Quotulatiousness

July 19, 2020

“Evolved cognition is a kludge – more properly, multiple stacks of kludges – developed under selection to be just barely adequate at coping”

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

ESR considers the role of programmers who need to document their software, after a brief trip into the kludginess of human cognition:

Maybe you’re one of the tiny minority of programmers that, like me, already enjoys writing documentation and works hard at doing it right. If so,the rest of this essay is not for you and you can skip it.

Otherwise, you might want to re-read (or at least re-skim) Ground-Truth Documents before continuing. Because ground-truth documents are a special case of a more general reason why you might want to try to change your mindset about documentation.

In that earlier essay I used the term “knowledge capture” in passing. This is a term of art from AI; it refers to the process of extracting domain knowledge from the heads of human experts into a form that can be expressed as an algorithm executable by the literalistic logic of a computer.

What I invite you to think about now is how writing documentation for software you are working on can save you pain and effort by (a) capturing knowledge you have but don’t know you have, and (b) eliciting knowledge that you have not yet developed.

Humans, including me and you, are sloppy and analogical thinkers who tend to solve problems by pattern-matching against noisy data first and checking our intuitions with logic after the fact (if we actually get that far). There’s no point in protesting that it shouldn’t be that way, that we should use rigorous logic all the way down, because our brains simply aren’t wired for that. Evolved cognition is a kludge – more properly, multiple stacks of kludges – developed under selection to be just barely adequate at coping.

This kludginess is revealed by, for example, optical illusions. And by the famous 7±2 result about the very limited sized of the human working set. And the various well-documented ways that human beings are extremely bad at statistical reasoning. And in many other ways …

QotD: How to raise a God-Emperor son

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

When my now-adult daughter was a child, another child once hit her on the head with a metal toy truck. I watched that same child, one year later, viciously push his younger sister backwards over a fragile glass-surfaced coffee table. His mother picked him up, immediately afterward (but not her frightened daughter), and told him in hushed tones not to do such things, while she patted him comfortingly in a manner clearly indicative of approval. She was out to produce a little God-Emperor of the Universe. That’s the unstated goal of many a mother, including many who consider themselves advocates for full gender equality. Such women will object vociferously to any command uttered by an adult male, but will trot off in seconds to make their progeny a peanut-butter sandwich if he demands it while immersed self-importantly in a video game. The future mates of such boys have every reason to hate their mothers-in-law. Respect for women? That’s for other boys, other men — not for their dear sons.

Jordan Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, 2018.

July 17, 2020

QotD: Gandhi’s views on chastity

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

… even more important, because it is dealt with in the movie directly — if of course dishonestly — is Gandhi’s parallel obsession with brahmacharya, or sexual chastity. There is a scene late in the film in which Margaret Bourke-White (again!) asks Gandhi’s wife if he has ever broken his vow of chastity, taken, at that time, about forty years before. Gandhi’s wife, by now a sweet old lady, answers wistfully, with a pathetic little note of hope, “Not yet.” What lies behind this adorable scene is the following: Gandhi held as one of his most profound beliefs (a fundamental doctrine of Hindu medicine) that a man, as a matter of the utmost importance, must conserve his bindu, or seminal fluid. Koestler (in The Lotus and the Robot) gives a succinct account of this belief, widespread among orthodox Hindus: “A man’s vital energy is concentrated in his seminal fluid, and this is stored in a cavity in the skull. It is the most precious substance in the body … an elixir of life both in the physical and mystical sense, distilled from the blood … A large store of bindu of pure quality guarantees health, longevity, and supernatural powers … Conversely, every loss of it is a physical and spiritual impoverishment.” Gandhi himself said in so many words, “A man who is unchaste loses stamina, becomes emasculated and cowardly, while in the chaste man secretions [semen] are sublimated into a vital force pervading his whole being.” And again, still Gandhi: “Ability to retain and assimilate the vital liquid is a matter of long training. When properly conserved it is transmuted into matchless energy and strength.” Most male Hindus go ahead and have sexual relations anyway, of course, but the belief in the value of bindu leaves the whole culture in what many observers have called a permanent state of “semen anxiety.” When Gandhi once had a nocturnal emission he almost had a nervous breakdown.

Gandhi was a truly fanatical opponent of sex for pleasure, and worked it out carefully that a married couple should be allowed to have sex three or four times in a lifetime, merely to have children, and favored embodying this restriction in the law of the land. The sexual-gratification wing of the present-day feminist movement would find little to attract them in Gandhi’s doctrine, since in all his seventy-nine years it never crossed his mind once that there could be anything enjoyable in sex for women, and he was constantly enjoining Indian women to deny themselves to men, to refuse to let their husbands “abuse” them. Gandhi had been married at thirteen, and when he took his vow of chastity, after twenty-four years of sexual activity, he ordered his two oldest sons, both young men, to be totally chaste as well.

Richard Grenier, “The Gandhi Nobody Knows”, Commentary, 1983-03-01.

July 8, 2020

QotD: Telecommuting in the post-Wuhan Coronavirus era

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

People are being stampeded into telecommuting. The thing is, dear media, once that happens, you can’t put it back in the bottle.

For two decades now, telecommuting and distance learning have been perfectly possible and even, frankly, beneficial. What has held it back is managers afraid they don’t know how to manage at a distance, corporations who think mega cubicle farms are a great way to be “important” and a general sense that only us, ne’er do wells, work in our pajamas on the sofa (I’ll have you know I’m wearing a sweatshirt and yoga pants. Never mind.)

If the panic lasts even two months (and the press will ensure it does before it collapses under its own weight) that reluctance to telecommute is going to be blown to hell. For one, once workers taste of THAT fruit, just anecdotally, 90% of them LOVE it. (The other 10% have very annoying children or spouses.)

And in the wake of the financial panic and wobbles, corporations are going to notice that they spend a lot less money when most of the workers work from home. At some point, they’ll also realize that they need much smaller facilities if they need facilities at all. And hey, money.

This will cause all sorts of other things, which I think will lead within two years to an exodus from the big cities everyone has crammed into because it’s where the jobs are. I think in turn this will lead to a world the social engineers really don’t like.

Sarah Hoyt, “Unintended Consequences”, According to Hoyt, 2020-03-12.

July 7, 2020

Taking stock after the worst of the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic

Filed under: China, Europe, Health, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

David Warren discusses an intractable “problem”:

I do not suppose it makes any practical difference what I have to say about a public health problem that invades the lives of billions; nor that readers will take me for a reliable epidemiologist when I say that the worst danger of that Batflu has now passed. (Infection rates spike, but the power of the virus to torture and kill has relented. The death rates continue downward.)

Nevertheless, I think there is some value in stating, even restating, the obvious — when what is obvious is in conflict with sensational reports, and the aggressive distortions of mass media, profiting from panic.

This Batflu became — more than any previous epidemic — a political issue, instantaneously. This is evident in the way it was spread, quite intentionally, by the Communist Party of China. (They shut down everything in Wuhan, except flights to Europe and America.) In all countries with democratic institutions, the disease became the centre of political attention, and unprecedented lockdowns were ordered. Likewise, unprecedented schemes of surveillance have significantly changed the relation between governments and governed, entirely for the worse. By means of current technology, the former will be able to perpetuate these changes, leaving those who wish to recover old liberties nowhere to hide.

Moreover, this is done by public demand. “The peeple” are easy to manipulate, once they have been frightened. The great majority of men, now and through the past, never cared about freedom. It has always been a minority concern, “for the intellectuals.” The “silent majority” will take their freedom, but only after their comfort and safety have been assured. The right to choose among consumer products is enough for them.

There are revolutions, such as the one that is now being attempted by the Left, but these never last. Either they are extinguished, under the wet blanket of public apathy, or the revolutionists succeed in installing a truly monstrous regime. Only thus, can they prolong their evil. Two generations of half-educated, indoctrinated, university grads favour a doctrinal dictatorship. Those still young are full of malign energy.

July 6, 2020

The Healthcare Crisis of 1941 – WW2 – On the Homefront 005

Filed under: Britain, Germany, Health, History, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 2 Jul 2020

When WWII breaks out many parts of the world are still missing population-wide healthcare. The pressure of the war deteriorates healthcare services even further. By 1941, both the British Commonwealth and Germany are facing an outright healthcare crisis on the home front.

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

Hosted by: Anna Deinhard
Written by: Fiona Rachel Fischer and Spartacus Olsson
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Fiona Rachel Fischer
Edited by: Mikołaj Cackowski
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)

Sources:
IWM D 2373, D 2318, B 14299, D 2315, D 2078, D 14318, D 2334
Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe
Bundesarchiv
Wellcome Images no. L0028759
From the Noun Project: london by Pablo Fernández Vallejo, Patient by Miho Suzuki-Robinson, Patient by Binpodo, Doctor by Wilson Joseph, Hospital by Hare Krishna, School by David, Apartment by Victoruler, Bus by Eucalyp
University of Liverpool Faculty of Health & Life Sciences

Soundtracks from the Epidemic Sound:
Farrell Wooten – “Blunt Object”
Johannes Bornlof – “Deviation In Time”
Skrya – “First Responders”
Gunnar Johnsen – “Not Safe Yet”
Johannes Bornlof – “The Inspector 4”
Jon Bjork – “For the Many”
Reynard Seidel – “Deflection”
Rannar Sillard – “March Of The Brave 4”
Cobby Costa – “From the Past”
Fabien Tell – “Last Point of Safe Return”
Cobby Costa – “Flight Path”
Andreas Jamsheree – “Guilty Shadows 4”
Jo Wandrini – “Puzzle of Complexity”

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

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

World War Two
2 days ago (edited)
It might be surprising that the global healthcare crisis of 2020 has an immediate relationship to WW2, but it does. Although, when you look at it, it’s logical — with every crisis humanity learns a little — it was still a little bit of a surprise to us how direct this relationship was when researching and writing this episode. Was it surprising to you too?

On the topic of writing, this is the first episode by our new co-writer, Fiona Rachel Fischer, who will now be a regular contributor to the On the Homefront series — please give her a warm welcome.

Sober Sailors – Rum Rations In The Navy: Grog

Filed under: Britain, Food, Health, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Townsends
Published 24 Feb 2020

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July 5, 2020

QotD: Gandhi and sanitation

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

It should be plain by now that there is much in the Hindu culture that is distasteful to the Western mind, and consequently is largely unknown in the West — not because Hindus do not go on and on about these subjects, but because a Western squeamishness usually prevents these preoccupations from reaching print (not to mention film). When Gandhi attended his first Indian National Congress he was most distressed at seeing the Hindus — not laborers but high-caste Hindus, civic leaders — defecating all over the place, as if to pay attention to where the feces fell was somehow unclean. (For, as V.S. Naipaul puts it, in a twisted Hindu way it is unclean to clean. It is unclean even to notice. “It was the business of the sweepers to remove excrement, and until the sweepers came, people were content to live in the midst of their own excrement.”) Gandhi exhorted Indians endlessly on the subject, saying that sanitation was the first need of India, but he retained an obvious obsession with excreta, gleefully designing latrines and latrine drills for all hands at the ashram, and, all in all, what with giving and taking enemas, and his public bowel movements, and his deep concern with everyone else’s bowel movements (much correspondence), and endless dietary experiments as a function of bowel movements, he devoted a rather large share of his life to the matter. Despite his constant campaigning for sanitation, it is hard to believe that Gandhi was not permanently marked by what Arthur Koestler terms the Hindu “morbid infatuation with filth,” and what V.S. Naipaul goes as far as to call the Indian “deification of filth.”

Richard Grenier, “The Gandhi Nobody Knows”, Commentary, 1983-03-01.

June 30, 2020

QotD: Ideologies and belief systems

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

It’s really not a good thing because it manifests itself not only in individual psychopathologies, but also in social psychopathologies. That’s this proclivity of people to get tangled up in ideologies, and I really do think of them as crippled religions. That’s the right way to think about them. They’re like religion that’s missing an arm and a leg but can still hobble along. It provides a certain amount of security and group identity, but it’s warped and twisted and demented and bent, and it’s a parasite on something underlying that’s rich and true. That’s how it looks to me, anyways. I think it’s very important that we sort out this problem. I think that there isn’t anything more important that needs to be done than that. I’ve thought that for a long, long time, probably since the early ’80s when I started looking at the role that belief systems played in regulating psychological and social health. You can tell that they do that because of how upset people get if you challenge their belief systems. Why the hell do they care, exactly? What difference does it make if all of your ideological axioms are 100 percent correct?

People get unbelievable upset when you poke them in the axioms, so to speak, and it is not by any stretch of the imagination obvious why. There’s a fundamental truth that they’re standing on. It’s like they’re on a raft in the middle of the ocean. You’re starting to pull out the logs, and they’re afraid they’re going to fall in and drown. Drown in what? What are the logs protecting them from? Why are they so afraid to move beyond the confines of the ideological system? These are not obvious things. I’ve been trying to puzzle that out for a very long time. […]

Nietzsche’s idea was that human beings were going to have to create their own values. He understood that we had bodies and that we had motivations and emotions. He was a romantic thinker, in some sense, but way ahead of his time. He knew that our capacity to think wasn’t some free-floating soul but was embedded in our physiology, constrained by our emotions, shaped by our motivations, shaped by our body. He understood that. But he still believed that the only possible way out of the problem would be for human beings themselves to become something akin to God and to create their own values. He talked about the person who created their own values as the overman, or the superman. That was one part of the Nietzschean philosophy that the Nazis took out of context and used to fuel their superior man ideology. We know what happened with that. That didn’t seem to turn out very well, that’s for sure.

Jordan B. Peterson, “Biblical Series I: Introduction to the Idea of God” {transcript], jordanbpeterson.com, 2018-03-12.

June 28, 2020

“Viking” was the word for “Incel” in the early Middle Ages

Filed under: Books, China, Europe, Health, History, India, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At least, that’s one interpretation offered by Mary Harrington at UnHerd:

Europe According to the Vikings (1000) from Atlas of Prejudice 2 by Yanko Tsvetkov.

Last week, World War 3 nearly started in Ladakh. A dry, high-altitude region of Indian Kashmir on the Himalayan border with China, it’s been the site of escalating tensions and military buildup for some time. On June 15, the first physical confrontation between the Indian and Chinese militaries for 45 years erupted, killing at least 20 Indian and 45 Chinese soldiers.

There are all sorts of geopolitical reasons cited for the escalating tension between the world’s two most populous countries, but there is one more central and timeless problem that is going to drive both countries towards violence and instability — women. Or a lack of them.

In his History of the Normans, written circa 1015, Dudo of St Quentin argued that the reason the Vikings went raiding was because they couldn’t find wives, an idea echoed by the Tudor antiquarian William Camden in his 1610 book Britannia. “Wikings”, Camden suggested, were what you got when there weren’t enough women to go round, resulting in an excess of young men hanging around full of machismo but without any prospect of finding a nice girl and settling down. (Viking literally means raider.)

So, whenever these spare males “multiply’d themselves to a burdensom community”, Camden reports that an area would draw lots. Those of the young troublemakers chosen in the lottery would be sent off on a ship to make a nuisance of themselves overseas. Which they did.

In evolutionary biology, the “operational sex ratio” is a term used to count the proportion of males and females in a given species that are seeking a reproductive mate. As soon as the ratio tilts away from 50:50, the sex that’s over-represented will have to compete to secure a mate from among the less-plentiful potential partners of the opposite sex.

Though they wouldn’t have used that phrase, both Dudo of St Quentin and William Camden were both describing this phenomenon in human males. Where potential wives are scarce and the “burdensom community” of spare men multiplies, the result is more violence and crime. One 2019 study showed that where polygyny — that is, multiple wives — is a social norm for higher-status men, attacks on neighbouring ethnic groups skyrocket. With a few men monopolising eligible women, the rest are forced to seek status and resources by attacking other tribes.

India and China both have an extremely “burdensom community” of spare males. The normal ratio of newborn boys to girls is around 105:100. But as Mara Hvistendahl documents in Unnatural Selection, thanks to prenatal ultrasound and sex-selective abortion the ratio in China is around 118:100, and 108:100 in India. In some regions of India, the ratio rises as high as 150 males to 100 females. Though sex-selective technology is now banned in India, it’s still widespread, and the country now has some 37 million more men than women. Studies estimate that China has around 30 million excess men.

June 23, 2020

QotD: Scientific discoveries despite “research” and “planning”

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

We live in a culture of “research” and “planning.” I’m not against honest research (which is rare), but mortally opposed to “planning.” The best it can ever achieve is failure, when some achievement comes despite its ham-fisted efforts. Countless billions, yanked from the taxpayers’ pockets, and collected through highly professional, tear-jerking campaigns, are spent “trying to find a cure” for this or that. When and if it comes, it is invariably the product of some nerd somewhere, with a messy lab. Should it be noticed at all, more billions will be spent appropriating the credit, or more likely, suppressing it for giving “false hope.” The regulators will be called in, as the police are to a crime scene.

For from the “planning” point of view, the little nerd has endangered billions of dollars in funding, and thus the livelihoods of innumerable bureaucratic drudges. That is, after all, why they retain the China Wall of lawyers: to prevent unplanned events from happening. But glory glory, sometimes they happen anyway.

David Warren, “That’s funny”, Essays in Idleness, 2018-03-08.

June 20, 2020

“What did you do in the Wuhan Coronavirus war, Daddy?”

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

Chris Selley metaphorically dons the garb of a war correspondent to report on how the Canadian government systematically mishandled the epidemic “war”:

Toronto General Hospital.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

At first, comparisons to wartime seemed a bit silly. All we were being asked to do, after all, was stay indoors. As the World Health Organization was declaring a pandemic 100 days ago, the commanders had everything under control: the borders, the epidemiology, the strategy, support for shuttered businesses and their employees. Traditionally, wartime puts those of us left on the home front to work whether we like it or not. This was entirely the opposite: the worst we would have to put up with — in theory, assuming government aid was as advertised — was the indignity of idleness. Collective inaction would flatten the curve, the forces of COVID-19 would be beaten back, and summer would be saved. Peace in our time.

And then it instantly turned to quagmire. Canadians watched slack-jawed as COVID-19 breached our most fundamental defences. You don’t need Sun Tzu’s perspicacity to inform people arriving in Canada of their responsibility to self-isolate, and exactly what self-isolation means — go directly home, do not stop for groceries, do not receive visitors. I just did it, right there, in half a sentence. But we couldn’t manage it: Where information was distributed at all, it was excessively complex even as it failed to deliver the central message. Provincial forces threatened mutiny. Alberta Commander-in-Chief Jason Kenney stormed into the Edmonton airport demanding answers. It took weeks to sort out.

[…]

If it didn’t seem like a war before, it sure did once the real live army was drafted in to bail out long-term care homes in Ontario and Quebec that had descended into horrifying squalor. We learned the appalling details from leaked military reports. And now, in an almost poetic act of military pigheadedness, the Ottawa Citizen reports the Armed Forces are trying to hunt down and punish the leakers.

The war must go on. But sitting here in still-locked-down Toronto, stewing in my own bile, I cannot say this is filling me with patriotic fervour. I find myself simultaneously envious of other provinces that are in the process of reopening, and sympathetic to their residents: If it weren’t for the two sick men of the federation [Ontario and Quebec] dominating the narrative, they would likely have reopened much earlier.

Indeed, jealousies have bloomed as weeks turned to months. Apartment dwellers envy other apartment dwellers who have balconies. All apartment dwellers envy homeowners. Everyone envies cottage-owners. Some cottage-country mayors have told cottage-owners to stay put and keep their infestations to themselves. People cooped up with their kids sometimes envy those with time to themselves; singletons who have had enough alone time to last a decade occasionally envy those trying to juggle kids with working from home. The pleasant novelty of Zoom-based socializing faded ages ago, as everyone realized that Zoom-based socializing sucks.

More than 8,200 Canadians are dead, most having lived long lives but many having died in grim and lonely circumstances. In future, considerably more deaths and distress will be associated with the lockdown itself. The psychological effects of this will be studied for decades. If war isn’t quite the right analogy, it’s certainly closer to a war than anything that has been contested on Canadian soil in my or my parents’ lifetime, and it will come at a greater cost to the whole of society than any actual war that Canadian forces have fought over that time. It’s a terrible shame that as a nation, we didn’t win.

June 18, 2020

Black Death and the Failure of Pandemic Lockdowns – Pandemic History 03

Filed under: Europe, Health, History, Science — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 17 Jun 2020

Starting in 1347 and for three centuries, the second plague pandemic provides ample time to learn how to deal with the recurring outbreaks. And yet, fears of ruining the economy, political expediency, and refusal to accept reality leaves those trying to implement protection measure to fight an uphill battle. The result is even worse economic consequences, and unfathomable death.

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

Hosted by: Indy Neidell and Spartacus Olsson
Written by: Indy Neidell and Spartacus Olsson
Directed by: Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Spartacus Olsson, Indy Neidell, and James Currie
Edited by: Karolina Dołęga
Sound Engineer: Marek Kamiński
Graphic Design: Ryan Weatherby

Visual Sources:
Wellcome Images
Patrick Gray on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/1360415…
Paul K on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bibliod…
Quinto Tiberio Angelerio and New Measures for Controlling Plague in 16th-Century Alghero, Sardinia digitalized by Google, original from Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Icons from The Noun Project by: Ben Mullins, parkjisun, Muhamad Ulum & Adrien Coquet

Music:
“A Far Cry” – Flouw
“Fire Building Ext 3” – SFX Producer
“Last Point of Safe Return” – Fabien Tell
“London” – Howard Harper-Barnes.mp3
“Please Hear Me Out” – Philip Ayers
“Scream Female 3” – SFX Producer
“Scream Male 6” – SFX Producer
“Superior” – Silver Maple
“Symphony of the Cold-Blooded” – Christian Andersen
“Barrel” – Christian Andersen

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

Research Sources:
Quinto Tiberio Angelerio and New Measures for Controlling Plague in 16th-Century Alghero, Sardinia Raffaella Bianucci, Ole Jørgen Benedictow, Gino Fornaciari, and Valentina Giuffra
“The Path to Pistoia: Urban Hygiene Before the Black Death”, G. Geltner, Past & Present, Volume 246, Issue 1, February 2020, Pages 3–33
Encyclopedia of the Black Death, Joseph Patrick Byrne
“Epidemiological characteristics of an urban plague epidemic in Madagascar, August–November, 2017: an outbreak report”, The Lancet, Rindra Randremanana, PhD, *Voahangy Andrianaivoarimanana, PhD, Birgit Nikolay, PhD, Beza Ramasindrazana, PhD, Juliette Paireau, PhD, Quirine Astrid ten Bosch, PhD, et al
Yersinia pestis, the cause of plague, is a recently emerged clone of Yersinia pseudotuberculosis, Mark Achtman, Kerstin Zurth, Giovanna Morelli, Gabriela Torrea, Annie Guiyoule, and Elisabeth Carniel
Insights into the evolution of Yersinia pestis through whole-genome comparison with Yersinia pseudotuberculosis, P.S.G. Chain, E. Carniel, F.W. Larimer, J. Lamerdin, P.O. Stoutland, W.M. Regala, A.M. Georgescu, L.M. Vergez, M.L. Land, V.L. Motin, R.R. Brubaker, J. Fowler, J. Hinnebusch, M. Marceau, C. Medigue, M. Simonet, V. Chenal-Francisque, B. Souza, D. Dacheux, J.M. Elliott, A. Derbise, L.J. Hauser, and E. Garcia
Distinct Clones of Yersinia pestis Caused the Black Death, Stephanie Haensch, Raffaella Bianucci, Michel Signoli, Minoarisoa Rajerison, Michael Schultz, Sacha Kacki, Marco Vermunt, Darlene A. Weston, Derek Hurst, Mark Achtman, Elisabeth Carniel, and Barbara Bramanti

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

TimeGhost History
2 days ago
As you have seen in this episode collective learning takes time. Some of you might infer one to one parallels between the situation during the second plague pandemic and our current pandemic in 2020. That would not be entirely correct and definitely not our intention. History doesn’t as much repeat itself as it echos into the present. While there are similarities between all pandemics, and we continue to struggle to find the correct response and countermeasures, our times are very different from the medieval and renaissance world. Science has developed further, society has evolved, and we have much more than one form of response to disease available. Moreover the pandemic that started in 1347 is in relative numbers (percentage of lethality) the worst pandemic to hit humanity in known history.

In the end we are historians, not health professionals or epidemiologists. Our contribution can never be what to do about COVID 19, that is too complex an issue for us to digest. What we can contribute is a historical perspective on what went wrong back then, and how we developed from there. The main takeaway from the Black Death should from that long term historical perspective be positive. The response lay the foundation of modern health care in hospitals. It helped create the beginnings of professional, trained, and vetted doctors, it changed the view on sanitation, and it started to shift our collective view on disease from superstition and conspiracy myths to factual analysis and a scientific response.

And there in that very last point lies perhaps the one and only thing that we can say with certainty that we need to remember in 2020 — listen to the scientists, not the hacks and politicians on all sides that base their rhetoric on, self interest, political expediency, and populism.

Never forget!

Spartacus

PS apologies for the audio problems on my mic during the first half of the video — it was scratching against my jacket and no one noticed, sadly we can’t get it out in post.

QotD: The feminization of culture

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

What’s happening to pop culture is a reflection of our age. We’ve been turned into Pandas by a smothering, soft totalitarianism. The feminization of the culture means we’re ruled by mothers, who refuse to ever let us wander from the nest, physically, spiritually, creatively or intellectually. That has had all sorts of effects, like the drop in sperm counts and the collapse of popular culture. A deracinated people, kept in adult daycare centers and tended to by belligerent spinsters is not going to have a lot to celebrate or live for.

“The Z Man”, “The Soundtrack Of This Age”, The Z Blog, 2018-03-15.

June 17, 2020

“We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!”

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

Theodore Dalrymple on the use of badges within the NHS to virtue signal and compel compliance in the unwilling:

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

In Britain’s highly-centralized, almost Soviet-style healthcare system, the National Health Service, staff are being encouraged all over the country to wear little rainbow-coloured metal badges to show that they are homosexual, bisexual, and transsexual-friendly, and do not discriminate against them. The wearing of these badges is voluntary, but about 3,000 of the staff of Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospitals, for example, now wear them. The self-congratulatory website of those ancient hospitals — St. Thomas’ is over 800 years old and Guy’s was founded in 1721, now combined into one administrative unit — says:

    The badges are just one way to show that Guy’s and St Thomas’ is an open, non-judgmental and inclusive place for people that identify as LGBT+ [which] stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender). The + simply means we are inclusive of all identities, regardless of how people identify themselves.

This language, which combines the unctuous with the bureaucratic, is typical of the way British hospital administrators express themselves nowadays. And if, as Buffon said, the style is the man himself, we may justly fear for a semi-totalitarian future.

By implication, the badges bully the staff, for if any of them refuse to wear one, their refusal is likely to be taken to mean that their minds are closed, judgmental (in the sense of being censorious, for even the attempt to avoid making judgments is itself based on a judgment), and exclusionary. It is to imply that they would deliberately treat any patients in the above mentioned categories differently and worse from all other patients. Wear the badge or declare yourself to be a bigot.

This is an insult to all those people who worked before the advent of the badges (or who now refuse to wear them) who strove and continue to strive always to treat patients to the best of their ability, irrespective of the many categories into which any individual patient falls. In my experience, the great majority of doctors have always tried to do this.

Let me give an example. Working as I did as a doctor in prison, I met many men who had done terrible things. I treated them, as a matter of course, to the best of my ability. I remember, for example, a man who had strangled three children and then impaled them on railings. Though I did not think he was a good man, and in that sense passed a judgment on him within the privacy of my mind, I treated him for his bronchitis exactly as I would have treated anyone else with bronchitis. I did not find this difficult in the least and do not claim any special merit for having done so, for it is only what all my colleagues in the profession did — as a matter not only of course, but of principle.

A couple of years ago, I read the diary of one of Marshal Pétain’s doctors during the latter’s imprisonment after World War II. The doctor had been a member of the Resistance and had no reason to love Pétain, to say the least: Pétain’s supporters would have had not a second thought about killing him if he had fallen into their power. Yet, as the diary makes clear, the doctor treated Pétain, who by then was demented, with the greatest humanity. Moreover, the doctor refused to publish his diary, despite the financial advantage of doing so, because he thought that publishing it would be to break patient confidentiality. It was only after his death, and more than half a century after Pétain’s, that the diary was published. The doctor’s adherence to his medical ethics was impressive, and he needed no badge to proclaim his virtue.

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