Quotulatiousness

August 21, 2023

Baby Boomers – “a marketing category is not an age group”

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

Sarah Hoyt (who’s a few years younger than me) tackles the generational conflict that always seems to flare up on social media, if not so much in real life:

I’m going to write about boomers, why a lot of us blame them for … almost everything, why my generation (roughly 55 to 64) not only are not boomers, but tend to be the most vociferous in “D*mn it, I’m not a boomer.” Why I’m vaguely amused that millennials call everyone older than them “boomer”. And why I find it bizarre that my kids both hate millennials and identify as millennials, though they both are d*mn close to z and closer to z in attitudes. (And the younger one in date of birth, I think.) And why all this is unfair, because a marketing category is not an age group, and yet, perfectly fair in aggregate, because demographics is not destiny, but it sure as heck is economy. And economics shapes your life in a way you probably can’t think about too deeply without becoming enraged.

So, yeah, friends, in-betweeners, X, millenials and Zers, lend me your ears. I come not to bury the boomers and not to praise them, but to explain to everyone, including the sane boomers in the audience why the fractiousness exists, and to give — under the heading of giving perspective on the lives of others that we normally keep quiet about — an idea of how my non-generation (We certainly are not Jones. We don’t jones for anything that the boomers had. We just aren’t them) has gone through. Without blaming the boomers, because an accident of birth is not their fault.

First of all, and taking in account that I’m the one who says the population is not booming out of control, let me dismiss the idea the baby boom wasn’t real. That’s goofy. (To put it mildly.) You can argue the causes, but for about ten years — no, not the twenty five claimed. Marketing generations are not demographic generations — after World War II, families grew. Blame it on prosperity, which allowed one parent to stay home and raise the sprogs. Blame it on tax credits (it has been argued if the comparable applied today, people would have families of five or six too.) Sure, blame it on the move rural to city, which was tied to prosperity too, and the fact that the newly independent nuclear families didn’t have to put up with grandma’s critique of their child bearing or raising. Or blame it on the men having been away and the relief of the long war being over.

Blame it on whatever you want, but even without looking at the numbers, just by looking at family histories, families of five or six weren’t rare. And three was about average, I think. Four not anything to remark on.

But, you’ll say, that’s fairly normal for the past period. Sure. My mom, who was almost a boomer comes from a family of five (should be six, one lost in infancy) and dad from a family of four. And I’m almost sixty, and both dad and I were very late children. So, yeah “But that was normal before.”

Yes, it was, but now throw in prosperity, moves to the cities and … It’s not the babies who were born, you see, it’s the ones who survived. Even mom who was raised, for brevity of explanation, in a slum where going to your playfriend’s funeral, or more likely his infant sibling’s funeral was absolutely normal, had more of her friends survive than was normal for her parent’s generation.

To put it another way. Up until the late 19th century, women routinely bore 10 children and didn’t get to raise a single one to adulthood.

Even in the nineteenth century, women at the upper class level Jane Austen wrote about, routinely made two or three baby shrouds as part of their trousseau. Because that many deaths were expected. By my parent’s time that had improved — no, not medicine, sanitation. Better drains, a weekly bath, and washing your clothes more than twice a year — to the point that you would regularly raise about half of what you bore. (My family, having steel constitutions rarely lost a child. To compensate, we were always relatively low fertility.)

The improvement brought on by rudimentary sanitation and washing up was such that in the nineteenth century Europe burst at the seams with kids, which led to rapid invention, expansion, and yes, the adoption of a lot of half baked ideas. Because that’s the result of a lot of kids suddenly in a society. Baby busts … well, most of the Middle Ages, lead to slow innovation, a tendency to ossify the social structures, laws and regulations increasingly made by old men, for a world they only imagine exists. Stop me when this sounds familiar.

The baby boom happened at the intersection of the discovery of antibiotics and their popularization and also inoculation of school aged kids, both of which meant an unexpected number of children surviving childhood and surviving it in good health. And people having about the number of children their parents had. BUT — and this is very important — those children grew to adulthood and did so without any significant physical impairment.

What it caused was the same effect as if everyone alive had decided to have double or more the number of children. It was a massive demographic elephant moving through the societal snake.

August 20, 2023

QotD: Fear of death

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

The two basic drivers of social change are fear of death and caloric surplus. They exist, as Marxists would say if they cared about actual human behavior, dialectically — the fear of death prompts a frantic search for caloric surplus; once attained, caloric surplus makes the once-adaptive fear of death neurotic and dysfunctional, literally morbid.

[…]

As pretty much every Victorian anthropologist remarked, “savages” all seem deliriously happy — when life is a constant struggle, your every moment is filled with deep meaning, high purpose. So, too, with men at war — Robert Graves or someone like that once said that his time in the trenches were the greatest moments of his life, because everything other than the now disappeared. I can’t speak from personal experience, but I’d lay good money that no combat veteran completely re-enters the civilian world, largely for this reason.

Those are reasonable fears of death. We all accept, intellectually, that we could go at any time, and we will inevitably go eventually, but unless you’ve had a brush with death — a moment where you know, with perfect clarity, that there’s a significant chance you’re going now — you can’t really appreciate it, emotionally.

Severian, “Communal Salvation”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-11-19.

August 17, 2023

“… the Chinese invented gunpowder and had it for six hundred years, but couldn’t see its military applications and only used it for fireworks”

Filed under: China, History, Military, Science, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

John Psmith would like to debunk the claim in the headline here:

An illustration of a fireworks display from the 1628-1643 edition of the Ming dynasty book Jin Ping Mei (1628-1643 edition).
Reproduced in Joseph Needham (1986). Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 5: Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Part 7: Military Technology: The Gunpowder Epic. Cambridge University Press. Page 142.

There’s an old trope that the Chinese invented gunpowder and had it for six hundred years, but couldn’t see its military applications and only used it for fireworks. I still see this claim made all over the place, which surprises me because it’s more than just wrong, it’s implausible to anybody with any understanding of human nature.

Long before the discovery of gunpowder, the ancient Chinese were adept at the production of toxic smoke for insecticidal, fumigation, and military purposes. Siege engines containing vast pumps and furnaces for smoking out defenders are well attested as early as the 4th century. These preparations often contained lime or arsenic to make them extra nasty, and there’s a good chance that frequent use of the latter substance was what enabled early recognition of the properties of saltpetre, since arsenic can heighten the incendiary effects of potassium nitrate.

By the 9th century, there are Taoist alchemical manuals warning not to combine charcoal, saltpetre, and sulphur, especially in the presence of arsenic. Nevertheless the temptation to burn the stuff was high — saltpetre is effective as a flux in smelting, and can liberate nitric acid, which was of extreme importance to sages pursuing the secret of longevity by dissolving diamonds, religious charms, and body parts into potions. Yes, the quest for the elixir of life brought about the powder that deals death.

And so the Chinese invented gunpowder, and then things immediately began moving very fast. In the early 10th century, we see it used in a primitive flame-thrower. By the year 1000, it’s incorporated into small grenades and into giant barrel bombs lobbed by trebuchets. By the middle of the 13th century, as the Song Dynasty was buckling under the Mongol onslaught, Chinese engineers had figured out that raising the nitrate content of a gunpowder mixture resulted in a much greater explosive effect. Shortly thereafter you begin seeing accounts of truly destructive explosions that bring down city walls or flatten buildings. All of this still at least a hundred years before the first mention of gunpowder in Europe.

Meanwhile, they had also been developing guns. Way back in the 950s (when the gunpowder formula was much weaker, and produced deflagarative sparks and flames rather than true explosions), people had already thought to mount containers of gunpowder onto the ends of spears and shove them in peoples’ faces. This invention was called the “fire lance”, and it was quickly refined and improved into a single-use, hand-held flamethrower that stuck around until the early 20th century.1 But some other inventive Chinese took the fire lances and made them much bigger, stuck them on tripods, and eventually started filling their mouths with bits of iron, broken pottery, glass, and other shrapnel. This happened right around when the formula for gunpowder was getting less deflagarative and more explosive, and pretty soon somebody put the two together and the cannon was born.

All told it’s about three and a half centuries from the first sage singing his eyebrows, to guns and cannons dominating the battlefield.2 Along the way what we see is not a gaggle of childlike orientals marvelling over fireworks and unable to conceive of military applications. We also don’t see an omnipotent despotism resisting technological change, or a hidebound bureaucracy maintaining an engineered stagnation. No, what we see is pretty much the opposite of these Western stereotypes of ancient Chinese society. We see a thriving ecosystem of opportunistic inventors and tacticians, striving to outcompete each other and producing a steady pace of technological change far beyond what Medieval Europe could accomplish.

Yet despite all of that, when in 1841 the iron-sided HMS Nemesis sailed into the First Opium War, the Chinese were utterly outclassed. For most of human history, the civilization cradled by the Yellow and the Yangtze was the most advanced on earth, but then in a period of just a century or two it was totally eclipsed by the upstart Europeans. This is the central paradox of the history of Chinese science and technology. So … why did it happen?

    1. Needham says he heard of one used by pirates in the South China Sea in the 1920s to set rigging alight on the ships that they boarded.

    2. I’ve left out a ton of weird gunpowder-based weaponry and evolutionary dead ends that happened along the way, but Needham’s book does a great job of covering them.

August 16, 2023

Facts about Africa’s Geography never taught in schools | Thomas Sowell

Filed under: Africa, Books, Economics, Environment, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Thomas SowellTV
Published 20 Nov 2021
(more…)

QotD: Cognitive dissonance, or when cultists retcon reality

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

[Leon] Festinger’s book When Prophecy Fails was a study of a UFO cult which predicted the end of the world on a very specific date … in 1953. Festinger was on hand to see what happened to the cult when the world didn’t end, and he discovered a very important psychological principle. He called it “cognitive dissonance”, but since that term has taken on a life of its own, we’ll swipe one from [the] Internet and call it a “retcon”.

For those with even a moderate level of commitment to the cult (and I’ll leave it to you to speculate what moderate commitment to a cult might be; Festinger’s work is not without its critics), disconfirmation of the cult’s central belief led, astoundingly, to an even greater commitment to the cult. “The world will end on X date” was immediately retconned into “the world didn’t end on X date because of our righteousness“.

You know you’re really onto something when it seems head-slappingly obvious in retrospect. Yeah, of course they did that. Everybody does that to a degree. You expect something isn’t going to work out, then it does work out — it must be because you’re special, right? It’s another way of assigning yourself agency in a world where you’re basically powerless over the big stuff. Humans are wired to believe they have agency, that things happen for a reason. It sounds like I’m giving Festinger at best a backhanded compliment, but I’m very seriously singing his praises — “everybody knows” this stuff, but no one had isolated and described it before. That’s a major achievement — if I could have the equivalent of “discovered cognitive dissonance” on my tombstone, I’d die an ecstatically happy man.

Severian, “Quick Takes: Festinger Edition”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-01-19.

August 15, 2023

“Babies are nature’s little smoke detectors”

Filed under: Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Rob Henderson covers some evolutionary arguments on how “we” became who we are today, including some of the ways parents and babies interact:

“Crying Baby” by iamprince160812 is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

Intriguingly, some researchers have suggested that infant crying is a signal of vigor that evolved to reduce the withdrawal of parental care.

The idea is that in the ancestral environment, inert, inanimate, lifeless infants were considered by parents to be physically weak or possibly in poor health and thus unlikely to survive. In contrast, being loud and relentlessly fussy demonstrated high energy, strong lungs, and good health. Indeed, infant crying is calorically costly, with a 13% increase in metabolic rate compared to resting.

Exhausted parent: “I’ve tried feeding you, changing you, holding you…What is it that you want?”

Crying baby: “To demonstrate to you how robust I am!”

This is likely why babies will often cry even when there is seemingly no immediate need, such as distress or hunger. Their unconscious, evolutionary aim is to ensure caregivers don’t neglect them or withdraw care or resources from them.

Of course, like most signals individuals send, babies don’t “know” they are doing this.

Infant crying also falls under the framework of error management theory. The idea is that it is more costly to under-react to potential dangers than overreact. In this case, it is better for a baby to be oversensitive and cry even when there is nothing wrong than to be under-reactive and not cry when something is wrong. A variation of this is the smoke detector principle.

A smoke detector produces a piercing, unmistaken alarm in the event of a fire. But it doesn’t actually detect fire — it detects smoke particles and activates upon the merest hint of potential danger. A false positive (e.g., alarm in response to burnt toast) is far more favorable than a false negative (failing to activate in response to flames). Thus these devices are calibrated to be annoyingly over-reactive.

Babies are nature’s little smoke detectors.

August 14, 2023

“Behold rationalism’s turncoats”

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

Brendan O’Neill calls out the New Atheist community for their wide adoption of the trans ideology-cum-faith:

Fractal Pride flags

We are living through a great showdown between hysteria and reason. On one side stand the adherents to the cult of transgenderism, hawking their hocus pocus about gendered souls and self-authentication through castration. On the other side stand those of us who know that biology is real, and that every cell in the human body is sexed, and that a man is as likely to become a woman as that chalice of wine is to become the blood of Christ during Mass (apologies, Catholics).

You’ll never guess which side some New Atheists are taking in this clash between delusion and truth. The crazy side. The side that says a bloke with a beard and balls can literally be a lesbian. Which is infinitely more cranky than the idea that a bloke with a beard and balls can literally be the Son of God. How did rationalist bros, those secularists on steroids, those Dawkins acolytes whose hobby for years was to make fun of the faithful, become devotees of such a strange, post-truth sect?

One by one, atheists are falling at the altar of trans. This week a Twitterfeed called The New Atheists slammed Richard Dawkins for becoming a TERF. Dawkins is a rarity in the new rationalist ranks: he thinks people with penises are men, not women, just as bread is bread, not the body of Christ. He is “utterly confused”, decreed his angry apostates. Biology “isn’t black and white, it’s a full spectrum of colour just like a rainbow”, they said. This hippyish belief that humans can pick their sex from a multicoloured smorgasbord is entirely an article of faith, of course, not science. Behold rationalism’s turncoats.

We’ve witnessed Neil deGrasse Tyson, America’s best-known scientist, bow to the creed of gender-as-feeling. In a TikTok video he said “XX/XY chromosomes are insufficient” when it comes to reading someone’s sex, because what people feel matters along with their biology. So someone might feel mostly female one day but “80 per cent male” the next, which means they’ll “remove the make-up” and “wear a muscle shirt”. Sir, that’s cross-dressing; it does nothing to refute the truth of chromosomes, which absolutely do tell us what sex a person is. As destransitioner Chloe Cole said to Tyson, you’re “confusing basic human biology with cosmetics”.

We’ve seen Matt Dillahunty, a leading American atheist, promote the mystic cry that there’s a difference between “what your chromosomes are” and your “gender identity”. “Transwomen are women”, he piously declares, perhaps keen to prove that while he might be fond of bashing the old religions, he has not one cross or blasphemous word to say about the new religion. Well, no one wants to be excommunicated from polite society.

Stephen Fry is another godless lover of science who appears to have converted to the trans belief. Phillip Pullman, Stewart Lee and others who were once noisy cheerleaders for rationalism are likewise strikingly reserved on this new ideology, this devotional movement which, among other things, invites young women to submit themselves to bodily mortification in order that they might transubstantiate into “men”. Seems like something a rationalist should question.

August 10, 2023

“Forget global boiling … It’s global gaslighting we should be worried about”

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

Remember when [your local TV station/newspaper] was blaring the alarming news that your [city/town/state/province] was warming at twice the rate of everything else? All the legacy media NPCs got the same patch at the same time — and it was blatant enough that most people realized it was utter bullshit. As Brendan O’Neill explains, they’re not normally quite so clumsy in their constant attempts to gaslight us all about the climate, but they’re definitely still doing it:

Picture the scene. You’re in London, the sky is menacingly grey, it’s drizzling. You zip your jacket against the elements, annoyed that Britain has just had one of its wettest Julys since records began. Then you reach for your copy of the Evening Standard as you head home from work, only to see splashed across the front page a Photoshopped image of the Earth on fire. “WHO WILL STOP EARTH BURNING?”, the hysterical headline asks. The drizzle turns to rain and you fold your Standard in two to use as an impromptu umbrella, turning a mad piece of global-boiling propaganda into flimsy protection from this strange, wet summer.

This was London yesterday. It really happened. It was yet another overcast day, in keeping with the record-breaking precipitation of the past month. The UK had an average of 140.1mm of rain in July, the sixth-highest level of July rainfall since records were first kept in 1836. And yet here was the freebie London paper warning us that flames will shortly engulf our celestial home. That heat death is coming. That an inferno of our own dumb making is licking at our feet. I know we live in mad times but even I never expected to see damp commuters brushing raindrops off their shoulders while surrounded by discarded papers telling us it’s so hellishly hot we might all soon die. Rarely has the gap between MSM BS and real life felt so cavernously vast.

They’re lying to us. Forget global boiling, the crazy term invented by UN chief António Guterres a couple of weeks ago. Forget global warming, even. It’s global gaslighting we should be worried about. If gaslighting, in the words of the Oxford dictionary, is “the process of making somebody believe untrue things in order to control them”, then that lunatic Standard cover was classic gaslighting. The planet is not on fire. Earth is not burning. These are untruths. This is delirium, not journalism; fearmongering, not fact-gathering. And the aim, it seems to me, is to try to control us; to frighten us with pseudo-Biblical prophesies of hellfire and doom until we obediently bow down to the eco-ideology.

Adding insult to injury, the Standard frontpage had pics of Joe Biden, Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi and Rishi Sunak next to its crackpot query, “WHO WILL STOP EARTH BURNING?”. Let’s leave to one side that President Biden doesn’t seem to know what planet he’s on half the time, never mind being able to save one; and that Rishi can’t even control Britain’s borders, far less the climate of our entire mortal coil; and that Xi and Modi are surely more concerned with their pursuit of economic development than with indulging the End Times hysteria of the Notting Hill set that writes and publishes the Standard. The more pressing point is this: no one needs to stop Earth from burning because Earth isn’t burning. You can’t put out a fire that doesn’t exist. As Bjorn Lomborg said last week, the idea that the “world is ablaze” is pure bunkum.

“Ultra-Processed Food” is so bad that we need extra scare-quotes!!

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

Christopher Snowden seems, for some inexplicable reason, to be skeptical about the hysterical warnings of people like Chris van Tulleken in his recent book Ultra-Processed People: Who Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food … and Why Can’t We Stop?

If Jamie Oliver is the fun police, Chris van Tulleken is the Taliban. The selling point of books like Ultra-Processed People is the idea that everything you know is wrong. Van Tulleken, an infectious diseases doctor and television presenter, takes this to extremes. In this book, almost everybody is wrong, many of them are corrupt and almost no one is to be trusted. Only Dr. van Tulleken, a handful of researchers and anyone who pays £25 to read this book knows the real truth. The problem is not sugar. The problem is not carbs. Artificial sweeteners don’t work. Exercise doesn’t work. Willpower doesn’t work. Every scientist who has published research contradicting his theory is in the pay of the food industry or — how’s this for an ad hominem argument? — has cited studies by people who are. The British Nutrition Foundation, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the British Dietetic Association, the Centre for Social Justice, the Institute of Economic Affairs, Tortoise Media, Diabetes UK, Cancer Research UK and the British Heart Foundation are all tainted by food industry funding. Even Jamie Oliver – Saint Jamie, the Sage of Essex — is guilty by his association with Tesco and Deliveroo, and because he makes ultra-processed food (“albeit fairly marginal items”).

It is this ultra-processed food (UPF), argues van Tulleken, that is the real cause of obesity and diet-related diseases in the world today. Food is classified as UPF if it is wrapped in plastic and contains an ingredient you don’t have in your kitchen. This includes everything from mustard to Magnums but, counter-intuitively, doesn’t include sugar, salt or fat. Van Tulleken doesn’t quite put it like this but, in effect, anything you make at home is healthy while nearly anything you buy in a supermarket, aside from raw ingredients, is bad for you.

The evidence for this striking proposition can be briefly outlined, and van Tulleken deals with it swiftly in a single chapter. Firstly, there are a number of studies using observational epidemiology which find a correlation between diets which are high in UPF and various ailments, including not only obesity, heart disease and type 2 diabetes, but also dementia, depression, cancer and more. Secondly, there is a randomised controlled trial which gave a small group of volunteers a two-week diet of either ultra-processed food or minimally processed food. The nutritional profile of each diet was similar (the same levels of salt, sugar, etc.) and the volunteers were offered twice as much as they needed to maintain a healthy weight. The people on the ultra-processed diet ended up eating 500 calories more than the people on the minimally processed diet and put on nearly a kilogram of weight.

The randomised controlled trial was published in 2019 and already has over 1,200 academic citations. Van Tulleken considers it to be extraordinarily robust, but it only really stands out because the general standard of dietary research is so poor. The volunteers were not given ultra-processed versions of the same meals. They were given totally different meals, plus very different snacks, and they could eat as much as they wanted for free. What does it actually demonstrate? Arguably, all it shows is that if you give people unlimited quantities of tasty food, they will eat more of it than if you give them blander food. Van Tulleken assures us that “the two diets were equally delicious”, but this would seem to contradict his claims elsewhere that UPF is “hyper-palatable”, delicious and irresistible.

As for the epidemiological correlations, what is it that actually correlates? UPF is an incredibly broad category encompassing most foods that are known as HFSS (high in fat, sugar or salt) and many more besides. People who eat a lot of UPF tend to have lower incomes, which correlates with all sorts of health conditions. In the study van Tulleken cites to demonstrate that UPF causes cancer, the people who ate the most UPF had the highest smoking rate and were least likely to be physically active. Epidemiologists attempt to control for such factors, but with so much going on in the data, it is an heroic assumption to think that the effect of food processing can be teased out from the effects of fat, sugar, salt, obesity, smoking, stress, exercise and numerous socio-economic influences.

QotD: The variable pace of evolution

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

The central argument of Gelernter’s essay is that random chance is not good enough, even at geologic timescales, to produce the ratchet of escalating complexity we see when we look at living organisms and the fossil record. Most mutations are deleterious and degrade the functioning of the organism; few are useful enough to build on. There hasn’t been enough time for the results we see.

Before getting to that one I want to deal with a subsidiary argument in the essay, that Darwinism is somehow falsified because we don’t observe the the slow and uniform evolution that Darwin posited. But we have actually observed evolution (all the way up to speciation) in bacteria and other organisms with rapid lifespans, and we know the answer to this one.

The rate of evolutionary change varies; it increases when environmental changes increase selective pressures on a species and decreases when their environment is stable. You can watch this happen in a Petri dish, even trigger episodes of rapid evolution in bacteria by introducing novel environmental stressors.

Rate of evolution can also increase when a species enters a new, unexploited environment and promptly radiates into subspecies all expressing slightly different modes of exploitation. Darwin himself spotted this happening among Galapagos finches. An excellent recent book, The 10,000 Year Explosion, observes the same acceleration in humans since the invention of agriculture.

Thus, when we observe punctuated equilibrium (long stretches of stable morphology in species punctuated by rapid changes that are hard to spot in the fossil record) we shouldn’t see this as the kind of ineffable mystery that Gelernter and other opponents of Darwinism want to make of it. Rather, it is a signal about the shape of variability in the adaptive environment – also punctuated.

Even huge punctuation marks like the Cambrian explosion, which Gelernter spends a lot of rhetorical energy trying to make into an insuperable puzzle, fall to this analysis. The fossil record is telling us that something happened at the dawn of the Cambrian that let loose a huge fan of possibilities; adaptive radiation, a period of rapid evolution, promptly followed just as it did for the Galapagos finches.

We don’t know what happened, exactly. It could have been something as simple as the oxygen level in seawater going up. Or maybe there was some key biological invention – better structural material for forming hard body parts with would be one obvious one. Both these things, or several other things, might have happened near enough together in time that the effects can’t be disentangled in the fossil record.

The real point here is that there is nothing special about the Cambrian explosion that demands mechanisms we haven’t observed (not just theorized about, but observed) on much faster timescales. It takes an ignotum per æque ignotum kind of mistake to erect a mystery here, and it’s difficult to imagine a thinker as bright as Dr. Gelernter falling into such a trap … unless he wants to.

But Dr. Gelernter makes an even more basic error when he says “The engine that powers Neo-Darwinian evolution is pure chance and lots of time.” That is wrong, or at any rate leaves out an important co-factor and leads to badly wrong intuitions about the scope of the problem and the timescale required to get the results we see. Down that road one ends up doing silly thought experiments like “How often would a hurricane assemble a 747 from a pile of parts?”

Eric S. Raymond, “Contra Gelernter on Darwin”, Armed and Dangerous, 2019-08-14.

August 8, 2023

Holding the BBC to account for their climate change alarmism

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

Paul Homewood‘s updated accounting of the BBC’s coverage — and blatant falsehoods — of climate change news over the last twelve months:

The BBC’s coverage of climate change and related policy issues, such as energy policy, has long been of serious and widespread concern. There have been numerous instances of factual errors, bias and omission of alternative views to the BBC’s narrative. Our 2022 paper, Institutional Alarmism, provided many examples. Some led to formal complaints, later upheld by the BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit. However, many programmes and articles escaped such attention, though they were equally biased and misleading.

The purpose of this paper is to update that previous analysis with further instances of factual errors, misinformation, half truths, omissions and sheer bias. These either post-date the original report or were not included previously. However, the list is still by no means complete.

The case for the prosecution

The third most active hurricane season
In December 2021, BBC News reported that “The 2021 Atlantic hurricane season has now officially ended, and it’s been the third most active on record”. It was nothing of the sort. There were seven Atlantic hurricanes in 2021, and since 1851 there have been 32 years with a higher count. The article also made great play of the fact that all of the pre-determined names had been used up, implying that hurricanes are becoming more common. They failed to explain, however, that with satellite technology we are now able to spot hurricanes in mid-ocean that would have been missed before.

Hurricanes: are they getting more violent?
Shortly after Hurricane Ian in September 2022, a BBC “Reality Check” claimed that “Hurricanes are among the most violent storms on Earth and there’s evidence they’re getting more powerful”. The video offered absolutely no data or evidence to back up this claim, which contradicted the official agencies. For instance, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) state in their latest review:

    There is no strong evidence of century-scale increasing trends in U.S. landfalling hurricanes or major hurricanes. Similarly for Atlantic basin-wide hurricane frequency (after adjusting for observing capabilities), there is not strong evidence for an increase since the late 1800s in hurricanes, major hurricanes, or the proportion of hurricanes that reach major hurricane intensity.

The IPCC came to a similar conclusion about hurricanes globally in their latest Assessment Review. However, the BBC article failed to mention any of this.

August 7, 2023

Legacy media puzzled at falling levels of public trust in the scientific community

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

Given the way “the science” has been politicized over recent years and especially through the pandemic, it’s almost a surprise that there’s any residual public trust left for the scientific community:

Sagan’s warning was eerily prophetic. For the last three-plus years, we’ve witnessed a troubling rise of authoritarianism masquerading as science, which has resulted in a collapse in trust of public health.

This collapse has been part of a broader and more partisan shift in Americans who say they have “a high degree of confidence in the scientific community”. Democrats, who had long had less confidence in the scientific community, are now far less skeptical. Republicans, who historically had much higher levels of trust in the scientific community, have experienced a collapse in trust in the scientific community.

John Burn-Murdoch, a data reporter at The Financial Times who shared the data in question on Twitter, said Republicans are now “essentially the anti-science party”.

First, this is a sloppy inference from a journalist. Burn-Murdoch’s poll isn’t asking respondents if they trust science. It’s asking if they trust the scientific community. There’s an enormous difference between the two, and the fact that a journalist doesn’t understand the difference between “confidence in science” and “confidence in the scientific community” is a little frightening.

Second, as Dr. Vinay Prasad pointed out, no party has a monopoly on science; but it’s clear that many of the policies the “pro science” party were advocating the last three years were not rooted in science.

“The ‘pro science’ party was pro school closure, masking a 26 month old child with a cloth mask, and mandating an mrna booster in a healthy college man who had COVID already,” tweeted Prasad, a physician at the University of California, San Francisco.

Today we can admit such policies were flawed, non-sensical or both, as were so many of the mitigations that were taken and mandated during the Covid-19 pandemic. But many forget that during the pandemic it was verboten to even question such policies.

People were banned, suspended, and censored by social media platforms at the behest of federal agencies. “The Science” had become a set of dogmas that could not be questioned. No less an authority than Dr. Fauci said that criticizing his policies was akin to “criticizing science, because I represent science”.

This could not be more wrong. Science can help us understand the natural world, but there are no “oughts” in science, the economist Ludwig von Mises pointed out, echoing the argument of philosopher David Hume.

“Science is competent to establish what is,” Mises wrote. “[Science] can never dictate what ought to be and what ends people should aim at.”

UN Secretary General updates Dante’s Inferno

Filed under: Environment, Media, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Sean Walsh on the differences between the lowest level of Hell as described by Dante and the UN Secretary General’s modern characterization:

Source: Jerome, Dante’s Nine Circles of Hell, Daily Infographic, August 27, 2017, http://www.dailyinfographic.com/dantes-nine-circles-of-hell

    “In the tide of time there have only been four absolutely fundamental physical theories: Newtonian mechanics; Clerk Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism; Einstein’s theory of relativity, and quantum mechanics” – David Berlinski, The Deniable Darwin

In Dante’s Inferno, Hell is, counter-intuitively perhaps, freezing cold. In the 9th Circle the Devil is entrapped in a lake of ice. An imaginative inversion of what we normally take Hell to be.

Clearly the 14th century Italian poet didn’t get the memo from UN secretary general Antonio Guterres, for whom the Hell we currently suffer is boiling hot. Or if he did get it, perhaps he binned it. I wouldn’t blame him.

There is, of course, another difference between the two Hells: in Dante’s conception you know you’re in it; in Guterres’s diagnosis you need to be told you are. Some “Hell” that is.

I jest of course. Guterres claim is not that we are currently in Hell, more that we are on the road to it. And that the diesel-fuelled vehicle we are travelling in is called “complacency”: a stubborn and bewildering refusal on the part of you and me to recalibrate, or rather abandon, our lives in accordance with the instructions of “settled science”. An inexplicable refusal to genuflect at the altar of the Climate Change Sanhedrin.

You’ll notice that we have been here before. Restrictions imposed during the “Covid pandemic” were also justified on the grounds of an alleged scientific consensus. It’s tempting, perhaps even irresistible, to think that lockdown was the rehearsal and that incoming climate-related restrictions (and they are incoming) the main event. An amplification of the tyranny. A bit like when a thug tries his hand at assault before graduating to murder.

It’s easy to establish a consensus when the grown-ups are excluded from the discussion. And such a consensus is not really worth the candle. In fact, it is normally injurious to a genuine search for truth.

I refer you to the quotation at the top of the piece. For context: David Berlinski is a polymath who has taught philosophy, mathematics and English at universities including Columbia and Princeton. He’s the real deal and a genuine maverick whose genius is confirmed by the fact that he’s been sacked from every academic position he’s ever held.

The four foundational theories he references were in the main constructed by geniuses whose creativity was enabled precisely by their cultivated indifference to the “settled science” of the day.

August 2, 2023

Britain’s troubling rise in hospital visits due to dog bites

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

Ed West has a dog, but he admits he’s not really a “dog person”:

American Bully Breed Dog. Male. Name: X-Men.
Photo by Verygoodhustle via Wikimedia Commons.

Dog breeds have different natures, something that would seem self-obviously true and yet which today the leading authorities in the British dog world seem to be in denial about, in particular when it comes to one of the unspoken trends of recent years – the huge increase in dog attacks.

This spike in dog-bites-man violence has led to a 50 per cent increase in hospital admissions for dog bites over ten years, the biggest rise being among children under the age of 4. Overall the number of fatalities has gone from an average of 3.3 in the 2000s to 10 last year, while dog attacks have risen recently from 16,000 in 2018 to 22,000 in 2022, and hospitalisations have almost doubled from 4,699 in 2007 to 8,819 in 2021/22.

The underlying story behind this escalation of violence is that much of it is the work of just one breed – the American Bully. And as we enter the summer holidays, the peak period for dog attacks, it’s worth pondering why the experts in the dog world are in such denial about the issue.

Public awareness of the American Bully problem has grown in recent months, spurred by some especially horrific attacks, as well as a widely-read article by legal academic and YouTuber Lawrence Newport. Lawrence looked at the data on dog attacks and observed that “a notable pattern emerges. In 2021, 2 of the 4 UK fatalities were from a breed known as the American Bully XL. In 2022, 6 out of 10 were American Bullies. In 2023, so far all fatalities appear to have been American Bullies.”

American Bullies, Newport explains, “are a breed resulting from modern mixes of the American Pitbull Terrier. They are known for very high muscle mass, biting power, and impressive strength, and come in several variations. Those that are bred for the greatest strength, weight and size are known as a part of the American Bully XL variety.”

Pitbulls are banned in Britain for a good reason, and in the US are responsible for “60–70% of dog fatalities“; yet under the Dangerous Dogs Act 1991 “the American Bully XL is currently permitted”.

What is surprising, Newport writes, is that “if you argue these dogs are dangerous, you will get a flood of comments from people … saying it’s the owner’s fault, not the dog’s. You might even be thinking this yourself, right now. But this is wrong. Whilst many Brits would contend that ‘Guns American Bully XL’s don’t kill people, people do’, the reality is different.

“Labradors retrieve. Pointers point. Cocker Spaniels will run through bushes, nose to the ground, looking as if they are tracking or hunting even when just playing – even when they have never been on a hunt of any kind. This is not controversial. Breeds have traits. We’ve bred them to have them.”

Pitbulls were created for bull-baiting, and when that was banned, they came to be bred to hunt down rats in a locked pen. “This required more speed, so they were interbred with terriers to make Pitbull Terriers. In addition to this, they began to be used for dog fighting: bred specifically to have aggression towards other dogs, and to be locked in a pit to fight (some are still used for this today). These were dogs likely kept in cages, away from humans, and bred for their capacity to earn money for their owners by winning fights. These were not dogs bred for loyalty to humans, these were dogs bred for indiscriminate, sustained and brutal violence contained within a pit.”

August 1, 2023

Evil climate heretics deny the revealed holy truth of global BOILING!

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

Notorious heretic Brendan O’Neill preaches climate denial! Where are the Green Gestapo when you need them?

And just like that we’ve entered a new epoch. “The era of global warming has ended, the era of global boiling has arrived”, decreed UN chief António Guterres last week. It’s hard to know what’s worse: the hubris and arrogance of this globalist official who imagines he has the right to declare the start of an entire new age, or the servile compliance of the media elites who lapped up his deranged edict about the coming heat death of Earth. “Era of global boiling has arrived and it is terrifying”, said the front page of the Guardian, as if Guterres’s word was gospel, his every utterance a divine truth. We urgently need to throw the waters of reason on this delirious talk of a “boiling” planet.

Guterres issued his neo-papal bull about the boiling of our world in response to the heatwaves that have hit some countries over the past two weeks. “Climate change is here [and] it is terrifying”, he said. We see “families running from the flames [and] workers collapsing in scorching heat” and “it is just the beginning”, he said, doing his best impersonation of a 1st-century millenarian crackpot. In fact, forget “climate change”, he said. Forget “global warming”, too. What we’re witnessing is a boiling. It all brings to mind the Book of Job which warned that the serpent Leviathan would cause the seas to “boil like a cauldron”. Leviathan’s back, only we call him climate change now.

The obsequious speed with which the media turned Guterres’s commandment into frontpage news was extraordinary. They behaved less like reporters than like the slavish scribes of this secular god and his delusional visions. “World entering ‘era of global boiling'”, cried the Independent, and we “know who is responsible”. No prizes for guessing who that is. It’s you, me and the rest of our pesky species. It always is. “Planet is boiling”, one headline breezily declared, confirming that Guterres’s fearful phrase, his propagandistic line no doubt drawn up with the aid of spin doctors in some UN backroom, is already being christened as fact.

Almost instantly, media outlets started lecturing readers on how they might help to put a halt to the coming evaporation of our planet. SBS in Australia advised us to “Reduce meat intake”, “Stop driving cars” and “Cut down on flights”. In short, stop all the fun stuff; make sacrifices to appease nature’s angry gods. Even self-styled radicals made themselves mouthpieces of the UN’s medieval sermonising. Novara Media instantly embraced “global boiling” as an apt metaphor for the arsonist impact humanity has had on Earth. Scratch a Marxist these days, find a Malthusian.

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