Sabaton History
Published Feb 7, 2024There are many inventors whose creations have been turned into weapons of war. A couple that really stand out are Alfred Nobel and Wernher von Braun. Today we’ll take a deep dive into their stories and the paradox of using destructive weapons for good, or creative weapons for destruction.
(more…)
May 25, 2024
Fathers of Light and Darkness – Rockets and Explosives – Sabaton History 126 [Official]
Comments Off on Fathers of Light and Darkness – Rockets and Explosives – Sabaton History 126 [Official]
May 24, 2024
Bernie Sanders finally finds a group of rich people who he thinks shouldn’t have to pay
As Tim Worstall points out, Bernie Sanders’ latest campaign is starkly at odds with his usual “make the rich pay” schtick:
“Bernie Sanders” by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 
.
It’s possible to think that Bernie Sanders, Senator that he is, is more than a little confused. Well, he’d not be the first elderly politician to suffer that fate. Nor the first socialist. It is necessary for me to be fair here though — one of his honeymoons he took in the Soviet Union. Which makes perfect sense to me — after all, there was bugger all else to do there other than your own wife.
However, here we’ve got him complaining about the cost of the new miracle drugs:
Bernie Sanders has urged Denmark to rein in its most valuable company, Novo Nordisk, and force it to slash prices on popular weight loss and diabetes treatments Ozempic and Wegovy, taking his fight to lower “outrageously high” drug prices in the United States to the company’s doorstep as its profits soar amid ongoing struggles to meet booming appetite for the revolutionary drugs.
Hmm, dunno how well that’s going to work with the Danes really. Yes, to some extent they’re milder than when they tried to rape and pillage the entirety of Europe but not wholly. My brother worked out in Afghanistan (feeding the troops) and he had a Danish unit rotate through. So he tells me their senior sergeant type carried a double bladed axe on his backpack — it didn’t come back clean from every patrol either. They’re not all equality and gender rights these days, you know?
So, we can imagine a certain portion at least of the Danish population celebrating this rapine of Medicare’s pockets by the simple expedient of selling a weight loss drug that actually works — which is, when we come to think of it, something of an innovation. Fen-Fen didn’t work after all. Hey, you know, Vinland failed but we’ll get ’em this time? We’re charging high prices because we can?
A second pass at the argument would be that the drugs are in fact incredibly cheap. When it was shown that the same drug — semaglutide — works in stopping (that’s “stopping” as in ceased, stopped, dead, like Bernie’s career would if it were ever proven he had taken part in an act of voluntary capitalism) chronic kidney disease. So much so that the very day they announced the trials on the drug were being stopped a year early, so obvious was the success, the share prices of all the dialysis provision companies dropped 20 and 30%. That is, at near whatever price, this drug is a money saver. Which is, you know, good. J Foreigner turns up with this thing that saves America, Americans, lives and money and yet Bernie whines — so like a socialist, eh? Capitalism with markets makes us the humans who are living highest on the hog, ever, but they really never do stop whining about it, do they?
But Bernie’s real complaint is that Americans are paying more to burn off the cheeseburgers than everyone else has to. But from everything else Bernie says about anything at all this is at it should be — the rich should pay.
Back to our basics. The basic drug development problem is that the development of a drug is a public goods problem. It costs $2 billion to get a drug through the FDA and gain approval to actually sell it. Yes, of course we should slaughter much of the regulation that makes it cost that much (personally, against character type, I only recommend capture and humane release for the actual bureaucrats) but that’s another matter. It does. But if everyone can just copy the drug at that point then no one will spend $2 billion. So, OK, patents, so the developers have a decade (the patent is two decades, it takes a decade to gain approval) to make their $2 billion back then anyone can copy it. The price falls to manufacturing cost plus normal profit level and we’re about as good as we can get. This is not a perfect system but for mass market drugs it’s about as good as we’re going to get.
Comments Off on Bernie Sanders finally finds a group of rich people who he thinks shouldn’t have to pay
May 22, 2024
Scott Alexander reviews The Others Within Us
At Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander discusses teh new hawtness in psychotherapy as expounded in Robert Falconer’s new book The Others Within Us:
Internal Family Systems, the hot new1 psychotherapy, has a secret.
“Hot new psychotherapy” might sound dismissive. It’s not. There’s always got to be one. The therapy that’s getting all the buzz, curing all the incurable patients, rocking those first few small studies. The therapy that was invented by a grizzled veteran therapist working with Patients Like You, not the out-of-touch elites behind all the other therapies. The therapy that Really Gets To The Root Of The Problem. There’s always got to be one, and now it’s IFS.
Sufficiently new and popular therapies are hard to get. Therapist training starts slow – the founder has to train the second generation of therapists, the second generation has to train the third generation, and so on. IFS says they have a 10,000 person wait list for their training program. So lots of people have heard great things about IFS, maybe read a manual or two, but never tried it or met anyone who has.
What I gather from the manuals: IFS is about working with “parts”. You treat your mind as containing a Self — a sort of perfect angelic intellect without any flaws or mental illnesses — and various Parts — little sub-minds with their own agendas who can sometimes occlude or overwhelm the Self. During therapy, you talk to the Parts, learn their motives, and bargain with them.
For example, you might identify a Part of you that wants to sabotage your relationships. You will visualize and name it — maybe you call her Sabby, and she looks like a snake. You talk to Sabby, and learn that after your first break-up, when you decided you never wanted to feel that level of pain again, you unconsciously created her and ordered her to make sure you never got close enough to anyone else to get hurt. Then you and the therapist come up with some plan to satisfy Sabby — maybe you convince her that you’re older now, and better able to deal with pain, and you won’t blame her if you get close to someone and have to break up again. Then you see a vision of Sabby stepping aside, maybe turning off the Windmill Of Relationship Sabotage or something like that, and then you never sabotage your relationships again. It’s more complicated than that, but that’s the core.
All of this is the classic version everyone learns from the manual. Before we get to the secret, let’s examine two big assumptions in more detail.
First, this isn’t supposed to be just the therapist walking you through guided imagery, or you making up a story you tell yourself. The therapist asks you “Look inside until you find the part that’s sabotaging your relationship”, and you are supposed to discover — not invent, discover — that your unconscious gives it the form of a snake called Sabby. And you are supposed to hear as in a trance — again, not invent — Sabby telling you that she’s been protecting you from heartbreak since your last breakup. When you bargain with Sabby, it’s a two-way negotiation. You learn — not decide — whether or not Sabby agrees to any given bargain. According to Internal Family Systems (which descends from normal family systems, ie family therapy where the whole family is there at once and has to compromise with each other), all this stuff really is in your mind, waiting for an IFS therapist to discover it. When Carl Jung talked about interacting with the archetypes or whatever, he wasn’t being metaphorical. He literally meant “go into a trance that gives you a sort of waking lucid dream where you meet all this internal stuff”.
(After reading the IFS manuals, I tried most of their tricks for initiating this sort of trance and meeting Sabby or whoever. I got nothing. I notice most of the patients with great results are severely traumatized borderlines, ie the same people who often get multiple personality disorder after the slightest hint from a therapist that this might happen. We’ll get back to this analogy later.)
The second assumption is that everything inside your mind is part of you, and everything inside your mind is good. You might think of Sabby as some kind of hostile interloper, ruining your relationships with people you love. But actually she’s a part of your unconscious, which you have in some sense willed into existence, looking out for your best interests. You neither can nor should fight her. If you try to excise her, you will psychically wound yourself. Instead, you should bargain with her the same way you would with any other friend or loved one, until either she convinces you that relationships are bad, or you and the therapist together convince her that they aren’t. This is one of the pillars of classical IFS.
The secret is: no, actually some of these things are literal demons.
1. Some people object to me calling it “new” – it was developed in the 1980s, and has been popular since the early 2010s. Still, the therapy landscape shifts slowly, and even an exponentially-growing therapy takes a long time to get anywhere.
Comments Off on Scott Alexander reviews The Others Within Us
May 20, 2024
At what point did “quiet genocide” become the preferred option for the climate cultists to “save the planet”?
The Daily Sceptic‘s Chris Morrison on the not-so-subtle change in the opinions of the extreme climatistas that getting rid of the majority of the human race is now the preferred way to address their concerns:
The grisly streak of neo-Malthusianism that runs through the green movement reared its ugly head earlier this week when former United Nations contributing author and retired UCL Professor Bill McGuire tweeted that the only “realistic way” to avoid catastrophic climate breakdown was to cull the human population with a high fatality pandemic. The tweet was subsequently withdrawn by McGuire, “not because I regret it”, but people took it the wrong way. McGuire is the alarmists’ alarmist, suggesting for instance that human-caused climate change could lead to more earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The Daily Sceptic will not take his views the wrong way. They are an illuminating insight into environmental Malthusianism that does not get anything like the amount of publicity it deserves.
Every now and then Sir David Attenborough allows the genial TV presenter mask to slip to reveal a harder-edged Malthusian side. Speaking to BBC Breakfast in 2021, he suggested that the Earth would be better off without the human race, describing us as “intruders”. In 2009, Attenborough became the patron of the Optimum Population Trust and told the Guardian: “I’ve never seen a problem that wouldn’t be easier to solve with fewer people.” In 2013, he made the appalling remark that it was “barmy” for the United Nations to send bags of flour to famine-stricken Ethiopia. Too little land, too many people, was his considered judgement.
Any consideration of the refusal of food aid these days brings to mind the 19th century Malthusian Sir Charles Trevelyan, the British civil servant during the Irish famines who saw the starvation as retribution on the local population for their moral failings and tendency to have numerous children. He is said to have seen the great loss of life as a regrettable but unavoidable consequence of reform and regeneration.
Anti-human sentiment is riven through much green thinking. In 2019, Anglia Ruskin University Professor Patricia MacCormack wrote a book suggesting humans were already enslaved to the point of “zombiedom” because of capitalism, and “phasing out reproduction is the only way to repair the damage done to the world”. Green fanatics can be a joyless crowd – it is not enough to declare a climate crisis, now they want a “nookie” emergency. As the economist and philosopher Robert Boulding once remarked: “Is there any more single-minded, simple pleasure than viewing with alarm? At times it is even better than sex.”
Comments Off on At what point did “quiet genocide” become the preferred option for the climate cultists to “save the planet”?
May 17, 2024
“Once a mind is infected with Climate Change, bioweapons are just another kind of carbon credit”
Jo Nova presents evidence of a university professor — a vulcanologist — who perhaps has more sympathy for the volcanoes he studies than the human race:
Let’s just say, hypothetically, that someone wanted an excuse to reduce global population, or limit competing tribes and religions, there’s a scientific hat for that. Climate Change is the ultimate excuse for mass death — done in the nicest possible way and for the most honorable of reasons. But isn’t that what they all say: Jim Jones, the Branch Davidians, Heavens Gate — death makes the world a better place?
The cult that pretends it isn’t a cult sells itself as “science”. I mean, what the worst thing you can think of? Would that be one degree of warming, or the Black Death?
In Bill McQuire’s mind the catastrophe is not when billions of innocent people die.
One hundred years from now, what would our great grandchildren prefer: that the world was slightly cooler or they were never born at all? If you hate humans it’s a terrible dilemma …
Bill McGuire, vulcanologist, accidentally put his primal instincts in a tweet last weekend:
Thirty years of telling us that humans are bad has consequences. As Elon Musk said” They want a holocaust for humanity.” It turns out a televised diet of one-sided climate projection by mendicant B-Grade witchdoctors might be a dangerous thing for mental health. If only Bill McQuire had seen a skeptic on TV?
Predictably the McGuire tweet spread far, and got crushing replies so the Emeritus Professor deleted it, as all cowards do, yelling at us:
To which the winning reply was:
Comments Off on “Once a mind is infected with Climate Change, bioweapons are just another kind of carbon credit”
May 16, 2024
The replication crisis and the steady decline in social trust
Theodore Dalrymple on the depressing unreliability — and sometimes outright fraudulence — of far too high a proportion of what gets published in scientific journals:
Until quite recently — I cannot put an exact date on it — I assumed that everything published in scientific journals was, if not true, at least not deliberately untrue. Scientists might make mistakes, but they did not cheat, plagiarise, falsify, or make up their results. For many years as I opened a medical journal, the possibility simply that it contained fraud did not occur to me. Cases such as those of the Piltdown Man, a hoax in which bone fragments found in the Piltdown gravel pit were claimed to be those of the missing link between ape and man, were famous because they were dramatic but above all because they were rare, or assumed to be such.
Such naivety is no longer possible: instances of dishonesty have become much more frequent, or at least much more publicised. Whether the real incidence of scientific fraud has increased is difficult to say. There is probably no way to estimate the incidence of such fraud in the past by which a proper comparison can be made.
There are, of course, good reasons why scientific fraud should have increased. The number of practising scientists has exploded; they are in fierce competition with one another; their careers depend to a large extent on their productivity as measured by publication. The difference between what is ethical and unethical has blurred. They cite themselves, they recycle their work, they pay for publication, they attach their names to pieces of work they have played no part in performing and whose reports they have not even read, and so forth. As new algorithms are developed to measure their performance, they find new ways to play the game or to deceive. And all this is not even counting commercial pressures.
Furthermore, the general level of trust in society has declined. Are our politicians worse than they used to be, as it seems to everyone above a certain age, or is it that we simply know more about them because the channels of communication are so much wider? At any rate, trust in authority of most kinds has declined. Where once we were inclined to say, “It must be true because I read it in a newspaper”, we are now inclined to say, “It must be untrue because I read it in a newspaper”.
Quite often now I look at a blog called Retraction Watch which, since 2010, has been devoted to tracing and encouraging retraction of flawed scientific papers, often flawed for discreditable reasons. Such reasons are various and include research performed on subjects who have not given proper consent. This is not the same as saying that the results of such research are false, however, and raises the question of whether it is ethical to cite results that have been obtained unethically. Whether it is or not, we have all benefited enormously from past research that would now be considered unethical.
One common problem with research is its reproducibility, or lack of it. This is particularly severe in the case of psychology, but it is common in medicine too.
Comments Off on The replication crisis and the steady decline in social trust
QotD: Modern parenting in open-concept houses
… our era does seem to be peculiarly marked by careless design. Few of the men who built middle-class versions of the Craftsman bungalow or Colonial Revival in the early twentieth century were trained architects, and they often adapted or simplified their designs to cut costs, and yet they somehow managed to get their proportions right. They might have used fewer columns than the more expensive examples of their styles, but what columns they did employ were the right shape, while today’s are liable to be too skinny (if Classically-inspired) or fat and stubby (if Craftsman). I won’t pretend I have an explanation for this — it seems a small aesthetic piece of a much broader societal failure, just one more case of chucking tradition out the window. Architect Léon Krier suggests that once the language of traditional design had been intentionally destroyed by architecture schools, it was very hard to recreate or rediscover because our new and exciting construction materials do not punish us for our errors the way wood, stone, and lime do. (“Even a genius,” he writes, “cannot build a lasting mistake out of nature’s materials.”)
But the real crime of most new construction isn’t the exterior details. It’s inside, and it’s walls. They’re missing.
Open floorplans are bad. They’re bad for entertaining and they’re bad for families. Sure, that photo looks great (if you’re allergic to color and texture) and the HGTV hosts love ’em, but imagine actually living in that room with children. Seriously, just try: how fast are the cushions coming off those couches? How fast are your neutrals drowned beneath colorful toys and backpacks? (Unless you’re inflicting the same sad beige color scheme on your children.) How much visual clutter can a room of that size accumulate, and how much help will a small child need just figuring out where to start tidying up?
How many times do you have to ask the monster truck vs. dinosaur battle by the fireplace to pipe down so you can talk to Daddy over here by the stove, for Pete’s sake?
There’s a school of American parenting that says every moment with your child should be spent intensively nurturing his or her precious individual development. At lunch, for instance, you should make eye contact with your ten-month-old and describe the texture and flavor of each food (perhaps in French!) while Baby carefully grinds it into her hair. Your child’s quiet drawing time will surely be enhanced by his mother hovering at his elbow: “Tell me about your picture, honey! Uh-huh, and how do we think the villagers feel about Gigantor devouring them? Gosh, you sure gave him some big teeth!” An open floorplan is a tremendous boon to this sort of parenting: your child is always visible, so you can always be engaged.
It is completely impossible to raise more than maybe two children this way.
I don’t know which way the causation goes — do parents who were already inclined to be a little more laid-back and hands-off find their lives have room for more kids, or does sheer number of children force you to alter your tactics? — but either way, small families and intensive parenting go together, and they live in an open-concept house with 1.64 children.
Walls and doors, on the other hand, are God’s greatest gift to large families. Of course it is wonderful to be together. It’s important to have spaces that will fit everyone. (We were very sad when it was no longer possible to pile everyone into a king-size bed, even with elbows.) But it’s just as important to be able to be apart: because your little brother is practicing piano while you’re trying to do algebra, or a blanket fort combines poorly with an elaborate board game, or just because LEGO spaceships are a noisy business and your mother is reading to your sisters. (Or, God forbid, reading a book herself.)
Because at the end of the day, houses are just the stage where life happens. This isn’t to say that the stage-dressing is irrelevant — there is real worth and value to surrounding ourselves with order and beauty, and understanding how your house or neighborhood got to be that way can illuminate new things about the world. But ultimately, what matters most is how you make it a home.
Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: A Field Guide to American Houses, by Virginia Savage McAlester”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-12-05.
Comments Off on QotD: Modern parenting in open-concept houses
May 14, 2024
Tesla versus the German green activists
It’s not surprising that environmental activists would dislike a large factory, but this weekend’s attempted storming of Tesla’s Gigafactory in Germany must have raised a few eyebrows:
Tesla Gigafactory Berlin-Brandenburg, 28 July 2023.
Photo by Michael Wolf via Wikimedia Commons.
Grünheide is a small town in Brandenburg and the site of Europe’s only Tesla factory. It is a rare bright point in a German economy that is otherwise rapidly deindustrialising thanks to fruitless Green environmental policies, and so it has become a flashpoint for leftist activism. You might think that the German left would have no problem with Tesla, as e-vehicles are an important pillar of the energy transition, but here you would be very wrong. Happy fairy tales about the bright future of electromobility emanate primarily from the leftist political establishment; their activist militias have different ideas, often preferring broad crusades against everything related to industry, capitalism and profit.
The Grünheide factory employs 12,000 people and contributes millions of Euros every year in taxes, which is bad enough from the activists’ point of view. Still worse, production has caused some water pollution, and Tesla plans to expand the factory, which will entail cutting down some trees. A bunch of “water justice” advocates and forest saviours have therefore crawled out of their Berlin squats and made their way to Grünheide to defend humanity from the scourge of car production.
One of them is a 25 year-old named Luis, who we read “has been committed to climate protection since 2019” and who is “concerned about drinking water”. He also doesn’t like the fact that Brandenburg has moved heaven and earth to stimulate the local economy by incentivising Tesla to set up their factory:
Luis is bothered that many special permits were granted for the construction of the electric car factory. Tesla sometimes constructed its factory on the basis of premature approvals: “You can just tell how interested the state of Brandenburg was in having Tesla set up shop here.”
It is terrifying indeed, the extent to which regional politicians will go to attract industry and employment to their states. Somebody must put a stop to this.
Back in March, when we were all reading long think-pieces about the grave threat posed by the “extreme right” and hundreds of thousands of dim idiots were taking to the streets to denounce non-existent Nazis, a gaggle of arsonists (or, in media patois, “activists”) calling themselves the “Volcano Group” burned down an electricity pole, stopping production at the Grünheide facility for days and cutting off power to various nearby villages. Because the Volcano Group are on the left, this was not an example of escalating political violence or the fruit of brutalised social media discourse.
Yesterday, our activist heroes returned to further their bold stance against industrial production, which is something nobody has ever thought of doing before. Some of them hail from a group called “Turn off Tesla’s tap.” They have partnered with “Disrupt,” which the Süddeutsche Zeitung calls a “platform” but which appears to be little more than a Twitter account with 1,784 followers, which is so deeply reviled they have had to turn off comments on all of their posts.
Comments Off on Tesla versus the German green activists
May 13, 2024
Unravelling the actual origins of Covid (aka Wuhan Coronavirus)
In Spiked!, Matt Ridley outlines some of the more recent admissions-against-interest of the people who used to accuse you of tinfoil-hattism and peddling conspiracy theories when the topic of the origins of Covid came up:
Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Wikimedia Commons.
Two of the key figures in the story of Covid’s origins gave away vital new information last week before the US Congress.
One of these figures is Ralph Baric, the University of North Carolina professor who invented ingenious techniques for genetically altering coronaviruses. He effectively taught scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China how to do “gain of function” experiments with bat-derived sarbecoviruses to make them more infectious or lethal in humanised mice. The other figure is Peter Daszak, the highly paid president of the non-profit, EcoHealth Alliance. Over many years, EcoHealth Alliance has channelled large sums of US taxpayer money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for “gain of function” experimentation, and for finding new sarbecoviruses in bats.
Up until now, Baric and Daszak have taken slightly different approaches to (hardly) helping the world understand what went on in Wuhan before the Covid-19 outbreak in November 2019. Baric has remained largely silent, refusing to do interviews or sign up to articles in the scientific press. He remained silent last week, too, but the Congressional Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released the transcript of a lengthy closed-door session it held with him in January.
Daszak, by contrast, has adopted a high profile, organising round-robin letters defending his friends and colleagues in Wuhan, giving interviews, writing articles and getting himself appointed to not one but two commissions investigating Covid’s origins, despite a glaring conflict of interest. He appeared before the subcommittee on 1 May.
Both men reluctantly admitted under oath to points that markedly strengthen the already strong hypothesis that the pandemic began with an accident in a laboratory in Wuhan. But before considering what they said, it might be worth briefly looking at the relationship between the two.
In comments on a draft of a grant proposal written in 2018, which were made public last year, Daszak boasted of how cheap it is to do experiments in Wuhan because they use a lower biosafety level (BSL-2), without negative-pressure work cabinets. Baric responded that US scientists would “freak out” at that. So a newly released email Baric sent to Daszak on 27 May 2021 smacks one’s gob somewhat. Responding to Daszak’s insistence that the Wuhan Institute actually used safer versions of these low safety standards for its experiments, Baric wrote:
Your [sic] being told a bunch of BS. Bsl2 [with] negative pressure, give me a break. There [sic] last paper mentioned bsl2 [with] appropriate PPE. This last part was the first and only time this was ever mentioned, never in earlier papers, and in the latest paper never defined either. I have no doubt that they followed state-determined rules and did the work under bsl2. Yes China has the right to set their own policy. You believe this was appropriate containment if you want but don’t expect me to believe it. Moreover, don’t insult my intelligence by trying to feed me this load of BS.
Baric clearly does not have a high regard for the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s safety standards, or indeed for his virus-hunting grantrepreneur colleague, Daszak. Nor do some other scientists who have nonetheless defended Daszak in public. Thanks to freedom-of-information revelations, we now know that “Dastwat” and “EgoHealth” are just two of the epithets used about him by his friends. With friends like that …
Both men still insist, however, that the pandemic began naturally – but, to borrow from Mandy Rice-Davies, they would say that wouldn’t they? Before the subcommittee, where even the Democrats gave him a pasting, Daszak was forced to concede some key points on which he had previously stonewalled or said the opposite.
Firstly, he had to concede that a lab leak was possible. Yet back in 2020, Daszak told Democracy Now that “the idea that this virus escaped from a lab is just pure baloney. It’s simply not true … So it’s just not possible.”
Comments Off on Unravelling the actual origins of Covid (aka Wuhan Coronavirus)
May 9, 2024
“The ability to believe entire gargling nonsense is strong in the [environmental] sector – as with this particular claim that we’re going to run out of rock”
Tim Worstall really, really enjoys kicking the stuffing out of strawman arguments, especially when they touch on something he’s very well informed about:
Some environmental claims are not just perfectly valid they’re essential for the continuation of life at any level above E. Coli. None of us would want the Thames to return to the state of 1950 when there was nothing living in it other than a collection of that E. Coli reflecting the interesting genetic and origin mix of the population of London. Sure, the arguments from Feargal and the like that a river running through 8 million people must be clean enough to swim in at all times is a bit extreme the other way around. One recent estimate has it that to perform that task for England would cost £260 billion — a few swimming baths sounds like a more sensible use of resources than getting all the rivers sparkling all the time.
Some are more arguable — violent and immediate climate change would be a bad idea, losing Lowestoft below the waves (possibly Dartford too) in 2500 AD might be something we can all live with. Arguable perhaps.
But some of these claims are wholly and entirely doolally. So much so that it’s difficult to imagine that grown adults take them seriously. But, sadly, they do and they do so on our money too.
Wow. According to this research 40% of the 1.5C C02 budget could be used just for digital & internet use/infrastructure & 55% of the earths carrying capacity for minerals & metals for the same use.
The internet alone could use 55% of the Earth’s carrying capacity of metals and minerals? Well, to take that seriously is insane. That is not mere hyperbolic insult, that actually is insane. I write as someone who has written an entire book on this very subject (available here, for free, save your money to buy a subscription to this excellent Substack instead). There is no metal or mineral that we’re even going to run short of — in the technical, not economic, sense that is — for tens of millions of years yet. As the average lifetime of a species is perhaps 2 million years that should see us out.
So, clearly, they’re using some odd definition of how many minerals and metals we’ve got that we can use. I thought they’d do the usual Club of Rome thing (no, read the book to find out), confuse mineral reserves with what’s available and thus insist we all died last Tuesday afternoon. Rather to my surprise, no, they didn’t. They went further into raging lunacy.
It’s not wholly obvious as they don’t really quite announce their assumption, it’s necessary to track back a bit — and that’s a problem in itself. A top tip about scientific papers — if they say “As Bloggs said” then what that really means is that many people accept what Bloggs said as being true and also useful. You do not have to reprove Einstein every time you do physics, you can just say “As is known”. You’ve only got to reprove Al if that’s what you’re really trying to do.
Thus, if a definition is a referral back to something else, elsewhere, then you can be sure that the definition is a building block being used by others in their own papers. It’s a generalised insanity, not a specific one.
So, what is that limit?
Here we quantify the environmental impacts of digital content consumption encompassing all the necessary infrastructure linked to the consumption patterns of an average user. By applying the standardised life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology, we evaluate these impacts in relation to the per capita share of the Earth’s carrying capacity using 16 indicators related to climate change, nutrients flows, air pollution, toxicity, and resources use, for which explicit thresholds that should never be exceeded were defined
Now this is in Nature Communications. So it’s science. Even, it’s Science. It’s also lunatic. For, tracking back to try to find what those “resources use” are that will be 55% used up by the internet. It’s possible to think that maybe we’re going to use too much germanium in the glass in the fibreoptic cables say, or erbium in the repeaters, or … specific elements might be in short supply? As the book wot I wrote above points out, that’s nonsense. So, what is the claim?
Tracking back we get to this:
Resource use, mineral and metals MRD kg Sb eq Abiotic resource depletion (ADP ultimate reserves) 2.19E+08 3.18E-02 JRC calculation based on factor 2 concept Bringezu (2015); Buczko et al. (2016) Resource use
That’s from Table 3.
Which takes us one stage further back. This paper here is talking about Planetary Boundaries and as with the building block idea. PBs — I assume — make the assumption that Bringzeu, and Biczlo et al have given us a useful guide to what those PBs are. Which is why they just use their method, not invent a new one. But that, in turn, also means that other people working on PBs are likely to be using that same definition.
[…]
Note what they’re doing. Humans should not take out of that environment more than nature puts back into it each year. That’s some pretty dumb thinking there, as we don’t, when we use a metal or mineral — except in very rare circumstances — take it off planet. We move it around a bit, no more. But the claim really is that we should abstract, for use, no more than is naturally added back each year.
So, the correct limitation on our minerals use is how much magma volcanoes add each year.
No, really, humanity can use no more earth than gets thrown out of a volcano each year. That’s it. To use more would mean that we are depleting the stock and that’s not sustainable, see?
Comments Off on “The ability to believe entire gargling nonsense is strong in the [environmental] sector – as with this particular claim that we’re going to run out of rock”
May 7, 2024
But Carbon Dioxide is scary, m’kay?
Last week, Chris Morrison shared some charts that show atmospheric carbon dioxide to be nowhere near high enough to be a concern … in fact, compared to ancient atmospheric conditions, CO2 may be at a potentially concerning low point:
Last year, Chris Packham hosted a five-part series on the BBC called Earth, which compared a mass extinction event 252 million years ago to the small rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide seen in the last 150 years. He said he hoped the “terror factor” generated by his programme would “spur us to do something about the environment crisis”. But as we shall see, the only terror factor is having to sit through an hour-long film consisting of cherry-picked science data and unproven assertions in the hope of persuading us that the increase in global temperatures in the last 150 years or so is comparable to the rise in temperatures over a considerable swath of geological time. Great play was made of a 12°C rise in average global temperatures 252 million years ago as CO2 levels started to rise, although Packham fails to report that CO2 levels were already at least four times higher back then than in modern times. The “science” that Packham cloaks himself with on every occasion is hardly served by terrorising the viewer with what is little more than a highly personal political message.
Think of all that suffering and wastage, he says about the fourth great mass extinction. I don’t think we want a comparable extinction to the one that happened 252 million years ago on our conscience, he adds. Of course, Packham is not the first person to politicise the end-Permian extinction when most plant and animal life disappeared to be replaced eventually with what became known as the age of the dinosaurs. As we can see from the graph below, even though that extinction event coincided with an uptick in CO2 levels, the general trend over a 600-million-year period was downwards ending in the near denudation currently experienced today. But scientists note that the rise started some time before the extinction event, with most of the Permian characterised by very low levels of CO2.
It is obvious why the three other great extinctions are of little interest to modern day climate alarmists. The Ordovician extinction 445 million years ago occurred when CO2 levels were 12 times higher than today, the Devonian wipe-out happen 372 millions ago when CO2 levels were falling, while the later Triassic/Jurassic event 201 million years ago occurred at a time of stable CO2. Hard to see a pattern there suggesting rising CO2 levels equals a mass extinction event. The disappearance of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago is generally attributed to the impact of a giant meteorite, while the current sixth mass extinction exists only inside the head of the Swedish doom goblin, and need not detain us at this point.
Since Packham was essentially making a BBC political film promoting Net Zero, he inevitably started with the fixed view that all our current environmental problems are the fault of CO2. An intense period of volcanic eruptions that led to huge coal deposits catching fire increased CO2 levels and almost instantly sent temperatures soaring at the end of the Permian period. About 20 million years of rain subsequently followed, he observed, taking some of the CO2 out of the atmosphere and order it seems was restored. Certainly, CO2 resumed a small descent but levels remained almost as high, or for some periods higher, as those at the end of the Permian period for another 120 million years. Packham does not provide an explanation of what happened to the average global temperature at this time.
The graph above shows why he avoided the subject. Temperatures did rise at the end of the Permian period after a long decline, but only as far as previous highs recorded 200 million years earlier. They then stayed at those levels for most of the next 200 million years, throughout the age of the dinosaurs. Helped by the increased levels of CO2, this is considered one of the most verdant periods in Earth’s history.
April 30, 2024
TikTok for Tots (and Instagram, and Facebook, and Twitter, and …)
Ted Gioia has some rather alarming information on just how many kids are spending a lot of time online from a very early age:
The leader in this movement is TikTok. But the other major platforms (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.) are imitating its fast-paced video reels.
My articles have stirred up discussion and debate—especially about the impact of slot machine-ish social media platforms on youngsters.
So I decided to dig into the available data on children and social media. And it was even worse than I feared.
30% of children ages 5 through 7 are using TikTok — despite the platform’s policy that you can’t sign up until age 13.
The story gets worse. The numbers are rising rapidly — usage among this vulnerable group jumped 5% in just one year.
By the way, almost a quarter of children in this demographic have a smartphone. More than three-quarters use a tablet computer.
These figures come from Ofcom, a UK-based regulatory group. I’ll let you decide how applicable they are to other countries. My hunch is that the situation in the US is even worse, but that’s just an educated guess based on having lived in both countries.
What happened in 2010?
One thing is certain — the mental health of youths in both the US and UK is deteriorating rapidly. There are dozens of ways of measuring the crisis, but they all tell the same tragic story.
Something happened around 2010, and it’s destroying millions of lives. […]
As early as age 11, children are spending more than four hours per day online.
Here’s a comparison of time spent online by age. Even before they reach their teens, youngsters are spending more than four hours per day staring into a screen.
Here’s what a day in the digital life of a typical 9-year-old girl looks like.
I don’t find any of this amusing. But if you’re looking for dark humor, I’ll point to the four minutes spent on the Duolingo language training app at the end of the day. This provides an indicator of the relative role of learning in the digital regimen on the rising generation.
Comments Off on TikTok for Tots (and Instagram, and Facebook, and Twitter, and …)
DNA and India’s caste system
Earlier this month, Palladium published Razib Khan‘s look at the genetic components of India’s Caste System:
Though the caste system dominates much of Indian life, it does not dominate Indian American life. At slightly over 1% of the U.S. population, only about half of Indian Americans identify as Hindu, the religion from which the broader categories of caste, or varna, emerge. While caste endogamy — marrying within one’s caste — in India remains in the range of 90%, in the U.S. only 65% of American-born Indians even marry other people of subcontinental heritage, and of these, a quick inspection of The New York Times weddings pages shows that inter-caste marriages are the norm. While tensions between the upper-caste minority and middle and lower castes dominate Indian social and political life, 85% of Indian Americans are upper-caste, broadly defined, and only about 1% are truly lower-caste. Ultimately, the minor moral panic over caste discrimination among a small minority of Americans is more a function of our nation’s current neuroses than the reality of caste in the United States.
But this does not mean that caste is not an important phenomenon to understand. In various ways, caste impacts the lives of the more than 1.4 billion citizens of India — 18% of humans alive today — whatever their religion. While the American system of racial slavery is four centuries old at most, India’s caste system was recorded by the Greek diplomat Megasthenes in 300 BC, and is likely far more ancient, perhaps as old as the Indus Valley Civilization more than 4,000 years ago. Indian caste has a deep pedigree as a social technology, and it illustrates the outer boundary of our species’ ability to organize itself into interconnected but discrete subcultures. And unlike many social institutions, caste is imprinted in the very genes of Indians today.
Of Memes and Genes
Beginning about twenty-five years ago, geneticists finally began to look at the variation within the Indian subcontinent, and were shocked by what they found. In small villages in India, Dalits, formerly called “outcastes,” were as genetically distinct from their Brahmin neighbors as Swedes were from Sicilians. In fact, a Brahmin from the far southern state of Tamil Nadu was genetically closer to a Brahmin from the northern state of Punjab then they were to their fellow non-Brahmin Tamils. Dalits from the north were similar to Dalits from the south, while the three upper castes, Brahmins, Kshatriyas and Vaishyas, tended to cluster together against the Sudras.
Some scholars, like Nicholas Dirks, the former chancellor of UC Berkeley, argued for the mobility and dynamism of the caste system in their scholarship. But the genetic evidence seemed to indicate a level of social stratification that echoes through millennia. Across the subcontinent, Dalit castes engaged in menial and unsanitary labor and therefore were considered ritually impure. Meanwhile, Brahmins were the custodians of the Hindu Vedic tradition that ultimately bound the Indic cultures together with other Indo-European traditions, like that of the ancient Iranians or Greeks. Other castes also had their occupations: Kshatriyas were the warriors, while Vaishyas were merchants and other economically productive occupations.
Brahmins, Kshatriyas, and Vaishyas were traditionally the three “twice-born” castes, allowing them to study the Hindu scriptures after an initiatory ritual. The majority of the population were Sudras (or Shudras), India’s peasant and laboring majority. Shudras could not study the scriptures, and might be excluded from some temples and festivals, but they were integrated into the Hindu fold, and served by Brahmin priests. A traditional ethnohistory posits that elite Brahmin priests and Kshatriya rulers combined with Vaishya commoners formed the core of the early Aryan society in the subcontinent, with Shudras integrated into their tribes as indigenous subalterns. Outcastes were tribes and other assorted latecomers who were assimilated at the very bottom of the social system, performing the most degrading and impure tasks.
The caste system as a layered varna system with five classes and numerous integrated jati communities.
Razib KhanThis was the theory. Reality is always more complex. In India, the caste system combines two different social categories: varna and jati. Varna derives from the tripartite Indo-European system, in India represented by Brahmins, Kshatriyas, and Vaishyas. It literally translates as “color”, white for Brahmin purity, red for Kshatriya power, and yellow for Vaishya fertility. But India also has Shudras, black for labor. In contrast to the simplicity of varna, with its four classes, jati is fractured into thousands of localized communities. If varna is connected to the deep history of Indo-Aryans and is freighted with religious significance, jati is the concrete expression of Indian communitarianism in local places and times.
Comments Off on DNA and India’s caste system
April 29, 2024
“The Earth goes around the Sun, or so they would have you believe …”
Colby Cosh on a recent “grand theory” from Andrea Matranga, an Italian economist who outlined his thoughts in a paper accepted by the Quarterly Journal of Economics, summarized in the sub-hed “Hunter-gatherers were better off than Neolithic farmers, diet-wise — until Earth was hit by seasonal extremes caused by Jupiter’s gravity”:
Reconstruction of a neolithic farmstead at the Irish National Heritage Park in Ferrycarrig.
Photo by Jo Turner via Wikimedia Commons.
Matranga’s own explanation for the invention of agriculture is: “Believe it or not, it is down to extraterrestrial forces”. Yes, that’s an actual quote from a cheeky Twitter thread in which Matranga summarizes his hypothesis colourfully. The real idea is that the period of the Neolithic Revolutions coincided with a time when seasonal temperature and rainfall differences were maximized by coinciding features of Earth’s orbit — features attributable mostly to Jupiter’s gravitational tug on us.
The Earth goes around the Sun, or so they would have you believe, and Earth’s rotational axis is tilted relative to the Sun, which creates the seasons. But the Earth’s motion has other subtle wobbles and shimmies caused by Jupiter: the eccentricity of its elliptical orbit grows and shrinks, and the rotational axis “precesses”, or wobbles, meaning that the face of the Earth pointing toward the Sun at our closest approach to it changes over time.
The implication of this is that over a period of millennia, and particularly in what we think of as the “temperate” zones, the magnitude of climate seasonality will itself change in a somewhat chaotic way. For some periods much longer than a human lifetime, seasonal changes might be almost beneath notice; a few millennia later, they become a dominant feature of human experience. And one hemisphere of the planet — say, the northern one — might end up with a lingering developmental advantage because it was favoured at the right moment by the precession of Earth’s axis.
Matranga pulls together a lot of math, astronomy and geography to show that the local Neolithic Revolutions coincide with maximum local seasonality, and then he builds some economic models of primitive society to suggest what effect this might have had on social organization and population evolution. Alfred Marshall would have told him to burn this part of his paper, but perhaps the equations are necessary for appearances. The crucial point is that Matranga has found a strong possible explanation for the Neolithic paradox — why, and when, humans in many places adopted a form of social organization that seems to have left most of them worse off on average.
For it’s not just the average that matters. In a world that was more or less the same year-round, hunter-gatherers didn’t have to worry about food storage: they could migrate cyclically within a small range, following wild game, to keep up with modest seasonal effects. But if the seasons then got more intense, food storage would become more important to the long-term survival of the group: one winter could now finish everyone off.
Comments Off on “The Earth goes around the Sun, or so they would have you believe …”
April 27, 2024
Climate science or climate “science”?
David Friedman is a very intelligent man and I wouldn’t want to face him in a debate, even on a topic I feel well-informed about. He’s not a scientist and hasn’t made a serious study of climate but he can read the reports and make up his own mind. He’s inclined to believe the data available indicates that the planet is warming but he isn’t convinced that this is enough to justify the kind of authoritarian controls that climate activists demand:
The argument for doing drastic things to prevent global warming has two parts. The first has to do with reasons to think that the earth is getting warmer and that the reason is human action, in particular the production of CO2. The second is the claim that changes we have good reason to expect if we do not take appropriate action to prevent them will have very bad consequences for us.
Much of the criticism I have seen of the argument has to do with the first half, with critics arguing that the evidence for global warming, at least the evidence that it is caused by humans and will continue if humans do not mend their ways, is weak. I do not not know enough to be certain that those criticisms are wrong; climate is a very complicated and not terribly well understood subject.1 But my best guess from watching the debate is that the first half of the argument is correct, that global climate is warming and human action is an important part of the cause. What I find unconvincing is the second half of the argument, the claim that climate change we have good reason to expect would have catastrophic consequences for humans.
Obviously one can imagine climate change large enough and fast enough to be a very serious problem — a rapid end of the current interglacial, for example. If, as I believe is the case, climate is not very well understood, one cannot absolutely rule out such changes.2 But most of the argument is put in terms not of what might conceivably happen but of what we have good reason to expect to happen. I think the outer bound of that is provided by the IPCC models. They suggest a temperature increase of a few degrees centigrade over the next hundred years resulting in a sea level rise of less than a meter.3
Comparing a map of global temperature to a map of population density shows densely inhabited regions with average temperatures from about 10°C to about 30°C, with some of the most densely inhabited regions at the high end of the range. I could find no empty areas that are hotter than all populated areas, hence no areas that are depopulated only because of how hot they are. If people can currently live, work, grow crops over a temperature range of twenty degrees it is hard to imagine any reason why most of them couldn’t continue to do so about as easily if average temperature shifted up by two or three degrees, with a century to adjust to the change.
That raises the question with which I titled this post: Does climate change catastrophe pass the giggle test? Is the claim that climate change on that scale would have catastrophic consequences one that a reasonable person should take seriously?
[…]
A different version of the catastrophist argument is the claim that climate is unstable, that an increase of a few degrees could trigger a much larger increase. That might be plausible if current temperatures were so high that additional warming would raise them above any in the past. But although present temperatures may be higher than any in the past two thousand years, as discussed in an earlier post, the Earth is much more than two thousand years old.
The graph below4 shows estimated global temperature over the past five hundred million years. While present temperature is high relative to the recent past it is cool relative to the more distant past, more than thirteen degrees below the high of the past hundred million years.
We are currently in an ice age, defined by geologists as a period when there is an ice cap on one or both poles. For most of the past five hundred million years there wasn’t.
The claim that we have good reason to expect climate change on a scale that will produce not merely problems for some but catastrophe for many is one that no reasonable person should take seriously.5
1. As some evidence, as of 2018 the temperature projections produced by the IPCC’s elaborate analysis did a somewhat worse job of predicting actual temperature than a straight line fit from the date when warming restarted after the midcentury pause to the date of each of the first four IPCC reports.
2. We cannot absolutely rule out catastrophic changes either caused by anthropogenic warming or prevented by anthropogenic warming. There is, in fact, some evidence, discussed in an earlier post, that the reason the next glaciation is not already starting is anthropogenic warming — not current warming due to the industrial revolution but warming that started some eight thousand years ago due to the invention of agriculture.
3. From Future Climate Changes, Risks and Impacts. RCP8.5 was originally designed as an upper bound on how high future CO2 emissions might be and assumed a level of world population growth that, so far, is not occurring, so should probably not be included.
4. The headline of the news story I found it in: “A 500-million-year survey of Earth’s climate reveals dire warning for humanity”.
If life gives you peaches, make cyanide from the pits.
5. The weaker claim that climate change will produce net costs for humans is, in my view, less obviously true than many believe. For reasons see my past posts on the subject.
Comments Off on Climate science or climate “science”?
