Finally, I suggest that the permanent caloric surplus that has obtained in the West since about 1950 has done more than anything to speciate us Postmoderns. It would take someone who Fucking Loves Science™ way more than I do to assert that the vast, obvious changes in the human race in the 20th century were merely physical. Consider the oft-remarked fact (at the time, at least) that British officers on the Western Front were a full head taller than their men. Then consider (ditto) the more-or-less open secret that a lot of those tall subalterns were gay. Correlation is not causation — growing up in the infamous English public schools probably had a lot to do with it, as Robert Graves himself says — but … there’s a pretty strong correlation.
Excess fat cranks up estrogen levels. You don’t need to be House MD to interpret this finding:
In males with increasing obesity there is increased aromatase activity, which irreversibly converts testosterone to estradiol resulting in decreased testosterone and elevated estrogen levels.
Or this one:
A study supports the link between excess weight and higher hormone levels. The study found that estrogen and testosterone levels dropped quite a bit when overweight and obese women lost weight.
This is not to say those swishy subalterns were fat — indeed, they were comically scrawny compared to Postmodern people. But a little goes a long way when it comes to hormones, especially in a world where “intermittent fasting” wasn’t a fad diet, but a way of life. Any one of us would keel over from hunger if we were forced to eat the kind of diet George Orwell described as his public school’s standard fare.
Follow that trend out to the Current Year, when pretty much everyone is grossly obese compared to even the Silent Generation. Heartiste and other “game” bloggers loved pointing out that the average modern woman weighs as much as the average man did in the 1960s. And while I think that’s overblown — we’re also several inches taller, on average, than 1960s people — there’s definitely something to it, especially when you consider how far the bell curve has shifted to the fat end. Not only do people weigh a lot more on average, the people who weigh more than average now weigh a hell of a lot more than heavier-than-average people did back when. See, for example, the ballooning weight of offensive linemen, who are professionally fat — in 2011 a quarterback, Cam Newton, weighed more than the average offensive lineman in the 1960s.
Put the two trends together and you have, on average, a hormone cocktail way, way different than even 50 years ago … and that’s before you add in things like all-but-universal hormonal contraception, lots of which ends up in municipal drinking water.
Severian, “Recent Evolution”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-09-28.
April 16, 2023
QotD: Homo electronicus and the permanent caloric surplus
April 15, 2023
QotD: When the pick-up artist became “coded right”
Today, the global face of pickup artistry is Andrew Tate: sculpted former kickboxing champion, self-described “misogynist”, and, now, alleged human trafficker. Whatever results from the current allegations, his fall is a defining moment in the cultural history of the now inseparable worlds of the political manosphere and pickup artistry, and provides an opportunity to reflect upon their entangled history.
Pickup artistry burst onto the scene in the 2000s, propelled by the success of Neil Strauss’s best-selling book The Game. More a page-turning potboiler cataloguing the mostly empty lives of pickup artists (PUAs) than a how-to guide (though Strauss wrote one of those too), the methods in the book had been developed through years of research shared on internet forums. The “seduction underground”, as the large online community of people doing this research was called, then became the subject of widespread media attention. Through pickup artistry, the aggressive, formulaic predation of women was normalised as esteem boosting, and men such as those described in Strauss’s The Game could be viewed in a positive light: they had transformed from zero to hero and taken what was rightfully theirs.
The emergence of PUAs generated a swift backlash. The feminist blogs of the mid-to-late 2000s internet, of which publications like Jezebel still survive as living fossils, rushed to pillory them. The attacks weren’t without justification, but the world of PUAs during this period, much like the similarly wild-and-woolly bodybuilding forums, had no obvious political dimension beyond some sort of generic libertarianism. It was only after these initial critiques that it began to be coded as Right-wing by those on the Left. Duly labelled, PUAs and other associated manosphere figures drifted in that direction. MTV’s dating coaches were not part of the political landscape, merely feckless goofballs and low-level conmen capable of entertaining the masses. But their successors would be overtly political actors.
Oliver Bateman, “Why pick-up artists joined the Online Right”, UnHerd, 2023-01-08.
April 12, 2023
Institutional Review Boards … trying to balance harm vs health, allegedly
At Astral Codex Ten Scott Alexander reviews From Oversight to Overkill by Simon N. Whitley, in light of his own experience with an Institutional Review Board’s demands:
Dr. Rob Knight studies how skin bacteria jump from person to person. In one 2009 study, meant to simulate human contact, he used a Q-tip to cotton swab first one subject’s mouth (or skin), then another’s, to see how many bacteria traveled over. On the consent forms, he said risks were near zero — it was the equivalent of kissing another person’s hand.
His IRB — ie Institutional Review Board, the committee charged with keeping experiments ethical — disagreed. They worried the study would give patients AIDS. Dr. Knight tried to explain that you can’t get AIDS from skin contact. The IRB refused to listen. Finally Dr. Knight found some kind of diversity coordinator person who offered to explain that claiming you can get AIDS from skin contact is offensive. The IRB backed down, and Dr. Knight completed his study successfully.
Just kidding! The IRB demanded that he give his patients consent forms warning that they could get smallpox. Dr. Knight tried to explain that smallpox had been extinct in the wild since the 1970s, the only remaining samples in US and Russian biosecurity labs. Here there was no diversity coordinator to swoop in and save him, although after months of delay and argument he did eventually get his study approved.
Most IRB experiences aren’t this bad, right? Mine was worse. When I worked in a psych ward, we used to use a short questionnaire to screen for bipolar disorder. I suspected the questionnaire didn’t work, and wanted to record how often the questionnaire’s opinion matched that of expert doctors. This didn’t require doing anything different — it just required keeping records of what we were already doing. “Of people who the questionnaire said had bipolar, 25%/50%/whatever later got full bipolar diagnoses” — that kind of thing. But because we were recording data, it qualified as a study; because it qualified as a study, we needed to go through the IRB. After about fifty hours of training, paperwork, and back and forth arguments — including one where the IRB demanded patients sign consent forms in pen (not pencil) but the psychiatric ward would only allow patients to have pencils (not pen) — what had originally been intended as a quick record-keeping had expanded into an additional part-time job for a team of ~4 doctors. We made a tiny bit of progress over a few months before the IRB decided to re-evaluate all projects including ours and told us to change twenty-seven things, including re-litigating the pen vs. pencil issue (they also told us that our project was unusually good; most got >27 demands). Our team of four doctors considered the hundreds of hours it would take to document compliance and agreed to give up. As far as I know that hospital is still using the same bipolar questionnaire. They still don’t know if it works.
Most IRB experiences can’t be that bad, right? Maybe not, but a lot of people have horror stories. A survey of how researchers feel about IRBs did include one person who said “I hope all those at OHRP [the bureaucracy in charge of IRBs] and the ethicists die of diseases that we could have made significant progress on if we had [the research materials IRBs are banning us from using]”.
Dr. Simon Whitney, author of From Oversight To Overkill, doesn’t wish death upon IRBs. He’s a former Stanford IRB member himself, with impeccable research-ethicist credentials — MD + JD, bioethics fellowship, served on the Stanford IRB for two years. He thought he was doing good work at Stanford; he did do good work. Still, his worldview gradually started to crack:
In 1999, I moved to Houston and joined the faculty at Baylor College of Medicine, where my new colleagues were scientists. I began going to medical conferences, where people in the hallways told stories about IRBs they considered arrogant that were abusing scientists who were powerless. As I listened, I knew the defenses the IRBs themselves would offer: Scientists cannot judge their own research objectively, and there is no better second opinion than a thoughtful committee of their peers. But these rationales began to feel flimsy as I gradually discovered how often IRB review hobbles low-risk research. I saw how IRBs inflate the hazards of research in bizarre ways, and how they insist on consent processes that appear designed to help the institution dodge liability or litigation. The committees’ admirable goals, in short, have become disconnected from their actual operations. A system that began as a noble defense of the vulnerable is now an ignoble defense of the powerful.
So Oversight is a mix of attacking and defending IRBs. It attacks them insofar as it admits they do a bad job; the stricter IRB system in place since the ‘90s probably only prevents a single-digit number of deaths per decade, but causes tens of thousands more by preventing life-saving studies. It defends them insofar as it argues this isn’t the fault of the board members themselves. They’re caught up in a network of lawyers, regulators, cynical Congressmen, sensationalist reporters, and hospital administrators gone out of control. Oversight is Whitney’s attempt to demystify this network, explain how we got here, and plan our escape.
“Stunning and brave” or “deliberately constructed misogyny”?
In The Critic, Jean Hatchet points out how well Dylan Mulvaney’s act is working to both maximize Mulvaney’s career and to actively denigrate women:
If a man seeks to humiliate a woman he encounters, nothing is easier than reducing her appearance to a mere caricature. Men do this directly in front of the woman they are targeting: lifting their voice to a squeak, exaggerating hand gestures, pushing out pretend breasts, wiggling their bum, pouting and fiddling with their hair. Most of these men confine the taunt to the woman in front of them, and the woman often feels and displays a righteous rage. However, when it comes to Dylan Mulvaney, the Tik Tok user who has become famous for his grotesque parody of women, women are not supposed to react critically. They are seen as cruel or “transphobic” if they express annoyance at being so grossly insulted.
In March 2022 Dylan Mulvaney saw a way to take his barely-concealed disdain for women up a level, with predictable success. After his career as a musical actor had stalled due to the Covid pandemic, with people finding solace daily on Tik Tok, wily Dylan invented a new role that guaranteed his future wealth and success. He announced he was embarking on a journey of “being a girl” and began a series of videos documenting this ludicrous notion.
Shortly before this year-long, very public “transition”, Mulvaney performed a pilot video for his current lucrative act. In it he told the viewer that he “had trouble finding roles” so a friend had invented one for him, a “femme character”. His character wears a pink dress and pearls, white gloves and ankle socks. At this point Mulvaney must have been delighted to glimpse a potential new career path. It was a very savvy move for him to extend and develop this caricature of a 1950s woman. Now, just over a year later, Dylan Mulvaney has highly paid “partnerships” with a number of companies including Budweiser, Kate Spade and — during the past week, to great objection — the Sportwear giant Nike.
In an inflammatory paid partnership video with Nike, an inanely grinning, barefoot Mulvaney wears a Nike sports bra and leggings. He performs a series of ridiculous moves including comedic side stretches, a theatrical run kicking his heels up nonsensically and failed chorus-line high kicks. He almost runs backwards into a hedge at one point and pulls a comedy expression of shock. It all looks ridiculous and slapstick. It mocks women by suggesting they exercise trivially and ineffectively, but smiling throughout.
The media seems unwilling to focus on the actual reasons many women are angry about this. It has focused instead on stating that objections to the sponsorship are because Dylan is trans. This is not why women are outraged. When a man “performs woman” in front of women to such a humiliating degree, when he waggles and jiggles and implies that weakness and silliness are inherent to being a woman who plays sport, women appropriately see this for the deliberately constructed misogyny it is. Ria Chapman, a London PE teacher, told me why she finds this act so irritating and offensive:
Girls are still routinely bullied and mocked for being sporty and or breaking stereotypes, their achievements and ambitions not being celebrated and valued like those of their male peers. For a sports company the size of Nike to use a male performing a parody of what he believes women behave like during sport only adds to the ammunition that boys will use to put girls down.
Utilising female stereotypes is the foundation of Mulvaney’s role. On his “Day 1 of being a girl” video debut, he said:
I’ve already cried three times, written a scathing email I didn’t send, ordered dresses online that I couldn’t afford and when someone asked me how I was, I said “I’m fine” but I wasn’t fine. How did I do, ladies?
All of this encapsulates the stereotype of women as emotionally fragile, frivolous spendthrifts, imprudent around clothes and financially inept. In the stereotype Dylan performs, women routinely suppress our emotions and focus on being polite at all times. It is an archaic depiction of requisite female behaviour which was seared into women’s consciousness over decades in the past. This view of “girlhood” took further decades for feminist women to dismantle. Dylan Mulvaney is building it back up before our eyes and we refuse to stay quiet about it.
Bud Light’s latest brand ambassador, Dylan Mulvaney
QotD: Karen
self-propelled lifestyle accessorieskids while she gets exalted at hot yoga and the nail salon, now that school’s out. Give her a week without Starbucks, I said, locked in her house with Kayden, Brayden, Jayden, and Khaleesi, and she’ll demand we never mention the word “flu” again.In other words, I misunderstood the essence of Karen. Karen is — first, foremost, and always — a victim. I of all people should’ve known better, because I was surrounded by Karens all the time in my personal and professional life. I’ve mentioned this story before, but bear with a quick repeat: At one of my first teaching gigs, at the big directional tech that makes up a lot of “Flyover State”, the department’s women got it into their vapid little heads that they — women — were being systematically excluded from positions of power. The fact that the department chair was a woman, and in fact the whole department, emeritus through first year grad student, was something like 65% female should’ve been their first clue, but nevertheless, they persisted. They got together a blue-ribbon commission, as one does, and studied the shit out of the problem. The much-ballyhooed report revealed …
… that all the positions of authority in the department, every blessed one, was held by a female. At which point, without missing a single fucking beat, they started complaining that being forced to hold all these positions of authority was keeping them from making adequate career progress.
I shit you not.
That’s Karen, my friends.
Severian, “The Civil War That Wasn’t”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-09-09.
April 4, 2023
QotD: We used to have this concept of “healthy socialization” for kids
30 years ago, that kind of thing wasn’t just possible, it was pretty easy, since Little League was still about silly stuff like having fun, and when high school coaches gave you the speech about teamwork and character building, he — get this — actually meant it. I know how crazy this sounds, but it was pretty much expected of us benchwarmers to take the piss out of the kid who carried on like he was some kind of Big League prospect. Nobody but parents came to the games, anyway, and wearing a letter jacket didn’t help you get girls (I tested this hypothesis extensively). Nowadays, of course, Little League squads are ruthlessly culled, and if you make the team, you’d better be ready to be put on a nutrition plan and workout schedule, to attend summer skills camps, to be no-shit scouted, by professionals, at an age where you’re still not really sure what girls are for.
You don’t get to be “a jock” for a semester, in other words. You are one, and that’s all you are, starting before puberty, and woe to the kid who only made the team because his hormonal clock was set a little ahead of the other boys’. The kid who can throw 75 at age ten, as we all know, is 99.8% certain to still be throwing 75 at age sixteen, when everyone on the JV team can catch up to it. In my day, that’s when the coach pulled you aside and explained a few things to you, gently but firmly pointing you towards the Model UN Club. He was good at it, and since he was good at giving those “teamwork and character” speeches, too, he’d tell you that this, right here, is one of those situations, so man up and accept your limitations.
Ah well. So much for being a jock. Cross it off the list, and try not to notice the relief in Mom’s eyes — and, yeah, the little bit of sadness in Dad’s — when they realize they don’t have to schlep you all over the goddamn place on summer evenings, sitting in the bleachers watching you ride the pine. Time to find something else …
Severian, “Alienation”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-10-29.
April 3, 2023
The poison garden of Alnwick
Tom Scott
Published 29 May 2017Inside the beautiful Alnwick Garden, behind a locked gate, there’s the Poison Garden: it contains only poisonous plants. Trevor Jones, head gardener, was kind enough to give a guided tour!
For more information about visiting the Castle, Garden, and poison garden: https://alnwickgarden.com/
(And yes, it’s pronounced “Annick”.)
(more…)
April 2, 2023
Ozempic versus the make-believe world of “Healthy at Every Size”
Poor Americans are being propagandized that being fat — even to the point of being unable to carry on ordinary tasks — is “perfectly healthy” at the same time that the glitterati, the wealthy, and the mediagenic are getting thinner thanks to diet, exercise, and (it’s an open secret) drugs and cosmetic surgery. Along comes an antidiabetic drug that was found to have an interesting off-schedule property:
If you, a commoner, encountered a feudal lord in the year 1200, the latter would likely be wearing fine armour, carrying a well-polished sword, and riding a horse. Upon seeing these visual cues, you would address him properly, lest he punish you for failing to show proper deference. But as the centuries passed, particularly in the years following the American and French revolutions, this notion of privilege faded; the rich might be a class apart, but at times they might be dressed much like you, even if their apparel was slightly better-made.
Today, however, the rich are separating themselves in perhaps the most obvious way of all: by perfecting their bodies, rather than what they put on them. The rich are fit and the poor are fat: reams of research confirms that the prevalence of obesity decreases as income increases. In the United States, where 41% of the entire population is obese — compared with 25% in the United Kingdom — it is a rare wealthy person who is morbidly overweight (blimp-sized Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker and portly former New Jersey governor Chris Christie are outliers). Increasingly, the rich in late middle age have come to resemble Jeff Bezos and Sarah Jessica Parker: ripped to shreds and almost certainly “enhanced” with various anti-ageing drugs and techniques, ranging from steroids and growth hormones to Botox injections and liposuction.
Into this mix comes semaglutide, an antidiabetic medication better known by its trade name Ozempic. Sold by pharmaceutical manufacturer Novo Nordisk, the drug, which reduces food intake by curbing appetite and slowing digestion, was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration to treat obesity in 2021. Since then, celebrities and fitness influencers have routinely shared before-and-after pics captioned with details of their courageous weight-loss journeys, which entailed jabbing themselves with a 1.5ml pen that contains a month’s worth of doses and costs roughly $900 without insurance.
Predictably, stories about Ozempic have proliferated in the tabloids and on social media. Some see the drug as a challenge to the celebrity movement that touts “fat acceptance”, and brought us the “slim-thick” era of curvy female superstars. They argue that Ozempic may work hand-in-hand with the return of the “heroin chic” look of the late Nineties. As interesting as it is to consider where these mixed messages might lead us — to a culture in which poor people are told it’s fabulous to be obese, while the rich get ever thinner and fitter — if this is a conspiracy, it’s not a new one. The rich have lusted after youth, beauty and fitness, in others and themselves, since time immemorial, always keeping the poor as downtrodden as possible while pacifying them with bromides about equality, liberty and fraternity. Ozempic, then, is not simply the key to thinness; those who pay for it are buying even more distance between themselves and the hoi polloi.
In short, this appears to be yet another sign that the elite are headed toward some sort of crude transhumanist utopia, complete with gene therapy and designer-baby selection. Some may scoff that this is science fiction, but this future looms: once they’re sufficiently fine-tuned, gene editing tools will likely eradicate heart disease, muscle wasting, neurodegenerative disorders, and other conditions in embryos that are still in utero — but their price will be nothing short of staggering. Similarly expensive gene therapies will enhance the overall performance of already-healthy humans, raising ethical questions about whether these procedures should “improve” a person or merely “fix” a condition. The rich, of course, will leave those debates to the philosophers and pay upfront for the best bodies that their considerable resources can buy. Already, news stories abound of billionaires pursuing immortality, with a few commentators trying to sanitise the pursuit by arguing that the research will somehow benefit even the least of us.
March 30, 2023
“Food insecurity” – one of the neat new benefits of our over-regulated economy
Elizabeth Nickson on how western governments (in her case, the provincial government of British Columbia) are working hand-in-glove with environmental non-governmental organizations to create “food insecurity”:
Original image from www.marpat.co.uk
In Canada, the British Columbia government in order to increase “food security” is handing out $200,000,000 to farmers in the province. Food insecurity, which means crazy high food prices, comes to us courtesy of the sequestration of the vast amounts of oil and gas in the province and the ever increasing carbon tax, which (like a VAT in Europe), as you probably know, is levied at every single step in food production. Add the hand-over-fist borrowing in which the government has indulged for the last 20 years, and you have created your own mini-disaster.
Ever since multinational environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) took over public opinion in the province, our economy has been wrenched from resource extraction to tourism. Tourism is, supposedly, low-impact. The fact that it pays $15 an hour instead of $50 an hour and contributes very much less to the public purse than forestry, mining, farming, ranching, oil and gas, means we have had borrow to pay for health care and schooling. This madness spiked during Covid, and, as in every “post-industrial” state, has contributed to making food very, very much more expensive, despite the fact that British Columbia where I live, is anything but a food desert. We could feed all of Canada and throw in Washington State.
Inflation comes from a real place, it has a source, it is not mysterious and arcane. Regionally, it comes from “green” government decisions. I pay almost 70 percent more for food now than I did five years ago. Of course one cannot know with any confidence how much the real increase is. The Canadian government was caught last week hiding food price statistics and well they might. The Liberal government leads with its “compassion”, blandishing the weak and foolish, hiding the fact that in this vast freezing country they are trying to make it even colder by starving and freezing the lower 50 percent of the population.
Even the Wasp hegemony that ran this country pre-Pierre Elliot Trudeau knew not to try that. But not this crew! It doesn’t touch them. They don’t see and wouldn’t care if they did, about the single mother working in a truck stop on the Trans-Canada Highway, who steals food for her kids because all her money is going towards keeping them warm.
[…]
The region in which I live used to grow all the fruit for the province, now, well good luck with that buddy. Last year under the U.N. 2050 Plan, local government tried to ban farming and even horticulture. That was defeated so hard that the planner who introduced it was fired and the plan scrubbed from the website. Inevitably it will come again in the hopes that citizens or subjects, as we in Canada properly are, have gone back to sleep. U.N. 2050, an advance on 2030, locks down every living organism, and all the other elements that make up life, assigns those elements to multinationals, advised by ENGOs, which can “best decide” how to use them.
If the only tool you have is a hammer, it’s tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail. It is only the most arcane and numerate think tanks who bang on and on about over-regulation and how destructive it is. Regulation is so complex that most people would rather do anything than think about it, much less deconstruct it.
“Nothing is as permanent as a temporary government program” … except those few that make your life easier
At Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander reacts to the US government’s new moves to make telehealth less useful for as many people as possible:
Telemedicine is when you see a doctor (or nurse, PA, etc) over a video call. Medical regulators hate new things, so for its first decade they ensured telemedicine was hard and inconvenient.
Then came COVID-19. Suddenly important politicians were paying attention to questions about whether people could get medical care without leaving their homes. They yelled at the regulators, and the regulators grudgingly agreed to temporarily make telemedicine easy and convenient.
They say “nothing is as permanent as a temporary government program”, but this only applies to government programs that make your life worse. Government programs that make your life better are ephemeral and can disappear at any moment. So a few months ago, the medical regulators woke up, realized the pandemic was over, and started plotting ways to make telemedicine hard and inconvenient again.
The first fruit of their labor is DEA-407, which makes it hard for telemedicine doctors to prescribe controlled substances. Controlled substances are drugs like Adderall, Ritalin, Xanax, or Ambien that the government has declared to be potentially addictive. The new rules say that telemedicine doctors can no longer prescribe these (or, in some cases, can prescribe them one time in an emergency).
Why don’t I like this decision? I am a telepsychiatrist. I work with about a hundred psychiatric patients who, for one reason or another, prefer online to physical appointments:
- Some live in small towns that don’t have psychiatrists of their own
- Some have agoraphobia, chronic pain, or some other condition that makes it hard for them to go to an office.
- Some move around a lot and like to be able to see their psychiatrist whether they’re in LA or SF.
- Some live hundreds of miles away from me, but know and trust me for some reason, and would rather see me than someone closer to them.
- Some appreciate the fact that I charge lower rates than psychiatrists who have offices, because I don’t have to pay for Bay Area commercial real estate and pass those costs on to my patients.
- Some work during work hours, and like being able to see me from their office instead of taking half the day off to travel to my location.
- Some like convenience and dislike inconvenience
As a psychiatrist, a big part of my job is prescribing controlled substances. For example, most guidelines agrees that the first-line treatment for severe ADHD is stimulant medications (eg Adderall or Ritalin). And although psychiatrists hate to admit it, the first-line treatment for temporary crisis anxiety, especially when it’s so bad that the patient isn’t able to listen to your clever plans to solve it with therapy, is benzodiazepines (eg Valium or Klonopin). You can’t be a good well-rounded psychiatrist without the option to sometimes prescribe these drugs.
“Well, your patients will have to find a different psychiatrist, or transition off of them”. Nobody ever finds different psychiatrists. Some of my patients are a bad match for my style or areas of expertise, and I’ve tried very hard to find them different psychiatrists, and it never works. Maybe there are no other psychiatrists in their area. Maybe the psychiatrists in their area don’t take the right insurance, or are too far away from mass transit. Maybe the psychiatrists have six month long wait lists. Sometimes it’s just that my ADHD patients get distracted and forget they were supposed to find new psychiatrists, and I can’t hold their hand literally all the time. As for transitioning off the medications, some patients absolutely cannot function at all without them. Did I mention that if you come off of some of them too quickly, you can literally die?
QotD: Revealed preference in the teenage hellscape of high school
Robert Stacy McCain, “Conflicting Signals”, The Other McCain, 2019-05-23.
March 27, 2023
The vicious – not virtuous – circle of green
Elizabeth Nickson thinks that our societal pursuit of green technology will be the undoing of everything we have built:
Some of us have been saying this for a very long time: green will bring down the world. Green creates a vicious circle, a term you may remember from Economics 101. It is when the serpent eats itself, no wealth is created and collapse results. That is what we are doing with ESG, with carbon taxes, with the forced adoption of unreliable vertiginously expensive green energy. It has skewed every single market. No one is investing in sound enterprise, and anything once sound is a Jenga tower, unstable, rotting from within. This. This is what threatens to bring down the world.
Green is built on subsidies. And not just government subsidy. Every mutual fund, every hedge fund, every multinational and every local or national corporation has a green monster within preventing innovative investments, sucking profits and growth. Every local, regional and state government leaks millions to green morons promising to “bring sustainable prosperity”. The only prosperity is theirs. They fiddle around in lakes and watercourses, producing “studies”, all of which are hysterical and exaggerated. They muck around in forests, buying as much as possible, shut them down, never visit again, leaving them to desertify. They buy farms and ranches, leaving them to rot. They are termites, eating us alive.
These outfits have burrowed into every level of government and every ministry. They are purely extractive. They do not produce anything of value. They leech. They move in and out of government. When in government, they identify sources of funds to plunder once out of government. In 2015, I did a cross-ministry analysis of just how much money these folks take from the government annually. It is in the hundreds of billions in the US alone. From private foundations they take more billions. All this money is used to shut down economic activity.
[…]
Here is the nasty little secret that lies at the heart of environmentalism. It has been long captured by plutocrats and WEFers, who use it to take resources once thought to belong to the people, to everyone, to use in order to innovate and develop. This freedom and access, and only this was the source of prosperity in the United States. It powered the entire world. It made America the beacon, the lighthouse of the world. It produced strong healthy brilliant young people who performed one feat of innovation, athleticism, and creation after another. All those kids today are working on ever more vicious ways to surveil, control and supress via AI.
And the interior is being cleared of people, businesses, farms, ranches, working forests, mines, and oil and gas installations.
In pursuit of 2030 goals, Biden’s agents are busily acquiring hundreds of millions of acres from private owners, from state and regional land banks, which they will then lock down. Many ranchers, including the heroic Wayne Hage, believe that government is taking that land to use as collateral for its massive debt to the Bank for International Settlements. The only people who will be able to use those resources are multinationals who pay a fee to government and to the BIS to pay down the loans. No citizens will be able to access those resources to make money for themselves, to build families and businesses and towns and cities. The environmental movement has, within 40 years, returned us to serfdom, where we eat what we are told to eat, go where we are told to go, take whatever medicine they want to give us, and eventually, fight when we are told to fight.
The environmental movement is so evil, it has twisted ethical standards to the point where we are able to kill each other with impunity. Their PR is so strong, so invasive, that every school child now believes there are too many people (this is nonsense), and population must be drastically drawn down (a genocide unrivalled in history). Every adult secretly fears this is true. This appalling lie has created a culture of death. What are the effects of this thinking, that life is no longer sacred, but a threat?
March 26, 2023
Plandemic? Manufactured crisis? Mass formation psychosis?
In The Conservative Woman, James Delingpole lets his skeptic flag fly:
“Covid 19 Masks” by baldeaglebluff is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
Tell me about your personal experiences of Covid 19. Actually, wait, don’t. I think I may have heard it already, about a million times. You lost all sense of smell or taste – and just how weird was that? It floored you for days. It gave you a funny dry cough, the dryness and ticklishness of which was unprecedented in your entire coughing career. You’ve had flu a couple of times and, boy, when you’ve got real flu do you know it. But this definitely wasn’t flu. It was so completely different from anything you’ve ever known, why you wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it had been bioengineered in a lab with all manner of spike proteins and gain-of-function additives, perhaps even up to and including fragments of the Aids virus …
Yeah, right. Forgive me for treading on the sacred, personal domain of your lived experience. But might I cautiously suggest that none of what you went through necessarily validates lab-leak theory. Rather what it may demonstrate is the power of susceptibility, brainwashing and an overactive imagination. You lived – we all did – through a two-year period in which health-suffering anecdotes became valuable currency. Whereas in the years before the “pandemic”, no one had been much interested in the gory details of your nasty cold, suddenly everyone wanted to compare notes to see whether they’d had it as bad as you – or, preferably, for the sake of oneupmanship, even worse. This in turn created a self-reinforcing mechanism of Covid panic escalation: the more everyone talked about it, the more inconvertible the “pandemic” became.
Meanwhile, in the real world, hard evidence – as opposed to anecdotal evidence – for this “pandemic” remained stubbornly non-existent. The clincher for me was a landmark article published in January 2021 by Simon Elmer at his website Architects For Social Housing. It was titled “Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics: Manufacturing the Crisis”.
In it Elmer asked the question every journalist should have asked but which almost none did: is this “pandemic” really as serious as all the experts, and government ministers and media outlets and medics are telling us it is? The answer was a very obvious No. As the Office for National Statistics data cited by Elmer clearly showed, 2020 – Year Zero for supposedly the biggest public health threat since “Spanish Flu” a century earlier – was one of the milder years for death in the lives of most people.
Let’s be clear about this point, because something you often hear people on the sceptical side of the argument say is, “Of course, no one is suggesting that Covid didn’t cause a horrific number of deaths.” But that’s exactly what they should be suggesting: because it’s true. Elmer was quoting the Age Standardised Mortality statistics for England and Wales dating back to 1941. What these show is that in every year up to and including 2008, more people died per head of population than in the deadly Covid outbreak year of 2020. Of the previous 79 years, 2020 had the 12th lowest mortality rate.
Covid, in other words, was a pandemic of the imagination, of anecdote, of emotion rather than of measured ill-health and death. Yet even now, when I draw someone’s attention to that ONS data, I find that the most common response I get is one of denial. That is, when presented with the clearest, most untainted (this was before ONS got politicised and began cooking the books), impossible-to-refute evidence that there was NO Covid pandemic in 2020, most people, even intelligent ones, still choose to go with their feelings rather with the hard data.
This natural tendency many of us have to choose emotive narratives over cool evidence makes us ripe for exploitation by the cynical and unscrupulous. We saw this during the pandemic when the majority fell for the exciting but mendacious story that they were living through a new Great Plague, and that only by observing bizarre rituals – putting strips of cloth over one’s face, dancing round one another in supermarkets, injecting unknown substances into one’s body – could one hope to save oneself and granny. And we’re seeing it now, in a slightly different variant, in which lots of people – even many who ought to know better – are falling for some similarly thrilling but erroneous nonsense about lab-leaked viruses.
It’s such a sexy story that I fell for it myself. In those early days when all the papers were still dutifully trotting out World Health Organisation-approved propaganda about pangolins and bats and the apparently notorious wet market (whatever the hell that is) in Wuhan, I was already well ahead of the game. I knew, I just knew, as all the edgy, fearless seekers of truth did that it was a lab leak wot done it. If you knew where to dig, there was a clear evidence trail to support it.
We edgy, fearless truth seekers knew all the names and facts. Dodgy Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance was in it up to the neck; so too, obviously, was the loathsomely chipper and smugly deceitful Anthony Fauci. We knew that all this crazy, Frankenvirus research had initially been conducted in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, but had been outsourced to China after President Obama changed the regulations and it became too much of a hot potato for US-based labs. And let’s not forget Ukraine – all those secret bio-research labs run on behalf of the US Deep State, but then exposed as the Russians unhelpfully overran territory such as Mariupol.
March 25, 2023
South Africa – from bad to indescribably worse
John Psmith reviews South Africa’s Brave New World: The Beloved Country Since The End Of Apartheid by R.W. Johnson. It isn’t a pretty picture at all:
The whole world had come to Pretoria to see the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as the first democratically elected South African President. It was the greatest assemblage of heads of state since John F. Kennedy’s funeral … But it was the flight of nine SAAF [South African Air Force] Mirages overhead, dipping their wings in salute, which brought tears to many eyes. It said so many things: the acceptance of, indeed, the deference to, Mandela by the white establishment, the acknowledgement that he was fully President, able to command all the levers of power — and, for many black people in the crowd, it meant that for the first time the Mirages’ awesome power and white pilots were on their side, part of the same nation … All the products of that white power, including South Africa’s sophisticated economy and infrastructure, were being handed over intact.
A little over a decade later and that same South African Air Force was no longer able to fly. It wasn’t for lack of planes: new ones were procured from European arms manufacturers in an astonishingly expensive and legendarily corrupt deal. But once purchased the planes rotted from lack of maintenance and languished in hangers for lack of anybody able to fly them. Most of the qualified pilots and technicians had been purged, and most of the remainder had resigned. The air force did technically still have pilots, after all it would be a bit embarrassing not to, but those pilots were chosen for patronage reasons and didn’t technically have any idea how to fly a fighter jet.
It isn’t just the air force. That whole “sophisticated economy and infrastructure” that got “handed over intact” now by and large no longer exists. Consider something as basic as running water: in 1994, South Africa had some of the most sophisticated water infrastructure on earth, with a whole system of dams, reservoirs, and long-distance inter-basin conduits working together to conquer the geographical challenges of having several major cities and mining centers located on an arid plateau. All of this water was safe, drinkable, and actually came out of the tap when you turned the handle. This picture was marred of course by poor delivery to black rural communities and squatter camps, but in the early 90s the government was making rapid progress towards serving more of those people too.
Like the air force, that water system is now basically non-functional. It’s estimated that something like 10 million people no longer have reliable access to running water. When the water does run, it’s frequently filthy and contaminated with human sewage. South Africa had its first urban cholera outbreak in the year 2000, and they are now a regular occurrence. Again, like the air force, this isn’t for lack of money or effort. The state has spent billions on trying to fix the water problems, and the government’s water bureaucracy has tripled in size since 1994. Something else has gone wrong.
Neither of these examples is cherry-picked. Ask about literally any of the necessities for human life, and the picture is the same: basically first-world quality under the apartheid Nationalist government, and basically post-apocalyptic today. The electric grid is failing, with rolling blackouts consuming the country on a daily basis. The rail network, once one of the finest on earth, is now so degraded that mines in the North of the country prefer to truck their products overland to ports in Mozambique rather than risk the rail journey to Durban. The medical system was once the jewel of Africa and now teeters on the brink of collapse, with qualified doctors and nurses fleeing the country in droves. As for education, one South African author notes: “When Anthony Sampson’s authorized biography of Mandela appeared one of its more embarrassing asides was that all the educational institutions which had nourished Mandela had since collapsed. A Mandela could be produced in colonial times, but no longer.”
Had enough yet? At last count between a third and a half of the population is unemployed. Public order is non-existent outside gated communities and tourist areas patrolled by private security. The murder rate in South Africa exceeds that of many active war zones. Every major city in South Africa is among the most dangerous cities on earth, and the countryside is much worse than the cities. The reported cases of rape alone establish South Africa as the worst country on earth for rape, and the vast majority of cases are likely unreported, since the police have essentially stopped prosecuting this crime.
Something has gone very wrong. What happened? That’s the subject of this book by R.W. Johnson, an ultra-detailed examination of the 10 or so years following the end of apartheid in 1994. Johnson is the right guy to write this book — he’s lived in South Africa since the 1960s, and was active in the movement against apartheid from its earliest days, so he personally knows most of the players who’ve been running the country. And now he has the bittersweet task of writing a book documenting how what happened is “just what white racists predicted and what white radicals like myself scorned”.
March 24, 2023
From “railway spine” to “shell shock” to PTSD
At Founding Questions, Severian discusses how our understanding of what we now label “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” evolved from how doctors visualized bodily ailments over a century ago:
A shell-shocked and physically wounded soldier in the First World War.
I mentioned “shell shock” yesterday, so let’s start there. Medicine in 1914 was still devoted to the “Paris School,” which assumed nothing but organic etiology for all syndromes. Sort of a reverse Descartes — as Descartes (implicitly) “solved” the mind-body problem by disregarding the body, so the “Paris School” of medicine solved it by disregarding the mind. So when soldiers started coming back from the front with these bizarre illnesses, naturally doctors began searching for an organic cause. (That’s hardly unique to the Paris School, of course; I’m giving you the context to be fair to the 1914 medical establishment, whose resistance to psychological explanations otherwise seems so mulish to us).
They’d noticed something similar in the late 19th century, with industrial accidents and especially train crashes. When a train crashed, the people in the first few cars were killed outright, those in the next few wounded, but the ones in the back were often physically fine. But within a few hours to weeks, they started exhibiting all kinds of odd symptoms. Hopefully you’ve never been in a train crash, but if you’ve ever been in a fender-bender you’ve no doubt experienced a minor league version of this.I hit a deer on the highway once. Fortunately I was at highway speed, and hit it more or less dead on (it jumped out as if it were committing suicide), so it got thrown away from the car instead of coming through the windshield. The car’s front end was wrecked, naturally, but I was totally fine. I don’t think the seatbelt lock even engaged, much less the airbag, since I didn’t even have time to hit the brakes.
The next few hours to days were interesting, physiologically. It felt like my body was playing catch up. I had an “oh shit, I’m gonna crash!!!” reaction about 45 minutes after I’d pulled off to the side of the road, duct-taped the bumper back on as best I could, and continued to my destination. All the stuff I would have felt had I seen the deer coming came flooding in. Had I not already been where I was going, I would’ve needed to pull over, because that out of the blue adrenaline hit had my hands shaking, and my vision fuzzed out briefly.
The next morning I was sore. I had all kinds of weird aches, as if I’d just played a game of basketball or something. I assume part of it actually was the impact — it didn’t feel like much in the moment, but if it’s enough to crumple your car’s front end (and it was trashed), it’s enough to give you a pretty good jolt. That would explain soreness in the arms, elbows, and shoulders — a stiff-armed, white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel, followed by a big boom. But I was also just kinda sore all over, plus this generalized malaise. I felt not-quite-right for the next few days. Nothing big, no one symptom I can really put my finger on, but definitely off somehow — a little twitchy, a little jumpy, and really tired.
Having done my WWI reading, I knew what it was, and that’s when I really understood the doctors’ thought processes. I really did take some physical damage, because I really did receive a pretty good full-body whack. It just wasn’t obvious to the naked eye. And since everyone has experienced odd physical symptoms from being rattled around, or even sleeping on a couch or sprung mattress, it makes sense — the impact obviously jiggled my spine, which probably accounts for a great many of the physical symptoms. Hence, “railway spine”. And from there, “shell shock” — nothing rattles your back like standing in a trench or crouching in a dugout as thousands of pounds of high explosive go off around you. It must be like going through my car crash all day, every day.
Skip forward a few decades, and we now have a much better physiological understanding of what we now call (and I will henceforth call) Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). There’s a hypothesis that I personally believe, that “shell shock” is also a whole bunch of micro-concussions as well as “classic” PTSD, but let’s leave that aside for now. The modern understanding of PTSD is largely about chemistry. Cortisol and other stress chemicals really fuck you up. They have systemic physical and mental effects. If those chemicals don’t get a chance to flush out of your system — if you’re in a trench for weeks on end, let’s say — the effects are cumulative, indeed exponential.
Returning to my car crash: I was “off” for a few days because my body got a huge jolt of stress chemicals. That odd not-quite-right thing I felt was those chemicals flushing through. Had I gone to a shrink at that moment, he probably would’ve diagnosed me with PTSD. But I didn’t have PTSD. I had a perfectly normal physiological reaction to a big shot of stress chemicals. If I’d gotten into car crash after car crash, though, day in and day out, that would’ve been PTSD. I’d be having nightmares about that deer every night, instead of just the once. And all that would have cumulative, indeed exponential, effects.
He then goes on to cover similar physical reactions to stimuli in modern life, so I do recommend you RTWT.
