Quotulatiousness

January 2, 2021

Victor Davis Hanson’s 2020 review

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

I’m not normally prone to weak puns, but I think it’s not unfair to call 2020 an Anus horribilis rather than an Annus horribilis, because the last twelve months have been utter ass:

The year 2020 is now commonly dubbed the annus horribilis — “the horrible year.” The last 10 months certainly have been awful.

But then so was 1968, when both Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. The Tet Offensive escalated the Vietnam War and tore America apart. Race and anti-war riots rocked our major cities. Protesters fought with police at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. A new influenza virus, H3N2 (the “Hong Kong flu”), killed some 100,000 Americans.

But an even worse 2020 saw the COVID-19 outbreak reach global pandemic proportions by March. Chinese officials mislead the world about the origins of the disease — without apologies.

Authorities here in the U.S. were sometimes contradictory in declaring quarantines either effective or superfluous. Masks were discouraged and then mandated. Researchers initially did not know how exactly the virus spread, only that it could be lethal to those over 65 or with comorbidities.

Initial forecasts of 1 million to 2 million Americans dying from the virus unduly panicked the population. But earlier assurances that the death toll wouldn’t reach 100,000 falsely reassured them.

[…]

For the first time in American history, given the lockdowns and the cold-weather viral resurgence, there was neither a traditional Thanksgiving nor Christmas for many people.

Yet amid the death, destruction and dissension, history will show that America did not fall apart.

In remarkable fashion, researchers created a viable and safe COVID-19 vaccine in less than a year — a feat earlier described as impossible by experts.

The nation went into recession but avoided the forecasted depression. This was partly because America in early 2020 was booming by historical standards, and partly because the Trump administration and Congress quickly infused some $4 trillion of liquidity into the inert economy.

For all the charges and counter-charges of voter fraud and Trump being a sore loser, President-elect Joe Biden will eventually take office. And Donald Trump will leave it.

This is the dawning of the Age of the Putz

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

At least, that’s how David Warren sees it:

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

… the spirit of Resolution has been dying in our society, and that is among the principal reasons that our public life has been down-trending. It is what we may call the Age of the Putz, using the term with its full Yiddish vigour, yet in English where we may say it in the presence of women and children. Yes, it means stupid, foolish, worthless, idle and so forth. But as I understand, at the fulcrum, it means “easy to swing around.” It means being led by one’s rope, as it were. A putz (understandably confused with a schmuck, or a nebbish) does what he has been told by the authorities, and oddly like the brave, he does not hesitate. But this is because he can’t endure pain. He can be agreeable, yet without charm. (Reader warning: my Yiddish may be defective.)

This would be acceptable, in the sense that there is nothing we can do about a putz — he has already surrendered — but a line must be drawn somewhere, if only for our own edification. This is where, in current jargon, we cross over from a putz, to a Karen. In my apartment building alone, there must be a dozen who have made this “transition.”

They are the ones who think they will die, if you’ve forgotten your bat-muzzle, or threaten to step within seventy inches of them, in an elevator. They may appear to be making a threat, by the shrieks of complaint they utter, but really it is only fear. It is, to be plain, the opposite of Resolution. The authorities, taking them for putzes, have easily instilled the “public health” terror, with “science” they have made up, and may yank them here or there as they want.

Could I make videos, I would record a snide little number that composed itself in my head, last May (when we were only two months into “fifteen days to flatten the curve”). It was entitled, “You’re Going To Kill People!” The dance component was a variation on the hippie-days twist, in which Walmart shoppers try to stay two feet clear of each other, while looting modest consumer durables.

January 1, 2021

QotD: Buying “organic” food

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

… every time I buy “organic”, I feel like I’m sending a reinforcement to several different forms of vicious stupidity, beginning with the term “organic” itself. Duh! Actually, all food is “organic”; the term just means “chemistry based on carbon chains”.

Take “no GMOs” for starters. That’s nonsense; it’s barely even possible. Humans have been genetically modifying since the invention of stockbreeding and agriculture; it’s what we do, and hatred of the accelerated version done in a genomics lab is pure Luddism. It’s vicious nonsense, too; poor third-worlders have already starved because their governments refused food aid that might contain GMOs. And without GMOs it’s more than possible that the new wave of wheat rust, once it really gets going, might condemn billions to death.

Vegan? I’ve long since had it up to here with the tissue of ignorance and sanctimony that is evangelical veganism. Comparing our dentition and digestive tracts with those of cows, chimps, gorillas, and bears tells the story: humans are designed to be unspecialized omnivores, and the whole notion that vegetarianism is “natural” is so much piffle. It’s not even possible except at the near end of 4000 years of GMOing staple crops for higher calorie density, and even now you can’t be a vegan in a really cold climate (like, say, Tibet) because it’ll kill you. In warmer ones, you better be taking carnitine and half a dozen vitamins or you’re going to have micronutrient issues sneak up on you over a period of years.

OK, I give on gluten-free. Some people do have celiac disease; that’s a real need. But “no trans fat”? Pure faddery, or the next thing to it. The evidence indicting trans fats is extremely slim and surrounded by a cloud of food-nannyist hype. I hate helping to keep that sort of balloon inflated with my dollars.

Who could be against “fair trade”? Well, me … because the “fair trade” crowd pressures individual growers to join collectives with “managed” pricing. If you’re betting that this means lazy but politically adept growers with poor resource management and productivity prosper at the expense of more efficient and harder-working ones, you’ve broken the code.

Finally, “pesticide-free”. Do I like toxic chemicals on my food? No … but I also don’t fool myself about what happens when you don’t use them. This ties straight back to the general cluster of issues around factory farming. Without the productivity advantages of pesticides, synthetic fertilizer, and other non-“organic” methods, farm productivity would plummet. Relatively wealthy people like me would cope with reduced availability by paying higher prices, but huge numbers of the world’s poor would starve.

I buy “organic” food because it tastes better and I can, but I feel guilty about reinforcing all the kinds of delusion and superstition and viciousness that are tied up in that label. We simply cannot feed a world population of 6.6 billion without pesticides and factory farming and GMOs and preservatives in most bread; now, and probably forever, “organic” food will remain a luxury good.

Try telling its political partisans that, though. Hyped on their belief in their own virtue, and blissfully ignorant about scale problems, they have already engineered policies that have cost thousands of lives during spot famines. The potential death toll from (especially) anti-GMO policies is three orders of magnitude higher.

And my problem reduces to this: how can I buy the kind of food I want without supporting dangerous delusions?

Eric S. Raymond, “Organic guilt”, Armed and Dangerous, 2010-08-23.

December 27, 2020

Moderna’s Wuhan Coronavirus vaccine was developed nearly a year ago

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

Philip Steele explains why Moderna’s vaccine was not made available until very recently, despite having been developed only days after the genetic code for the virus was published:

Few people realize that the Moderna vaccine against COVID-19 — which the FDA has finally declared “highly effective,” and which is now being distributed to Americans — has actually been available for nearly a year.

But the government wouldn’t let you take it.

The vaccine, a triumph of medical science known as mRNA-1273, was designed in a single weekend, just two days after Chinese researchers published the virus’s genetic code on January 11, 2020.

For the entire duration of the pandemic, while hundreds of thousands died and the world economy was decimated by lockdowns, this highly effective vaccine has been available.

But you, and all the people who died, were prohibited by the government from taking it.

There are some who claim that the FDA “saves lives” by putting the brakes on medical innovation with their requirements for years-long, and often decades-long, billion-dollar medical trial procedures.

Missing here is the obvious counterpoint — How many lives did the FDA sacrifice to disease in the meantime?

In the case of COVID-19 we know the answer: more than 300,000 deaths so far in the United States and counting.

December 21, 2020

Boris “Ebenezer” Johnson cancels Christmas

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

What is it with British PMs and political U-turns?

So Christmas is cancelled. The neo-Cromwellian edict has been issued. The thing that Boris Johnson said would be “inhuman” just a few days ago has now been done. For the first time in centuries people in vast swathes of England – London and the South East – will be forbidden by law from celebrating Christmas together. The government’s promise of five days’ relief from the stifling, atomising, soul-destroying lockdown of everyday life has been snatched away from us. It’s too risky, the experts say; the disease will spread and cause great harm. You know what else will cause great harm? This cruel, disproportionate cancellation of Christmas; this decree against family festivities and human engagement.

This evening Boris Johnson executed the most disturbing u-turn of his premiership: he scrapped the planned relaxation of lockdown rules for Christmas. He commanded that London and the South East will be propelled into Tier 4, yet another Kafkaesque category of authoritarianism dreamt up by our increasingly technocratic rulers. This means no household mixing, including on Christmas Day. That’s millions of planned get-togethers, family celebrations, cancelled with the swipe of a bureaucrat’s pen. Other areas outside of London are luckier: Boris has graciously granted them one day off from the lockdown rules, on Christmas Day, when they may mix with people from other households. They will no doubt give praise to their benevolent protectors for such festive if fleeting charity.

There is much that is disturbing about Boris’s decree. It is being justified on the basis that a new strain of Covid-19 is spreading in the South East and seems more contagious than earlier strains. That is certainly something we should be aware of. But Boris also declared that there is no evidence that this new strain has led to “increased mortality”. So what is going on here? Surely before enacting the drastic, almost unprecedented measure of preventing millions of people from celebrating Christmas together the government should offer up clearer evidence of the significant social harms that would allegedly spring from such celebrations? The political and media elites go on and on about “evidence-based policy”, except when it comes to locking people down. Then it’s all “Yeh, go ahead, better safe than sorry”.

December 19, 2020

QotD: Ego and the A-listers

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

It’s not that people at the top of their fields are more virtuous. Well … actually I think people at the top of their fields do tend to be more virtuous, for the same reason they tend to be be more intelligent, less neurotic, longer-lived, better-looking, and physically healthier than the B-listers and below. Human capability does not come in [neatly] divisible chunks; almost every individual way that humans can excel is tangled up with other ways at a purely physiological level, with immune-system capability lurking behind a surprisingly large chunk of the surface measures. But I don’t think the mean difference in “virtue”, however you think that can actually be defined, explains what I’m pointing at.

No. It’s more that ego games have a diminishing return. The farther you are up the ability and achievement bell curve, the less psychological gain you get from asserting or demonstrating your superiority over the merely average, and the more prone you are to welcome discovering new peers because there are so damn few of them that it gets lonely. There comes a point past which winning more ego contests becomes so pointless that even the most ambitious, suspicious, external-validation-fixated strivers tend to notice that it’s no fun any more and stop.

[…]

I think there are a couple of different reasons people tend to falsely attribute pathological, oversensitive egos to A-listers. Each reason is in its own way worth taking a look at.

The first and most obvious reason is projection. “Wow, if I were as talented as Terry Pratchett, I know I’d have a huge ego about it, so I guess he must.” Heh. Trust me on this; he doesn’t. This kind of thinking reveals a a lot about somebody’s ego and insecurity, alright, but not Terry’s.

There’s a flip side to projection that I think of as the “Asimov game”. I met Isaac Asimov just a few months before he died. Isaac had long been notorious for broadly egotistical behavior and a kind of cheerful bombast that got up a lot of peoples’ noses. But if you ever met him, and you were at all perceptive, you might see that it was all a sort of joke. Isaac was laughing inside at everyone who took his “egotism” seriously – and, at the same time, watching hungrily for people who could see through the self-parody, because they might – might – actually be among the vanishingly tiny minority that constituted his actual peers. The Asimov game is a constant temptation to extroverted A-listers; I’ve been known to fall into it myself. It’s not really anybody’s fault that a lot of people are fooled by it.

Another confusing fact is that though A-listers may not be about ego or status competition, they will often play such games ruthlessly and effectively when that gets them something they actually want. The something might be more money from a gig, or a night in the hay with an attractive wench, or whatever; the point is, if you catch an A-lister in that mode, you might well mistake for egotism some kinds of display behavior that actually serve much more immediate and instrumental purposes. Your typical A-lister in that situation (and this includes me, now) is blithely unconcerned that a bystander might think he’s egotistical; the money or the wench or the whatever is the goal, not the approval or disapproval of bystanders.

Finally, a lot of people confuse arrogance with ego. A-listers (and I am including myself, again, this time) are, as a rule, colossally arrogant. That is, they have utter confidence in their ability to meet challenges that would humble or break most people. Do not be fooled by the self-deprecating manner that many A-listers cultivate; it is a mask adopted for social purposes, mostly to avoid freaking out the normal monkeys. But this arrogance is not the same as egotism; in fact, in many ways it is the opposite. It is possible to be arrogant about one’s abilities compared to the statistically average human being and the range of challenges one is likely to encounter, but deeply and genuinely humble when dealing with peers or contemplating the vastness of one’s own ignorance and incapability relative to what one could imagine being. In fact, this combination of attitudes is completely typical of the A-listers I have known.

Eric S. Raymond, “Ego is for little people”, Armed and Dangerous, 2009-11-09.

December 13, 2020

QotD: The statistical “Rule of Silicone Boobs”

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

If it’s sexy, it’s probably fake.

“Sexy” means “likely to get published in the New York Times and/or get the researcher on a TEDx stage”. Actual sexiness research is not “sexy” because it keeps running into inconvenient results like that rich and high-status men in their forties and skinny women in their early twenties tend to find each other very sexy. The only way to make a result like that “sexy” is to blame it on the patriarchy, and most psychologist aren’t that far gone (yet).

[…]

Anything counterintuitive is also sexy, and (according to Rule 2) less likely to be true. So is anything novel that isn’t based on solid existing research. After all, the Times is the newspaper business, not in the truthspaper one.

Finding robust results is very hard, but getting sexy results published is very easy. Thus, sexy results generally lack robustness. I personally find a certain robustness quite sexy, but that attitude seems to have gone out of fashion since the Renaissance.

Jacob Falkovich, “The Scent of Bad Psychology”, Put a Number On It!, 2018-09-07.

December 8, 2020

QotD: Booze

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

I absolutely reject all the arguments of increased insurance liability and potential legal problems created by booze — I have no interest in the blatherings of insurance types and lawyers, because they’ve caused most of our Nanny-related problems anyway. The problems occur not with booze itself, but with the lack of personal restraint. And that’s something which is addressed by people acting like adults, not like children let loose in a candy store with $1,000 to spend.

Here’s part of the booze problem we face Over Here.

American beer is too weak, and American short drinks are served too strong.

The problem with weak beer is not its weakness per se, but the fact that you have to drink quite a bit of it to get a decent buzz — and the problem with drinking in quantity is that it’s really difficult to know when to stop once the old Alcohol Accelerator comes into play. I’d rather have a pint of Boddington’s Ale than four Michelobs (which are about equal in terms of buzz generation). The difference is that the former is, well, a pint; the latter is three pints. That’s a lot of liquid to drink, in a lunch hour, which means you have to drink it fast; whereas the Brit pint can be savored in a leisurely fashion, knowing that the destination will be the same.

Kim du Toit, “Un-Lubricated”, Kim du Toit – Daily Rant, 2005-02-24.

December 6, 2020

“As ever, our Liberal friends prefer to be judged by their pure intentions rather than their rather tattered record”

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

The good folks at The Line suggest that we monsters in the peanut gallery stop hurting poor Little Potato’s feeeeeeeeeelings:

Typical image search results for “Justin Trudeau socks”

What we can say is that supporters of our current government continue to insist that the prime minister and his cabinet be granted a level of benefit of the doubt that they simply have not earned. Declarations that the Liberals have botched the vaccine rollout are premature, but they are not preposterous. As ever, our Liberal friends prefer to be judged by their pure intentions rather than their rather tattered record. We at The Line have known enough true Grits in our time to believe that this isn’t an act. Liberals really do believe that so long as they mean well, they should be forgiven their failures. Indeed, the failures should be forgiven and forgotten.

And boy, can they get testy when someone declines to do them the courtesy of treating this five of a government like a nine. They’ll shriek about Harper and Ford and Kenney and American-style whatever, they’ll argue in bad faith, they’ll demand an audit of Andrew Scheer’s household expenses, they’ll shut parliament down in the middle of a national emergency to spare the boss from embarrassing questions about his latest ethical flub. In short, they’ll do anything to avoid admitting that this Liberal government has blown more than enough high-profile issues to have forfeited any right to be bummed out when someone dares wonder if they’ll do any better on vaccines.

Over the last five years, the Liberals have failed to hit their own targets on balancing the budget and cleaning up Indigenous water supplies. They failed to hit Harper’s targets on carbon reduction, failed to win a UN seat, failed to deliver promised military procurements, failed on electoral reform, failed to improve our decrepit transparency system, and failed to notice any number of outrageous policies and proposals so long as they were proffered en français, in which case they couldn’t avert their eyes fast enough.

We could go on, but the point is made. And they’ve done it all after daring to talk in their opening days of deliverology, a term that’s now a political punchline thanks to how badly Trudeau and the Gang failed to live up to the hype of their own managerial jargon.

The problem with all this failure is far bigger than the sum of its various sad parts. A government that routinely writes cheques its competence can’t cash may be in a hurry to forgive itself, but not all Canadians are as fond of Justin Trudeau as Justin Trudeau clearly is. A proven track record of failure by the state erodes public confidence in the state, and the sneering contempt Liberals have for anyone who notices the failure doesn’t help. We find it absolutely amazing how many Liberals (rightly!) decry the rise of populism without ever seeming to ponder for a New York minute what role their own manifest mediocrity has played in fuelling it. So we’ll kindly hear no more from the Liberals about the know-nothing idiocy of the woke left and the destructive buffoonery of the nationalist right until they stop doing such a shabby job with the goddamned centre.

December 5, 2020

The “new normal” will, by definition not be “normal”

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

At Spiked, Brendan O’Neill cries “Down with the New Normal!”

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

Few phrases inspire more horror in me than “the new normal”. It is falling from the lips of public-health experts and lockdown-loving commentators everywhere. Forget the “old normal” of going maskless into the streets, or ramming yourself into a crowd of thirsty punters at the bar in a pub, or taking a lover without constantly worrying that he or she might make you ill with his or her breath. Such reckless libertinism was for the old world, apparently, the era BC (Before Covid). We are all now heading into the New Normal, a brave new world of forever social-distancing being built for us by a benevolent bureaucracy that simply wants to protect us from disease.

Everywhere you turn there is talk of the new normal. Out will go bare faces, hand-shaking, hugs and sweaty crowds, and in will come masks, elbow-bumping, and sitting six feet away from everyone else at concerts and shows. Bye bye, mosh pits. Yes, even when the vaccine comes, which is when many of us hoped we would see our freedoms restored, the uber-cautious habits we have developed during the Covid crisis should continue, experts say. Jonathan Van-Tam, England’s deputy chief medical officer, said this week that these “habits”, including face-covering, should continue for “many years”. Better safe than sorry, eh?

Van-Tam isn’t alone. Many experts and commentators are predicting, and even welcoming, a decline in social engagement and physical contact as we head into the new normal. “The Coronavirus killed the handshake and the hug — what will replace them?”, asks Time magazine, blissfully unaware of how mad it sounds. “Hugs, high fives, fist bumps, back pats [and] shoulder squeezes” could all disappear after 2020, Time predicts. And it talked to one of many experts who thinks that’s no bad thing. Dr Mark Sklansky, an American cardiologist, told Time he has always hated hand-shaking. “Hands are warm, they’re wet, and we know that they transmit disease very well”, he said. But where “being anti-handshake was fringe thinking” in the past — !! — it is now increasingly common to be handshakephobic, says the wise doctor. Put your wet, diseased paws away, everyone.

And the new normalists are not letting the imminent rolling-out of the vaccine puncture their dreams of a world without clammy handshakes and other forms of sickness-spreading human contact. People expecting to be “back to normal by spring” are “expecting too much” of the vaccine, said a British microbiologist a couple of weeks ago. Even with a vaccine, “we will not be returning to the old normal”, decrees the Lancet. No, apparently “physical distancing and hand hygiene must continue indefinitely”. Maybe these doom-mongers are keen on physical distancing because they know a lot of people would probably like to give them a clout for their miserabilism?

November 28, 2020

Showdown at the O.K. BBQ joint

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

Toronto police reacted with overwhelming force to a rebellion centred on a small business in Etobicoke, intending to overawe any more potential lockdown opponents on Thursday. Jay Currie is of the “worse before better” school on this particular flare-up of public sentiment:

Well over 100 Toronto police officers and at least ten horses shut down Adamson’s BBQ today. They arrested the proprietor for “trespass” on his own property.

His sin was, of course, opening when Toronto is under “lockdown”. And then opening again and then, today, getting around the changed locks on his premises and opening again.

Now there will be plenty of people who will say, “Well, it’s the law and necessary if we are going to ‘stop the spread'”. But I suspect there will be a strong minority who will say, “Lockdowns don’t work and Costco is in full operation a block away.” Have at it, my interest is in the show of force.

For the City of Toronto and the Province of Ontario, Adamson’s was a point of rebellion which had to be crushed. At any cost. If Adamson’s was able to open the entire pandemic lockdown regime would collapse. So out came 100+ cops and the horses. (I was surprised there was not a tactical vehicle or two.)

Given that there were all of about a hundred people at the BBQ spot today this was more than sufficient force to ensure Adamson’s would not be able to open. No doubt Mayor Tory and Premier Ford are pretty sure the job is done. Adam Skelly, the owner, is cooling his heels in custody pending a bail hearing. (If that hearing goes as I expect, there will be compliance conditions attached to his bail, namely no re-opening.)

Big government relies upon the general complacency of its citizens. A couple of hundred people showing up to a BBQ joint can be handled with a large police presence. A couple of thousand? Much more difficult. 20,000, not a chance.

I keep saying to my very worried wife, “Worse before better.” Which means that before there is any chance that reason, moderation and good government is restored, things have to get a lot worse. On the left, groups like BLM and Antifa work very hard to create martyrs for their narrative. So far with limited success. Adam Skelly may have set in motion the process which will make him a living martyr for common sense and a degree of justice.

As of Friday morning the GoFundMe campaign for Skelly had reached $130,000 (I’m expecting it to be shut down for “reasons” any time soon … but it was still online and accepting donations when I checked at 10am).

November 27, 2020

Is clean water too much to ask for in a first world nation?

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

Ted Campbell explains how he would resolve the TWENTY-FIVE YEAR OLD PROBLEM in the Neskantaga First Nation in northern Ontario, which is one of the many First Nation public health issues the federal government has been promising to address for years:

A few weeks ago I was horrified to read about the 25 year long water problems that continue to plague the Neskantaga First Nation in North-Western Ontario ~ yes you read that right: it’s been 25 years since these Canadians have had clean, potable water! I begged the government to Do Something! and I offered one concrete idea based upon by near certain knowledge of what the Canadian Armed Forces can and have done for people overseas. One of my readers, a retired colonel in our Military Engineering branch confirmed that what I suggested was doable.

Now I read, in a report by Campbell Clark in the Globe and Mail, that the main problems are a combination of political over-promising and bureaucratic ineptitude. I am going to blame Justin Trudeau for pretty much all of the political over-promising: he made it a centrepiece of his 2015 election campaign and then totally failed to follow through. He has to wear at least a large part of the bureaucratic ineptitude, too, because he’s been prime minister of Canada for over five years. He’s failed, again.
OK, I can hear you saying: if you’re so smart how would you fix things?

For a start I would stick with the outlines of my earlier proposal: I would ask the Army to help, right now, using existing technology. We would declare this a disaster ~ and if Canadians going without clean water for 25 years doesn’t qualify as a disaster then I don’t know what does ~ and send the Canadian Armed Forces’ Disaster Assistance Response Team (the DART) to the Neskantaga First Nation and tell them to fix whatever needs fixing ~ using the Indigenous Services department’s budget. When they finished there we would buy them a new water purification system and send them the next First Nation that has a water disaster on its hands. People overseas will have to wait or we’ll have to build a second DART.

Next I would ask the Army and the Canadian manufacturers of water purification systems to work together with First Nations corporations, like Matawa First Nations Management, to develop (at the Indigenous Services department’s expense) concrete, workable plans to install, operate and maintain, over their complete life-cycle, water purification and waste disposal systems and the electrical power and the power and water distribution systems necessary to support them.

After this long, it may not be that the government can’t deliver these services, it might be that the government has deliberately chosen not to deliver.

November 14, 2020

“… we all know that Wrong Opinions Are No Longer Allowed On The Internet”

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

Jen Gerson has some Wrong Opinions that she shared On The Internet, so Dr. Bradley Mitchelmore, BSc. (Pharm), ACPR, PharmD, RPh has has taken it upon himself to try to get her cancelled:

Firstly, to explain how this little gem fell into my lap, some context is required. While I was avoiding the interminably dull task of invoicing our fine writers of The Line the other day, I threw out a position that some might find controversial.

That is, I find the trend towards identifying women by terms like “birthing people,” “menstruators,” “front-hole possessors” and “uterus bearers,” to be both reductive and offensive. I have no objection to finding more inclusive language for circumstances in which we want to acknowledge trans and non-binary people (ie; a phrase like “pregnant people” seems clunky, but inoffensive to me); but to date, all of this new language reduces the class of “women” to either a biological function or a bodily part.

Pregnancy is a particularly sensitive topic for a lot of women because, for most of us, the process is terrifying. To go through childbirth is the most profound loss of bodily autonomy imaginable and many women I know struggle with the after effects of feeling as if we’ve been treated like interchangeable breeding sows by some doctors and nurses. If a doctor started calling me a “birther” or a “uterus-bearer” while stretching my cervix apart knuckles-deep with two fingers, my response would not be welcoming.

I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that linguistic shifts that re-frame an entire biological sex class as “breeders” only ever seems to target one sex. Very few well-intentioned and committed activists are waging war online over the definition of “men.”

A lot of this is misogyny gilded in progressive language. And very few women want to stand up to the misogyny on the “pro-woman” team, nor suffer the consequences of pissing that team off. So most stay silent until they see a tweet like the one above, at which point they flood my DMs with private statements of support and relief. I’m happy to serve as a psychological outlet in that regard, but I’ll show you in a moment why they’re so afraid to say what they think.

Anyway, this is all just my opinion. I’m not married to it. If the trend comes around to allowing us to call all “male-bodied” people “dicks,” I might reconsider the position entirely. But we all know that Wrong Opinions Are No Longer Allowed On The Internet and therefore a doctor jumped in with one of the most delightfully fatuous replies I’ve ever received.

November 12, 2020

Puritans let no pandemic go to waste

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

In Spiked, Annabel Denham illustrates how the ongoing Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic has enabled and encouraged nanny state thinking:

Not actually the official symbol of Britain’s National Health Services … probably.

Over the course of the past seven months, we have seen every indulgence come under fire for its supposed role not just in transmitting coronavirus but also in causing any excess deaths. Cast your mind back to the start of the crisis, when the World Health Organisation launched its #HealthyAtHome campaign, advising us to shun butter and sugary drinks, despite there being little evidence such a move would serve to limit the spread or impact of Covid-19.

Then there was the dismally weak Chinese study, which found smokers were more likely to become seriously ill from Covid, which was warmly received by the public-health establishment. It handed them their smoking gun, until it became clear smokers were significantly less likely to actually contract the disease in the first place.

Now we have the destruction of the pub industry. First there was the 10pm curfew, imposed with little regard for the fact that it would encourage house parties held in far less safe environments than heavily regulated pubs or restaurants. Advocates seemed to gloss over the evidence suggesting that less than five per cent of infected individuals contacted by NHS Test and Trace had been in close contact with another person in a hospitality venue. Then there was the clampdown on households mixing, Scotland’s first minister Nicola Sturgeon’s indoor booze ban, and the bizarre insistence that pubs in Tier 2 could only serve alcohol if food was dished out at the same time.

This pandemic has triggered renewed fervour among nanny-state obsessives – no more so than among those determined to take down the food industry. You can bet that with hospitalisations and deaths on the rise again, there will be a commensurate increase in one-sided agitprop from celebrity supporters like Henry Dimbleby or Jamie Oliver. Just last month the latter called on the government to market water – yes, water – to young people as more attractive than soft drinks and proposed an “eat well to stay well” scheme modelled on the government’s Eat Out to Help Out initiative. Meanwhile, this week the government announced that advertising junk foods like sausage rolls and fish fingers would be banned online.

If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, then the public-health lobby’s mental wellbeing is surely in doubt. According to a collection of essays by Dolly Theis, long-term advocate of anti-obesity measures, 700 policies have been proposed in Britain over the past 30 years. In reality, these are the same policies renewed, repackaged and ramped up by fanatical single-issue pressure groups, the sort who claim obesity is an epidemic when hundreds of thousands are dying by Covid’s hand.

November 8, 2020

“… participants in men’s sport, on average, out-perform participants in women’s sports, current science is unable to isolate why this is the case”

Filed under: Health, Politics, Sports — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Barbara Kay is not in favour of clearly misogynistic sports policies:

2016 high school boys compared to 2016 Olympic Women’s Finalists.
Source: http://boysvswomen.com/#/

No hormone treatment is required, says the EWG, because being male or female is not dependent on biology but on one’s feelings: “(It) is recognized that transfemales are not males who become females. Rather these are people who have always been psychologically female.” Furthermore, these individuals must be allowed to participate in “the gender with which they feel most comfortable and safe, which may not be the same in each sport or consistent in subsequent seasons.” Your eyes do not deceive you. First they justified trans women competing with women because they had “always” felt they were female. Then they say the “always” female trans athlete might “be” male for certain sports or at different times.

It gets worse.

They say that although “participants in men’s sport, on average, out-perform participants in women’s sports, current science is unable to isolate why this is the case.” This is nonsense on two counts. First, there is no “on average” about it. Virtually all high-performance male athletes out-perform all high-performance female athletes. And second, even in 2014, abundant scientific data “to isolate why this is the case” was readily, even effortlessly (#Google!) available.

Data or no data, a statement in the document itself makes clear that the ideological fix was in from the get-go: “The Expert Working Group held strongly to the principle that the inclusion of all athletes, based on the fundamental human right of gender self-determination overrides any consideration of potential competitive advantage.”

Needless to say, but it must be said anyway: Male athletes have nothing whatsoever to fear in competing with trans male athletes. This is a problem for female athletes only, which seems not to trouble the CCES at all. I’m not a feminist, but I know a misogynistic sport policy when I see it. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress