Quotulatiousness

April 30, 2026

QotD: The terrible economics of (most) recycling efforts

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

New York City confidently predicted that it would save money by starting a mandatory recycling program in 1992, but it took so much extra labor to collect and process the recyclables that the city couldn’t recoup the costs from selling the materials. In fact, the recyclables often had so little value that the city had to pay still more money to get rid of them. The recycling program cost the city more than $500 million during its first seven years, and the losses have continued to mount. A new study by Howard Husock of the Manhattan Institute shows that eliminating the city’s recycling program and sending all its municipal trash to landfills could now save taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars annually — enough money to increase the parks department’s budget by at least half.

Even those calculations underestimate the cost of recycling because they include only the direct outlays, chiefly the $686 per ton that the city spends to collect recyclables. But what about all the valuable time that New Yorkers spend sorting and rinsing their trash and delivering it to the recycling bin? For a New York Times Magazine article in 1996, I hired a Columbia University student to keep track of how much time he spent recycling cans and bottles and how much material he gathered in a week. Using those figures (eight minutes to gather four pounds), I calculated that if the city paid New Yorkers a typical janitor’s wage for their recycling labors, their labor would cost $792 per ton of recyclables — over $100 per ton more than what the city pays its sanitation workers to collect it.

As the economics of recycling worsened, cities in America and Europe found that the only viable markets for their recyclables were in poor countries, chiefly in China and other Asian nations, where processing recyclables was still profitable, thanks to lower wages and lower standards for worker safety and environmental quality. But as those countries have gotten wealthier, they’ve become reluctant to accept foreign trash. As bales of unwanted recyclables pile up in warehouses, towns have had to start sending them to landfills, and dozens of American municipalities have finally had the sense to cancel their recycling programs.

John Tierney, “Let’s Hold On to the Throwaway Society”, City Journal, 2020-09-13.

Update, 1 May: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

April 27, 2026

QotD: The false economy of reducing plastic packaging for food products

Filed under: Business, Economics, Environment, Food, Health, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

One morning in 1996, I sat with a class of fifth-graders in Manhattan as they gazed mournfully at a photo of a supermarket package of red apples. It was part of a slide presentation by the director of environmental education for the Environmental Action Coalition, the guest lecturer at that day’s science class.

“Look at the plastic, the Styrofoam or cardboard underneath,” she told the class. “Do you need this much wrapping when you buy things?”

“Noooo,” the fifth-graders replied.

It was all so obvious to them, the fifth-graders as well as their lecturer. She was barely out of college, but she thought that she knew more about selling produce than supermarket executives and packaging engineers who had spent their careers studying this question. She was sure that plastic wrap and Styrofoam were wasteful and harmful to the environment because she had never seriously considered the alternative or wondered why those products were introduced.

To merchants and shoppers in the late 1920s, there was nothing wasteful about the revolutionary packaging material introduced by DuPont. Cellophane seemed miraculous because it was not only moisture-proof but also transparent. “EYE IT before you BUY IT,” DuPont advertised, and shoppers welcomed this new feature enabling them to judge the quality of produce and meat before they paid up. Cellophane kept things fresh much longer, an advantage advertised to everyone from homemakers to soldiers. During World War II, a DuPont ad showed a German soldier looking on enviously as American prisoners of war opened packages of cigarettes from home that were wrapped in cellophane: “The prisoners who have better cigarettes than their guards.”

Soviet citizens in the 1980s were similarly envious of Westerners’ new plastic grocery bags, which sold for $5 apiece on the black market in Moscow. The bags were coveted partly as a status symbol (a hard-to-get imported product) and partly because they were so light and compact. In a shortage-plagued economy, Muscovites never knew when a scarce item would suddenly become available in a nearby store, so they wanted to have an empty bag with them, just in case.

American merchants and shoppers switched from paper to plastic packaging because it reduced waste. Plastic was cheaper because it required fewer resources to manufacture. It required less energy to transport because it was lighter. Plastic took up less space in landfills than paper, and it further reduced the volume of household trash because it preserved food longer. The typical household in Mexico City, for example, generated more garbage than an American household because it bought fewer packaged products and ended up discarding more food that had spoiled.

But activists eager to find some reason to oppose disposable products have ignored these advantages. They blame America’s throwaway society for polluting the oceans with plastic, though virtually all that pollution comes from either fishing vessels or from developing countries with primitive waste-management systems — mostly the Asian countries that were importing plastic recyclables from America. Instead of castigating American consumers, environmentalists should blame themselves for creating the recycling programs that sent plastic to countries where it was allowed to leak into rivers. The best way to protect marine life is to throw used plastic into the trash, not the recycling bin, so that it goes straight to a well-lined local landfill instead of ending up in the ocean.

And instead of campaigning to ban plastic grocery bags, green activists should be promoting their environmental advantages. Banning them results in higher carbon emissions because the substitutes are thicker and heavier, requiring more materials and energy to manufacture and transport, and these paper bags and tote bags typically aren’t reused often enough to offset their initial carbon footprint. Greens may feel virtuous lugging groceries home in a paper or tote bag, but the shoppers choosing plastic are actually doing more to combat global warming and reduce consumption of natural resources.

John Tierney, “Let’s Hold On to the Throwaway Society”, City Journal, 2020-09-13.

April 25, 2026

Can a genuine Canadian launch capability grow from a sketchy concrete pad in Nova Scotia?

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Space — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Along with many others, I was boggled to hear this week that the Canadian government was spending $20 million per year to lease a “launch facility” — photos show a pretty rudimentary concrete pad surrounded by gravel and not much else — which the Ukraine-connected lessor itself is leasing from the Nova Scotia for $13,500 per year. John Carter is somewhat more optimistic than I am that there’s a path from the dubious patch of land to a real maple-flavoured space program:

Guysborough, Nova Scotia, site of the MLS “spaceport”
Image from Google Maps.

It would be a gross exaggeration to say that Canada doesn’t have a space program. The launch of the Alouette 1 satellite in 1962 made Canada the fourth country to place an object into orbit around the Earth. Astronaut Marc Garneau nearly became the leader of Canada’s Liberal Party in 2012 (yes, we could have had an astronaut prime minister … Canadians voted for a nepo baby instead); astronaut Chris Hadfield is a minor celebrity in Canada; Jeremy Hansen became the first Canadian to visit the Moon a few weeks ago. Various iterations of the Canadarm have been fixtures of Space Shuttle missions and the International Space Station for decades. However, Canada does not yet have its own, native launch capability. The Canadian Space Agency acts as an appendage of NASA, with Canadian astronauts and satellites hitching rides on American rockets.

The announcement that the Canadian government is taking steps to develop a Canadian launch capacity has roused me from my uneasy slumber of the last several weeks, and I have awakened in a cranky mood. Several aspects of this story have annoyed me, both those relating to the government’s execution, and those emerging from the reaction from influencers whose justified skepticism of Ottawa’s intentions is intersecting with their poor understanding of space in a fashion that is leading them to beclown themselves.

The story that got everyone’s attention was a two hundred million dollar lease Ottawa signed with Maritime Launch Services for a spaceport in Nova Scotia, Canada’s largest Atlantic province, covering ten years of operations at twenty million dollars per year. The spaceport is, at the moment, essentially just a concrete pad at the end a gravel road, with no other apparent infrastructure.

The “spaceport”
Image from Postcards from Barsoom

There are several genuine reasons for serious concern with this, which have been detailed by a Nova Scotian NIMBY who’s been annoyed by MLS for several years now. MLS is a Ukrainian-American company whose original business model was to design, manufacture, and launch the Ukrainian-built Cyclone 4M, which it has never successfully done. To be fair, this effort was interrupted by the Ukrainian war, which for obvious reasons redirected Ukrainian rocketry to military production. However, it’s also worth emphasizing that MLS is an offshoot of the Ukrainian Space Agency, which is every bit as corrupt as you’d expect. The Ukrainian Space Agency has been mired in several expensive scandals over the years; one of them resulted in the theft of $10 million from Export Development Canada.

A former Liberal Party premier, Stephen McNeil, sits on MLS’s advisory board, which could be quite natural and could also be an indication of bog-standard conflict of interest.

The company’s finances are rather suspicious. It has posted operating losses of several million dollars a year, with the exception of 2025 when it lost $47 million1; revenue in 2025 was less than $15,000, and in 2024 it was zero. The incredible 2025 cash burn was apparently due to MLS acquiring Spaceport Canada. The company’s normal losses seem to be mostly due to executive compensation for its small roster of employees: the CEO and CFO between them rake in about a million dollars. This is despite the company not apparently actually have done anything yet. Other expenses include paying the Ukrainians for technical documentation for a launch vehicle MLS had already abandoned, and debt service on funding advanced by investors.

In 2024, MLS abandoned the scheme to launch Ukrainian rockets and pivoted to an “airport model”, the idea being that they would make money by charging launch service providers for the use of their spaceport. In 2025 there were precisely two launches from MLS’s concrete pad. Both of them were suborbital. One of them was a student-designed rocket from Toronto’s York University.

Even more absurdly, MLS’s concrete pad is on Crown land, which the company rents from Nova Scotia for $13,500 a year. This then looks like Ottawa renting its own land for $20 million a year.

In yet another suspicious-looking move, one of MLS’s chief financiers, Sasha Jacob, sold millions of shares immediately after the deal was announced and the stock price 10x’d; he then exercised stock options to replenish his position at below-market rates, thereby maintaining interest in the company while pocketing a couple million dollars.

All of this looks a whole lot like one more public-private partnership grift in which press releases and public relations materials project a hologram of visionary development, while the funds disappear into a complex web of regulatory compliance, stock buybacks, environmental impact studies, and executive salaries, without anything ever actually being built. This is a scam in which Canada’s Laurentian elites have learned to excel. It turns out that it is much easier, and far more profitable, to get paid for something you’re pretending to do instead of actually doing it; when the inevitable questions get asked, you simply throw up your hands and complain of unexpected engineering difficulties, tortuous regulatory pathways, or other factors beyond your control. None of the people involved – not government ministers, not government bureaucrats, not their private-sector partners – care one bit whether any given project succeeds, because they get paid by the taxpayer and the debt taken out in the taxpayer’s name regardless of outcomes. It is my working assumption that there is nothing more to this supposed space program than this. We are governed by theatre kids dancing to the tune of the Music Man, and none of them know anything about doing anything real.

April 24, 2026

Britain’s Green Party … not your weird cousin’s old Green Party

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Environment, Media, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Green Party have been more of a punchline than a party for decades in British politics, but the Green Party of today shares only a name with its earlier incarnations (the old UK party is now split into three separate Green Parties for England and Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland). Now, it’s become a significant threat to the Labour Party thanks to its unlikely fusion of socialist and green policies with strong support from Britain’s growing Muslim community:

The Green Party is a growing force in British politics. In February, they gained the Parliamentary constituency of Gorton and Denton in a by-election — a supposedly “safe” seat for the Labour Party. Local elections in May see them set to make big gains — perhaps sweeping to power in several town halls in London, perhaps including Camden, where Sir Keir Starmer is one of the local MPs. Opinion polls often show them roughly level with Labour and the Conservatives.

This is quite a change from previous decades when they were indulged as eccentrics on the political fringe. The Green Party (or the Ecology Party, as it was earlier named) were the sandal-wearing, muesli-munching environmentalists who wanted to go back to nature. They opposed economic growth — but their supporters tended to be affluent enough that they could afford to do so. Its leader was the aristocrat Sir Jonathon Porritt.

They were the breed George Orwell was thinking of when he wrote: “One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England”.

Great fun. But there was a darker side to the quackery then and now. A totalitarian mentality which, as Orwell also vividly described, proves horrific when it prevails.

Increasingly, the Green Party has shifted its focus away from the environment. In the few towns and cities where it has gained power locally, such as in Bristol and Brighton, it has proved ineffective at practical work in this respect. Typical behaviour would be to pass a motion declaring a “climate emergency” but then perform lamentably when it comes to recycling or tree planting or any of the relevant matters they have the power to deal with.

There was always a distortion in its supposed concern for sustainability in that it was really an excuse to denounce capitalism. The Property and Environment Research Center, a US think tank which champions free-market environmentalism, has shown a more enlightened approach. Their work has included a comparison of privately-owned and state-owned forests. Another applies property rights to marine assets. But the role of property rights as a means of good stewardship of our planet is dismissed by the Green Party out of hand.

In any case, much of the campaigning by the Green Party now is on non-green issues. Its leadership talks a lot about foreign policy and a broader economic pitch focusing on class war rhetoric and an extreme programme of state control. Taxing the rich is always seen as the panacea, despite the reality that many entrepreneurs are already fleeing the United Kingdom due to its hostile fiscal environment.

Its Manifesto for the last election two years ago proposed a Wealth Tax, a pensions tax, and a big increase in Capital Gains Tax. A £90 billion carbon tax would have closed down much of British industry, which was probably the idea.

April 22, 2026

QotD: Traditional Chinese approaches to science

Filed under: China, History, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Those of you who have studied physics know that the laws of motion are usually introduced through the mechanics and dynamics of point particles, or of simple objects acting under the influence of discrete and coherent forces. The reason for this is straightforward: even a tiny bit more complexity, and the system’s behaviour quickly dissolves into a morass that’s analytically intractable and computationally infeasible. The fact that the mutual gravitational influences of just three celestial objects results in chaotic dynamics has entered into popular culture as the “three-body problem”. But even a simple double-pendulum is impossible to predict, even with all kinds of simplifying assumptions (massless rods, no friction, no air resistance, etc., etc.).

It’s not just physics. The central technique of modern science is that of boiling something down to its absolute simplest form, understanding the simplest non-trivial case as thoroughly as possible, and only then building back up to more familiar situations. In physics we start with contrived gedankenexperimenten: “what if two particles collided in a vacuum”, and build experimental apparatuses designed to mimic these ultra-simple cases. In economics we imagine markets with a single buyer and a single seller, both perfectly rational. In political philosophy we imagine human beings in a state of nature, or societies established by a primitive contract. In biology we try to understand the functions of organisms, organs, or other systems by recursively taking them apart and trying to figure out each part in isolation. In every case, what we’re engaging in is “analysis”, ἀνά-λυσις, literally a “thorough unravelling”, understanding the whole by first understanding its parts.

This approach is totally alien to the traditional Chinese understanding of reality, which held instead that no part of the world could be understood except in its relation to the rest of the universe. You can see this in the domains of science where they did maintain a lead. Is it really a coincidence that the Medieval Chinese got frighteningly far with the mathematics of wave mechanics? Or quickly deduced the causes of the tides? Or made great strides with magnetism? In each of these cases, the physical phenomenon in question was compatible with an “organicist conception in which every phenomenon was connected with every other according to a hierarchical order”. Indeed, in all of these cases real understanding was aided by the assumption that a universal harmony underlay all things and connected all things. The tides really are in harmony with the moon, and the lodestone with the earth.

This science, founded on holism rather than on analysis, made great strides in some fields but fell behind in others. It readily imbibed action at a distance, but it could not and would not tolerate the theory of atoms. In this way it serves as a strange mirror of Medieval European science, which also loved the theory of correspondences, also loved alchemy and disdained analysis. The difference is that the glorious intellectual synthesis of Neo-Confucianism was never seriously challenged, it survived the Mongol conquest, it survived the desolation of the civil wars that preceded the Ming founding, it survived everything until communism. In contrast, the eerily-similar Thomistic metaphysics of the High Middle Ages was broken apart by the Reformation, and sufficiently discredited that analytical methods could take their first tentative steps.

This is, to be clear, my own crazy theory, because Needham never really gave a solution to his own puzzle. I came up with it only as a sort of thought-experiment, because I wanted to see if I could find a solution to Needham’s puzzle that disdained material explanations in favour of intellectual tendencies, because I find such theories curiously underrated in our culture. I only half-believe this theory,1 but I find it interesting because twentieth-century Western science has in some ways come back around to the holistic view of things: from Lagrangian methods in theoretical physics, to category theory in mathematics, to systems biology and ecology. It wouldn’t be the first time that a way of viewing the world useful to one age became an impediment to reaching the next one. The question is: what are we missing today?

John Psmith, “REVIEW: Science in Traditional China, by Joseph Needham”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-08-14.

  1. The thing about material conditions is they usually are dispositive!

April 20, 2026

Civilization-building is gendered, sorry ladies

Filed under: Health — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On Substack, Janice Fiamengo explains why the very different strengths and weaknesses of men and women will always lead to what appear to be unequal results, and fighting against biology is always a bad idea:

Even if the numbers don’t back it up, women feel that this is so true.

Social psychologist Roy Baumeister explored the relevant research in Is There Anything Good About Men (2010), a cautiously non-feminist book in which the author readily asserted that he, like most everyone else, prefers women to men. Women are more lovable, he claimed, and more pleasant to be around.

But he was not quite willing to accept the now-mainstream thesis that women can replace men in all areas of society.

His thesis is summed up in the book’s sub-title: How Cultures Flourish By Exploiting Men. Men are the foot soldiers of civilization as well as its leaders. They are the ones who make things work or make new things.

Men are the ones who must prove their utility to society. Their drive to be useful has powered centuries of back-breaking work, risk-taking, tool-building, self-sacrifice, and outstanding performance of a sort that has never been expected of women (and still isn’t).

Women in the main tend not to work as hard as men to succeed because they don’t have to. Women developed different strengths and tendencies.

Women’s strength, for good and ill, is in the inter-personal arena: not only in caring for those who are weaker but also in being cared for by those who are stronger. Women are good at reading people’s emotions and desires, and at expressing their own.

Men are not rewarded for expressing emotions and desires; men are oriented to acting, often under pressure to perform competently, in large groups and systems.

“The female brain,” according to Baumeister, “tends to be geared toward empathy, which includes emotional sensitivity to other people and deep interest in understanding them and their feelings. In contrast, the male brain is oriented toward understanding systems, which means figuring out general principles of how things operate and function together, and this applies to inanimate objects as much as social systems” (p. 85).

Baumeister supports his argument in a book-length exploration of men’s system-building. He shows how men are driven to work with, and in competition with, other men to make it possible for large numbers of human beings to live together in complex, efficient networks. The large social institutions that have characterized western cultures, from the army to churches, from corporations to unions, and from market places to police forces, give evidence of men’s system-building.

Women can work well within the systems that men devise, but they rarely devise new systems on their own. This is not because women are, on average, less intelligent than men (except at the very highest levels). It is because women’s motivations and sources of satisfaction are generally different from men’s.

Women’s contribution to culture in nurturing children, providing companionship, and looking after the family home has been a crucial one. But it does not drive innovation or invent new technologies.

Even the most intelligent women are rarely compelled, as highly intelligent men often are, to pursue scientific and other breakthroughs with the single-minded focus necessary for greatness. Often, as in the case involving Matt Taylor discussed above, many women do not seem to value or understand the nature and importance of such breakthroughs.

Women’s main contribution in the male civilizational sphere has been to lobby for admission and then to complain about, and work to undermine, the male culture of competitive excellence.

April 15, 2026

QotD: Archaeological evidence of human achievement misses a lot

Filed under: History, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

We associate human achievement, striving, and greatness with the archaeological remains that testify to them — things like written works and monumental architecture — because often that’s our only evidence that it ever happened. But sometimes, a little clever digging (literal or figurative) can uncover glories of a barbarian past. The most obvious example, of course, is that of the Iliad and the Odyssey, products of a non-state people’s oral culture in the Greek Dark Ages and only recorded with the reintroduction of writing centuries later. How many other texts would be considered classics of world literature if only they had ever become, you know, actual texts? But let’s go beyond art: if you want to talk world-bestriding greatness more broadly, look no further than the ferociously expansive Proto-Indo-Europeans, whose obsession with “imperishable fame” left their DNA all over Eurasia and their culture and even mythology so deeply embedded in their daughter cultures that it can be convincingly reconstructed today.1 Or the Polynesians, whose expansion is arguably even more impressive given how much harder it is to travel across ocean than steppe. Sure, it’s not the Lion Gate or the Mona Lisa — or even the cuckoo clock — but the remains we do have should remind us of the other cultural achievements that have doubtless been lost like tears in the rain.

“What cultural achievements?” you may ask, eyeing the world’s few remaining hunter-gatherers, and it’s true: we judge barbarians of the past by analogy to barbarians of today.2 But that’s not entirely reasonable; there’s no reason to assume that a lack of cultural elaboration among, say, the highlanders of Papua New Guinea reflects anything about the Lapita culture, let alone about the Middle Stone Age or Neolithic Europe.3 It reminds me of the friend who once explained to me, quite seriously, that he would never work for a startup because they’re all culturally dysfunctional and have stupid products. And, you know, statistically he’s probably right: most startups suck, because if they’re any good at what they do they don’t stay startups for long.4 But we all know that different cultures are different: some groups of people see a horizon and burn with the desire to know what’s beyond it, and others don’t. Well, guess who those horizons are going to end up belonging to?

Of course there’s something nice about things that last: the written works and monumental architecture give succeeding generations something to point to and discuss, a jumping-off point for their own striving. Reading Latin is great, partly because you can read what the Romans had to say but more because you can read the same things that every educated person since the Romans has read. But that’s talking about their utility for us, not anything intrinsic to them; if the Huns or the Mongols or the Turks had come a little farther west and despoiled a little more thoroughly, it wouldn’t have retroactively detracted from the grandeur that was Rome. It would simply have turned it into a dark age because it would have left us blind.

Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: Against the Grain, by James C. Scott”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-08-21.

  1. Calvert Watkins argues for a Proto-Indo-European Ur-myth in the charmingly-titled How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics, which really ought to contain more stat blocks than it does.
  2. Or, more often, a hundred years ago, since there are vanishingly few non-state peoples left.
  3. I can’t get over how annoying it is that there’s an entirely different set of terms for periods of human history depending on what continent you’re discussing.
  4. I’m sorry if it’s uncool, but by the time you employ someone with a certification from the Society of Human Resource Managers you’re not really a startup anymore even if your office fridge is full of energy drinks.

April 13, 2026

QotD: Cognitive Bias

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

The experiment seemed to vindicate Michael Shermer’s maxim that “smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons”. In “Notes on Nationalism”, Orwell noted that some of the best-educated embraced some of the most bizarre ideas. “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that,” he wrote, after describing some 1940s-era conspiracy theories. “No ordinary man could be such a fool.”

Why do we have cognitive biases? They seem like a colossal failure of the evolution of the human brain. But the more we learn about them, the better we understand their purposes. One is that they save us time and effort — the frugal reasoning argument. Suppose we go into the supermarket to buy cereal. You carefully read all the boxes, figuring out whether the All-Bran or the Just Right gives you the best nutritional balance and value in dollars per kilogram or pound. I grab a box because I like the colour or because it has a sponsorship deal with my football team. You make the more rational choice, but I spend much less of my life in the cereal aisle at the supermarket and more doing other things. It’s easy to see how the same logic gets applied to, for example, voting. Assuming that the consequences of voting the “wrong” way don’t cause me to lose as much time and effort as I would have given up to carefully select the right candidate, I come out ahead in the end.

And then there’s the prospect that cognitive biases could simply be side-effects of useful and valuable short-cuts our brains have developed. Our tendency to see patterns in randomness leads to the spread of conspiracy theories. Our ability to generalise from a few points of information leads to prejudice. The knee-jerk reactions to danger which kept our ancestors from being eaten by sabre-tooth tigers can also lead to irrational decisions in the face of more abstract threats like crime, terrorism, natural disasters, or stock-market crashes. And finally, shared beliefs, even incorrect beliefs, might promote group cohesion. Our brains are imperfect at reasoning, but they may be so for good reason.

Adam Wakeling, “George Orwell and the Struggle against Inevitable Bias”, Quillette, 2020-08-08.

April 12, 2026

“The ‘Green Energy Transition’ is … a watermelon, green on the outside and red on the inside”

Filed under: Africa, Business, Environment — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On Substack, John Robson discusses the state of the fake green economy in the wake of a carbon market scandal where a now-bankrupt “green” company appears to have sold far more “carbon credits” than they should have:

One problem among many with the “Green Energy Transition” is that it was always a watermelon, green on the outside and red on the inside. It wasn’t market-driven, it was designed, and hyped, by people who didn’t care what people actually wanted to buy and indeed, in many cases, who actively believed that consumer preferences were inefficient and unenlightened. As when Bloomberg Green worries about “What a Clean Cookstove Company’s Bankruptcy Means for Carbon Markets”. Why one company’s bankruptcy should mean anything for “carbon markets” is less clear even than what a “clean cookstove” would be. One where you sprayed and wiped the backsplash as well as the main surface? But both are clearer than “carbon markets”. You just can’t go into a store and buy carbon. What are they talking about? Why, another face-plant by central planning, of course.

According to the article, in case you weren’t independently aware of it:

    This year was supposed to be a turning point for carbon markets, with the United Nations’ long-delayed country-to-country trading system coming into force and airlines preparing to enter a mandatory program to offset their emissions.

Before we get to “a turning point for carbon markets” let us give a bit of attention to “supposed to be”. Supposed by whom? Perhaps people who think the United Nations was an efficient central planner, or some subset of them. But we’ll bet that nobody normal ever said to you, or anyone else, in the course of a chat last year, “2026 will be a turning point for carbon markets”. Nobody.

Also, who was going to compel airlines to enter a “mandatory program”? Laws are made at the national level, not internationally. Turns out it’s the UN too, via the International Civil Aviation Organization, so no one was going to bungle or cheat, obviously. What could go wrong?

[…]

Why? If a company selling stoves went bankrupt in Peoria, would it cause people in Kenya, or Patagonia, or Tokyo to reconsider the whole issue of applying heat to transform food and decide that stoves, food or both were overrated? No. Of course not. The problem here is that this whole business of carbon credits was flummery.

First you made an estimate of how much harm carbon dioxide did which was nonsense. Then you made an estimate of how much CO2 some activity would release that was also nonsense. And then you made an estimate of how much CO2 some activity would not release (in this case cooking with ethanol in Mombasa) that was also nonsense. And on that basis you proposed to link the worlds of high finance, aviation and having stuff generally to a system that would have been economic rubbish even if it weren’t flashing a big bright sign “Defraud the gullible foreigners HERE!!!” Which it was.

Mathiness being in vogue, Bloomberg Green has a colourful chart explaining that “Cookstove credits are expected to become more important from 2027” that deserves as much respect as the journalistic passive voice typically does. Or perhaps even less.

The story also says:

    Prices on Corsia, the marketplace for airlines where Koko was looking to sell its credits, fell as low as $12.25 from about $15 just before the firm’s collapse, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, and now sit at $12.85.

As prices for tulips softened abruptly in the Netherlands in 1637. Except at least there really were tulips and markets for same. Corsia is not a marketplace. It is, instead, the ICAO’s (remember: the International Civil Aviation Organization) “Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation”. As if ethanol stoves in Kenya, a land of some 53.3 million people who presumably only eat three meals a day on average, could offset the vast clouds of so-called “carbon pollution” that travellers, including the big-carbon-footprint bigmouths who lead most western countries, emit every day. The whole thing is speculation piled on ignorance atop mismeasurement built on the sand of dishonesty. What could go wrong?

April 7, 2026

Alberta is the only province moving in the right direction

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Martyupnorth responds to Tristin Hopper’s post about Don’t Be Canada: How One Country Did Everything Wrong All At Once, which he published a year ago:

Here is a one-line summary of each of Tristin’s 8 points:

Housing crisis: Canada pioneered turning entire cities into over-leveraged real estate bubbles, driving home ownership out of reach for ordinary people because prices detached from wages.

Crime and justice: Soft-on-crime policies, catch-and-release bail, and activist courts created a revolving door for repeat offenders, leaving our streets unsafe.

Harm reduction & drugs: “Safe supply” and decriminalization experiments escalated addiction and public drug use, worsening overdoses, tent cities, and societal harm instead of reducing it.

Euthanasia (MAiD): Canada rapidly expanded medical assistance in dying into one of the world’s most aggressive programs, with soaring death numbers and cases pushing it as a tratement for poverty and disability.

Healthcare system: Despite high spending, Canada’s “free” system ranks near the bottom in performance among developed nations, with deadly wait times and dysfunction.

Transgender policies: Canada went further than most countries with permissive rules on youth transitions, pronouns, biological males in female spaces, and related ideology in schools and institutions.

Identity politics and “anti-racism”: Canada outdid even the U.S. in embracing divisive oppressed frameworks, including declaring itself guilty of an ongoing “genocide” against Indigenous people with little accountability.

Censorship and speech laws: Expansive hate speech rules, online content takedowns, and bills like the Online Harms Act pushed Canada toward Orwellian restrictions, chilling expression and drawing international warnings.

Canada took progressive ideas further and faster than peers, almost always with cascading negative consequences, turning a once-stable nation into a totally dysfunctional one.

He’s right in saying that Danielle Smith is the only one finally acknowledging that things aren’t working, and is trying to reverse some of these pad idea.

It’s still not enough to save Alberta, we need to divorce ourselves from the rest of Canada and their bad ideas.

April 4, 2026

Be on the lookout for “toxic confidence”

Filed under: Health, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Freddie deBoer disagrees with a recent New York Times piece which proclaims that “toxic confidence” is the current psychological tic of choice:

[…] But then, the whole theatrical embrace of imposter syndrome wasn’t really about a sincere belief that they didn’t belong in the program, that they had gotten in through some mistake. It was, instead, an expression of a very weird element of Millennial culture, which is the embrace of insecurity as a means of belonging.

Which brings me to Savannah Sobrevilla and her recent trend piece, destined to be a New York Times classic, “Toxic Confidence Has Taken Over”. You can already guess the argument here, but I’ll give you the nut anyway:

    … it used to be that “impostor syndrome” dominated conversations, the anxious stance of millennials with adult responsibilities and women leading corporate workplaces trying not to rankle. Even if you felt deserving of accolades, the social graces of the time required the expression of modesty.

    Now, in an era of aggressively handsome incels and macho political posturing, cultivated humility feels trite. A younger generation, coming out of high school and college in Covid lockdown, feels less beholden to dampening their light. Who has time for affected meekness when playing the braggart not only tickles the soul, but has the potential to convince others of one’s own greatness?

The phrase itself, “toxic confidence”, is doing a lot of work in this essay, and I can just imagine an NYT editor reading the pitch, seeing that phrase, and salivating. But there’s not a lot there, really. Strip away the arch tone and the carefully curated examples (reality-television grifters, Trump-administration blusterers) and what you’re left with is a fairly straightforward complaint: some people believe in themselves too much, and it’s making a certain kind of person uncomfortable. Of course, there’s always been braggarts and narcissists and perennially self-impressed people around us, in any era, and that they’re annoying is not generally considered newsworthy. What makes this a classic NYT trend piece is that it makes an observation that’s comprehensible only to a certain strata of reader — middle aged or younger, culturally savvy, educated, urban in ethos if not necessarily in geography, too online. These people aren’t experiencing the age-old frustration with the conventionally overconfident, but are facing (if Sobrevilla is to be believed) the demise of a recent generational embrace of performative insecurity, which makes them uncomfortable. That discomfort is worth examining, because it reveals less about a cultural pathology than about whose neuroses we’ve decided to normalize.

As usual, I blame my own generation. For roughly fifteen years, Millennial culture ran a remarkable experiment: it rebranded anxiety, self-doubt, and chronic insecurity as virtues. This is certainly connected to the phenomenon of illness as identity and disorder as fashion I’m always complaining about […] but is, I think, a distinct phenomenon, the rearrangement of healthy confidence into pathology and pathological self-doubt into virtue. The weird affordances of social media gave certain culturally and socially influential people the ability to imprint their own neuroses onto the wider culture, recasting that neuroses as a sort of down-to-earth norm. In that context, impostor syndrome ceased to be something to overcome and became a membership card. Everybody started bragging about their social anxiety; people gleefully declared their FOGO; “I’m the worst”, said with the right ironic lilt, became fodder for bonding. Vulnerability, performed on cue, was currency. The implicit agreement was powerful and, when you examine it, fairly cruel: if you seemed too assured, too unbothered by your own inadequacy, you were either deluded or dangerous. The rules had been rewritten by indoor kids, the chronic overthinkers, the people who had built entire identities around their relationship with self-doubt, and the rules said confidence was suspect.

What Sobrevilla calls “toxic confidence” is largely just the renegotiation of those rules, an attempt to cast an incipient reclamation of basic, uncomplicated self-assurance as some sort of aggressive masculinist cult. A couple of examples that Sobrevilla calls out specifically include Olympic free skier Eileen Gu and actor Timothée Chalamet; I’m afraid these examples just make Sobrevilla seem afraid of excellence. When Gu — an Olympic gold medalist, a celebrity, a Stanford student, and a burgeoning entrepreneur — says that being inside her own head is “not a bad place to be”, that isn’t pathology; it’s the statement of a young woman who has done the work and is honest about it. (And wouldn’t we prefer for everyone to feel like insider their own head is a nice place to be?) Maybe Gu is a genuinely awful human being, I don’t know, but nothing Sobrevilla references rises to the level of narcissism or whatever other pseudo-medical accusation we’re throwing around these days. I find Chalamet a little aggravating, but when he says that he aspires to be considered among the great actors of his time, when all is said and done, that’s not a statement of Trumpian bellicosity but instead a reflection of honest, healthy ambition. We’ve been so conditioned to expect performative self-deprecation that accurate self-assessment reads as arrogance.

Artemis II – later than hoped, but better now than never

Filed under: Cancon, Space, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

CDR Salamander goes fullbore (because it’s Friday, and that’s what he normally does on a Friday):

Official crew portrait for Artemis II, from left: NASA Astronauts Christina Koch, Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman, Canadian Space Agency Astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
Photo by Josh Valcarcel for NASA

I grew up with the Apollo Program and some of my earliest memories were watching astronauts during the lunar landings. You could see the Saturn V launches from my backyard.

Just as I was getting old enough to really enjoy it, it all stopped.

The 1970s.

The worst people for the worst reasons killed the space program as it became part of the national malaise of the 1970s, the core of which was defined by the period from the last person on the moon in 1972 through the fall of Saigon three years later, and bookended by the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-80.

For those who received the promise of 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey as to what the future in space would be never fulfilled, we tried to get excited by partial measures — Skylab; the Space Shuttle and its disasters; the downgrading of Reagan’s Space Station Freedom into the “Model UN in space”, the International Space Station; and the lingering malaise and distraction that we endured during the Clinton and Obama administrations.

Here we are 53 years later, and at last we are reaching for the moon again. We never should have left.

[…]

And so North America—three Americans and a Canadian—is heading to the moon.

Back at last.

The Commander Reid Wiseman, is a U.S. Navy Captain and former F-14 driver. The Pilot is another U.S. Navy Captain, Victor Glover, though he was a F/A-18 bubba.

Navy wins again!

Mission Specialist Christina Koch comes from a great ACC school, and for comic relief, we have our Canadian Mission Specialist, Jeremy Hansen, the only one who is on their first space flight.

Somewhere there are plenty of young men and women who, I hope, are watching as my generation did, the best of mankind again reaching out.

Let’s not let the momentum stop this time. Keep pushing out. It is what our species does best, and it brings the best out of us.

April 3, 2026

“Rocket launches are America at its best”

Filed under: Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Jen Gerson on the Artemis II launch on April 1st:

Artemis II launch, 1 April, 2026
NASA image

I’m not The Line‘s resident space dork; and, yet, I, like everyone likely reading this piece, watched the launch of Artemis II last night, enraptured and hopeful for a successful slingshot around the moon.

My son watched with me, he counted down from 10, and he jumped up when the rockets lit up, throwing four astronauts in a tin can into space.

This stuff is cool on its own merit, but it hits us all somewhere a little deeper than mere wonder at the extraordinary mechanics.

Watching a manned rocket launch is the barest little window-crack opening into a distant future. It’s a monumental effort to throw a fine fishing line into the darkness, hoping against hope that some great destiny is on the other side just waiting for us to tug at it.

By all rational accounts space travel is dumb. It’s an extraordinarily expensive use of human capital and time and resources to reach into nothingness and expanse. We all love pictures of stars and planets and nebulae, but we may never glean much of real material value from these investments in our own lifetimes. Or our great-grandchildren’s lifetimes.

There may be nothing but lifeless rock and death beyond our own ecosystem; no other place we will ever call home.

In fact, from where we sit today, that’s probably true.

Yet we do this stupid thing anyway. We must do the stupid thing anyway.

[…]

Rocket launches are America at its best, and perhaps now more than usual, we need to remind ourselves that this best still exists. Perhaps especially on the same night we sat fearing the President would announce that NATO was over and the world was breaking. (He didn’t, and I guess it’s not for now.)

And regardless of what nation we belong to, whether we’re accountants, butlers, or mothers, every single one of us carries that thin thread of life forward. We all take part in the project. We all have a place. Some of the big roles may be assigned to individual players, but the destiny of humanity is shared. (Whether we like it or not.)

So, we can all be moved together in these moments. We can all imagine what great-great-great grandchildren who have long forgotten our own names might think while watching archival footage of the Artemis II launch. What even greater world might they achieve. What more fanciful ambitions might be open to them. Maybe they will say that this was the moment we started to get our priorities right and our acts together. Maybe things will get better.

Maybe Artemis II, absurd and wasteful, is neither. Who knows how my son will metabolize the video stream of this really cool rocket; I cannot say who he may come to be for witnessing it.

Our craziest aspirations are the way we send our love to the children too far distant for us to see or know.

For my own part, I caught the space bug very early through science fiction of the 1950s and 60s, especially from the writings of Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. Earth is just our starting point, and one planet isn’t enough to ensure the survival of our species, so exploring space is an evolutionary necessity.

April 2, 2026

Modern-day serial killers are called “Doctor”

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

At Science is not the answer, William M. Briggs explains why these are the long-foretold “hard times”:

Poor John Wayne Gacy. Reports are that the infamous mass murderer was looking up from his perch in Hell, musing about the more than thirty people he raped, tortured, then butchered and said “I was born too early”.

He was right.

If he had only waited a few short years to begin his horror spree, not only would he not have been arrested and executed, he would have received glowing tributes, warm praise from his colleagues, and he would have been paid by the state for every person he killed. And he would have had a much, much higher score than a mere 33 (official count).

Tale the case of modern-day born-on-time serial killer Dr — doctor, doctor — Ellen Wiebe. She beats Gacy’s score by more than ten times. She is credited with slaughtering over 500 people in Canada’s MAiD program. As impressive as that tally is, it is incomplete. It doesn’t count the lives inside would-be mothers she ended, for she is also an abortionist. And she is still going strong, cheered on by the Canadian government. By the time she is done, Mao himself will be envious of her feats.

That its own government joyfully starts killing off its own people proves Canadian civilization has exhausted itself. It, and a great many other civilizations, are experiencing the last phase of the ancient cycle: hard men make good times, good times make soft men, soft men make hard times. The hard times are just coming upon them, and us, created by the good times the remarkable lives of our predecessors created for us.

There are small cycles and large. Small versions of this litany are always playing out: in individual lives, in select localities, in nations. These are easy to see. But there are also larger waves, harder to spot because they are so encompassing. They are global in scope and span eras. This is why even when riding down a Great Wave toward an abyss, it can seem, and be, for a time and in a place things are improving.

Our lives are short, we see most things only with immediacy; we extrapolate too easily, and we expect matters will play out in Hollywood time, as it were. The fault is expected because when history is presented it is foreshortened. Events which took centuries are completed in pages. It is almost impossible to put ourselves in the position of a man who lived in the latter stages of the Roman empire, who lived his entire life in reasonable enough times, and who didn’t see the end coming.

It is a great mistake to view the litany wholly, or even largely, in material terms. Certainly cushy living makes for sloth and fat men. But we are also spiritual (rational) creatures. When the bulk of our ideas are given to us in packaged “education”, and we don’t have to work from them, we are cursed by easy thinking, intellectual malaise. It’s true the West has largely given up Christianity, its ideas stale and uninspiring to most. But in the East it is the same. The great hope of Science has paled. Our customary motivating forces are no longer motivating, the great old visions no longer forceful as they once were. Largely. There are many local exceptions. But they are just that: exceptions.

We recall Emil Cioran, who said, “Every exhausted civilization awaits its barbarian, and every barbarian awaits his demon”. Our barbarians are no longer awaited (we are their demons). Rulers in the West are inviting them in. And making it a crime, in many places, to oppose the inflow. Such is their ardor to have strangers among us, it is hard not to argue that these rulers want to be put out of their misery.

April 1, 2026

“Facilitated Communication (FC) is a discredited technique that should not be used”

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

Perhaps it’s just me, but I read Freddie deBoer‘s refutation of Facilitated Communication with a kind of rising horror, that a parent or trusted adult could so take advantage of a disabled person to commit this kind of fraud:

“Facilitated Communication” by Faure P, Legou T and Gepner B is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 .

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: The New York Times has again casually endorsed facilitated communication, or FC, a relentlessly-discredited practice that plays on the desperation and credulousness of parents of severely disabled children. As in the past, they’ve done this while barely seeming to understand that they’re doing something controversial at all. The culprit this time is a review of the new novel Upward Bound “by” Woody Brown, a man with severe autism who has been nonverbal his entire life and dictated his book through FC, which is also the means through which he earned a masters degree and other remarkable feats. Brown, like so many others who have been “saved” through FC, was found to have all manner of remarkable intellectual abilities once someone else was “facilitating” his communication.

The review describes Brown “tapping letters on a board” while his mother interprets and voices the words. That is the textbook structure of FC: a disabled person who cannot otherwise communicate produces output while a facilitator mediates, guides, or stabilizes the process. Or so proponents claim. Without the facilitator, the disabled person is mute; with their guidance, they suddenly become remarkably verbally proficient, often learned and verbose. If you’re new to the FC debate, you should trust your skepticism: the fact that the mother has to be present and participating, the fact that Brown cannot manipulate the board without the mother’s involvement, the fact that he has never been subject to rigorous research that involves “message-passing” or “double-blind” tests … This is the inconvenient, damning reality.

Message passing, or double-blind, tests are simple and remarkably effective. Information is provided to both the disabled person and the facilitator, often in the form of pictures or individual words, with both the facilitator and the test subject receiving the same information some times and discordant information other times. That is to say, the disabled person and the facilitator will sometimes both be shown a star or a watermelon or a flower or a bird, while at other times one might get the star picture while the other gets the bird, etc. If the disabled person genuinely crafts their responses, this should be a trivially easy test to pass: the facilitated communication will produce the information that the disabled subject received. And yet very close to literally 100% of the time in rigorous research, across dozens of studies with thousands of combined attempts, interactions produce the information the facilitator received and not the information the disabled person received. Surveying the literature, the consistency of this finding is remarkable — and there is no coherent explanation for how this could happen if indeed FC results in messages being sent from a conscious and alert test subject. Instead, these findings are perfectly consistent with Occam’s razor and the assumption that the facilitator is the one speaking.

Thanks to this overwhelming body of research literature, professional societies have tended to be unusually blunt about FC. The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, the leading professional body in this field, states unequivocally: “Facilitated Communication (FC) is a discredited technique that should not be used”. It continues: “There is no scientific evidence of the validity of FC, and there is extensive scientific evidence … that messages are authored by the ‘facilitator’ rather than the person with a disability”. This is not a marginal view; it reflects decades of careful studies across multiple countries. There are many other statements from relevant medical organizations and expert bodies that reach the same conclusion, which is to be expected, considering that the evidence points in only one direction. Are the facilitators deliberately engaging in fraud? No, it’s very likely that they’re being sincere, at least in the large majority of cases. The explanation is the ideomotor effect, the same unconscious motor influence that drives Ouija boards. The facilitator is not deliberately faking communication but unknowingly producing it, usually to satisfy their own desperate longing to connect with the disabled person.

So how did we get here? I guess the Times feels like it’s fine to smuggle in flagrant pseudoscience under the guise of a book review. Hey, it’s just a book review! But I’m afraid that claims of fact that appear in the paper’s pages are the paper’s responsibility, and this review represents a profound journalistic failure. The review treats FC as valid, when in fact FC has been exhaustively discredited for decades. In doing so, it does something worse than merely misinform; it participates in a harmful fiction that exploits vulnerable families and misrepresents disabled individuals. As I’ve said before, this issue is difficult to address in part because the families who fall for FC are so sympathetic. And the FC community goes to great lengths to enable this form of wishful thinking; they’ve created a number of superficially-different approaches to avoid scrutiny and defy the debunkings of the past, including avoiding the term “facilitated communication” itself. They now tend endorse tools like letter boards and techniques like “spelling”, which they claim are fundamentally different. But it’s all still FC, all still a matter of a verbal and cognitively-unimpaired adult “interpreting” the language of a severely disabled person and producing language that they’re consistently and conspicuously incapable of producing on their own.

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