Quotulatiousness

February 16, 2023

A modern irregular verb: I mis-spoke. You spread misinformation. He has been banned from social media

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

I derive my headline from the original words of Bernard Woolley: “That’s one of those irregular verbs, isn’t it? I give confidential security briefings. You leak. He has been charged under section 2a of the Official Secrets Act.” It was a joke in Yes, Minister, but as Jon Miltimore shows, it’s a model for how the powers-that-be want to treat how information is shared on social media:

As Reuters reported in a recent fact-check, Mr. Gore was guilty of misrepresenting scientific data — or “spreading ‘misinformation'”.

In 2009, many responded playfully to Gore’s faux pas.

“Like most politicians, practicing and reformed, Al Gore has been known to stretch the truth on occasion”, NPR noted, adding that Gore had also claimed he’d helped create the internet.

Today, misinformation is treated in a much different way — at least in some instances. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, many writers and scientists who questioned the government’s use of lockdowns, mask mandates, enforced social distancing, and vaccine mandates were banned from social media platforms while others lost their jobs.

San Francisco attorney Michael Senger was permanently banned from Twitter after calling the government’s pandemic response “a giant fraud”. Prior to him, it was former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson who got the boot after questioning the efficacy of vaccines in preventing COVID-19 transmission. Months earlier it was author Naomi Wolf, a political advisor to the presidential campaigns of Bill Clinton and Al Gore.

All of these accounts were reinstated after Elon Musk purchased the company. Twitter is hardly alone, however. Facebook and YouTube also announced policies banning the spread of COVID misinformation, particularly information related to vaccines, which is what got Drs. Peter McCullough and Robert Malone ostracized and banned.

Some may argue these policies are vital, since they protect readers from false information. However, there is nothing that says Big Tech can only ban information that is false. On the contrary, in court proceedings Twitter has claimed it has “the right to ban any user any time for any reason” and can discriminate “on the basis of religion, or gender, or sexual preference, or physical disability, or mental disability”.

Facebook, meanwhile, has argued in court that the army of fact-checkers they employ to protect readers from false information are merely sharing “opinions”, and are therefore exempt from defamation claims.

[…]

What Big Tech is doing is concerning, but the fact that this censorship is taking place in coordination with the federal government makes it doubly so.

In July, in arguably the most anti-free speech pronouncement made at the White House in modern history, White House press secretary Jen Psaki noted the White House is “flagging problematic posts for Facebook”.

“We are in regular touch with these social media platforms, and those engagements typically happen through members of our senior staff, but also members of our COVID-19 team”, Psaki explained. (Today we know that these companies are staffed with dozens of former CIA and FBI officials.)

All of this is being done in the name of science, but let’s be clear: there’s nothing scientific about censorship.

February 15, 2023

J.K. Rowling’s critics reach the “Burn the witch!” phase

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

In The Free Press, Megan Phelps-Roper introduces a new audio series featuring extensive interaction with J.K. Rowling herself:

J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books were insanely popular among Millennials until she had the temerity to say things the Trans* activists hated. Now, they try to sell customized copies of her books that omit her name completely.

J.K. Rowling is arguably the most successful author in the history of publishing, with the possible exception of God. And “Harry Potter” was a kind of bible for my generation. Since its publication beginning in the late ’90s, the series has taught tens of millions of children about virtues like loyalty, courage, and love — about the inclusion of outsiders and the celebration of difference. The books illustrated the idea of moral complexity, how a person who may at first appear sinister can turn out to be a hero after all.

The author herself became part of the legend, too. A broke, abused, and depressed single mother — writing in longhand at cafes across Edinburgh while her baby girl slept in a stroller beside her — she had spun a tale that begat a global phenomenon. If “Harry Potter” was a bible, then Rowling became a kind of saint.

When she gave the Harvard commencement address in 2008, she was introduced as a social, moral, and political inspiration. Her speech that day was partly about imagination: “the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared”.

“We do not need magic to transform our world,” Rowling told the rapt audience. “We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already.”

The uproarious applause that greeted her in 2008 is hard to imagine today. It’s hard to imagine Harvard — let alone any prestigious American university — welcoming Rowling. Indeed, I’m not sure she’d be allowed to give a reading at many local libraries.

That’s because to many, Rowling has since become a kind of Voldemort — the villain of villains in her own stories.

It all blew up in the summer of 2020.

“‘People who menstruate'”, Rowling wrote on Twitter, quoting a headline. “I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”

She continued: “If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction. If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased. I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives. It isn’t hate to speak the truth.”

It’s hard to capture the breadth of the firestorm that followed.

February 13, 2023

Appliance futility by design

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon, Environment, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tal Bachman recounts a miserable — but increasingly common — experience with modern “energy efficient” home appliances:

The LG 5.8 cubic foot Capacity Top Load Washer sat in the laundry room, brand new. Maybe it was my imagination, but it looked insouciant.

Dad said it was the latest and greatest in laundering technology. Supposedly, some sort of internal sensor system (having something to do with a computer) fine-tuned water levels depending on clothing weight. Or something. I can’t remember exactly what he — or was it the moving guy? — said.

I did notice the washing machine had several preset wash cycles — Allergiene, Sanitary, Bright Whites, Towels, Heavy Duty, Bedding, and more. You could select them with a shiny, space-age-looking chrome dial. (I would later discover the machine had other fancy features with names like TurboWash™ 360, ENERGY STAR® Qualified, Smart Diagnosis™, and ThinQ™ Technology [Wi-Fi Enabled]).

[…]

Well, it was win-win-win, with a minor caveat. The caveat was the washing machine. Turns out that for all its razzle-dazzle features, it didn’t actually clean clothes. Even worse, it took hours to not clean clothes. The “Allergiene” cycle, for example, took almost four hours. Yet when you pulled your clothes out, you could still make out the orange juice or tomato sauce stains. I’d never encountered a more useless washing machine.

“How you feeling about this new washing machine?”, I asked Dad, a few days after the hunkering down began.
“Great!”, said Dad.

Okay, I thought. That’s not unusual. Music — as opposed to the mundane or practical — occupies most of Dad’s awareness, and always has. Besides, most of his clothes are black, and he probably hasn’t noticed it’s not removing the ketchup stains. Maybe he will in a few weeks.

And maybe in the meantime, I thought, I could figure out a way to reprogram the machine for cycles which actually washed. And were faster.

But no. That turned out to be way too much to hope for. The machine allowed no independent control over water volume, cycle time, or water temperatures. It only allowed selection of a preset computerized cycle — none of which got your clothes clean.

[…]

Yet more irritating was the reason it skimped on water and power: it was trying to stop global warming. Oops — I mean “climate change”. It was “environmentally friendly”. Except it wasn’t, because you usually had to run at least two cycles to get your clothes clean. That’s right: you had to use the same amount of water in the end anyway, and double the electricity.

And so — not for the first time — I had stumbled upon yet another example of technological “progress” which exacerbated the very (pseudo) problem it purported to solve. The new useless LG “Save the World!” piece of garbage was the home equivalent of Hollywood stars taking private jets to a carbon reduction conference in Switzerland.

[…]

The US Department of Energy, I discovered, had begun imposing energy efficiency regulations in the early 1990s. A decade later, they made the regulations even stricter (see here also). Then, as the years passed, they made them even stricter. And then stricter. And then stricter. All the while, the feds offered appliance manufacturers huge tax incentives — i.e., huge cash rewards — to accelerate their phase out of functional washing machines.

Government succeeded. Today, minus the loophole-exploiting Speed-King (which the feds will probably crush soon), you cannot find a new washing machine — front- or top-loading — which washes clothes anywhere near as well as its predecessors. The rationale for this — saving the world from global warming — doesn’t even rise to the level of ludicrous. Just for starters, as I type this, we’re enduring one of the coldest winters ever recorded. New Hampshire’s Mount Washington Observatory just recorded a wind chill calculation of minus 109 degrees Farenheit, an all-time record for the United States (and approaching midway between the average temperatures of Jupiter and Mars). Temperatures are thirty degrees Farenheit colder than average in many places. Why would anyone want to bring temperatures down even further? And at the cost of destroying washing machine functionality? And what loon could actually believe home washing machines change the climate?

In any case, thanks to an essentially totalitarian government run by bought-and-paid-for liars, control freaks, and imbeciles, we have gone technologically backward — certainly in the appliance domain, but in others — for no good reason at all. (Regulations have also downgraded dishwashers, toilets, showers, and other appliances, but we can discuss those another time)

Back in 2019, Sarah Hoyt expressed her frustrations with “modern” “energy-efficient” appliances which matched our experiences exactly.

February 12, 2023

JunkScientific American

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

The editors of Scientific American have been steadily injecting more political and progressive content into their traditional coverage of hard scientific topics:

Scientific American magazine has been around since 1845, evolving into a reader-friendly purveyor of hard science, a respected, slightly intimidating denizen of supermarket checkout lines. But judging by the recent ridiculous trend of stories and editorials, it’s been wholly captured by the woke blob.

On the surface the monthly still does what it says on the label in providing long articles, short reviews, and cool photographs for an intelligent audience, with almost-comprehensible stories on the physics of black holes for science buffs, and stunning photos of deep-sea creatures for the rest of us.

But then there’s the ludicrously left-wing ideology that seeps into every issue. A NewsBusters perusal of the contents of each 2022 regular-release monthly issue revealed 34 stories grounded in liberal assumptions and beliefs, nearly three per issue. That’s even after skipping stories with liberal themes that were nonetheless science-based — for example, a cover story on melting glaciers in Antarctica wasn’t included.

Of course, the COVID pandemic in particular tugged the magazine toward government interventionism and the smug rule of health “experts”.

Some of the most bizarrely “woke” material is online-only, with a wider potential reach. The most notorious recent example is a January 6, 2023 opinion piece, cynically seizing on the on-field collapse of a Buffalo Bills player to label the NFL racist: “Damar Hamlin’s Collapse Highlights the Violence Black Men Experience in Football — The “terrifyingly ordinary” nature of football’s violence disproportionately affects Black men“. It’s written by Tracie Canada, who is, no surprise, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology.

So what’s the solution? Surely Canada wouldn’t recommend banning blacks from the National Football League for their own protection?

But plenty of bizarre pieces fill the print edition. Here’s a headline from the July 2020 issue of this purported science magazine: “The Racist Roots of Fighting Obesity“. Yet a June 2019 SA article argued that the nation’s “biggest health problem” was obesity. So is Scientific American, for being concerned about obesity, by its own bizarre standard racist as well?

QotD: The heyday of Victorian newspapers

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

A few years ago, I did some research on three early Victorian murders that caused me to read several provincial newspapers of the time. I discovered incidentally to my research that the owners or editors of about half of the British provincial newspapers also sold patent medicines; and this made perfect sense, for by far the greatest advertisers in provincial newspapers were the manufacturers of patent medicines. The owners or editors of the newspapers sold advertisements to the producers of patent medicines, then they sold the newspapers in which the advertisements appeared, and finally they sold the products themselves to the readers. It was an excellent example of rational commercial synergy. (About half of the medicines, by the way, were either to cure or to prevent syphilis — a disease, then, that was a great support to the press of the time.)

Now, the principal quality or characteristic of the sellers of patent medicine has always been effrontery, that is to say the blatant insinuation of the false. Thomas Holloway’s innovation was to insinuate such falsehood on a mass or industrial scale. There was hardly a newspaper in which he did not place a weekly advertisement; moreover, he pioneered the advertisement that masquerades as news story. He would ensure that reports of miracle cures in faraway places, supposedly wrought by his pills and ointment, and written as matter-of-factly as possible, were placed in every newspaper, reports whose veracity no one could possibly check for himself, of course.

As Napoleon once said, repetition is the only rhetorical technique that really works — besides which hope and fear render people susceptible to effrontery. In Thomas Holloway’s time, the fear of illness was often, and the hope of cure rarely, justified; at least Holloway’s preparations were unlikely to do much harm (they contained aloe, myrrh, and saffron), unlike the prescriptions of the orthodox doctors of the time. They allowed for the possibility of natural recovery, whereas orthodox medicine often hurried its consumers into their graves. Nevertheless, the claims Holloway made for his ointment and pills were preposterous, and something is not curative just because it fails to kill.

Holloway made an immense fortune by his effrontery and founded a women’s college in the University of London on the proceeds.

Theodore Dalrymple, “The Way of Che”, Taki’s Magazine, 2017-10-28.

February 10, 2023

“What’s happening to children is morally and medically appalling”

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

In The Free Press, Jamie Reed explains why she gave up her job as as a case manager at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital and is now speaking out against the early and aggressive therapeutic treatment of gender-confused children and teens:

Reed in her office. (Theo R. Welling).

Soon after my arrival at the Transgender Center, I was struck by the lack of formal protocols for treatment. The center’s physician co-directors were essentially the sole authority.

At first, the patient population was tipped toward what used to be the “traditional” instance of a child with gender dysphoria: a boy, often quite young, who wanted to present as — who wanted to be — a girl.

Until 2015 or so, a very small number of these boys comprised the population of pediatric gender dysphoria cases. Then, across the Western world, there began to be a dramatic increase in a new population: Teenage girls, many with no previous history of gender distress, suddenly declared they were transgender and demanded immediate treatment with testosterone.

I certainly saw this at the center. One of my jobs was to do intake for new patients and their families. When I started there were probably 10 such calls a month. When I left there were 50, and about 70 percent of the new patients were girls. Sometimes clusters of girls arrived from the same high school.

This concerned me, but didn’t feel I was in the position to sound some kind of alarm back then. There was a team of about eight of us, and only one other person brought up the kinds of questions I had. Anyone who raised doubts ran the risk of being called a transphobe.

The girls who came to us had many comorbidities: depression, anxiety, ADHD, eating disorders, obesity. Many were diagnosed with autism, or had autism-like symptoms. A report last year on a British pediatric transgender center found that about one-third of the patients referred there were on the autism spectrum.

Frequently, our patients declared they had disorders that no one believed they had. We had patients who said they had Tourette syndrome (but they didn’t); that they had tic disorders (but they didn’t); that they had multiple personalities (but they didn’t).

The doctors privately recognized these false self-diagnoses as a manifestation of social contagion. They even acknowledged that suicide has an element of social contagion. But when I said the clusters of girls streaming into our service looked as if their gender issues might be a manifestation of social contagion, the doctors said gender identity reflected something innate.

To begin transitioning, the girls needed a letter of support from a therapist — usually one we recommended — who they had to see only once or twice for the green light. To make it more efficient for the therapists, we offered them a template for how to write a letter in support of transition. The next stop was a single visit to the endocrinologist for a testosterone prescription.

That’s all it took.

When a female takes testosterone, the profound and permanent effects of the hormone can be seen in a matter of months. Voices drop, beards sprout, body fat is redistributed. Sexual interest explodes, aggression increases, and mood can be unpredictable. Our patients were told about some side effects, including sterility. But after working at the center, I came to believe that teenagers are simply not capable of fully grasping what it means to make the decision to become infertile while still a minor.

February 8, 2023

“Smoking has been a net gain for the Treasury ever since King James I started taxing it heavily in the 1600s”

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

Christopher Snowden asks whether we should believe the consistent claims of public health advocates on how much things they disapprove of (smoking, drinking, etc.) “cost” the taxpayer:

If smoking costs the taxpayers £173 billion, then how much does widespread forced feeding of office pastries cost?

If you say that a certain activity costs society £10 billion a year, most people would assume that if that activity disappears, society will save £10 billion a year.

They might have different ideas of what “society” means. Some will assume that the £10 billion is a cost to taxpayers while others will assume that some of the cost is borne by private individuals and businesses. But the majority will, quite reasonably, assume that the cost is to other people, i.e. those who do not participate in the activity.

And nearly everyone will assume that the £10 billion is money in the conventional sense of cash that can be exchanged for goods and services.

But when it comes to estimates from “public health” campaigners about the cost of drinking/smoking/obesity, all these assumptions would be wrong. Most of the “costs” are to the people engaged in the activity and they are not financial costs. Taxpayers would not pay less tax if they disappeared. In general, they would pay more.

Last month I mentioned an estimate of the “cost” of gambling in the UK and said:

    These studies have no merit as economic research. They are purely driven by advocacy. The hope is that the average person will wrongly assume that the costs are to taxpayers and agitate for change.

The main aim of these Big Numbers is to convince the public that heavily-taxed activities place a burden on society that exceeds the tax revenue, thereby justifying yet more taxes and prohibitions.

In the case of smoking, this has become more and more difficult. Smoking has been a net gain for the Treasury ever since King James I started taxing it heavily in the 1600s. Today, as the smoking rate dwindles and tobacco duty rises ever higher, anti-smoking campaigners have got their work cut out duping non-smokers into thinking otherwise.

Tobacco duty brings in about £12 billion a year. For years, groups like Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) used a figure of £13.74 billion as the “cost of smoking”. This came from a flimsy Policy Exchange report which included £5.4 billion as the cost of smoking breaks and £4.8 billion as the cost of lost productivity due to premature mortality. Neither of these are costs to the taxpayer. They are not even external costs, i.e. costs to non-smokers.

Last year, in a review commissioned by the Department of Health, Javed Khan came up with a figure of “around £17 billion” as the “societal cost” of smoking. This included “reduced employment levels” (£5.69 billion) and “reduced wages for smokers” (£6.04 billion). Again, these costs fall on smokers themselves and are not external costs. They are, in other words, none of the government’s business.

Last week, a report commissioned by Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) pulled out all the stops and announced that the cost of smoking to Britain was now — wait for it! — £173 billion. Go big or go home, eh?

February 4, 2023

QotD: Leftists against humanity

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

Yesterday in a group, a friend said what is obvious about the left is that they seriously oppose human reproduction and longevity. Ultimately human life, I guess.

Here’s the list as to why:

NOT AN EXHAUSTIVE LIST:

1) Pushing to maximize abortion

2) Pushing to maximize homosexuality

3) Multiple different initiatives to make child rearing more difficult and expensive including

    a) Ramping up the intensity of social services scrutiny, effectively necessitating high intensity “helicopter parenting”
    b) Turning schools into indoctrination factories that don’t prepare children to function independently but do prepare them to have constant fights with their parents over their indoctrination
    c) Making healthcare more expensive through constantly ramping regulation, making the actual having of children more difficult and prohibitively expensive
    d) Pushing to nationalize healthcare, granting them further power over who lives or dies – allowing limitation of IVF, and also
    e) legitimizing legal euthanasia while also pushing to make healthcare decisions for the public (see Canada right now)

4) Pushing from other regulatory angles to make the de facto standard a two-income family, ensuring children are raised in daycares and further pushing family budgets to the brink

5) Using the student loan system to turn the bulk of reproductive age, upwardly mobile people into collateral in a deal that passes billions of dollars directly from the US government to the same system that then indoctrinates those kids to the point of full societal dysfunction; encouraging, as much as possible, the use of sex as entertainment ONLY

6) Turning sterilizing yourself into the hot new fad for kids

7) Turning the simple identification of gender into a minefield so that even sex between people who aren’t mutilating themselves is suddenly difficult to even consider

8) Willfully manipulating nursing homes into putting elderly people in a position where they are MOST LIKELY to die during COVID

9) Adopting COVID policies which foreseeably shut down cancer diagnostics and treatment for almost two years, which is the most likely cause of the 10 fold increase in the rate of cancers since the COVID lockdowns (although I can’t entirely discount that the vaccines themselves are partially responsible because, sing it with me now, you can’t ensure the long term safety of something that hasn’t been around long enough to have long term safety data, which is why we do clinical trials and not mass experiments on the general public. I note in passing that the drug companies are so trustworthy they demanded legal indemnity as a condition of participating, while swearing blind that the product was safe and effective even though it was physically fucking impossible for them to have data to back that up due to minor problems like the requisite quantity of time not passing.)

Sarah Hoyt, “I Don’t Believe in Aliens”, According to Hoyt, 2022-10-31.

February 3, 2023

A spectre is haunting Ontario politics: the spectre of [Shock! Horror!] American-style healthcare!

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

Everyone in Canada has heard alarming stories of people in the United States being presented with five- or six-figure bills for hospital care, and any hint that one of our provincial healthcare systems might move in that direction scares the pants off almost everyone. Politicians know this well, and salivate at the chance of deploying charges that their opponents favour “American-style” changes to our system because it’s a guaranteed vote-winner. None of it has to be true — very few Canadians know much about US systems aside from the horror stories — but it’s always effective.

In The Line, Harrison Ruess makes the sensible point that there are more healthcare systems in the western world than those of Canadian provinces and our closest neighbour:

Toronto General Hospital in 2005.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

First, to be emphatic on this point, we need to be realistic about where our system ranks globally.

It is truly bewildering to me the lengths that otherwise smart and empathetic Canadians will go to to defend the status-quo approach to health care in Canada. The results we get, versus the money we spend, is simply not brag-worthy. The argument that our system works great, if only we threw more money at it, doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

Is our health care okay? Sure. Decent? Probably. Is it great? Hardly. Could we do better? Yes, much. Do we need to spend more? Maybe a tad, but not likely much, if any. To wit:

    According to OECD data, on life expectancy Canada ranks 16th. On mortality rates from avoidable causes, we’re 23rd. On cancer survival rates we range from 13th down to 18th, depending on the cancer type. On the number of one-year-olds vaccinated for diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis, we rank an abysmal 37th (even the U.S. is higher here at 27th. Gulp.). One area where we do rank closer to the top is spending as a proportion of GDP, where we sit seventh.

World Health Organization (WHO) data wasn’t any more flattering, where Canada’s health care ranked 30th in overall performance despite being 10th in spending. The Commonwealth Fund ranks Canada 10th out of 11 in performance and 6th out of 11 in spending. In report after report Canadians aren’t getting the outcomes we need or want based on the money we’re spending on our current system.

Besides for reasons of nostalgia, why would anyone spend their energy defending these sorts of results? “We’re 16th! We’re 16th!” is hardly a chant you’d hear at a rally. It’s time to do better. And I get the feeling most people recognize this – certainly when you get onto Main Street.

Ipsos polling from December 2021 reported that 55 per cent of Canadians are “somewhat satisfied” with their health care, alongside 22 per cent that are “somewhat dissatisfied.” I.e. three quarters of Canadians find themselves in the middle of the road on the quality of our health care. This seems about right — mediocre support for mediocre health care. (The strongly satisfied and strongly dissatisfied were about even, at 12 per cent and 10 per cent respectively.)

But today Canadians are also, rightly, very worried. Leger polling in January 2023 showed that 86 per cent of Canadians are worried about the state of our health care.

January 30, 2023

Crime on Toronto’s public transit system is merely a symptom of a wider social problem

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

As posted the other day, Matt Gurney’s dispiriting experiences on an ordinary ride on the TTC are perhaps leading indicators of much wider issues in all of western society:

“Toronto subway new train” by BeyondDC is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 .

Caveats abound. Toronto is, relatively speaking, still a safe city. The TTC moves many millions of people a week; a large percentage of whom are not being knifed, shot or burnt alive. And so on. We at The Line also suspect that whatever is happening in Toronto isn’t happening only in Toronto, but Toronto’s scale (and the huge scope of the TTC specifically) might be gathering in one place a series of incidents that would be reported as unconnected random crimes in any other city. A few muggings in Montreal or Winnipeg above the usual baseline for such crimes won’t fit the media’s love of patterns as much as a similar number of incidents on a streetcar or subway line.

Fair enough, duly noted, and all that jazz.

But what is happening out there?

Your Line editors have theories, and we’ve never hesitated to share them before: we think the pandemic has driven a portion of the population bonkers. We’d go further and say that we think it has left all of us, every last one, less stable, less patient, less calm and less empathetic. For the vast majority of us, this will manifest itself in many unpleasant but ultimately harmless ways. We’ll be more short-tempered. Less jovial at a party. Less patient with strangers, or even with loved ones. Maybe a bit more reclusive.

But what about the relatively small majority of us that were, pre-2020, already on the edge of deeper, more serious problems? What about those who were already experiencing mental-health issues, or living on the edge of real, grinding poverty?

It’s not like the overall societal situation has really improved, right? COVID-19 itself killed tens of thousands, and took a physical toll on many more, but we all suffered the stress and fear not just of the plague, but of the steps taken to mitigate it. (Lockdowns may have been necessary early in the pandemic, but they were never fun or easy, and that societal bill may be coming due.) Since COVID began to abate, rather than a chance to chill out, we’ve had convoys, a war, renewed plausible risk of nuclear war, and now a punishing period of inflation and interest-rate hikes that are putting many into real financial distress. We are coping with all of this while still processing our COVID-era stress and anxiety.

The timing isn’t great, is what we’re saying.

And on the other side of the coin, basically all our societal institutions that we’d turn to to cope with these issues — hospitals, social services, homeless shelters, police forces, private charities, even personal or family support networks — are fried. Just maxed out. We have financial, supply chain and, most critically, human-resource deficits everywhere. The people we have left on the job are exhausted and at their wits’ end.

This leaves us, on balance, less able to handle challenges than we were in 2020, due to literal exhaustion of both institutions and individuals. Meanwhile, against the backdrop of this erosion of our capacity, our challenges have all gotten worse!

It’s not hard to do the mental math on this, friends. It seems to us that in 2020, the policy of Canadian governments from coast to coast to coast, and at every level, was to basically keep a lid on problems like crime, homelessness, housing prices and shortages, mental health and health-care system dysfunction, and probably others we could add. One politician might put a bit more emphasis on some of these issues than others, in line with their partisan priors, but overall, the pre-2020 status quo in Canada was pretty good, and our political class, writ large, basically self-identified as guardians of that status quo, while maybe tinkering a bit at the margins (and declaring themselves progressive heroes for the trouble of the tinkering).

But then COVID-19 happens, and all our problems get worse. And all our ways of dealing with those problems get less effective. It doesn’t have to be by much. Just enough to bend all those flatlined (or maybe slightly improving) trendlines down. Instead of homelessness being kind of frozen in place in the big cities, it starts getting worse, bit at a time, month after month. The mental-health-care and homeless shelter systems that weren’t really doing a great job in 2020, but were more or less keeping big crises at a manageable level, started seeing a few more people fall through the cracks each month, month after month. Those people are just gone, baby, gone.

The health-care system that used to function well enough to keep people reasonably content, if not happy, locks up, and waitlists balloon, and soon we can’t even get kids needed surgeries on time.

The housing shortage goes insane, and prices somehow survive the pandemic basically untouched.

The court system locks up, meaning more and more violent criminals get bail and then re-offend, even killing cops when they should be behind bars.

None of these swings were dramatic. They were all just enough to set us on a course to this, a moment in time where the problems have had years to compound themselves and are now compounding each other.

Here’s the rub, folks. The Line doesn’t believe or accept that any of the problems we face today, alone or in combination, are automatically fatal. We can fix them all. But we need leaders, including both elected officials and bureaucrats, who fundamentally see themselves as problem fixers, and who understand right down deep in their bones that that is what their jobs are, and that they are no longer what they’ve been able to be for generations: hands-off middle managers of stable prosperity.

January 20, 2023

“… any association with Davos should put an individual or organization under notice of suspicion”

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Europe, Government, Health, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

CDR Salamander wants to sign up — like so many of us — for a post-Davos world:

The whole World Economic Forum/Davos experience is one part Bond villain parody, one part clout seeking billionaires, one part megalomania, a heaping cup of greed, and a dash of rent seeking.

In 2023 things have reached the point where any association with Davos should put an individual or organization under notice of suspicion. Amazing to see people who claim to be American conservatives or lovers of liberty attending in an non-ironic, non-protesting capacity.

This wannabee gaggle of quasi-oligarchs and autocrat throne sniffers represents everything that is wrong with the human desire for control, power, and to crush the individual for fun and profit.

They pretend to be the world government in waiting that no one asked for, no one wants, and trust me on this — no one wants to live under. Being unaccountable to the people is their ideal state.

If you don’t know what I am referring to above, shame on you. Google it yourself, but I couldn’t help but giggle when I read the title from this article by Gideon Rachman at The Financial Times; Geopolitics threatens to destroy the world Davos made.

Really? It is? Then by all means let’s have MOAR!

    …the 2023 WEF — the first to take place in its regular winter location since the pandemic began — could be seen as signalling a return to normalcy. However, China’s sudden abandonment of its zero-Covid policy has raised fears that a new wave of variants could emerge.

    And, even if a fresh pandemic phase is avoided, Covid has left its mark on the way governments and businesses think about globalisation. The assumption that goods and commodities can always be shipped easily around the world has been shattered.

Except for the mentally fragile few and those who leverage power through them, the world is over COVID like it is over the flu. The last three years has been a clarifying event bringing in to stark relief those autocracy worshipers and hypocrites who hold individual rights in contempt. It also helped us see the existential danger a free people can face when they put themselves at the mercy of governments who see a crisis opening a door for an easy grasp at additional powers they will never want to give back.

The past the Davos set desired failed the future that is our present, but that doesn’t give pause to any of them. The Davos view of the future where everyone (except for those at the top) lives in a pod, eats bugs, owns nothing but is “happy” is at best dystopian, at worst justifies at some point if they are not stopped, open global revolt against the ruling class with all the violence and blood that comes with it.

[…]

Simply unacceptable in democratic nations that the will of the people might promote change in political leadership. Next thing you know, they might want even more free speech and redress of grievances.

    Those world leaders who are present might do well to take the funicular up to the Schatzalp Hotel, which served as Mann’s model for the sanatorium in The Magic Mountain. The hotel’s view is the best in Davos — it may offer a chance for quiet reflection on how to prevent war and natural disaster from once again engulfing the global economy

Unspoofable.

Perhaps they should reflect on how they encouraged Russian aggression and European vulnerability to hydrocarbon blackmail? Should they take a moment to see how they look the other way as the PRC engages in wholesale oppression of their Muslim minority? Are they proud of their dividends derived from almost unimaginable levels of air and water pollution flowing out of PRC’s slave labor run factories?

Unlikely — they might miss out on the next party.

A post-Davos world?

How do we bring it here faster?

Christopher Snowden on our latest “Clown World” alcohol guidelines

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

At Velvet Glove, Iron Fist, Christopher Snowden pokes gigantic holes in the stated justification for the latest Canadian drink consumption recommendations (also mentioned in this post yesterday):

Canada is on the brink of making itself an international laughing stock by cutting its drinking guidelines from two drinks a day to two drinks a week. The previous guidelines were only set in 2011 so Canadian drinkers can be forgiven for being suspicious about this dramatic change. The evidence base has not significantly changed in the interim. The evidence for the health benefits of moderate drinking has continued to pile up.

The only thing that has really changed is that neo-temperance zealots like Tim Stockwell have tightened their grip on alcohol research. Stockwell and his “no safe level” pal Tim Naimi both live in Canada and are both authors of the report that has made the ludicrous new recommendations.

I have been saying for over a decade that the “public health” plan is to get the guidelines down to zero so they can start regulating alcohol like tobacco. The evidence does not support this fundamentally ideological campaign and so the evidence has been dropped in favour of fantasy modelling and cherry-picking.

[…]

A Canadian “standard drink” contains 13.45 grams of alcohol. Three standard drinks equals 40 grams. Four standard drinks equals 53 grams. The meta-analysis has no data on people who drink so little, so the claim that colon cancer risk increases at three or more standard drinks is not supported even by the authors’ own preferred source.

As for breast cancer, which can only affect half the population and is partly why most countries have different guidelines for men and women, the report cites this meta-analysis of 22 studies, 13 of which found no statistically significant association with drinking. It pooled the studies and reported a 10 per cent increase in risk for people drinking 10 grams of alcohol a day. As with the colon cancer study, this was the minimum quantity studied so it tells us nothing about Canadians who drink 3-5 standard drinks.

In terms of mortality, another meta-analysis found that light drinking was not positively associated with any form of cancer, including breast cancer, and was negatively associated with cancer in a couple of instances […]

As countless studies have shown, heart disease and stroke risk is substantially reduced among light and moderate drinkers. For example, a meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies (which track people’s drinking habits and health status over a number of years and are the most reliable studies in observational epidemiology) found that drinkers were 25 per cent less likely to die from coronary heart disease than teetotallers. The evidence for strokes is similar.

This is main reason why life expectancy is longer for moderate drinkers and the relationship between alcohol consumption and mortality is J-shaped.

The authors of the Canadian report essentially ignore all this evidence and instead focus on a cherry-picked meta-analysis written by Stockwell, Naimi and pals which massively adjusted the figures to arrive at their desired conclusion. This is inexcusable.

At The Line, Jen Gerson points out the utter absurdity of public health officials doing their best Carry Nation bar-smashing imitations while at the same time pushing for “harm reduction” policies for cocaine, heroin, and other illegal narcotics:

“Bayer Makes Heroin” by dog97209 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 .

“The guidance is based on the principle of autonomy in harm reduction and the fundamental idea behind it that people living in Canada have a right to know that all alcohol use comes with risk,” noted the CCSU and, hey, yeah!

I like to understand my risks so that I can make informed decisions.

But you know what else poses significant risk?

Lots of morphine and cocaine.

I think this is generally known. But God help you if you want to engage in a conversation about the risks society might be courting with safe supply or even harm-reduction strategies, and have fun being labelled a Conservative troglodyte who just wants suffering addicts to die in the street. You’re probably just a rich, callous asshole who opposes all of these evidence-based policies who blows second-hand smoke into the faces of your children while drinking your sixth beer of the night at the local pub. Just shut up and pick up those discarded needles in your yard, you monster.

I was picking on Health Canada previously, but they’re hardly the only ones who display a bizarre split-personality on these issues. Any story by or on the CBC on the matter of alcohol use now sounds like something straight out of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Yet just try to find critical reporting on safe consumption sites or safe supply policies. Almost all of it is uniformly glowing.

[…]

Obviously, I don’t think that our public-health officials are telling Canadians that heroin takes the edge off a hard day better than a glass of red or a pint of beer. But did we learn nothing over the course of the pandemic about the importance of consistent and clear public-health communications? The target audience for this is not those who have carefully studied harm reduction and substance use disorders. It’s people who just like to have a drink with dinner.

If our governments want to maintain any credibility, they can’t be uptight about how many glasses of pinot noir we drink, and then appear to be loosey goosey on heroin. It’s just impossible to take that kind of suck-and-blow at face value, but that’s exactly how this messaging will come across to people who aren’t closely engaged with this issue. “The government wants to give free hard drugs to junkies but thinks my cocktail is a problem?”

January 19, 2023

You must be protected from coworkers who threaten your health … by bringing in cake?

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

Christopher Snowden knows a slippery slope when the media pushes another nanny state health concern as serious as cake in the workplace:

    If nobody brought in cakes into the office, I would not eat cakes in the day, but because people do bring cakes in, I eat them.

Who is this co-worker from hell? Who is this whining, snivelling infant demanding that the rest of the world forfeits their small pleasures because she has no self-control?

It is none other than the head of the Food Standards Agency, Susan Jebb, who is in The Times tomorrow comparing cakes to passive smoking.

The full quote reads:

    “We all like to think we’re rational, intelligent, educated people who make informed choices the whole time and we undervalue the impact of the environment”, she said. “If nobody brought in cakes into the office, I would not eat cakes in the day, but because people do bring cakes in, I eat them. Now, OK, I have made a choice, but people were making a choice to go into a smoky pub.”

Indeed they were, Susan, before people like you took that choice away to such an extent that even a pub that put up a sign saying “SMOKERS ONLY” on the door and employed no one but smokers would still forbidden from accommodating them.

I’ve made a few slippery slope arguments in my time — contrary to midwit opinion, they are often valid — but even I never imagined that a workplace smoking ban would evolve into a workplace cupcake ban. Talk about the thin end of the wedge!

    While saying the two issues were not identical, Jebb argued that passive smoking inflicted harm on others “and exactly the same is true of food”.

To inflict something on someone implies that it is done without their consent. In that sense — and leaving aside the question of whether wisps of secondhand smoke are actually harmful — passive smoking doesn’t inflict harm on a person who knowingly goes to a smoky pub. The same is obviously true of someone who offers you a cake. If they held you down and physically shoved it down your throat, that would be a different matter, but surely that is already illegal under some law or other?

Meanwhile, Canadian nanny state enablers are trying to do battlespace prep to get the government to mandate new warning labels to containers of alcoholic beverages and to significantly cut the already low maximum “recommended consumption”:

… a report on the new drinking guidance released Tuesday by the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction says the warning labels could inform consumers about serious health risks including cancer, the number of standard drinks in a container and the benefits of limiting consumption to two drinks a week.

“Consuming more than two standard drinks per drinking occasion is associated with an increased risk of harms to self and others, including injuries and violence,” the report says.

The guidance is based on the findings of a panel of 23 experts who reviewed nearly 6,000 peer-reviewed studies as part of a two-year process that also considered feedback from 4,845 people during an online public consultation process in spring 2021.

The most recent available data show that alcohol causes nearly 7,000 cancer deaths each year in Canada, with most cases being breast or colon cancer, followed by cancers of the rectum, mouth and throat, liver, esophagus and larynx. Liver disease and most types of cardiovascular diseases are also linked to alcohol use.

The guidance updates Canada’s Low-Risk Drinking Guidelines set in 2011, when two drinks a day were considered low risk and it was believed that women could safely consume up to 10 drinks a week and men could have 15 drinks.

January 15, 2023

One last dance for Davos?

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

Elizabeth Nickson on the “walls closing in” but this time it isn’t “on Trump”, but it might be “on the World Economic Forum” and their enablers:

Klaus and his gang were in full egomaniacal flight last week in Davos. I wonder how secretly scared they were, swanning around in their $30,000 Loro Piana topcoats dreaming of what … a nice quiet prison? Their liability for this latest attempt to escape the whirlwind through forced pharmaceuticals and the construction of the Biomedical Security State, must be dawning on them. It was always a possibility, but they figured the populace — thanks to their equally witless behaviourists — were so dumb they’d consent to being permanently damaged and think it was the fault of the extreme right. And climate change.

[…]

In Australia, the more Covid shots you’ve had, the more Covid you get and the more you die. The unvaccinated sail by relatively unperturbed.

Did you know that Big Pharma takes between $8 to $10 Trillion out of the US economy every year? GDP is only $23 Trillion. That’s a lot of money to claw back by every injured person, every family who lost a wage earner, a mother, a treasured child. This is a profit center for the great unwashed unmatched in human history. A massive transfer of wealth from the .01% to us.

They are all liable: every executive, every celebrity, every film producer, every hospital chief, every newspaper publisher, every television station owner, every multinational media company, every medical center, every university, every employer, every politician who forced and bullied people. Their wealth is about to become ours.

QotD: The uncertain “certainties” of war in space

Filed under: Books, Military, Quotations, Space — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The comments for that post were very active with suggestions for technological or strategic situations which would or would not make orbit-to-land operations (read: planetary invasions) unnecessary or obsolete, which were all quite interesting.

What I found most striking though was a relative confidence in how space battles would be waged in general, which I’ve seen both a little bit here in the comments and frequently more broadly in the hard-sci-fi community. The assumptions run very roughly that, without some form of magic-tech (like shields), space battles would be fought at extreme range, with devastating hyper-accurate weapons against which there could be no real defense, leading to relatively “thin-skinned” spacecraft. Evasion is typically dismissed as a possibility and with it smaller craft (like fighters) with potentially more favorable thrust-to-mass ratios. It’s actually handy for encapsulating this view of space combat that The Expanse essentially reproduces this model.

And, to be clear, I am not suggesting that this vision of future combat is wrong in any particular way. It may be right! But I find the relative confidence with which this model is often offered as more than a little bit misleading. The problem isn’t the model; it’s the false certainty with which it gets presented.

[…]

Coming back around to spaceships: if multiple national navies stocked with dozens of experts with decades of experience and training aren’t fully confident they know what a naval war in 2035 will look like, I find myself with sincere doubts that science fiction writers who are at best amateur engineers and military theorists have a good sense of what warfare in 2350 (much less the Grim Darkness of the Future Where There is Only War) will look like. This isn’t to trash on any given science fiction property mind you. At best, what someone right now can do is essentially game out, flow-chart style, probable fighting systems based on plausible technological systems, understanding that even small changes can radically change the picture. For just one example, consider the question “at what range can one space warship resolve an accurate target solution against another with the stealth systems and electronics warfare available?” Different answers to that question, predicated on different sensor, weapons and electronics warfare capabilities produce wildly different combat systems.

(As an aside: I am sure someone is already dashing down in the comments preparing to write “there is no stealth in space“. To a degree, that is true – the kind of Star Trek-esque cloaking device of complete invisibility is impossible in space, because a ship’s waste heat has to go somewhere and that is going to make the craft detectable. But detectable and detected are not the same: the sky is big, there are lots of sources of electromagnetic radiation in it. There are as yet undiscovered large asteroids in the solar-system; the idea of a ship designed to radiate waste heat away from enemies and pretend to be one more undocumented large rock (or escape notice entirely, since an enemy may not be able to track everything in the sky) long enough to escape detection or close to ideal range doesn’t seem outlandish to me. Likewise, once detected, the idea of a ship using something like chaff to introduce just enough noise into an opponent’s targeting system so that they can’t determine velocity and heading with enough precision to put a hit on target at 100,000 miles away doesn’t seem insane either. Or none of that might work, leading to extreme-range exchanges. Again, the question is all about the interaction of detection, targeting and counter-measure technology, which we can’t really predict at all.)

And that uncertainty attaches to almost every sort of technological interaction. Sensors and targeting against electronics warfare and stealth, but also missiles and projectiles against point-defense and CIWS, or any kind of weapon against armor (there is often an assumption, for instance, that armor is entirely useless against nuclear strikes, which is not the case) and on and on. Layered on top of that is what future technologies will even prove practical – if heat dissipation problems for lasers or capacitor limitations on railguns be solved problems, for instance. If we can’t quite be sure how known technologies will interact in an environment (our own planet’s seas) that we are intimately familiar with, we should be careful expressing confidence about how future technology will work in space. Consequently, while a science fiction setting can certainly generate a plausible model of future space combat, I think the certainty with which those models and their assumptions are sometimes presented is misplaced.

Bret Devereaux, “Fireside Friday: August 14th, 2020”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-08-14.

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