marching into machine-gun nests in one of the dumber battles of the First World War. We assume their strategy was to create memorable soundbite moments of Telford refusing to answer, or maybe trip her up into a gotcha. But the Tories spent so much time repeating the one question Telford had already made manifestly clear she was not gonna answer that they didn’t ask a way better question: what the hell are women in the armed forces supposed to react to the fact that their government knew that there were sexual misconduct allegations against Gen. Vance, and that they just sat around and waited for him to retire three years later?

Look, we weren’t born yesterday. If we were, we wouldn’t be as exhausted as we are. (Though probably roughly equally as frightened of sudden loud noises.) We know that there is a political desire for the CPC to link Trudeau himself to the scandal. But there was a bigger, more profound scandal laying right before their eyes — everyone in the PMO and the senior levels of National Defence knew there were unanswered questions about Gen. Vance and they were all A-fucking-OK with that. For years. The right questions to ask weren’t what Trudeau knew, and when, or who chose to tell (or not tell) him this, that or the other thing. The only relevant question is how these people could dare look any female member of the military, or any of their loved ones, in the eyes.

The PMO and senior defence officials knew. For three years. They didn’t know everything, but they knew enough to know they should know more. No one cared. So Gen. Vance stayed in command, and oversaw the military’s efforts to, uh, root out sexual misconduct and end impunity among high-ranked abusers.

That’s what the CPC should have been asking about, and that’s what Canadians should be angry about. But they didn’t, and we aren’t. And that’s why nothing’s gonna change.

May 6, 2021

QotD: Bureaucracy and “Dunbar’s Number”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

    Dunbar’s number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships — relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person … By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, [Dunbar] proposed that humans can comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships.

    Wikipedia

Let’s stipulate that the “leader” of a “Dunbar Group” can effectively manage ALL of the group’s affairs. In our hypothetical community, “Dunbarville” (note that we’re doing a very Hobbesian “thought experiment” here), our leader – let’s call him Steve – can grasp the essentials of every issue facing the town. He doesn’t need to be an expert without portfolio. He doesn’t have to know all the ins-and-outs of, say, farming to be the effective leader of Dunbarville. However, he has to know that farming is a thing, the basics of how it’s done, understand the importance of well-maintained farms to the community, etc. Steve can delegate the management of Dunbarville’s kolkhoz to an experienced expert farmer, but Steve knows enough to be able to intervene effectively if the farm expert gets too big for his overalls.

Now consider what happens if Steve is any good at his job. Because Dunbarville’s kolkhoz is so well-managed, it can support a much larger population than 150. What does Steve do? Well, he knows that a population greater than 150 will be beyond his capacity to handle 100% effectively … but he also knows that forcing population restrictions on Dunbarville is the fastest way to get himself exiled, after which they’re going to have a baby boom anyway, so Steve does the best he can. In a few years he’s operating at 90% efficiency, then 70%, then 55%, because the community is simply growing too large for any one man to handle.

Now he has to delegate, and the delegation has to be permanent. Steve simply can’t keep up with everything that’s going on in the kolkhoz. So he delegates “kolkhoz management” to Gary. Gary’s not a bad guy – in fact, he’s the dude who managed the kolkhoz so well in the first place. But that task is, itself, now too big for even Gary to handle, so Gary hires some assistants. Worse, Gary knows he’s getting on in years, so to make sure the kolkhoz will keep working at peak, baby-boom-causing efficiency even after he’s gone, he sets up the Gary School of Farm Management …

And so forth, you get the point, we don’t have to run through the whole thing. That’s what I mean by “irreducible complexity” (IC). Once you clear the Dunbar Number, certain tasks have to be independently managed by cadres of experts who are only nominally answerable to the central authority. That’s where bureaucrats come in, and that’s where bureaucrats are good. Steve can’t manage ALL of Dunbarville’s affairs anymore, since it’s now a bustling community of 1,500, but he can manage the 150 bureaucrats who report to him. And since those bureaucrats are supervising only 150 people themselves …

Bureaucrats are, in effect, the re-imposition of a Dunbar Number on an increasingly complex society. When I say that the Roman Empire, for example, was under-bureaucratized, that’s what I mean. Maybe the Emperor had the good sense to limit his high officials to 150, but they had to manage 400 lower officials each, and each of those 400 were responsible for 20,000 peasants, or whatever the numbers actually were. That’s “irreducible complexity,” org-charts version. Unless you’ve got a perfectly balanced ratio of managers to managed, things are going to get very fuzzy at the edges, very fast … and that’s of course assuming complete competence on everyone’s part.

Severian, “Anticipations and Objections (I)”, Founding Questions, 2020-12-16.

April 30, 2021

Bill C-10, despite frequent government denials, would regulate user-generated content on the internet

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Michael Geist continues to sound the alarm about the federal government’s bill to vastly increase CRTC control over Canadians’ access to information and entertainment options online, including the Heritage minister’s mendacity when challenged about how the CRTC’s powers will increase to censor individual Canadians in what they post to online services like YouTube:

Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault and the Liberal government’s response to mounting concern over its decision to remove a legal safeguard designed to ensure the CRTC would not regulate user generated content has been denial. The department’s own officials told MPs that all programming on sites like Youtube would be subject to regulation, yet Guilbeault insisted to the House of Commons that user generated content would be excluded from regulation as part of Bill C-10, his Broadcasting Act reform bill.

However, based on new documents I recently obtained, it has become clear that Guilbeault and the government have misled the Canadian public with their response. In fact, the government effectively acknowledges that it is regulating user generated content in a forthcoming, still-secret amendment to Bill C-10. Amendment G-13, submitted by Liberal MP Julie Dabrusin on April 7th and likely to come before the committee studying the bill over the next week, seeks to amend Section 10(1) of the Broadcasting Act which specifies the CRTC’s regulatory powers. It states:

    (4) Regulations made under paragraph (1)(c) do not apply with respect to programs that are uploaded to an online undertaking that provides a social media service by a user of the service – if that user is not the provider of the service or the provider’s affiliate, or the agent or mandatary of either of them – for transmission over the Internet and reception by other users of the service.

The amendment is a clear acknowledgement that user generated content are programs subject to CRTC’s regulation making power. Liberal MPs may claim the bill doesn’t do this, but their colleagues are busy submitting amendments to address the reality.

But it is not just that the government knew that its changes would result in regulating user generated content. The forthcoming secret amendment only covers one of many regulations that the CRTC may impose. The specific regulation – Section 10(1)(c) of the Broadcasting Act – gives the CRTC the power to establish regulations “respecting standards of programs and the allocation of broadcasting time for the purpose of giving effect to the broadcasting policy set out in subsection 3(1).”

April 14, 2021

Schrödinger’s photo ID requirements

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Mark Steyn notes the odd inconsistency of US authorities insisting on or ignoring the need for photo ID for different demographics. So much for equal treatment in the United States.

“TSA Checkpoint” by phidauex is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Whenever you fly anywhere in America, you require picture ID — so that, when you get to the head of the great endless security line, the TSA agent can get out his jeweler’s loupe and examine how the ink lies on the paper. And, when he’s finished doing that, he can fish out his UV light to study the watermark on your ID.

Which is all bollocks even by the standards of American security-state bureaucracy. Why bother going to all the tedious trouble of fake ID when real ID is so easy to acquire? On September 11th 2001, four of the terrorists boarded the flight with genuine, valid picture ID issued by the state of Virginia and obtained through the illegal-immigrant day-workers’ network run out of the parking lot of the 7-Eleven in Falls Church.

If that didn’t get Americans mad about the cosseting of the undocumented, I doubt they’ll care a fig about this latest privilege. But I thought it worth mentioning anyway: While you’re stuck with the Loupe & Light guy poring over your ID, the federal government announced last week that migrants crossing the southern border will be permitted to fly within the United States without any valid ID. You’re on orange alert now and forever, they’re in the express check-in.

This is where selective enforcement of the laws always leads — to a broader contempt for all law, and an end to equality before the law. In 2021 no developed nation needs mass unskilled immigration. Some have it for historical reasons — a hangover of empire, as in Britain and France; some have it for sentimentalist pseudo-humanitarian reasons, as in Sweden and Norway. But neither of these rationales account for what the laughably misnamed Department of Homeland Security is doing at America’s southern border.

April 13, 2021

“… loving a country also means being honest. We should never get high on our own own flag-covered, syrup-scented supply.”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Health — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Lauren Dobson-Hughes sits Canada down for a bit of an intervention:

Once upon a time, there was a fairytale castle with soaring turrets and gabled windows. The castle had long been undergoing renovations, so the owners draped the scaffolding with trompe l’oeil cloths — fabric imprinted with the image of the historical building beneath, to maintain an impression of the beauty hidden below.

From the cloth, you imagined the castle must be stunning. And yet behind the façade, it is crumbling. Its walls are mold-ridden, and the floors are rotten. The scaffolding props up a shell.

This metaphor has come to represent the way I’ve come to think about Canada since this pandemic began. As a country, we are so fixated on the mythology we project out to others — the trompe l’oeil cloth — that we’ve allowed the actual capacities, systems and structures of our country to crumble.

The first inkling came early in the pandemic. As COVID-19 numbers rose, it was revealed that the Public Health Agency of Canada did not have nationwide case numbers. This piece delves further, but “Ottawa does not have automatic access to data in [provincial and territorial] systems.” Provinces were sending daily case numbers to Ottawa on paper. This is one small example, but a revealing one. In fact, we lack a nationwide public-health system at all. And as the auditor-general’s report showed, we also lack the knowledge and expertise — the skilled people — to manage crises like this, too.

Then came protracted discussions about financial support for Canadians affected by lockdowns. The debate was not about whether Canadians deserved help — it was that Canada’s financial systems are so outdated and disjointed, that we literally could not work out how to get money from the federal government into bank accounts. It shouldn’t be this complex. In a functioning country, the central revenue agency should be able to transfer money to people without task forces of bureaucrats and experts, the establishment of new IT systems, and McGyvering an assortment of existing programs.

[…]

The list it goes on — the chaotic vaccine roll-out, the fractured public communications, the devolving of responsibilities to the very most local level with little overarching purpose or even organization. All of it marked by disjointed, outdated systems, lack of skills and know-how, and no overall goal or narrative. We need to face it — we have allowed our nation to crumble from the inside, while holding tight to the mythology that we’re an effective, functioning country.

At this point, I feel the need for a disclaimer that I love Canada. But loving a country also means being honest. We should never get high on our own own flag-covered, syrup-scented supply.

April 3, 2021

QotD: When governments try to “help” small businesses

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Government, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In 1961, economist Benjamin Chinitz argued that New York was more resilient than Pittsburgh because New York possessed a culture of entrepreneurship, originally inculcated by the garment industry, where anyone with a good idea and a couple of sewing machines could start a business. By contrast, gritty cities like Pittsburgh, dominated by large smokestack industries that tended to snuff out small-scale entrepreneurial activity, eventually faced a crisis when those industries grew less profitable, and the local economy struggled to adjust.

Love for small business is one of the few universals in American politics. In a 2018 Gallup poll, just 56 percent of Americans viewed capitalism positively; but 92 percent had a positive view of small business, and 86 percent viewed entrepreneurs positively. Government at all levels has policies intended to help small businesses, but there’s little evidence that these programs are effective — and even when bureaucrats try to help, they impede small-business creation by imposing new regulations. The New York City Business License and Permit index presents a daunting compendium of licenses and certifications that can be required to start a business in the city — such as the Esthetics License (needed if you want to “conduct beauty treatment”) and the Certificate of Fitness for Fire and Emergency Drill Instructor (necessary to “lead fire drills in buildings that do not require a Fire Safety Director”).

Such overregulation represents a second way that the deck gets stacked in the American economy against outsiders. The decline of American entrepreneurship is a discouraging trend of the last 30 years. In 2015, economist John Haltiwanger documented numerous signs of diminished business dynamism in the United States. In the early 1980s, he noted, America’s startup rate exceeded 13 percent, which meant that about one-eighth of all firms had just begun. The startup share fell to 10 percent near the end of the Clinton years and below 8 percent during the Great Recession. While no consensus exists about the causes of this dramatic drop, expanding business regulation is a plausible candidate.

Edward L. Glaeser, “How to Fix American Capitalism”, City Journal, 2020-12-13.

March 24, 2021

Eichmann: Mass Murderer or Train Conductor? – WW2 Biography Special

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 23 Mar 2021

Adolf Eichmann was one of the masterminds behind the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”. Or was he? In his trial, he argued to be merely a bureaucrat who was following orders. This episode attempts to shine a light on the real role of this controversial figure.

Did 90 Minutes Decide the Fate of the Jews? – The Wannsee Conference – WAH 027 – January 1942 Pt. 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd1gH…​

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Or join The TimeGhost Army directly at: https://timeghost.tv

Follow WW2 day by day on Instagram @ww2_day_by_day – https://www.instagram.com/ww2_day_by_day
Between 2 Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sources

Hosted by: Spartacus Olsson
Written by: Spartacus Olsson, Joram Appel
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Joram Appel
Edited by: Karolina Dołęga
Sound design: Marek Kamiński

Colorizations by:
Daniel Weiss
Spartacus Olsson
Mikołaj Uchman

Sources:
– Yad Vashem: 3887/1, Y69EO4_, 1605/1431, 102co3, 76/68, 4229/59, 29/56, 73GO3_, 74AO9_, 1922/6, 2749/3, 2986/71, 4229/61, 03/198, 4613/789, 73AO6, 1572/17,
– United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
– Bundesarchiv
– Icons from the Noun Project: freight car by Evgeni Moryakov, School by Adrien Coquet, Watchtower by Eliricon
– Picture of Frontkämpfervereinigung in 1925 courtesy of Wienbibliothek im Rathaus, Tagblattarchiv Fotosammlung, TF-999034
– Picture of Wannsee villa courtesy of JoJan from Wikimedia Commons
– Library of Congress

Soundtracks from Epidemic Sound:
– “Rememberance” – Fabien Tell
– “Deviation In Time” – Johannes Bornlof
– “Last Minute Reaction” – Phoenix Tail
– “It’s Not a Game” – Philip Ayers
– “Moving to Disturbia” – Experia

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com​.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

March 16, 2021

QotD: Combat accounting

Filed under: Asia, Bureaucracy, Humour, Military, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… for the pilots and crew of one such helicopter, the law of averages caught up to them, and the helicopter, being test-flown well out over the ocean, disappeared without a trace. No mayday, no clue, just a helo and several souls gone, amidst a war that was eating both like a ravenous beast.

Enter the flexible and utilitarian morals and institutional larceny that allows the best-run military machines to cope with the insanity of war. Because a squadron, roughly comparable in size to an infantry battalion, is several hundred men, and even at 1960s prices, multiple millions of dollars worth of machines, tools, parts, equipment, and miscellany, from nuts and bolts to aircraft engines, and everything in between. Canteens, machine guns, flak jackets, toilet seats, high explosive ordnance, and everything else you can imagine, and a million things you cannot, in quantities normally only encountered at a Wal-Mart or Target store, or aboard a 100-car freight train.

And not to put the point too finely, 8000 miles away from home, in a war zone where things were destroyed daily by tons of bombs, rockets, mines, shells, bullets, and of course, the finest pilfering skills of one of the most thriving black market economies of all time. Anything not guarded 24/7 would disappear in minutes in Vietnam, up to and including entire aircraft and other major end-user items. (Think things like APCs, tanks, artillery pieces, jeeps, etc.)

And senior NCOs and junior officers are responsible for all that stuff, as well as every commanding officer having to personally sign for and accept responsibility for everything down to the last door knob and belt buckle. Which, amidst such widespread theft and combat destruction, was sheer insanity coupled with practical impossibility.

Until the helicopter went missing.

Because after a dutiful search for survivors yielded nothing whatsoever, a report had to be filed, and items accounted for. Whereupon some shifty but brilliant NCO or senior NCO pointed out to a junior officer that it would be rather convenient to cover for all the tons of things blown up, stolen, lost, pilfered, etc., to just include them on the manifest and equipment carried on that now gone-forever helicopter.

And so, in rapid order, every crew chief, maintenance shop, and officer from warrant to XO certified, in detail, the manifest of tools, spare parts, and military miscellany that had been aboard the doomed flight, and the CO signed off on it, immediately bringing the reality of property on hand into line with what was actually able to be found, touched, and wielded by that squadron.

This boon to military accounting had, of course, the obvious flaw.

Someone higher up in the hierarchy, presented with the dozens of pages of missing gear on the missing aircraft, did some napkin math, and observed deftly that the weight of the missing items would be roughly twenty times the maximum lifting capacity of the helicopter in question, and the only way a craft actually so burdened could have achieved aerial flight was if someone had detonated an explosive device under the skids in the mid-teen kiloton range. Otherwise, it would have been like trying to get an elephant off the ground using a pair of hummingbird wings.

But the military being the military, no one wanted to rock the boat, and so the obviously fraudulent work of fiction was funneled right back to the gaping maw of Pentagon reports, where it disappeared like the Ark of the Covenant at the end of Raiders Of The Lost Ark, and the cosmic scales were in balance.

Raconteur, “Squadron Property and Cultural Rubicons”, Raconteur Report, 2018-09-27.

March 2, 2021

Warship purchasing is not for the faint-of-heart

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Economics, Government, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Campbell talks about the way the Royal Canadian Navy plans for warship purchases … and how the best-laid plans can be derailed by ignorant political advisors:

An artist’s rendition of BAE’s Type 26 Global Combat Ship, which was selected as the Canadian Surface Combatant design in 2019, the most recent “largest single expenditure in Canadian government history” (until the RCAF gets their replacement for the CF-18 Hornet).
(BAE Systems, via Flickr)

Once upon time,* about 25 to 30 years ago, in the mid 1990s, when I was the director of a small, very specialized team in National Defence Headquarters (NDHQ) in Ottawa, something like this happened: One of my colleague, who had a title like Director of Maritime Requirements or something similar said to one of his principle subordinates, “Look, now that the 280s (Canada had four Tribal Class destroyers with pennant numbers starting at 280, they were often just called ‘280s’) are finished their mid-life refit and now that the new frigates are entering service it is time to put a ‘placeholder’ in the DSP for their eventual replacements.” The DSP was (still is?) the Defence Services Programme, it is the internal document which sets out the long range spending plans (maybe hopes is a better word) for the Canadian Armed Forces.

Anyway, the Navy commander (the officer assigned to write the document, not the Commander of the Royal Canadian Navy who is nicknamed the Kraken (CRCN)) sat at his desk and consulted the most recently approved planning document which, as far as I can remember, called for a surface fleet of 25 combat vessels and four large support ships plus numerous minor war vessels (like minesweepers) and training vessels. The officer then prepared a memorandum for the joint planning staff which said that the Navy would need 25 new combat ships, to be procured between about 2015 and 2035, in five “batches” of five ships each** at a total cost of about $100 Billion, in 2025 dollars. He didn’t say much beyond that, actually, he was just intending to “reserve” some money a generation or so in the future. His memorandum sailed, smoothly, past his boss and the commodore but questions came from a very senior Air Force general: Where he asked, did the $100 Billion come from? That was an outrageous number, he said.

A meeting ensure where the Navy engineering people came and said, “$100 Billion is a very reasonable guesstimate. Our brand new frigate are costing $1 Billion each when they come down the slipway. They will each have cost the taxpayers two to three times that by the time we send them to be broken up thirty or forty years from now. Adding in the inevitable costs of new technology and inflation, which we know is higher for things like military ships and aircraft than it is for consumer goods, then a life-cycle cost of $4 Billion for each ship is very conservative. The admirals and generals huffed and puffed but they didn’t argue ~ they knew that the engineering branch insisted on using life cycle costing, even though no-one but them understood it, and they also knew that arguing with engineers is like mud-wrestling with pigs: everyone gets dirty but the pigs love it.

A decade later, when a new government was planning the National Shipbuilding Procurement Strategy, which was all about making the Canadian shipbuilding industry competitive and had very little to do with ships ~ except they would be the “product” for which the Government of Canada would pay top-dollar, the Navy was told it could have fewer ships, in two classes, and someone ~ NOT the military’s engineering branch ~ assigned a cost figure to the project which was, to be charitable, pulled out of some political/public relations staffer’s arse.

[…]

* The story is true, in general, but I was not directly involved in any of it. I learned about what happened from three main sources: 1. routine briefings that my bosses (directors-general and branch chiefs) gave, regularly, to we directors, dealing with what was going on in the HQ and in the big wide world; 2. periodic chats with my colleagues, after work on Friday afternoons, in the bar of the Officers’ Mess ~ many of us regarded 2. as a more reliable source of information than 1.; and 3. in the case of the story about the Navy engineers and the Air Force general, by a friend and colleague who was in the room.

** The idea, long before the National Shipbuilding Strategy, was to keep shipyards moderately busy on a continuous basis. The 25 ships would all be similar: the first “batch” of five would be identical, one to the other; the second “batch” would be very similar but with some improvements; the five ships of batch 3 would be similar to the ships from the second batch and those from batch 4 would be rather like their batch 3 sisters. Finally, the batch 5 ships would be product improved versions of batch 4 ~ they would still be “sisters” of the batch 1 ships, but not, in any way, twins. The idea was that about the time that the batch 5 ships were being delivered the first of the batch 1 ships would be getting ready for a mid-life refit (after 15 to 20 years of service) which would result in it being much more like the batch 5 ships … and so on.

February 6, 2021

“WebMD is the Internet’s most important source of medical information. It’s also surprisingly useless”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Health, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Scott Alexander discusses why WebMD is not the be-all and end-all of internet medical resources:

WebMD is the Internet’s most important source of medical information. It’s also surprisingly useless. Its most famous problem is that whatever your symptoms, it’ll tell you that you have cancer. But the closer you look, the more problems you notice. Consider drug side effects. Here’s WebMD’s list of side effects for a certain drug, let’s call it Drug 1:

    Upset stomach and heartburn may occur. If either of these effects persist or worsen, tell your doctor or pharmacist promptly. If your doctor has directed you to use this medication, remember that he or she has judged that the benefit to you is greater than the risk of side effects. Many people using this medication do not have serious side effects. Tell your doctor right away if you have any serious side effects, including: easy bruising/bleeding, difficulty hearing, ringing in the ears, signs of kidney problems (such as change in the amount of urine), persistent or severe nausea/vomiting, unexplained tiredness, dizziness, dark urine, yellowing eyes/skin. This drug may rarely cause serious bleeding from the stomach/intestine or other areas of the body. If you notice any of the following very serious side effects, get medical help right away: black/tarry stools, persistent or severe stomach/abdominal pain, vomit that looks like coffee grounds, trouble speaking, weakness on one side of the body, sudden vision changes or severe headache.

And here’s their list of side effects for let’s call it Drug 2:

    Nausea, loss of appetite, or stomach/abdominal pain may occur. If any of these effects persist or worsen, tell your doctor or pharmacist promptly. Remember that your doctor has prescribed this medication because he or she has judged that the benefit to you is greater than the risk of side effects. Many people using this medication do not have serious side effects. This medication can cause serious bleeding if it affects your blood clotting proteins too much. Even if your doctor stops your medication, this risk of bleeding can continue for up to a week. Tell your doctor right away if you have any signs of serious bleeding, including: unusual pain/swelling/discomfort, unusual/easy bruising, prolonged bleeding from cuts or gums, persistent/frequent nosebleeds, unusually heavy/prolonged menstrual flow, pink/dark urine, coughing up blood, vomit that is bloody or looks like coffee grounds, severe headache, dizziness/fainting, unusual or persistent tiredness/weakness, bloody/black/tarry stools, chest pain, shortness of breath, difficulty swallowing.

Drug 1 is aspirin. Drug 2 is warfarin, which causes 40,000 ER visits a year and is widely considered one of the most dangerous drugs in common use. I challenge anyone to figure out, using WebMD’s side effects list alone, that warfarin is more dangerous than aspirin. I think this is because if WebMD said “aspirin is pretty safe and most people don’t need to worry about it”, people might use aspirin irresponsibly, die, and then their ghosts might sue WebMD. Or if WebMD said “warfarin can be dangerous, be careful with this one”, people might refuse to take warfarin because “the Internet said it was dangerous”, die of the stuff warfarin is supposed to treat, and then their ghosts might sue WebMD. WebMD solves this by never giving the tiniest shred of useful information to anybody.

This is actually a widespread problem in medicine. The worst offender is the FDA, which tends to list every problem anyone had while on a drug as a potential drug side effect, even if it obviously isn’t. This got some press lately when Moderna had to disclose to the FDA that one of the coronavirus vaccine patients got struck by lightning; after a review, this was declared probably unrelated. For the more serious version of this, read Get Ready For False Side Effects. Why does the FDA keep doing this if they know it makes their label information useless? My guess is it’s because they don’t want to look like cowboys who unprincipledly consider some things but not other things. What if someone accused the person deciding what things to consider of being biased? So the FDA comes up with a Procedure, and once you have a Procedure it has to be “take everything seriously”, and then it falls on random small-fry people who aren’t the FDA to pick up the slack and explain which side effects are worth worrying about or not, and then those small fries don’t do that, because they could get sued.

I think the same concern motivates WebMD diagnosing everything as cancer. If they said something other than cancer, then people might sigh with relief, not bother to get a cancer screening, die from some weird cancer that doesn’t present the way normal cancers do, and then their ghosts might sue WebMD.

Of course, WebMD and other online medical information sites didn’t invent hypochondria, they merely made it easier to do to yourself what Jerome K. Jerome did one fine London morning in 1888:

I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch — hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into — some fearful, devastating scourge, I know — and, before I had glanced half down the list of “premonitory symptoms,” it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.

I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever — read the symptoms — discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it — wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus’s Dance — found, as I expected, that I had that too, — began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically — read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright’s disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid’s knee. […] I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.

January 30, 2021

Obey your technocratic elites, peasant!

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Government, History, Liberty, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Scott Alexander considers some historical (and current) examples of you peasants being steamrolled by the powers of the government at the behest of the technological elites of the day:

I am not defending technocracy.

Nobody ever defends technocracy. It’s like “elitism” or “statism”. There is no Statist Party. Nobody holds rallies demanding more statism. There is no Citizens for Statism Facebook page with thousands of likes and followers.

[…] it worries me that everyone analyzes the exact same three examples of the failures of top-down planning: Soviet collective farms, Brasilia, and Robert Moses. I’d like to propose some other case studies:

1. Mandatory vaccinations: Technocrats used complicated mathematical models to determine that mass vaccination would create a “herd immunity” to disease. Certain that their models were “objectively” correct and so could not possibly be flawed, these elites decided to force vaccines on a hostile population. Despite popular protest (did you know that in 1800s England, anti-smallpox-vaccine rallies attracted tens of thousands of demonstrators?), these technocrats continued to want to “arrogantly remake the world in their image,” and pushed ahead with their plan, ignoring normal citizens’ warnings that their policies might have unintended consequences, like causing autism.

2. School desegregation: Nine unelected experts with Harvard and Yale degrees, using a bunch of Latin terms like a certiori and de facto that ordinary people could not understand let alone criticize, decided to completely upend the traditional education system of thousands of small communities to make it better conform to some rules written in a two-hundred-year-old document. The communities themselves opposed it strongly enough to offer violent resistance, but the technocrats steamrolled over all objections and sent in the National Guard to enforce their orders.

US Highway System needs in 1965 from “Needs of the Highway Systems 1955-1984”, a letter from the Secretary of Commerce to the House Committee on Public Works, approved May 6, 1954.
US Government Printing Office via Wikimedia Commons.

3. The interstate highway system: 1950s army bureaucrats with a Prussia fetish decided America needed its own equivalent of the Reichsautobahn. The federal government came up with a Robert-Moses-like plan to spend $114 billion over several decades to build a rectangular grid of numbered giant roads all up and down the country, literally paving over whatever was there before, all according to pre-agreed federal standards. The public had so little say in the process that they started hundreds of freeway revolts trying to organize to prevent freeways from being built through their cities; the government crushed these when it could, and relocated the freeways to less politically influential areas when it couldn’t.

4. Climate change: In the second half of the 20th century, scientists determined that carbon dioxide emissions were raising global temperatures, with potentially catastrophic consequences. Climatologists created complicated formal models to determine how quickly global temperatures might rise, and economists designed clever from-first-principle mechanisms that could reduce emissions, like cap-and-trade systems and carbon taxes. But these people were members of the elite toying with equations that could not possibly include all the relevant factors, and who were vulnerable to their elite biases. So the United States decided to leave the decision up to democratic mechanisms, which allowed people to contribute “outside-the-system” insights like “Actually global warming is fake and it’s all a Chinese plot”.

5. Coronavirus lockdowns: The government appointed a set of supposedly infallible scientist-priests to determine when people were or weren’t allowed to engage in normal economic activity. The scientist-priests, who knew nothing about the complex set of factors that make one person decide to go to a rock festival and another to a bar, decided that vast swathes of economic activity they didn’t understand must stop. The ordinary people affected tried to engage in the usual mechanisms of democracy, like complaining, holding protests, and plotting to kidnap their governors – but the scientist-priests, certain that their analyses were “objective” and “fact-based”, thought ordinary people couldn’t possibly be smart enough to challenge them, and so refused to budge.

Nobody uses the word “technocrat” except when they’re criticizing something. So “technocracy” accretes this entire language around it – unintended consequences, the perils of supposed “objectivity”, the biases inherent in elite paradigms. And then when you describe something using this language, it’s like “Oh, of course that’s going to fail – everything like that has always failed before!”

But if you accept that “technocracy” describes things other than Soviet farming, Brasilia, and Robert Moses, the trick stops working. You notice a lot of things you could describe using the same vocabulary were good decisions that went well. Then you have to ask yourself: is Seeing Like A State the definitive proof that technocratic schemes never work? Or is it a compendium of rare man-bites-dog style cases, interesting precisely because of how unusual they are?

I want to make it really clear that I’m not saying that technocracy is good and democracy is bad. I’m saying that this is actually a hard problem. It’s not a morality play, where you tell ghost stories about scary High Modernists, point vaguely in the direction of Brasilia, say some platitudes about how no system can ever be truly unbiased, and then your work is done. There are actually a bunch of complicated reasons why formal expertise might be more useful in some situations, and local knowledge might be more useful in others.

January 13, 2021

QotD: Bureaucracy as a filter

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Health, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Imagine there’s a new $10,000 medication. Insurance companies are legally required to give it to people who really need it and would die without it. But they don’t want somebody who’s only a little bit sick demanding it as a “lifestyle” drug. In principle doctors are supposed to help with this, but doctors have no incentive to ever say no to their patients. If the insurance just sends the doctor a form asking “does this patient really need this medication?”, the doctor will always just check “yes” and send it back. Even if the form says in big red letters PLEASE ONLY SAY YES IF THERE IS AN IMPORTANT MEDICAL NEED, the doctor will still check “yes” more often than a rational central planner allocating scarce resources would like. And insurance companies are sometimes paranoid about refusing to do things doctors say are important, because sometimes the doctor was right and then they can get sued.

But imagine it takes the doctor an hour of painful phone calls to even get the right person from the insurance company on the line. Now there’s a cost involved. If your patient is going to die without the medication, you’ll probably groan and start making the phone calls. But if your patient doesn’t really need it, and you just wanted to approve it in order to be nice, now you might start having a heartfelt talk with your patient about the importance of trying less expensive medications before jumping right to the $10,000 one.

Organizations have a legal incentive not to deny people things, because the people involved can sue them. But they have an economic incentive not to say yes to every request they get. Seeing how much time and exasperation people are willing to put up with in order to get what they want is an elegant way of separating out the needy from the greedy if every other option is closed to you.

This story makes sense and would help explain why bureaucracy gets so bad, but I’m not sure it really fits the evidence. People complain a lot about bureaucracy in places like the Department of Motor Vehicles, but the DMV doesn’t lose anything by giving you a drivers license and isn’t interested in separating out people who really want licenses from people who only want them a little. If the DMV can be as bureaucratic as it is without any conspiratorial explanation, maybe everything is as bureaucratic as it is without any conspiratorial explanation.

Scott Alexander, “Bureaucracy as Active Ingredient”, Slate Star Codex, 2018-08-31.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress