Quotulatiousness

December 8, 2023

“An error of this magnitude makes one wonder how robust such calculations are”

Filed under: Britain, Food, Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Christopher Snowden notes the proliferation of media and public advocacy groups warning us about “junk food”:

On Monday, the front page of The Times led with a speech from Henry Dimbleby and a cost-of-obesity estimate from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change — the perfect start to the week for any Times reader. According to Sir Tony’s think tank, “the effect on national productivity from excess weight is nine times bigger than previously thought”. An error of this magnitude makes one wonder how robust such calculations are (the previous estimate only came out last year), but Mr Dimbleby saw it as further proof that food should be treated like smoking.

    The NHS “will suck all the money out of the other public services” while “at the same time, economic growth and tax revenue will stagnate. We will end up both a sick and impoverished nation,” Dimbleby will warn.

Would it be unfair to point out that the USA has much higher rates of obesity than the UK and also has much higher GDP growth?

As I pointed out on what I shall continue to call Twitter, the estimates as bunkum. They come from Frontier Economics and were first commissioned by the makers of Wegovy, presumably to make their effective but expensive weight loss drug look like a relative bargain.

Their previous estimate of the cost of obesity to “society” was £58bn. This year’s estimate is £98bn, most of which (£57bn) comes from lost quality-adjusted life years. As I tire of pointing out, these are internal costs to the individual which, by definition, are not costs to wider society. I can’t stress enough how absurd it is to include lost productivity due to early death as a cost to the economy. You might as well calculate the lost productivity of people who have never been born and claim that contraception costs the economy billions of pounds.

Since the previous estimate, the costs have been bulked up by including the costs of being overweight, but there is no indication in the wafer-thin webpage of what these are. Being merely overweight doesn’t have many serious health implications. The healthcare costs have doubled, but as in the previous report, the new estimate does not look at how much more healthcare would be consumed if there was no obesity. No savings are included. What we need is the net cost.

The “report” that The Times turned into a front page news story is no more than a glorified blog post. It contains no detail, no methodology and none of the assumptions upon which it is based can be checked. It comes with an eight page slideshow from Frontier Economics which is described as a “full analysis” but which doesn’t contain any useful figures either.

Estimates like this are bound to mislead the casual reader into thinking that they are paying higher taxes because of obesity. There is no other reason to publish them, as they have no academic merit. They are designed to be misunderstood.

Sure enough, the very next day The Times was explicitly claiming that the putative £98 billion — now rounded up to £100 billion — was a direct cost to government …

    The findings come after an analysis found this week that Britain’s weight problem is costing the state almost £100 billion a year.

“When you see the same signs here that characterised collapse in other polities for the last 5000 years, it means collapse is coming here too – we’re not special snowflakes”

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

Feeling good? Happy with your culture and comfortable that major disruptions won’t disturb you? Here’s Theophilus Chilton to harsh your mellow:

There are essentially three basic reasons why those on the American Right haven’t shrugged the same way regular folks in Europe are beginning to (see Spain and France as well as Ireland for recent examples). The first of these is because the American Right still holds onto a residual trust in elections and democracy and the whole “We’ll get ‘em next election!” mentality. Having been fed a decades-long diet of reverence for democracy and voting and whatnot acts as a desensitising agent that keeps many Americans anesthetised to the actual uselessness of such attitudes.

But this will continue to erode as we see more obvious election fraud. Eventually, when the norm becomes “go to bed with the right-wing candidate ahead by 10% and wake up with the left-wing candidate winning by 0.5%,” elections will lose what legitimacy they have left. Further, as “democracy” comes to be increasingly defined as “whatever the Regime wants to do“, more and more normies will start to clue in to the fact that democratic forms are not going to save America, but are in fact what are destroying it.

Second, Heritage Americans and those on the normie Right tend to assume that everybody still plays by the old, traditional set of norms, including FedGov. This “seemed” plausible when the Regime employed incrementalism to gradually acculturate normies to its agenda. But as they accelerate their revolutionary overthrow of everything that normies thought would be sacrosanct like they have over the past few years, this sense of “norms” will go away. And when that happens, there will be a whole lot of people suddenly open to the possibility that something else might become a new set of norms.

Third, because America is so BIG – especially in the geographical sense – Heritage Americans have been able to self-mitigate many of the worse aspects of the Regime agenda. They could get away from the slums. Federalism allowed them to find states in which to prosper despite the Regime’s efforts. And so forth. Regular folks in many places could still plausibly think America was a high trust, high social cohesion society because where they were at locally might well have been. But as the Regime accelerates, this also will stop. $oros DAs will continue to release violent criminals while punishing law-abiding citizens for defending themselves and their property. Immigration and inflation will further erode the economic prosperity that still remains, which is something that fleeing to a Red state can’t fix. And of course, it will all be brought home starkly once 20,000 or so Palestinian “refugees” get relocated into their counties.

Let’s remember that this is what we actually saw in Ireland. Even into the Oughts, Ireland was homogenous, relatively high IQ and high trust, was the Celtic Tiger with lots of prosperity. Then globohomo decided that Ireland needed tons of “refugees” just like the rest of Europe and suddenly that prosperity and safety and high trust went away. What was the response? Riots and continued disorder that Regime attempts to clamp down on are only going to make worse.

This is going to wear out eventually, which is something that FedGov knows. That’s why they’ve been ramping up gun control efforts over the past few years despite constant opposition from the courts. They’re merely trying to prepare for the inevitable by disarming the people they know they need to suppress the most. Unlike most Euro and Anglosphere countries, Americans haven’t allowed themselves to be disarmed — and that’s something that really does vex The Powers That Be.

But the problem is that it isn’t the 1950s anymore, or even the 1990s for that matter. Back in the 1950s, FedGov could literally stick bayonets at the backs of high school students and force unwilling southern states to integrate their schools. Even in the 1990s FedGov could send its agents to besiege and murder dozens of men, women, and children and most people even at an official level wouldn’t say a thing. But now its 2023 and we’re quite a bit further along the decentralisation path in our secular collapse phase. What FedGov had the moral legitimacy and competency to pull off back then isn’t guaranteed for them now anymore.

So what happens when the FBI wants to do another Waco? What happens if Texas decides it doesn’t want to allow the FBI to do another Waco? We’re past the point where we can blithely say, “Well, the Feds can just make Texas go along with it!” Our place in our collapse cycle means that’s not going to fly like it could have 30 years ago.

At this point, the goal should not be to calm people down but to get them riled up so that when (not if) the break comes, it will be so widespread and numerous that it will completely overwhelm the ability of FedGov and its agencies to deal with it. In this vein, I think of Solzhenitsin’s quote from Gulag Archipelago,

    And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? … The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If … if … We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation … We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.

So what does this mean practically? It means people need to start organising locally with people they trust, building a network in their town or county, coordinating with friendly local power holders. It means stockpiling the necessary tools for the maintenance of their freedoms. It means training to shoot, learning how to use comms, thinking both strategically and tactically — obtaining the knowledge to use with your organising. Most of all, it means being morally and temperamentally prepared to oppose the enemies of our people, both foreign and domestic.

December 7, 2023

Burying the lede … and the victims

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Maxime “Mad Max” Bernier sent out a fundraising letter to PPC supporters that included some disturbing new data from Statistics Canada:

As usual, the biggest news in Canada is being ignored by all of our crooked establishment politicians and the dishonest corporate media.

Last week Statistics Canada released a report on deaths in Canada (causes of death, overall life expectancy, etc), which include the latest data from 2022.

I’m not a doctor, a scientist, or even a statistician, but when I saw the table below, a few things jumped out at me.

First, deaths related to covid-19 (check the fourth line) were at an all-time high in 2022!

Can you believe that? There were more covid deaths in 2022 than the two years before.

And yet that same year saw the end of mask mandates, vaccine passports, and most covid measures.

For two years the elites blasted us with propaganda and warped our society around this mild illness, but when deaths were rising, they were silent. Bizarre!

To be clear, I am not advocating for any of these unnecessary draconian restrictions to return, I am just demanding some honesty and consistency from our morally corrupt politicians, public health officials, and media!

It has never been so obvious that covid restrictions were not scientific, they were just about politics and control.

But the most disturbing part is what I have circled at the bottom of the table. Deaths with “ill-defined or unspecified causes” have been steadily increasing since 2020.

These deaths have almost TRIPLED since 2020 from 6,841 to 16,043 in 2022.

What could be causing this? What happened in 2021 that could have caused this explosion of unexplained deaths over the last 2 years?

An experimental pharmaceutical product was rushed to market and forced on Canadian society, is what happened.

They told us it was “safe and effective” but over the last few years we have learned more and more about how that covid shot was neither.

Now more and more Canadians are dying from causes very likely related to the covid shot.

And where is the accountability?!

There is no admission of any possible error on the part of the government. On the contrary, it’s still encouraging everyone to get boosters!

There are no demands for an inquiry by the opposition parties to investigate the potential risks associated with the covid jab.

There are no investigative journalists trying to get to the bottom of one of the biggest medical scandals in Canadian history.

No! They’re just trying to sweep it under the rug and move on!

We can’t wait for the political establishment to hold itself to account. We saw throughout the covid years that the government, the opposition, and the media will all work together to protect themselves and each other.

And we can’t let them get away with it!

The only kind of conspiracy theories the media is interested in

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

Chris Selley points out the obvious bias legacy media polls bring to any investigation into the popularity of various conspiracy theories:

Readers, were you aware that polls show conservative Canadians are more prone to believing in conspiracy theories than liberal Canadians? I’m kidding — of course you were. The pollsters haven’t stopped asking about it since the pandemic hit: Insights West in April 2021, Angus Reid in November 2021, Abacus Data in June 2022, Leger Marketing in the spring of 2022, and again this week. And we in the media can’t get enough of it: “Conspiracy theories are popular in Canada, especially among conservatives, poll says”, was The Canadian Press headline for this week’s Leger poll.

The notion that the Conservative Party of Canada and some of its leading lights are inviting violence through unconscionably heated and conspiratorial rhetoric is endemic in the Canadian newsroom. While I’m no fan of unconscionably heated rhetoric, I very much doubt actual extremists, or potentially violent extremists, see anyone worth choosing among Canada’s federal political leaders. But in any event, it apparently needs saying that not all conspiracy theories are created equal. Some aren’t conspiracy theories at all.

To its credit, The Leger poll released this week mostly confines itself to proper conspiracies: 9/11 Trutherism, a faked lunar landing, etc. Somewhere between 36 per cent (the truth about John F. Kennedy’s assassination was covered up) and five per cent (the earth is flat) believe completely or somewhat in these notions.

But by far the most popular statement among those Leger presented to respondents was as follows: “Mainstream media manipulates the information it disseminates”. Fifty-five per cent of respondents overall agreed with that; the JFK coverup was in a distant second at 36 per cent.

What’s “mainstream media”? If it includes, say, Al Jazeera and Fox News, then the statement is obviously true. (What does “manipulate” mean, for that matter? It doesn’t necessarily imply bad faith.) And the belief is certainly not just confined to Conservative voters: 47 per cent of NDP voters and 53 per cent of Green voters agreed, compared to 69 per cent of Conservative supporters.

What the question definitely does, however, is boost the overall numbers and make them more newsworthy. So Leger (and media) can say “79 per cent of Canadians believe in at least one of the conspiracy theories we asked them about”, and “Conservative voters (94 per cent) are more likely to believe in at least one of the theories”.

That’s a quibble, really. Other polls have, in my view, been utterly shameless about this sort of results-padding.

Take this proposition, for example, which Abacus put to its respondents: “52 per cent think government accounts of events can’t be trusted”.

That is a true statement. It applies to every government in the world, ever.

Even to mention Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset in Canadian political conversation is to risk being branded a conspiracy theorist. But it’s a real-deal “world governance” manifesto, it’s absolutely bonkers from start to finish, everyone from Justin Trudeau to the King (in a previous role) has made approving noises about it, and to the very limited extent it should be taken seriously, everyone should oppose it.

December 4, 2023

QotD: The “ivory gulag”

Filed under: Education, Health, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Looking at the cat ladies of both sexes and all 57 genders who ruined Trashcanistan, it seems obvious that they skipped sexual maturity – they jumped straight from “tween-ager” to “menopausal”. Even the young women in the “Social Justice” movement look – and, crucially, act – like they’re pushing fifty, while the young “men” are neotenous. Most of them are what bodybuilders call “skinny fat” – scrawny yet flabby, with no muscle tone – and the rest are morbidly obese. A crowd of college kids, again of both sexes and all however-many genders, looks like the mosh pit at the Lilith Fair. Without their exaggerated displays of secondary sex characteristics – ironic facial hair on the lads, pussy hats on the lassies – who could even tell them apart?

So, too, with their mentalities. I spent many years toiling in the groves of academe, so obviously my social life (such as it was) contained a lot of post-menopausal lesbians. No creature is more solipsistic than this. Whatever maternal instincts she once might’ve had, have curdled into general naggy truculence, and since they have all the money and free time in the world in which to indulge their narcissism, if they can’t find any actual wrongthink around they’ll simply invent some. Before the Deplorables were driven to organize themselves for gaudy, suicidal, IRA-style violence, post-Oranzhevvy Trashcanistan felt, I imagine, a lot like a college campus …

… which the few people with normal serum hormone levels who were stuck there often called “the ivory gulag”. Make of that what you will.

Severian, “Hormones, or Lack Thereof”, Founding Questions, 2021-01-20.

December 3, 2023

“I find myself despising the elites I joined in ways that shock me. I have come to despise the woke left, their indifference to crime, their reveling in reverse-racism, their deep hatred of Western civilization”

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I’ve been reading Andrew Sullivan’s Substack since he started and it’s always been a pretty clear indicator that as soon as the name Trump is mentioned, the rest of the piece can be ignored because he’s been saying the same things for literally years now. This week’s article is a significant break with that tradition. It’s not that he suddenly likes Trump but that he seems to have gained more understanding about why other people support him:

As old-time Dishheads may recall, I was one of a handful of pundits who thought in early 2016 that Trump not only could, but probably would, win the election. I could feel his appeal in my lizard brain, and had long studied the fragility of liberal democracy in my frontal cortex. But the moment I knew his presidency was almost certain was when the Brexit result was announced in June, when everyone still assumed Hillary was a shoo-in. Something was stirring. And that’s why, after my annual trip back to Britain last week, I’m feeling the nausea again.

[…]

Add to that anger a lockdown far more intense than in the US and a period of crippling inflation, and you have a recipe that will likely lead to a Labour landslide next year. And in so many countries right now, for a variety of reasons, you see the same “blow it all up” mentality, turfing out incumbents mercilessly, often in favor of performative populists of various hues and flavors.

Look at the Netherlands: a progressive country that just saw Geert Wilders’ hard-right anti-immigration party go from 10 percent in 2021 to 23.5 percent of the vote, and become by far the biggest party in the Dutch House of Representatives, with center-right parties open to joining them. Or Argentina, where a weirdly coiffed, former rock-singer, Javier Milei — who had a near mental breakdown in a televised interview during the campaign, complaining about voices that weren’t there — wiped out the Peronist establishment in a landslide.

Orbán’s decisive re-election, Meloni’s electoral victory in Italy, and Sweden’s lurch to the right all suggest a sudden widening of the Overton window in much of Europe. In Germany, the AfD, the far-right movement, is now polling at 21 percent of the electorate, compared with 15 percent for Chancellor Scholz’s Social Democrats and 9 percent for the Greens. None of it is particularly coherent. Milei is Steve Forbes in a very bad toupee — about as far away from Boris’ Red Toryism or entitlement-friendly Trumpism as you can get. The only truly consistent thing is the ridiculous hair, and contempt for elites.

And the fear of the crazy right has gone. Milei and Wilders instantly moderated on some of their most outlandish positions, as soon as power was within reach. No, Milei won’t dollarize the Argentine economy, it turns out; and no, Wilders won’t ban mosques, as he tries to build a coalition government. Meloni has talked up immigration control, but in power, she hasn’t done much about it, and her support for Ukraine and the EU has been a big surprise. Poland’s hard-right party showed it could not stay in power forever this year, and in Spain, Vox lost ground. But in all this, a taboo has been broken — the same kind of taboo that the election of Donald Trump represented. The small-c conservatism of the Western electorate has expired.

That’s why I find the re-election of Joe Biden so hard to imagine. Biden is the incumbent of all incumbents. He became a senator in 1973! He has been vice president for eight years and president for four. He’s extremely old for the job he is doing, and everyone knows it. He has presided over inflation higher than at any time since the 1970s, and a huge new wave of legal and illegal immigration. We may now have a higher percentage of the population that is foreign-born than in the entire history of this country of immigration. Americans’ support for a border wall is the highest it’s been since 2016.

And Gallup’s latest polling on how the public feels about crime should terrify the Democrats. Coming back to DC this week after seven months away, I’m struck by how stark the decline has become. It says something when a city is experiencing a massive wave of carjackings, bars the cops from pursuing them, and just hands out free AirTags so you can track your stolen car yourself.

And the key, lame argument from Biden will be that Trump is too big a risk to take. He’s right. Broadly speaking, I agree with Bob Kagan on the crazed ambitions of this tyrant wannabe. But how has that argument worked out so far? Impeachments and indictments seem to have strengthened, not weakened him. And what we’re seeing all over the world is that voters are rushing toward the risky candidates, not away from them.

And Trump has already been in office for four years, and … democracy didn’t end, did it? Or at least, that’s what his supporters will say. They’ll remember the pre-Covid years as the good old days (and economically they wouldn’t be wrong), and also vent anger at an elite that seems to care more about pronouns and “equity” than protecting the border or controlling crime — the core functions of government. I’d be worried if Biden were ahead of Trump by five points in the battleground states. But he’s actually behind.

And though I will never vote for Trump, in my lizard brain, I kind of get the appeal. Inflation and mass immigration, alongside a bewildering and compulsory cultural revolution, are the kind of uncontrollable things that make people vent, especially if the president seems oblivious to these concerns — as Biden does. When Elon Musk f-bombed on Andrew Ross Sorkin and the advertisers who are boycotting X this week, the rational part of me shook my head. He’s bonkers and may see his company collapse from his whims and rages.

But at some deeper level, I also wanted to yell “Fuck yeah!” I find myself despising the elites I joined in ways that shock me. I have come to despise the woke left, their indifference to crime, their reveling in reverse-racism, their deep hatred of Western civilization. I hate how they’ve taken so much of the progress we made on gay integration and thrown it all away in transqueer solipsism. I loathe their piety and certainty and smugness. I found their instant condemnation of Israel, even as October 7 was taking place, shocking.

Doctor What-are-your-pronouns

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

I don’t watch Doctor Who although I have fond childhood memories of watching William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton’s respective “Doctors” and I caught one or two episodes of Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker in the role. That the show is still running on British TV is a wonder … but it got headlines for a recent installment that had the Doctor being told off for “assuming” an alien creature’s pronouns:

Remember when Doctor Who was fun? Watching it now is about as much fun as being publicly humiliated at work by some jumped-up nonbinary form-filler from HR who thinks he’s amazing because he’s painted one of his fingernails black.

A good example of this joylessness is a scene in the most recent special, “The Star Beast”, which has been treated by right-on broadsheet types as a moment of profound importance. Yet all that happened was a transwoman character – played by transwoman actor Yasmin Finney – lectured the Doctor about pronouns. In a moment of unforgivable Time Lord-cis privilege, the Doctor had assumed a diminutive alien called Beep the Meep used male pronouns. What was he thinking?

It is this sort of banal plot line that encapsulates the shrivelling ambition of science fiction. Once the genre dared to hold up a provocative mirror to contemporary society. From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, sci-fi challenged lazy assumptions. Now it revels in groupthink that feeds the collective self-righteousness of indolent teenagers and adults with teenage imaginations.

This matters, because at its best sci-fi can dazzle and even inspire us with the potential strangeness of the imagined future. A few years ago I made a series presented by William Shatner tracing the cultural and technological influence of Star Trek. In one episode, the inventor of the mobile phone, Martin Cooper, told director Julian Jones how he had been inspired by the example of Captain Kirk’s hand-held “communicator”. Will anyone invent something inspired by the new Doctor Who? A new set of guidelines for pronoun use, perhaps?

You can tell how out of touch Doctor Who has now become by the fact its enormously pompous showrunner, Russell T Davies, seemed to think that the new series would shock viewers with its “progressive” radicalism. The only shock was the alien pronoun scene’s patent stupidity.

I mean, why on Earth would the Doctor assume the gender of any alien? He has been encountering aliens with no fixed gender since the 1960s. The Doctor has effectively been asking aliens for their pronouns for nigh on 60 years.

Davies may think he’s blazing a trail with the new series of Doctor Who. But the truth is that gender-bending in science fiction is as old as the frozen hills of Gallifrey. In The War of the Worlds, published 125 years ago, HG Wells regaled us with Martian invaders who reproduced asexually. And hermaphrodites pepper sci-fi, from the work of Philip K Dick to that of Ursula K Le Guin.

QotD: Intersectionality and the “American experiment”

Filed under: Education, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Let me remind you of the educational vision of the Founders, by way of E.D. Hirsch: “The American experiment … is a thoroughly artificial device designed to counterbalance the natural impulses of group suspicions and hatreds … This vast, artificial, trans-tribal construct is what our Founders aimed to achieve.” Intersectionality aims for the exact opposite: an inflaming of tribal suspicions and hatreds, in order to stimulate anger and activism in students, in order to recruit them as fighters for the political mission of the professor. The identity politics taught on campus today is entirely different from that of Martin Luther King. It rejects America and American values. It does not speak of forgiveness or reconciliation. It is a massive centrifugal force, which is now seeping down into high schools, especially progressive private schools.

Today’s identity politics has another interesting feature: it teaches students to think in a way antithetical to what a liberal arts education should do. When I was at Yale in the 1980s, I was given so many tools for understanding the world. By the time I graduated, I could think about things as a Utilitarian or a Kantian, as a Freudian or a behaviorist, as a computer scientist or a humanist. I was given many lenses to apply to any one situation. But nowadays, students who major in departments that prioritize social justice over the disinterested pursuit of truth are given just one lens — power — and told to apply it to all situations. Everything is about power. Every situation is to be analyzed in terms of the bad people acting to preserve their power and privilege over the good people. This is not an education. This is induction into a cult, a fundamentalist religion, a paranoid worldview that separates people from each other and sends them down the road to alienation, anxiety, and intellectual impotence.

Jonathan Haidt, “The Age of Outrage: What the current political climate is doing to our country and our universities”, City Journal, 2017-12-17.

December 2, 2023

Joe Biden solves the inflation problem, fat!

Filed under: Business, Economics, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Like any lying dog-faced pony soldier would know, it’s as easy as saying “Trunalimunumaprzure“:

Inflation is kicking just about everyone in the junk here lately, regardless of whether that junk is an innie or an outie. It’s been rough on a lot of us, but I know just how hard it’s been on me and mine.

Prices are up significantly over the last few years and my income isn’t up nearly as much. This creates issues with our finances. The upside is that it’s forced me to be better with money.

But prices are still higher than Willie Nelson on a SpaceX flight.

Luckily, President Joe Biden has figured out the solution to all our problems. He’s going to just tell companies to drop prices.

Yes, seriously.

    This week, the White House announced the launch of a Council on Supply Chain Resilience, created with the hope to “strengthen America’s supply chains” and “lower costs for families.”

    …

    President Joe Biden delivered remarks from the White House on Monday to announce the new council’s creation. He touted the lower inflation rate and falling grocery prices but admonished American companies for, in his view, not going far enough.

    “Let me be clear: To any corporation that has not brought their prices back down — even as inflation has come down, even as supply chains have been rebuilt — it’s time to stop the price gouging,” Biden warned, imploring them to “giv[e] the American consumer a break.”

Here’s the issue, at least as I see it.

At Thanksgiving, it was noted here that prices are nearly 20 percent higher than in 2019. This while inflation has supposedly decreased. Prices are still high because it’s not so much that inflation has fallen but that the rate of inflation’s increase has fallen. It doesn’t mean prices should drop, only that they should increase at a slower rate.

December 1, 2023

QotD: The OODA loop

Filed under: Business, Military, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There was a fighter pilot named John Boyd who became the most important strategic theorist writing in English during the 20th century. He began with E/M (energy-maneuverability theory), which became the basis on which modern fighter aircraft are designed and modern fighter tactics taught. He ended his career as one of the architects of the winning “left-hook” strategy in the 1991 Gulf War. Connecting these was a general theory of military effectiveness (and more generally, organizational effectiveness) centered around what he called the OODA loop.

OODA theory is worth reading about in more depth for anyone interested in … well, any kind of competitive dynamics, actually – military, commercial, individual, anything. The Wikipedia article is a good start. Stripped to its essentials, the theory is that competing entities have to go through repeated iterations of observing conditions, relating observation to a generative theory, deciding what option to pursue, and acting. Victory tends to go to the competitor who can run this cycle the fastest.

OODA theory was originally generalized from the observation that in fighter design, maneuverability (especially a shorter turning radius) beats straight-line speed. When you get inside your opponent’s OODA loop, either physically or conceptually, you can attack him from unexpected angles. You can be where he isn’t. You have the initiative; he is reduced to reacting, often with too little and too late.

Eric S. Raymond, “The Smartphone Wars: Tightening the OODA Loop”, Armed and Dangerous, 2011-02-18.

November 30, 2023

Canadian government declares victory over Google, then lays down its arms and marches into captivity

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The Trudeau government has won a glorious, historic victory over the evil capitalistic powers of Google in the war of Bill C-18. Let all patriotic Canadians raise their hands to cheer our victorious politicians before they have to admit out loud that they fucked up real good:

Heritage Minister Pascale St. Onge has surrendered to Google and Canadian media have avoided what would have been a catastrophic exclusion from the web giant’s search engine.

In the short term, this is very good news. The bureaucrats at Heritage must have performed many administrative contortions to find the words needed in the Online News Act‘s final regulations to satisfy Google, a beast which isn’t easily soothed. In doing so, they have managed to avoid what Google was threatening — to de-index news links from its search engine and other platforms in Canada. Given that Meta had already dropped the carriage of news on Facebook and Instagram in response to the same legislation, Google’s departure would have constituted a kill shot to the industry.

Instead, the news business will get $100 million in Google cash. For this, all its members will now fight like so many pigeons swarming an errant crust of bread.

The agreement will also allow the government, while surrounded by an industry whose reputation and economics have been devastated by this policy debacle, to attempt to declare victory. Signs of that are already evident.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that while 100 million bucks is nothing to sneeze at, in the grand scheme of things it is a drop in the bucket for an industry in need of at least a billion dollars if it is to recover any sense of stability. Indeed, when News Media Canada first began begging the government to go after Google and Meta for cash, some involved were selling the idea that sort of loot was possible.

This did not turn out to be so.

Instead of the $100,000 per journo cashapalooza that was once hoped for, the final tally will be more like $6,666.00 per ink-stained wretch.

That figure is based on two assumptions. The first is that the government has agreed to satisfy Google’s desire to pay a single sum to a single defined industry “collective” that would then divide the loot on a per-FTE (full-time employee) basis to everyone granted membership in the industry’s bargaining group. Google had made it clear it had no interest in conducting multiple negotiations and exposing itself to endless and costly arbitrations. So, as we have a deal and Google held all the cards, it’s fair to assume it got what it wanted — a single collective with a single agreement and a single cheque.

Why Wilders’ PPV appealed to Dutch voters and why the establishment is utterly horrified

Filed under: Europe, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Free Press, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Evelyn Markus explain why Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom took so many seats in the Dutch elections:

Geert Wilders, leader of the Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV).
Photo by Wouter Engler via Wikimedia Commons.

It was in 2004, the same year that Theo van Gogh was brutally murdered, that Geert Wilders saw his opening.

Though Wilders had been in Dutch politics for a long time, that year Wilders left the VVD — the center-right party where he served alongside Ayaan — and branched out on his own with a new party, the Party for Freedom. The key issue that led to his break was that Wilders refused to countenance the possibility of EU membership for Turkey (which the VVD was willing to accept as long as certain conditions were met).

Almost immediately, Wilders became the most controversial man in Dutch politics. He urged the banning of the Quran and a halt to the construction of new mosques. He railed against what he described as the “Islamization of the Netherlands”. When he asked a crowd in 2014 whether they wanted “more or fewer” Moroccans, the crowd chanted “fewer”, and Wilders replied that this was something that would be arranged. Prosecutors argued this constituted an illegal collective insult, and the Dutch High Court ultimately ruled that Wilders was guilty, but without sentencing him to a penalty.

It was easy to be scandalized by Wilders. The press and the political class certainly were. Some publicly supported Wilders’ prosecution in the “fewer Moroccans” case.

We disagreed — and still do — with Wilders’ calls for blanket bans on additional asylum seekers, with the notion of banning the Quran (let alone any book), and with his consistent failure to draw a distinction between Islam and Islamism.

But we understand how and why his message resonated with the public.

While elites over the past two decades have told the public to ignore their lying eyes, Wilders continued to emphasize the hot-button subjects that resonated with the public: the struggling economy, the importance of borders, the risks of devolving too much power to Brussels, the threat of Islamism, and the challenge of mass migration.

While elites told the public that opposing migration was xenophobic, ordinary people noticed structural changes in their country and felt they — the public — had not been adequately consulted. In the 1960s, 60,000 Muslims lived in the Netherlands; today there are around 1.2 million, thanks to massive chain migration, asylum, and a high birth rate. (Fewer than 50,000 Jews remain in the country.)

While political elites told the public to be tolerant of Islam, in keeping with a long-standing tradition of religious tolerance, ordinary people saw that Islamists were increasingly well-entrenched in the country, a point even made by Dutch intelligence officials. Although Wilders’ rhetoric can be uninhibited and extreme, he articulates a general and perfectly legitimate feeling among voters who know that Islamism is a threat to their way of life and want to oppose it. (Wilders has been the subject of sustained Islamist threats and has had to live his life within a tight security bubble because of them.)

While elites told the public that giving more power to the EU was an unqualified good, ordinary people took a more nuanced view. When we left the Netherlands in the early 2000s, the Dutch were solidly pro-EU. Today, although most Dutch voters do not wish to leave the EU, there are growing concerns that, especially when it comes to migration and borders, too much authority has been ceded to supranational institutions.

Over the years, we have heard more and more friends express private sympathy with Geert Wilders. And it should be noted that during the most recent campaign, he toned down some of his more extreme rhetoric. Previously, his party called for a “Ministry of Re-migration and De-Islamization”. That is no longer the case. Similarly, the phrase “Islam is not a religion, but a totalitarian ideology”, which was previously part of the election manifesto, was scrapped. This time around, Wilders emphasized his commitment to working within the Dutch coalition system, which he conceded would require him to make compromises in order to be able to govern.

The recent aggressive and occasionally violent pro-Palestinian demonstrations in the Dutch streets — as elsewhere — may have been the final blow that led to last week’s landslide. It’s worth noting that Wilders’ voters do not fit a crude stereotype — he won the most votes of any party among voters between the ages of 18 and 35.

The challenge facing Javier Milei

Filed under: Americas, Bureaucracy, Economics, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Craig Pirrong outlines just how much work Argentinian President-Elect Javier Milei will have to accomplish to begin to bring Argentina’s government in line with his electoral mandate:

When I wrote Milei is not a leftist, let’s say that rather understates the matter. Milei loathes leftists and leftism, and repeatedly refers to them on television and in public appearances in scatalogical terms, calling them “leftards”. He despises collectivism, and asserts bluntly that leftists are out to destroy you. His mission is to destroy them first.

As someone so vehemently hostile to the left and well outside conventional political categories, Milei’s victory has triggered a mass moral panic, especially in the media. The New York Times coverage was (unintentionally) hilarious: “Some voters were turned off by his past outbursts and extreme comments over years of work as a television pundit and personality.” Well, obviously a lot more weren’t, but I guess one has to take solace where one can, eh, NYT?

Milei’s agenda is indeed a radical one, especially for a statist basket case like Argentina. To combat the country’s massive (140 per cent annualised) inflation, Milei says he will dollarise the economy and eliminate (“burn down”) the central bank. He also wants to reduce radically the role of the state in Argentina’s economy. He says he wants to “chainsaw” the government – and emphasises the point by campaigning with an actual chainsaw.

His election on this programme sparked a rally in Argentine financial markets, with government debt rising modestly and stock prices rallying smartly.

Will Milei be able to deliver? Some early commentary has doubted his ability to govern based on the fact that his party’s representation in the legislature is well below a majority. That may be an issue, but not the major obstacle to Milei’s ability to transform Argentina into what it was at the dawn of the 21st century: an advanced, rapidly growing economy and a relatively free society.

The real obstacle is one that is faced by anti-statists everywhere – the bureaucracy. (I do not say “civil service” because that phrase is at best aspirational and more realistically a patent falsehood. Akin to the Holy Roman Empire that was neither holy nor Roman, the “civil service” is neither civil nor a service.)

Argentina’s bloated state is its own clientele with its own interests, mainly self-preservation and an expansion of its powers. Moreover, it has created a whole host of patronage clients in business and labour. Milei’s agenda is anathema to this nexus of public and private interests. They will make war to the knife to subvert it.

Even a president with an electoral mandate faces formidable obstacles to implementing his agenda. The most important obstacle is what economists call an “agency problem”. The bureaucrats are agents of the chief executive, but it can be nigh unto impossible to get these agents to implement the executive’s directives if they don’t want to. Their incentives are not aligned with the executive, and are often antithetical. As a result, they resist and often act at cross purposes with the executive.

The modern chief executive’s power to force his bureaucratic agents to toe the line is severely circumscribed. At best, the executive can make appointments at the upper levels of the bureaucracy (such as the heads of ministries or departments), but the career bureaucrats who can make or break the executive’s policy are beyond his reach, and not subject to any punishment if they subvert the executive’s agenda.

November 29, 2023

Grover Cleveland – more “republican” than any Republican alive today

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

Not having studied American history in school, I don’t know a lot about most American presidents, especially those of the 19th century whose names aren’t Jefferson, Jackson, or Lincoln. One of the presidents I only knew about because his name turned up in a lot of original Trivial Pursuit questions was Grover Cleveland, the only man (so far) who has ever been elected to non-consecutive terms:

Grover Cleveland (1837-1908), President of the United States, 1885-89 and 1893-97.
Photo from the National Archives and Records Administration (NAID 518139) via Wikimedia Commons.

Cleveland won the White House in 1884 on a platform of restraining federal spending and corruption. Running for re-election in 1888, he won the popular vote but lost to Republican Benjamin Harrison in the Electoral College. A major reason he came out of retirement to run again in 1892 was the reckless spending of the Harrison administration. He beat Harrison that year and became the only man ever elected to non-consecutive terms (1885-89 and 1893-97).

I call to the reader’s attention an article ex-President Cleveland wrote three years after the end of his second term, in June 1901. Titled “The Waste of Public Money”, it was one of half a dozen he penned for The Saturday Evening Post. In this one, he referred to “a malign condition which threatens us,” an “evil” that he saw as “calamitous and destructive to our national character and integrity”.

In 1901, the federal government spent half a billion dollars over the whole year, roughly equivalent in real terms to around $12 billion today. Washington spends that much now in about half a day. Lest you think the feds were misers in 1901, ponder what Cleveland had to say in his article that year:

    Probably no one will have the hardihood to deny that the cost of our Government is excessive and wasteful, and that for this condition the heedless neglect and indifference of our people are in some degree responsible … If the aggregate mass of our people are at all blameworthy on account of the present advanced stage of public prodigality, it is largely because they overlooked and tolerated its small beginnings, when at all times they should have been vigilant and uncompromising. A self-ruling people … should constantly remember that nothing multiplies itself more abundantly than national extravagance, and that neither an individual nor a popular government can easily correct or check habits of waste.

The former president did not for a moment believe that only the politicians were to blame for excessive spending. He boldly asserted that many Americans embraced it. They were effectively bought and paid for, guilty of “accepting the bribes of selfish and personal advantage which public waste and extravagance offer”.

Cleveland was often warned by advisers to moderate his stances to avoid controversy. Biographer H. Paul Jeffers quotes him as responding once to such advice by asking, “What is the use of being elected or re-elected unless you stand for something?” When he vetoed a bill to relieve drought-stricken farmers with federal money, he made it plain that “though the people support the government, the government should not support the people”. He saw his job as upholding the Constitution and keeping the federal government in its proper place, not weakening “the bonds of common brotherhood” by robbing Peter to pay Paul.

This was a man who said what he meant and meant what he said, come Hell or high water. He spoke with a clarity of principle that makes a nation great, and the absence of which makes a great nation fail. He understood that no society in history that allowed itself to be bribed by its politicians ever survived such legal larceny.

In the final paragraphs of his June 1901 Saturday Evening Post article, Cleveland admonished his fellow Americans. With these words, he urged them to muster the character to resist being bribed with their own money:

    The lessons of extravagance and paternalism must be unlearned; economy and frugality must be reinstated; and the people must exact from their representatives a watchful care for the general welfare and a stern resistance to the demands of selfish interests, if our Government is to be an enduring and beneficent protection to a patriotic and virtuous people.

Many Americans today would undoubtedly dismiss Cleveland’s warnings as “quaint” and “old-fashioned”. They want the government to give them stuff and they don’t think much about who will pay for it. They think even less about how it corrupts the national character.

QotD: The children of the revolution

Filed under: Humour, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.

As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn’t measure up. What would run through the streets soon enough wouldn’t be a revolution or a riot. It’d be people who were frightened and panicking. It was what happened when the machinery of city life faltered, the wheels stopped turning, and all the little rules broke down. And when that happened, humans were worse than sheep. Sheep just ran; they didn’t try to bite the sheep next to them.

Terry Pratchett, Night Watch, 2002.

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