Quotulatiousness

October 30, 2020

Cancelling Halloween? I thought the Grinch only worked Christmas…

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

At The Line, Jen Gerson argues against cancelling the Halloween trick-or-treat candy hoarding:

“SHA Halloween ‘trick or treat’” by U.S. Army Garrison Japan is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Look, I can empathize with the impulse to do something, DO ANYTHING, to stem the concerning growth of COVID-19 cases. But if you were to craft a low-risk family holiday that offered a psychologically necessary reprieve from the joyless grind of the last year, you couldn’t do much better than trick-or-treating.

It’s children (low risk), outdoors (low risk), in masks (low risk), engaging in the briefest possible social interactions (medium risk). Yet Canadians have received mixed advice about the tradition; some jurisdictions have cautioned parents to skip it. Gatineau has, reasonably, restricted Halloween parties, but permitted trick-or-treating with restrictions.

I’ve asked several doctors — The Line‘s personal panel of COVID-19 experts — to weigh in on Halloween. Their responses on trick-or-treating prohibitions ranged from: “(this is) extraordinarily dumb” and “I would write something about it but I wouldn’t be able to express myself without extreme profanity.” To “pretty safe” and “shouldn’t be cancelled” as long as reasonable precautions are enacted — like masking, distancing, and perhaps re-thinking trick-or-treating in apartment buildings. Leaving a bowl filled with candy on the porch, rather than opening the door for every little germy ghoul, is also a reasonable precaution.

One person expressed concern that trick-or-treating would inevitably lead to adult schmoozing — but this does not bear a resemblance to any version of this tradition that I have ever experienced. The purpose of trick-or-treating is to maximize the efficient collection of candy; any adult who dawdled or took a drink at a neighbour’s house would find himself deeply at odds with his screaming and fitful progeny. But then, I was somebody’s particularly terrible progeny.

Then there’s this piece of advice from Oregon, noted in the video above, in which a beclowned public health official advised against “trick or treat events because of the high risk of people crowding and people congregating in areas close together.”

If your memory has not yet blanked this absurdity out, it’s vaguely similar to the logic of Ottawa public health officials who last April advised against chatting over the fence with a neighbour because: “It kind of starts with that and then a couple more people add on and before you know it you have a parking lot party or a backyard party.”

(Ottawa walked that recommendation back shortly afterward.)

October 29, 2020

How to fix the CBC

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

… aside from cutting off the massive subsidies from the federal government, which would be my preferred solution if “nuke it from orbit” isn’t a viable choice. Let it sink or swim as a purely private media entity — I’d be betting on the “sink”, personally because they don’t currently have to compete thanks to their funding from the feds and are not noted for their quick adaptation skills. However, Peter Menzies isn’t quite as anti-CBC as I am:

In a recent piece here at The Line, I lamented the current status of the CBC. That’s easy enough to do, but it’s fair to ask what can actually be done to fix it. These ideas don’t provide all the answers but, implemented with conviction and speed, here’s where to start. Because there are some things that can be done, and relatively quickly, to revitalize the institution: the CBC may well be hell-bent on its own destructive dualism but clarifying its role and purifying its soul are still possible by getting it out of the advertising business and turning it into a proper public media.

Right now, the CBC is neither fish nor fowl. Sometimes, as with radio, it is a popular public broadcaster. At others, with its television channels, it fancies itself a commercial broadcaster, albeit a publicly-funded and relatively unpopular one. It plows both of those personalities into its commercial online operations and supplements them with reportage of the kind traditionally associated with newspapers. Like a creature of mythology, it shape-shifts through all of these roles as best suits its needs and moods.

On top of that, its OMG obsession with Trump’s America has drawn it far away from its content mandate to ensure Canadians learn about each other wherever they live in this vast and beautiful country. While its performance indicates otherwise, CBC’s purpose is not to secure a large audience share in the GTA or, in French, in Montreal, in order to earn more revenue. Nor is CBC News Network’s mandate to compete with CNN. The Corp’s raison d’etre, as defined in legislation, is to tell Canadians each other’s stories — even if the GTA and Montreal don’t care.

The only way to purify the CBC then, is to ban it — once and for all — from collecting advertising revenue from domestic consumption of its product. As its radio operations are already advertising-free this means no more ads on its TV or websites. Done. Finished.

October 27, 2020

Conspiracy theories grow thanks to mistrust of public officials and media

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

It’s commonplace to say that such-and-such a conspiracy theory is merely an intellectual playground for the paranoid and the gullible, but conspiracy theories don’t spontaneously generate — at least not the ones that gain wide audiences. Daniel Miller looks at some of the reasons these theories become attractive and gain adherents:

QAnon alleged clues about the NYC bombing, 10 December 2017.
Wikimedia Commons.

In the wake of six months of mixed-messages and baffling government policies, following four years, if not twenty years, of mystifying imponderables, the concept of a “conspiracy theory” has recently reentered the lexicon of semi-criminalized thought.

In August The New York Times stigmatized anti-lockdown protesters in Berlin as a worrying admixture of “neo-Nazi groups, conspiracy theorists as well as Germans who said they were fed up with the restrictions” and similar language was used about the protesters in London, as social media companies began purging accounts linked to the QAnon conspiracy theory, which conjectures that the world is controlled by a secret global cabal of blood-drinking sex criminals.

Believing conspiracy theories, evidently, is a Bad Thing, but any concept capacious enough to incorporate both the tens, even hundreds of millions of people skeptical about the global political response to SARS-2, and the much smaller number entertaining more involved explanations demands a careful analysis.

Really the first question is who you can trust. One answer is the official authorities, as represented by the esteemed New York Times, but the news website which welcomed the 45th US President to office with three years of spurious coverage of what turned out to be the Russiagate hoax, before pivoting to the historical phantasmagoria of the 1619 Project, no longer strikes everyone as the impeccable source which revealed the existence of Saddam Hussein’s WMD stockpile and links to Al-Qaeda before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, or whose Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Walter Duranty discounted rumours of a 1933 famine in the Soviet Union as “an exaggeration or malignant propaganda.”

This leaves individuals only to their own wits and devices in the face of a puzzling world in which information is everywhere, much of it questionable, not all the facts are available, and many are ultra-politicized, and meanwhile, unknown agendas are being continually carried out.

What’s really going on? As with any speculative enterprise, the problem is to construct a plausible hypothesis by using various models to interpret limited data. There is no question that, at different moments in history, individuals and groups have worked together in secrecy to launch conspiratorial exploits and there is no obvious reason for thinking this practice has now totally ceased. “People of the same trade seldom meet together,” observed Adam Smith in 1776, “even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public.” Still, this is not in itself evidence of any specific plot happening now.

October 25, 2020

Canada’s broken [REDACTED] to [REDACTED] [REDACTED]

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

In The Line, a look at the failings of the federal government’s promises to fix the badly broken Access to Information system:

Sometimes, Line readers, though we always strive to be fair, we cannot deny that certain politicians are just fun to skewer. Because some of them are just terrible, terrible people, and while we polite Canadians don’t normally report too much on the personal lives of our elected leaders, well, what can we say? When you can, within responsible journalistic bounds, give a dirtbag a hard time for falling down on the job, hey. Life is good!

Patty Hajdu, the federal minister of health, is actually … perfectly pleasant. This isn’t unheard of in our politicians, but it’s rare enough to mention here, all to make very clear that we take no particular pleasure in reporting on her pathetic performance this week. But report it we must. And pathetic it surely was.

Under sharp questioning by Tory MP Michelle Rempel Garner, Hajdu very carefully and deliberately aimed a soon-to-be-banned .44 Magnum revolver at her foot, waited a dramatic second for effect, and then figuratively blew her poor extremity to smithereens. Rempel Garner had been asking about the abysmally broken state of the federal access-to-information systems, and Hajdu, with all-too-Liberal scorn, stood up and declared:

    Mr. Speaker, I have spoken to hundreds, if not thousands, of Canadians since the pandemic was first announced, when COVID-19 arrived on our shores. In fact, not once has a Canadian asked me to put more resources into freedom of information officers. What they have asked me for is to ensure that all the resources of Canada are devoted to one thing, and that is the health, safety and economic prosperity of our country. We are going to continue to make sure that Canada has the most robust response possible.

There are two gigantic problems with Hajdu’s answer there.

The first is that Canada’s access-to-information regime is notoriously dysfunctional, and her government has long admitted that. Indeed, fixing this disgrace was a major plank in the party’s 2015 platform.

In the years since, the government has effectively accomplished the square root of zero.

QotD: The omnibenevolent, omniscient state

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

If the state were all-wise and all-good it is conceivable that it would not misuse its supreme economic power. But the idea that the state is somehow wiser and better than the best of its citizens is a metaphysical delusion. In practice the concentration of all economic power in the hands of the state … has hitherto always been followed by the enslavement of thought and action. “Power corrupts”, and states do not differ from individuals in this respect. But the tyranny of an individual is limited by the circumscribed area of his power, whereas the power of the collectivist state is boundless; and the concentration of all power in the hands of the state will in practice almost certainly be followed by the imposition of a rigid orthodoxy in belief.

Ivor Thomas, The Socialist Tragedy, 1951.

October 22, 2020

Carbon taxes may be the most efficient way to address GHG emissions, but no government has implemented them properly

Filed under: Business, Economics, Environment, Government — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I was persuaded by the economic arguments in favour of a carbon tax to address the externaly of greenhouse gas emissions, but I’ve long been skeptical that governments would actually implement them in a way to minimize economic distortion. A report from the Fraser Institute this week shows I was right to be doubtful, as none of the 31 OECD countries in the study have managed to introduce some form of carbon pricing without political “tinkering” … rather than replacing inefficient regulations, taxes and mandates with the carbon tax, they’ve generally just added carbon pricing on top of existing rules, making the carbon pricing scheme merely another tax grab that fails to achieve the stated goals:

Most economists consider human-made greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions an unintended negative externality of production and consumption. A negative externality occurs when the effects of producing or consuming goods and services impose costs on a third party which are not reflected in the prices charged for said goods and services. In the context of GHG emissions, this negative externality is calculated using the “social cost of carbon,” which is the future damage to society (adjusted to present value) of one additional tonne of carbon emitted to the atmosphere today.

Governments have a wide variety of policy alternatives to address the negative externality of emissions depending on the degree and depth of the policy intervention. They can either mandate individuals and firms to change their behaviour through com­mand-and-control regulations, grant subsidies and tax credits to foster cleaner energy sources, or use market-based mechanisms to correct the misalignment of incentives. It is widely acknowledged that carbon pricing, one of these market tools, is the most cost-effective policy to reduce emissions, as it relies on price signals and trade to provide flex­ibility to economic agents as to where and how emissions mitigation occurs.

[…]

This report includes thirty-one high-income OECD countries, where each country has either implemented a carbon tax, an ETS [emissions trading system], or a combination of both pricing mechan­isms. Carbon taxes are being implemented in 14 of them whereas 25 of these countries have their emissions covered by an ETS. Our analysis finds that, on average, 74 percent of carbon tax revenues in high-income OECD countries go directly into their general budget with no earmarking for any specific expenditure, while 12 percent are ring-fenced for environmental spending, and only 14 percent for revenue-recycling measures. This means that most governments are using carbon taxes as a revenue-raising tool rather than a mechanism to internalize the negative externalities of emissions in a cost-effective man­ner. Additionally, the vast majority of ETS revenues are being used to artificially acceler­ate the use of renewable energy sources, infrastructure, and technology.

The study also finds that no high-income OECD country has used carbon pricing to repeal emission-related regulations, but instead have introduced new ones following the adoption of the carbon tax or the ETS. Emissions caps, mandated fuel standards, technology-based standards, and renewable power mandates are just some examples of these regulations that undermine the cost-effectiveness of carbon pricing mechanisms. The majority of high-income OECD countries have a combination of support schemes for renewable energy sources, carbon pricing tools, and command-and-control regulations.

Overall, no high-income OECD country is following the textbook model of an optimal carbon pricing system, undermining their theoretical efficiency by design and implementation.

October 20, 2020

The watchful algorithms of the Nanny State’s AI tools

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

David Warren considers the evolution of the Nanny State’s arsenal of technological surveillance (supplemented by the Karenstapo):

While it is not in my interest, currently, for gentle reader to get off the Internet, the idea must have occurred to him. In times like these, why put yourself under watch from Big Brother (or, Big Sibling, as he might prefer)? Why surround yourself with his electronic eyes, the way I am presently surrounded by jackhammers?

Granted, Nanny State was devising ways to track its citizens, and to exercise “crowd control,” long before the Internet was invented. But we had the advantage with them, for they were incompetent, often laughably inept. However, Internet-plus-meejah-plus-activists-plus-Guvmint makes a more capable adversary.

I am not recommending a systematic withdrawal from the world. That is for people with a religious calling, or some grave eccentricity. Rather I am thinking of self-defence, in the spirit of buying a gun. Of course, I am writing from Canada, one of the countries where owning a gun is more-or-less illegal; as is any other form of self-defence. (“When seconds count, the police will be here in minutes.”) Though I have noticed that, upcountry, the “No Hunting” signs tend to be used for target practice.

The “other side,” as I see it, which always worked on numbers, now has algorithms. “Artificial Intelligence” can home right in. The Nanny State never took the individual seriously, except when he was offering a threat. Now it is threatened by anything human. It is, as it were, utilitarian in outlook — “the greatest good for the greatest number” — along with other fatuous concepts, unamenable to reason. By its nature, it is positivist, nominalist, relativist, and “idealistic” in a very abstract way.

Whereas we, so far as we are human, take ourselves quite personally. In a clinch, we often prefer our own survival, and the survival of family and friends, to the requirements of a bureaucratic “policy.” That this is “selfish” should be immediately affirmed.

Because the masses are now deprived of a Christian education, they misconstrue the “selfishness” of Christian teaching, which tells us that we ought selfishly to become saints. Our intention should be to get ourselves to Heaven, along with any we know who can be taken with us. But charity is not “selfish,” in ways they understand. Under modern tenets of “multiculturalism,” even fidelity to the old Christian view is decried as a form of selfishness, calling out for persecution. For this is because it is “cultural,” not “multi” — for all the many languages it speaks.

Our enemy wants us to eschew uniqueness, and become instead “diverse” — by which it means homogenized and narrowly interchangeable. Increasingly, this adversary has the means to enforce its arbitrary will.

QotD: The errors of socialist experiments

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

The rock on which socialistic experiments have hitherto always foundered is human nature. Any sound political system must be based on a correct appreciation of human nature; and socialism is bound to fail because it offends the best elements of human nature and panders to the worst.

Ivor Thomas, The Socialist Tragedy, 1951.

October 19, 2020

Sarah Hoyt – “… I’ve been feeling like I’m at the end of a Bond movie, and the villain is telling me his big master plan and how Western Civilization is tied to the train tracks and can’t escape”

Filed under: China, Government, Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Sarah Hoyt explains why she’s not expecting the US federal election next month to resolve anything, at least not in a positive way:

At this point I hold about a 10% chance the Democrats/Socialists/Communists (interchangeable now that the masks are off) don’t fraud their way into full power, pack the court and rip our system apart, to install (yet again) a form of communism. This is complicated by the fact that a lot of them are in China’s pockets. Or rather, China has been filling their pockets for a long while. We might find ourselves working for racist, hegemonic overlords, besides suffering all the ills of a descent into communism. (By the way, they’ve already been doing this to some extent to the less fortunate countries, including most African countries. The left in the US and Europe believes this is benevolence. And that Chinese aren’t racist. I wouldn’t believe it, if it hadn’t been said to me over and over.)

There is maybe another 25% of chance we’ll find ourselves in CW II, now with even more foreign interference. What comes out of that, G-d only knows, and I’m not Him. Which is good, because I have trouble enough being me.

And there is a very strong chance that even if Trump wins the White House, besides continuing to have to drive a car where the wheel is disconnected (the extent of which I wasn’t even fully sure of until this month) he won’t do more than delay the crash.

Sometimes here, and particularly at insty, because I tend to do that really late at night when I’m exhausted and less able to control my moods, you’ll catch a hint of how hopeless I feel our situation to be.

In fact since the lockdown, I’ve been feeling we were screwed. That the lockdown was imposed all over the world on such flimsy evidence, that countries and churches, and every cultural institution not only submitted to it but kept telling the people how much it was needed sent me into a deep depression from which I haven’t fully recovered. (Again, the evidence that this virus was MAYBE as bad as the flu has been before our eyes since the beginning. You don’t need special equipment to see it. The homeless were congregating and not dying in droves. The people in slums in the third world weren’t dying at a higher rate than usual. And there were the numbers from the Diamond Princess. Which some idiot here tried to justify with “but they got the best treatment.” In a floating petri dish. With no special equipment. May G-d have mercy on the soul of every idiot who bought that bullshit.).

This last week, on the other hand, I’ve been feeling like I’m at the end of a Bond movie, and the villain is telling me his big master plan and how Western Civilization is tied to the train tracks and can’t escape.

Oh, not the massive corruption of the Biden crime family. I mean seriously. Any of you who didn’t know already that Crackhead McStripperbang wasn’t being paid for foreign countries for his services must have been living under a rock.

Not even the ridiculous, immediate coordination with which our tech overlords moved to clamp down on that information and preventing it from reaching the virgin ears of most of our willfully and willingly ignorant countrymen.

No, what discouraged me most was the “sexual preference” suddenly becoming a slur and Webster dictionary falling in line. (Seriously, guys, sexual preference goes way beyond orientation. For instance, my sexual preference is monogamous and with someone I love. If you think that there’s no preference involved, you must think people have absolutely no control over their impulses.) Because that bullshit couldn’t happen, even in the most totalitarian of conspiracies.

And that’s the terrifying thought. These people are no more conspiring than your breaklines being cut are a conspiracy not to stop the car.

They are a result of deep inlaid propaganda and misseducation which cause a lot of people to try to fall into line with the “word from above” and be “right” with those they view as the smart people and the masters of society.

October 18, 2020

Larry Correia on the danger in allowing Big Tech to decide what speech is and is not allowed to be heard

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The recent now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t over allegations that former Vice President Biden’s son used his father’s influence to gain vast sums of money are — ahem — unproven but persuasive. The frantic efforts of companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter to keep those allegations out of the public eye get Larry Correia very angry:

If social media had banned Obama’s press secretary, and then stopped Diane Feinstein and Chuck Schumer from sharing articles from the New York Times, and then shut down the Obama campaign page nineteen days before his election against Mitt Romney, everyone would have lost their fucking minds. And rightfully so! Because that kind of blatant manipulation of information is evil.

If I put that into a thriller my editor would tell me it was too far fetched. Nobody would buy into such mustache twirling villainy, even if I was writing cyberpunk dystopia.

But Correia, they are private companies and you are usually against meddling in the affairs of private companies, you big hypocrite! Yeah, usually I am, but this is also something new, the likes of which mankind has never seen before, with these entities being the primary exchange of information for BILLIONS of people, so it’s kind of hard to put this thing which didn’t exist before into historical context. Facebook has no real competitors, and it has something like 2.7 billion regular users. With the flick of a switch it can stop a third of the Earth’s population from seeing whatever it doesn’t want them to see. Humanity has never had that before.

That’s real fucking power right there.

Now, unlike most people on the internet, I am not compelled to pretend to be a lawyer who just got my law degree from the University of Internet. Communications law is not my area, and I’m not going to be a Dunning-Krugerand talking about section 230 or whatever.

However, what I do know is that this is some seriously dangerous bullshit, and if we keep going down this road it is going to lead to some very bad ends. Freedom of speech functionally ceases to exist when both sides speak, but only one side is heard. If social media is a forum, then it needs to be an actual forum. If it is functionally a propaganda arm of the DNC, then so be it, but it can’t keep pretending to be something it’s not, while mindfucking the populace.

They are subpoenaing the Twitter CEO to come testify before congress but I expect that to be another utterly useless clown show where dummies ask dumb questions about something they don’t understand to some clever asshole who is just going to lie.

Like most liberty minded people, I have a reflexive dislike for government regulation of the free market. If the government can screw something up, it will. However I doubt I’ll feel that strongly about the sanctity of the free market as I’m being starved to death in a re-education gulag, after conservatives were stupid enough to let a tiny group of control freak statists have absolute power over the whole country’s speech and information.

What we’ve got right now with a handful of organizations having a monopoly over news and knowledge is stupid, getting stupider, and going to end extremely badly.

I don’t give a shit if you are liberal or conservative, the idea of some entity like Google determining what mankind is allowed to know or not know should terrify the shit out of you. Free speech becomes a meaningless concept if only approved speech is ever seen. And if you are cheering this shit on because right now it is helping your team score points against the other team, you are fool. Because once they have that power it is only a matter of time until one of your beliefs ends up on the naughty list too.

(note, that’s not an issue for Kool Aid drinking progs, because they don’t actually have any beliefs beyond GET POWER. It took them less than 24 hours to change “sexual preference” to a bad thing in the dictionary)

The only good thing about this situation is that even though Facebook and Twitter are trying to monopolize the flow of information, they are still bad at it. This week’s attempt at shutting down the New York Post‘s expose will probably go down as the biggest Streisand Effect in history. Their painfully obvious censorship will make far more people pay attention and lend credence to the report. Because after all, they wouldn’t try this hard to squish it, if there wasn’t some meat to it.

The diplomatic spat with China is “forcing the prime minister to bring out the biggest guns in his arsenal: his really serious socks”

Filed under: Cancon, China, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Line shows just how seriously Justin Trudeau is taking China’s most recent not-so-veiled threats against Canadians in Hong Kong:

The warm glow of a good feed faded quickly in Ottawa, alas, where our nice little vacation from history continues its unravelling apace. China’s ambassador to Canada is issuing increasingly dire threats to the safety of our citizens, specifically the hundreds of thousands of Canadians living in Hong Kong, forcing the prime minister to bring out the biggest guns in his arsenal: his really serious socks, a very frowny photograph by Adam Scotti, and, we expect, the imminent announcement that on top of all her current duties, Chrystia Freeland will be appointed Progressive Minister In Charge Of Figuring Out What The Hell We Should Do About China But Not In A Way That Offends Anyone The Middle Class Build Back Green Error Error Program Alarm—

Whoa! Sorry! The Freeland Job Generator glitched again. No surprise, considering the miles Trudeau has put on it in only five years. Let’s hope it doesn’t give out entirely — we’d need 47 years to procure another one.

Anyway, as to the matter at hand, your Line editors are pragmatic folk. Canada can’t punch at the same level as China; under Mr. Trudeau, indeed, despite all our for-Liberal-egos-only preening about Canada being back, we can’t even punch at the same level as Ireland and Norway. But it’s time Canadians face facts: we can either continue pretending that China’s increasingly aggressive and threatening behaviour is a problem that will go away if we ignore it long enough, or we can at least pretend that we have balls and take what actions we can. Obviously we’re not going to send a fleet to parade up and down their coast, but there are things we can realistically do, and we aren’t. Australia, for instance, also in Beijing’s sights, has rolled out a series of measures to curtail China’s substantial influence there. Canada ought to be doing the same. And we could start by immediately banning Huawei, and encouraging every other country that would listen — which doesn’t seem to be many — that they should too.

Do we expect the Liberal government to do this? No. Making money shilling for the Chinese regime is the best thing to happen to post-politics Liberals since Ontario’s air ambulance service. But they should do this. And the delay is only gonna make it hurt more when events eventually force us to accept that China is not our friend, never has been, and never will be under the current political leadership.

October 11, 2020

QotD: Britain’s National Health Service cult

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

The NHS has not served the nation well, if international comparison is the criterion by which it should be judged. For example, when the NHS was founded (when British healthcare was among the best rather than the worst in Europe) the population of France had a life expectancy six years lower than that of Britain; it is now two years higher. The health of the population in Spain improved more under Franco than that of the British under the NHS in the same years. Of course, there are determinants of life expectancy other than healthcare systems, but at the very least the comparisons do not suggest any particular virtue to the NHS.

Survival from many serious illnesses such as cancer, heart attacks and strokes is lower in Britain than in most European countries. Publicity is sometimes given to these statistics but they are not immediately apparent to patients or their relatives, and in any case the NHS is immune to criticism because its deficiencies are assumed to be departures from its essential goodness or the result of inadequate funding.

No number of scandals, such as that of Mid Staffs in which hundreds of patients were neglected to a degree that often defied belief, all in plain sight of a large bureaucracy supposedly devoted to ensuring the quality of patient care, can dent faith in the NHS. Staff committed, and management connived at, acts of cruelty that would have made Mrs Gamp blush. Mr Cameron’s government, anxious not to seem an enemy of the NHS, which would have been politically damaging, swept the scandal under the carpet.

A system whose justification for its nationalisation of healthcare was egalitarianism has failed even in the matter of equality. If anything, the difference between the health of the richest and poorest sections of the population has increased rather than decreased under the NHS.

The gap between the life expectancy of unskilled workers and that of the upper echelons, which had been stable for decades before the foundation of the NHS, began to widen afterwards and is now far wider than it ever was. Again, there are reasons for inequality in health other than the deficiencies of healthcare, the prevalence of smoking and obesity, for example; but if systems are to be judged by their effects, the NHS has failed in its initial goal.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Empire of conformists”, The Critic, 2020-04-29.

October 9, 2020

The passing of the “unipolar moment”

Filed under: Cancon, China, Government, India, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Dominion Ben Woodfinden considers the return of foreign policy concerns to Canadian politics after a multi-decade disappearance:

The collapse of the Soviet Union ushered in what the late Charles Krauthammer, in a famous Foreign Affairs essay [PDF], called the “unipolar moment” in which the United States became the unquestioned global hegemon, with no true political, economic, or ideological rivals left. We have been living for the last three decades in this moment.

But Krauthammer’s use of “moment” is deliberate. Krauthammer readily admitted that unipolarity was temporary, and that “no doubt, multipolarity will come in time.” Were he alive today, Krauthammer would probably be ready to proclaim the unipolar moment over. Great power rivalry is back, and the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated this, killing off any hopes that the relationship between an increasingly aggressive China and the United States could be anything other than adversarial.

This rivalry looks set to become the defining feature of the post-COVID international order, and as the Meng Wanzou case and the kidnapping of the two Michaels reveals, Canada finds itself unavoidably caught in the middle of this burgeoning rivalry. Where Canada fits into this is now one of the most important questions facing our country today.

Canada’s relationship with the United States is our most important relationship. We are unavoidably connected to our neighbour, and our relationship with the United States is a largely amiable one. But despite our integration and close ties with America, Canada remains a sovereign nation, and most Canadians retain a desire for Canada to continue to behave and act like one. Similarly, while it is a Canadian pastime to criticize the flaws and failings of our southern neighbour, we still share the same fundamental democratic values. Thus when it comes to figuring out where Canada stands in the middle of this new great power rivalry, we have little choice but to be broadly aligned with the United States and other free democratic nations.

[…]

Canada can accomplish these goals by prioritizing the strengthening of our relationship with other democratic nations that share our values and are also wary of the rise of an aggressive China with global ambitions. There is no shortage of other nations that fit this description. Most obvious are other Commonwealth nations with which we share common values and history. I’ve written before here in defence of CANZUK, a proposed agreement between Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom that would strengthen economic ties and prioritize foreign policy and military coordination between these four nations. This is a good start, and strengthening the relationship between other Westminster nations to ensure that we all have an independent voice alongside America would be valuable to all prospective CANZUK members. [Federal Conservative leader Erin] O’Toole was an early supporter of CANZUK during his 2017 leadership bid, and this is something we should prioritize.

Another Commonwealth nation that Canada should prioritize the strengthening of economic and political relations with is India, a nation also threatened by an assertive China. While Canada-India relations have soured under the current government, rebuilding this relationship should be a priority. The current Indian government is not without its controversies and diaspora politics in Canada is complicated to put it mildly. But in the face of a confrontational and dangerous Chinese regime, we don’t have much choice other than to pursue closer and warmer relations with India, even if this will displease some.

Speaking in code and public health

Filed under: Government, Health, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Joshua Hind relates the tragedy that forced US emergency services to wean themselves off their many confusing (and sometimes conflicting) spoken codes and use plain language to help reduce tragic misunderstandings among different emergency response organizations:

“First responders on site of the Lac-Megantic train derailment” by TSBCanada is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

In the beginning, it was standardized, and the best-known codes, like “10-4,” were consistent from town to town or state to state. But it didn’t take long for newer codes to emerge, which often meant different things depending on where you were. Efforts to reorganize the codes every 20 years or so only compounded the problem. On a local level, in any one town, it wasn’t a problem. But when cops or firefighters from different towns had to work together it could lead to disaster.

In 1970, a particularly severe wildfire season in California killed 16 people in a 13-day period and laid bare the cost of bad interagency communication. The rat’s nest of codes, abbreviations, and jargon prevented firefighters from different towns from communicating with the speed and clarity a major disaster demands. To address the problem, the U.S. Forest Service created FIRESCOPE, the first complete system for organizing and managing major incidents. One of the primary principles of this new system was to “develop standard terminology.”

Despite this effort, which later went national and then international (the province of Ontario has its own version, the “Incident Management System”) coded language continued to proliferate. Nearly 30 years after FIRESCOPE was launched, on September 11th, incompatible technology, lack of protocols, and a refusal to harmonize terminology likely contributed to the deaths of 121 firefighters who were caught in the collapse of the North Tower because they either didn’t hear or couldn’t understand the warnings that the building was about to fail.

Which brings us back to 2006, and FEMA’s notice to first responders. After decades of asking agencies to stop using coded language, the federal government made funding contingent on compliance. “The use of plain language in emergency response is a matter of public safety,” the memo’s introduction read. “There simply is little or no room for misunderstanding in an emergency situation.” From that point forward, all interdepartmental communication would have to be un-coded. A fire would be called “fire.” A shooting would be “a shooting.” And if you needed help, you’d say “HELP!”

Police, fire departments and paramedics slowly but surely got on board and started using some form of the incident management system which included plain language. As use of the system spread, other sectors, like large music festivals and other live events, began adopting the concepts to better synchronize public safety programs with the first responders who support them. Today it’s not unusual for producers, technicians and event security staff to attend training at the police college right next to fire captains and police officers.

Then COVID-19 happened, and we realized that no one had told Public Health.

October 7, 2020

QotD: The gullible generation

Filed under: Government, History, Liberty, Quotations, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

World War II, which I have described (in The Probability Broach) as a struggle between competing brands of fascism, was much the same thing. For the beleaguered people of Europe, it meant being forced to choose between Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. Would you rather be shot or gassed?

For Americans, it meant looking for protection by a political regime so grossly and criminally corrupt that future historians will shake their heads, wondering how an entire people could be such suckers. “The Greatest Generation”, that miserable collectivist mouthpiece Tom Brokaw has called them. Looking back over what my father told me of his life, how his family suffered in the government-caused Great Depression, how he and his comrades risked unspeakable danger in the war, and how he became a prisoner in Germany — all to aggrandize the virtual godhood of Franklin Delano Roosevelt — I call them “The Gullible Generation”.

On the other hand, people loved the Roosevelt Administration so much that they passed a Constitutional amendment to make sure that no sonofabitch could ever be elected to more than two Presidential terms again.

World War II gave government complete, dictatorial control of American society, control of industry, control of communications, control of the economy, control that Roosevelt had desperately lusted after before the war, but failed to achieve. If anyone objected, or insisted on his rights under the Constitution, all the other side had to say was, “Don’t you know there’s a war on?”

The government enjoyed that level of control. Once the war was won, and people looked forward to a period of peace, the government plunged us into the Korean War, Vietnam, and an increasing number of undeclared and stupid conflicts in order to retain its power. “Don’t you know there’s a war on?” never worked quite as well as it had to shut dissenters up, but it’s clear that this scam will go on and on and on until something drastic is done to stop it.

L. Neil Smith, “The Deep State”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2019-04-14.

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