Quotulatiousness

July 21, 2022

Farmers’ protests against insane environment mandates continue in the Netherlands

Filed under: Environment, Europe, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

For some unknown reason, the huge protests by Dutch farmers against ridiculous environment-protection rules seems to be getting almost no media coverage. As Rex Murphy pointed out in the National Post, if this was happening in Canada, the government would already have imposed the Emergencies Act and be actively depriving people of their civil rights across the board. Somehow, this protest is uninteresting to most of the legacy media, but as Brendan O’Neill explains, it is a huge deal:

This strange, sunny week has provided the best proof yet that the West’s elites have taken leave of their senses. That they have fully retreated from reason, and from reality itself. As farmers and workers across the world continue to rise up against the tyrannical consequences of climate-change alarmism, what are the elites doing? Engaging in yet more climate-change alarmism. Wringing their hands over the hot weather and its forewarning, as they see it, of the manmade heat-death of the planet that is apparently just around the corner. They continue to peddle the very politics of eco-dread that is whacking farmers and the working class and storing up problems for us all.

The contrast could not have been more stark. On one side we have farmers everywhere from Ireland to the Netherlands to, of course, Sri Lanka making it as plain as they can that the warped ideology of Net Zero will make it harder for them to produce the food that humanity needs. And on the other side we have the Net Zero fanatics of the upper middle classes continuing to push their dire, destructive green ideology. The heatwave proves we must cut emissions even faster and more severely, they tweet in their breaks from sunning themselves in their spacious gardens, even as farmers tell them that the zealous obsession with cutting emissions will make it harder to grow crops. So this is where we’re at – with a ruling class more invested in fact-lite narratives of apocalypse than in the basic responsibility of a society to make food.

This politics is best understood as luxury apocalypticism. It is clearer than it has been for a very long time that the fantasy of the end of the world, of marauding, industrious mankind polluting itself into oblivion, is something only the well-off and time-rich can afford to indulge. The dream of eco-doom is a simultaneously self-hating and self-serving political narrative. It expresses the elite’s turn against the very modernity they helped to create while also flattering their belief that only they can save us. That only their plans to slash emissions, to cut back on global travel and generally to shrink the “human footprint” can hold Armageddon at bay. The great benefit of the global revolt of farmers and workers is that it is injecting a truth and a realism into public discussion that might just help to push back the luxurious and ruinous ideologies of the new elites.

Everywhere, farmers are saying “Enough”. In the Netherlands farmers have been revolting for weeks against their government’s perverse demands that they slash their use of nitrogen compounds. The Dutch government, under pressure from the EU, has committed itself to cutting its nitrogen emissions in half by 2030. This would entail farmers getting rid of vast numbers of their livestock, crushing their ability to make a living and to produce what needs to be produced. So we have the truly surreal situation where Dutch farmers are protesting in their thousands for the right to feed the people of the Netherlands while the elites of the Netherlands demonise them, harass them and even shoot at them. I can think of no better illustration of the loss of logic and humanity within the modern elites than this strange spectacle.

July 20, 2022

Climate change is nothing new, and it was warmer in England for a few hundred years in the Middle Ages

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Europe, History, Wine — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

If you’ve been reading the blog for a while, you’ll have noticed that I’m not a fan of trying to panic people about climate change … catastrophism just isn’t my thing. I certainly don’t deny that climate change happens and I agree that it is happening now, but I’m highly skeptical that human action has more than a minor influence compared to the ups and downs of long-term climate shifts driven by natural forces. Ed West has a thumbnail sketch of just how much the European (and especially English) climate change impacted ordinary people during the Middle Ages:

Chart from the Journal of Quaternary Science Reviews showing Greenland ice core data over the last 10,000 years. At the end of the Minoan Warming came the Bronze Age Collapse, after the Roman Warming came the fall of the western Roman Empire.

The climate is changing, with all that entails, something we’ve known about for several decades now. Among the early proponents of the theory of climate change was mid-century climatologist Hubert Lamb, who spent most of his career at the Met Office and during the course of his studies made a curious historical discovery.

It was once widely believed that climate remained relatively stable over recorded history, civilisational lifespans being too brief to see such grand changes. But while looking into medieval chroniclers, Lamb was struck by the numerous references to vineyards in England, some as far as the midlands. As long as anyone had ever remembered, the country had been too cold to grow wine, except in tiny pockets of Sussex which occasionally produced almost-drinkable white.

William of Malmesbury, living in the 12th century, observed of his native Wiltshire that “in this region the vines are thicker, the grapes more plentiful and their flavour more delightful than in any other part of England. Those who drink this wine do not have to contort their lips because of the sharp and unpleasant taste, indeed it is little inferior to French wine in sweetness.” How could that have been?

Lamb concluded that Europe must have been considerably warmer during the Middle Ages, and in 1965 produced his great study outlining the theory of the Medieval Warm Period; this posited that Europe was at its hottest in the High Middle Ages (1000-1300) and then became unusually cool between 1500 and 1700.

Since then, Lamb’s thesis has been reinforced by analysis of pollen in peat bogs, as well as the radioactive isotope Carbon-14 found in tree rings (the less sun, the more Carbon-14). In Medieval Europe, every summer was a hot girl summer — and tiny changes could make earth-shattering differences.

The people of Europe enjoyed that extended period of warmer weather for about 300 years, then things suddenly got far worse:

Across Europe, people must have noticed a change. Farmers in the Saastal Valley in Switzerland were probably the first to observe what was happening, back in the 1250s, when the Allalin Glacier began to flow down the mountain. Surviving plant material from Iceland suggests an abrupt decrease in the temperature from 1275 — and, as Rosen points out, a reduction of one degree made a harvest failure seven times more likely. From 1308 England saw four cold winters in succession; the Thames froze, chroniclers recalling dogs chasing rabbits across the icy surface for the first time.

As with many things, change was gradual, until it was dramatic, for then came the disastrous year of 1315. The Chronicle of Guillaume de Nangis, written by a monk at the Abbey of Saint-Denis outside Paris, recorded that in April the rains came down hard — and didn’t stop until August.

Drenched and starved of sunlight, the crops failed across Europe. The price of food doubled and then quadrupled. By May 1316, crop production in England was down by up to 85 percent and there was “most savage, atrocious death”, as a chronicler put it. Hopeless townsfolk walked into the countryside, searching for any bits of food; men wandered across the country to work, only to return and find their wives and children dead from starvation. At one point, on the road near St Albans, no food could be found even for the king. Emaciated bodies could be seen floating face down in flooded fields.

The Great Famine killed anywhere between 5-12% of the European population, although some areas, such as Flanders, suffered far worse death rates, losing up to a quarter of their population to hunger.

Apparently “Crisis-Pregnancy Centers” prey exclusively on young people who menstruate!

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

Chris Bray reveals some of the shocking information a new investigation has turned up about so-called “Crisis-Pregnancy Centers” in the United States:

A quick illustration of the Red-Blue Chasm, the immensity of which can now only be estimated using theories borrowed from astrophysics.

An email message this morning from The Chronicle of Higher Education offers a deep investigative dive into an obscure topic — in a message that barely fit on my screen, so the screenshot is cut off a bit at the top:

Figured that out, did they? Coming soon: “Pizza shops orbit college campuses. Scholars have determined that they offer a bread-like disc strewn with red liquid and white-colored molten coverings”.

The investigation of pregnancy centers proceeds on the kind of dark foreboding that a television show conveys with poor lighting and a low vibration on the soundtrack. Since the reporter didn’t manage to get a single pregnancy center advocate or volunteer on the record, despite sending some email messages, the whole investigation takes all criticism entirely at face value, uncontested and unexamined. That leads to framing like this:

    Some centers target college students. Andrea Swartzendruber, an epidemiologist at the University of Georgia, analyzed the centers’ locations in Georgia and found that they were disproportionately clustered around the state’s colleges and high schools when compared with other health clinics. Swartzendruber and her colleague Danielle Lambert have mapped the locations of more than 2,500 crisis-pregnancy centers across the United States.

Yes, friends, I’m afraid this is the actual dark truth: Pregnancy centers target young women. They don’t target eight year-old boys or the elderly at all! nOw Do YoU SeE tHe hIddEn aGenDa!?!?!?!? THERE’S NOT A SINGLE CRISIS-PREGNANCY CENTER INSIDE A SINGLE RETIREMENT COMMUNITY!!!!!

Anyway, scholars were able to determine this, using sophisticated geospatial analysis.

The story also includes shock-quotes from an actual college student, Hana, who went to a crisis pregnancy center, like this one: “She kept referring to my pregnancy as a baby.”

And then, presumably, they invaded Poland.

July 19, 2022

How dating apps have changed the dating world

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

Rob Henderson on the changes dating sites have accelerated in the dating community:

    “In the United States, 35 percent of Tinder users are college students ages 18 to 24 … ‘I’ve heard a joke on campus that goes something like this: ‘First base is hooking up, second base is talking, third base is going on a date and fourth base is dating’.“ (source).

I am just old enough to remember what the dating scene was like before the rise of Tinder and other dating/hook-up apps. It has changed a lot.

2012 was another world in many ways.

The situation has changed for everyone on the dating market. Even those who don’t use these apps. This is because even for the people who don’t use the apps, they still live in an environment where others use them. Over time, those who don’t use apps must adapt to the preferences and behavior of those who use them. Not the other way around.

One example of how the scene has changed. I have a friend from college. A good-looking guy. He showed me how many women he has matched with: More than 21,000. Twenty-one thousand. Tinder actually identified him as a valuable user early on, and gave him free perks and upgrades. They lifted his radius restrictions. This allowed him to match with even more women. I have another friend. Doesn’t have the best pictures on his profile. But not a bad looking guy. Over roughly the same period of time as my other friend, he has matched with seven women.

Some findings on dating apps:

  • 18 to 25 percent of Tinder users are in a committed relationship.
  • Women aged 23 to 27 are twice as likely to swipe right (“liked”) on a man with a master’s degree compared with a bachelor’s degree.
  • Men swipe right (“liked”) on 62 percent of the women’s profiles they see; women swipe right (“liked”) on only 4.5 percent of the men’s profiles they see.
  • Half of men who use dating apps while in a committed relationship reported having sex with another person they met on a dating app. All women who used dating apps while in a committed relationship reported having sex with another person they met on a dating app.
  • 30 percent of men who use Tinder are married.
  • In terms of attractiveness, the bottom 80% of men are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men.

One way dating apps might be changing the dating scene. People used to have to go out to meet people. And it was costly to lose a relationship partner, in part because of the process involved in meeting someone new. Today, people know that a new partner is a few swipes away. Partners might be more replaceable. If things start deteriorating with their current partner, some can pull out a goldmine in their pocket.

There may be some sexual stratification going on as well. My two friends are examples of the above finding that being slightly more attractive as a man leads to far more matches.

July 18, 2022

John von Neumann, The Man From The Future

Filed under: Books, History, Science — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

One of the readers of Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten has contributed a review of The Man From The Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann by Ananyo Bhattacharya. This is one of perhaps a dozen or so anonymous reviews that Scott publishes every year with the readers voting for the best review and the names of the contributors withheld until after the voting is finished:

John von Neumann invented the digital computer. The fields of game theory and cellular automata. Important pieces of modern economics, set theory, and particle physics. A substantial part of the technology behind the atom and hydrogen bombs. Several whole fields of mathematics I hadn’t previously heard of, like “operator algebras”, “continuous geometry”, and “ergodic theory”.

The Man From The Future, by Ananyo Bhattacharya, touches on all these things. But you don’t read a von Neumann biography to learn more about the invention of ergodic theory. You read it to gawk at an extreme human specimen, maybe the smartest man who ever lived.

By age 6, he could multiply eight-digit numbers in his head. At the same age, he spoke conversational ancient Greek; later, he would add Latin, French, German, English, and Yiddish (sometimes joked about also speaking Spanish, but he would just put “el” before English words and add -o to the end). Rumor had it he memorized everything he ever read. A fellow mathematician once tried to test this by asking him to recite Tale Of Two Cities, and reported that “he immediately began to recite the first chapter and continued until asked to stop after about ten or fifteen minutes”.

A group of scientists encountered a problem that the computers of the day couldn’t handle, and asked von Neumann for advice on designing a new generation of computers that was up to the task. But:

    When the presentation was completed, he scribbled on a pad, stared so blankly that a RAND scientist later said he looked as if “his mind had slipped his face out of gear”, then said “Gentlemen, you do not need the computer. I have the answer.” While the scientists sat in stunned silence, Von Neumann reeled off the various steps which would provide the solution to the problem.

Do these sound a little too much like urban legends? The Tale Of Two Cities story comes straight from the mathematician involved — von Neumann’s friend Herman Goldstine, writing about his experience in The Computer From Pascal to von Neumann. The computer anecdote is of less certain provenance, quoted without attribution in a 1957 obituary in Life. But this is part of the fun of reading von Neumann biographies: figuring out what one can or can’t believe about a figure of such mythic proportions.

This is not really what Bhattacharya is here for. He does not entirely resist gawking. But he is at least as interested in giving us a tour of early 20th century mathematics, framed by the life of its most brilliant practitioner. The book devotes more pages to set theory than to von Neumann’s childhood, and spends more time on von Neumann’s formalization of quantum mechanics than on his first marriage (to be fair, so did von Neumann — hence the divorce).

Still, for those of us who never made their high school math tutors cry with joy at ever having met them (another von Neumann story, this one well-attested), the man himself is more of a draw than his ergodic theory. And there’s enough in The Man From The Future — and in some of the few hundred references it cites — to start to get a coherent picture.

July 17, 2022

Science by press release

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

Christopher Snowden on a media-genic “study” from a few years ago that supported the priors of the anti-alcohol campaigners and thus was given full uncritical media coverage, despite obvious flaws in data selection and methodology:

In 2018, the Lancet published a study from the “Global Burden of Disease Alcohol Collaborators” which claimed that there was no safe level of alcohol consumption. This was widely reported and was naturally welcomed by anti-alcohol campaigners. The BBC reported it under the headline “No alcohol safe to drink, global study confirms”. (Note the cheeky use of the word confirms, despite the finding going against fifty years of evidence.)

The study wasn’t based on any new epidemiology. Instead it took crude, aggregate data from almost every country in the world, mashed it together and attempted to come up with a global risk curve.

As I said at the time:

    The study contains no new evidence and uses an unusual modelling approach based on population-wide data from various online sources. If you look at this massive appendix you can see the kind of data they were using. The figures are extremely crude.

    The authors don’t dispute the benefits of moderate drinking for heart disease but they claim that the benefits are matched by risks from other diseases at low levels of consumption and are outweighed by the risks at higher levels of consumption. Some diseases which have been associated with benefits of drinking, such as dementia, are excluded from the analysis entirely. They also ignore overall mortality, which you might think was kind of important.

A typical risk curve for alcohol consumption and mortality is J-shaped. It looks like this …

But the GBD’s risk curve for “all attributable causes” looked like this…

You will notice that there appears to be no protective effect at moderate rates of consumption in the GBD’s curve. One important reason for this is that they associate alcohol consumption at any level with tuberculosis. Tuberculosis remains a serious health problem in much of the world, but not in Britain. So what relevance does a global risk curve have to us? None.

Moreover, TB is not really an alcohol-related disease and is only viewed as such in this study because (a) drinking might weaken the immune system and (b) people who go to bars and clubs are more likely to catch an infectious disease. I kid you not.

Earlier almost-steam-engine developments

Filed under: Europe, History, Science, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes picks up the story of the development of the steam engine (part one was linked here):

As I explained in Part I, the spark for my investigation was noticing that one Salomon de Caus, as early as 1615, had very probably made what amounts to a solar-powered version of Savery’s engine. By concentrating the sun’s rays on trapped air above the water in copper vessels, the resulting expansion of the trapped air and steam drove the water up a pipe to make a fountain flow. Most crucially of all, however, when the vessels cooled again they sucked water up and into them from a cistern below — a principle that de Caus also applied to having statues make music when the sun shone, and which he hinted may be useful for other things too.

Noticing this machine was a big shock to me, but de Caus’s invention was not even that original. It was actually an improvement of another, almost entirely ignored device described by Hero of Alexandria as early as the 1st Century, and which Hero in turn derived from one Philo of Byzantium who wrote in the 3rd Century BC.

Philo’s original device was very simple: a hollow leaden sphere with a bent tube rising out of it and into some water at the bottom of a jug. As the sun heated the sphere, the expanding air was pushed up the tube and into the jug’s water, escaping by bubbling out of the water. And crucially, when the sphere was removed from the sun and allowed to cool, the water was then drawn up the tube and into the sphere — Philo, about 1,900 years before Savery, had already encapsulated in a simple model the power of condensation to raise water.

Philo’s device was simple, but the principles it illustrated do appear to have been applied. Hero’s work, for example, includes a libas, or “dripper” fountain. In this alternative version of Philo’s apparatus, Hero connected the jug and sphere by two other pipes to a cistern underneath, as well as starting with some water already in the sphere. The jug now acted more like a funnel, into which the original bent tube now dripped its water like a fountain when the sun shone on the sphere. When cooled, however, the sphere replenished itself from the cistern underneath. It was almost exactly like de Caus’s version, which merely improved the strength of the fountain when it was heated, seemingly by replacing the lead with more heat-conductive copper and by using glass convex lenses to concentrate the sun’s rays.

Hero’s solar-powered dripping fountain doesn’t sound all that impressive, but both Philo and Hero appreciated the wider potential of its underlying principles.

Philo, for example, noted that it might make use of alternative heat sources: he described how his apparatus would work whether pouring hot water over the sphere, or by heating it over a fire. Once it cooled, it would always draw the water up.

Hero even suggested a mechanical use for the effect. By setting a fire on a hollow, airtight altar, the heated air within would flow down a tube into a sphere full of water, which in turn would be pushed up another tube into a hanging bucket. The bucket, when sufficiently heavy with water, would then pull on a rope to open some temple doors. Crucially, when the fire was extinguished, Hero noted that the cooling of the air in the altar would draw the water back into the sphere again, lighten the bucket, and so allow the doors to be closed by a counterweight. Although the condensing phase was really just for resetting the device, the fundamental ideas behind a Savery engine were already there: it raised water, used a fuel, and exploited condensation. It even did some light mechanical work.

July 16, 2022

Declarations of faith in the Church of Scientism

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

Chris Bray points out the hard-to-miss similarities between traditional religious beliefs and the modern beliefs of the congregations of the Church of Scientism:

Christian churches tend the bust out the HE IS RISEN banner on Easter Sunday, and here’s a version of the central declaration of faith from another religion, the Church of Scientism:

“We stand by science, so we stand by the vaccine.” These hang from every lamppost on the sizeable campus of a major research hospital in Los Angeles, an identical recitation of faith that appears before the eyes of the medical pilgrim every thirty steps or so. You can chant it in a rhythm, if you’re so inclined, as ye performest thine Stations of the Vaccine. The true penitent will park on Robertson, to walk past the maximum number of signs, but mark ye the parking restrictions, for the ways of Los Angeles parking enforcement are cruel, and many are they who suffer the penalties.

If this isn’t a declaration of a faith, then what is it? The call and response, the this-therefore-this:

Priest: Because of science, we save lives every day.

Congregation: We stand by science, so we stand by the vaccines.

You can hear the chanting in your head, can’t you? The repetition, the delivery of a mantra in a form that allows you to perceive it, and perceive it, and perceive it, and perceive it yet again before ye makest thine turn onto San Vicente. When you say it often and identically, it wears grooves; it patterns the dailiness of life with the avenues of belief. It’s Benedictine Scientism.

Or, you know, not. My bet is that most people never notice these signs, or never notice them twice, but the choice to make them and to display them is compellingly bizarre and creepy. I wish I could have witnessed the meeting of medical administrators that led to that choice, because I’m fairly confident that it played like a Paddy Chayefsky movie IRL.

I’ve been reminded over and over this week how important Substack has become. This absolute must read post from el gato malo discusses the complete implosion of popular trust in the mRNA injections, from the sharp decline in booster uptake to the “that parrot is dead” numbers regarding mRNA uptake in children under the age of five. Flatly, people aren’t taking this shit anymore, and they’re for damn sure not having it injected into their children.

QotD: No, your baby isn’t racist

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

Look, it’s not even racial, but it is tribal. Because human beings are tribal. By evolution and inclination, humans associate most with people they’re used to, and they feel safe amid a small number of people they know well.

The insanity of all the “your baby is racist” studies is thinking that babies prefer people who look like THEM. This is not the case. They prefer people who look like those they identify as parents. Take a Chinese baby, at birth, and have him raised by Maori and they’ll react badly to people who look Chinese. Think of it in terms of the band of human (or pre-humans.) If a baby found himself amid a group that didn’t look like its caretakers chances were it was dead and/or lunch. Sending up a distress signal in the form of wailing is its only hope its caretakers will come and rescue it. (“It” because I’m including pre-humans. This applies — with bells on — to baby chimps, btw, who are just human-adjacent.)

Sarah Hoyt, “They’re Out To Get You”, According to Hoyt, 2019-04-09.

July 13, 2022

Creating an American Homo Sovieticus

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

Chris Bray has had to visit a large urban hospital frequently in the last little while and he’s noticed just how readily some people have adapted to the pandemic world situation:

A large urban hospital (not the one Chris is talking about here).
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Observers of the Soviet Union noted the presence of Homo Sovieticus, the species adapted to the culture: “a double-thinking, suspicious and fearful conformist with no morality”. It seems fairly clear that the Blue Zones are birthing a version of this creature, well accustomed to a life centered on compliance rituals and the production of the Required Documents™.

But Soviet subjects usually found a layered response to the compliance culture, with backdoor deals and systems of baksheesh. Factories and offices evolved a set of people who learned the skills of a fixer, greasing supply chains and easing problems with a little something for your family. I just happen to have a couple of extra cartons of cigarettes, friend, and about that delayed shipment of ball bearings …

So one of the things that’s interesting about Large Urban Hospital, where the rules are the rules and I’m sorry, sir, that’s our policy, is that the rules aren’t entirely the rules, and the luck of the personnel draw sets your course. I already know the helpful front desk check-in staff — Hi, welcome back! — and I already know which one scowls at the computer, and asks if you’re sure you cleared your visit in advance, and says she’s going to need to make a few phone calls to check on your paperwork, and I need to see those test results again (she says, pulling on her scowling at documents glasses). Checking in at the lobby desk can take thirty seconds, or it can take ten minutes; it can be miserable and hostile, or it can be relatively pleasant and human. But in both cases, the person behind the computer, and the people who put them there and provide them with the systems that govern their work, believe that the work is standardized, and everyone at the check-in desk is enforcing the rules.

We have literally insane systems of ritual behavior, but within those systems we have people who are still people, and people who have very much embraced the compliance behaviors. There are dehumanizing institutions, and holy shit are there people who like it.

July 12, 2022

“Misrepresentation, exaggeration, cherry picking or outright lying … in support of the theory of imminent catastrophic global warming”

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

Y’know, the folks at The Daily Sceptic really need to tell us what they think instead of cloaking their opinions in euphemisms:

Two top-level American atmospheric scientists have dismissed the peer review system of current climate science literature as “a joke”. According to Emeritus Professors William Happer and Richard Lindzen, “it is pal review, not peer review”. The two men have had long distinguished careers in physics and atmospheric science. “Climate science is awash with manipulated data, which provides no reliable scientific evidence,” they state.

No reliable scientific evidence can be provided either by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), they say, which is “government-controlled and only issues government dictated findings”. The two academics draw attention to an IPCC rule that states all summaries for policymakers are approved by governments. In their opinion, these summaries are “merely government opinions”. They refer to the recent comments on climate models by the atmospheric science professor John Christy from the University of Alabama, who says that, in his view, recent climate model predictions “fail miserably to predict reality”, making them “inappropriate” to use in predicting future climate changes.

The “miserable failure” is graphically displayed below. Since the observations cut-off, global temperatures have again paused.

Particular scorn is poured on global surface temperature datasets. Happer and Lindzen draw attention to a 2017 paper by Dr. James Wallace and others that elaborated on how over the last several decades, “NASA and NOAA have been fabricating temperature data to argue that rising CO2 levels have led to the hottest year on record”. The false and manipulated data are said to be an “egregious violation of scientific method”. The Wallace authors also looked at the Met Office HadCRUT database and found all three surface datasets made large historical adjustments and removed cyclical temperature patterns. This was “totally inconsistent” with other temperature data, including satellites and meteorological balloons, they said. Readers will recall that the Daily Sceptic has reported extensively on these issues of late and has attracted a number of somewhat footling “fact checks”.

Happer and Lindzen summarise: “Misrepresentation, exaggeration, cherry picking or outright lying pretty much covers all the so-called evidence marshalled in support of the theory of imminent catastrophic global warming caused by fossil fuels and CO2.”

July 6, 2022

The ongoing protests by Dutch farmers demand your attention

Filed under: Environment, Europe, Government, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Protests in many countries in the western world can get violent and even be claimed (by the targets of the protest) to be “insurrections”, but protests in the Netherlands always have more of an edge to them than elsewhere, because when the Dutch really get angry they have, in the past, gone so far as to kill AND EAT their prime minister. The current protests haven’t gone that far yet, but politicians should keep in mind that Dutch farmers can react primally to being treated in the way the Soviets treated the kulaks:

This is really important – you know, on the level of “pay attention or your food supply is next”.

We reported last week that Dutch farmers were attacking government vehicles, blocking roads, and dumping manure on government buildings in response to a new “climate” policy that shut down numerous family farms because their cows were farting too much.

These farmers are now banned from working their own land to feed their families.

Let me explain what’s happening and why it is of the utmost importance as I randomly drop in videos of what the Dutch farmers are doing to keep your attention.

Unelected elites at the World Economic Forum, World Bank, United Nations, and BlackRock think us little people are rodents that are polluting the Earth, and that it’s their job to cull us and tame us so we can follow their smartypants amazingness into what is obviously a glorious future.

These elites get corporations to fall in line by promoting “Environmental-Social-Governance” metrics (a scorecard, if you will) that shows how many woke policies a company is adopting. Do they have a climate pledge? Are they hiring based on skin color, gender, and sexual fetish? Do they fly a rainbow flag over their headquarters? Do they have at least a few dozen “equity” executives to make sure everyone is a good little Marxist?

Companies lose customers by joining this radical, perverse cult, but they get access to the trillions of dollars represented by the elites and the corrupt organizations, from the WEF to the WHO to the mega-investment firms. They don’t care if you boycott them because they are expecting to simply outlast you.

The elites then get governments to fall in line by lobbying, pushing big money into local elections, and taking over school boards and classrooms to ensure good little disciples are being churned out to vote for the right people. They get young people riled up, telling them the planet is burning and that unarmed black men are yelling “Hands up, don’t shoot!” while being gunned down by racist white cops in the streets. Good people watch as their cities burn and politicians bail out the rioters.

July 4, 2022

(Very expensive) roads, bridges, and railways to nowhere

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Government, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Palladium, Brian Balkus wonders why American can’t build anything any more:

Construction of the Fresno River Viaduct in January 2016. The bridge is the first permanent structure being constructed as part of California High-Speed Rail. The BNSF Railway bridge is visible in the background.
Photo by the California High-Speed Rail Authority via Wikimedia Commons.

Sepulveda’s cost and schedule overrun aren’t even the worst of it. Just as unattainable as a shortened commute is the Californian dream of building a bullet train that could take you from Los Angeles to San Francisco in under three hours. In 2008, a year before the Sepulveda project began, the state tried to turn this dream into a reality after voters approved a 512-mile high-speed rail (HSR) project. Amid failing overseas wars and financial crises, at the time it could’ve become a symbol of renewal not just for California but the entire country. Instead, it came to exemplify a dysfunctional government that lacks the capacity to build.

At the time California began accelerating the development of its HSR system it only had 10 employees dedicated to overseeing what was the most expensive infrastructure project in U.S. history. It ended up 14 years (and counting) behind schedule and $44 billion over budget. Incredibly, the state has not laid a single mile of track and it still lacks 10 percent of the land parcels it needs to do so. Half of the project still hasn’t achieved the environmental clearance needed to begin construction. The dream of a Japanese-style bullet train crisscrossing the state is now all but dead due to political opposition, litigation, and a lack of funding.

Despite its failure, the HSR project inaugurated the U.S.’s megaproject era. Once a rare type of project, by 2018 megaprojects comprised 33 percent of the value of all U.S. construction project starts. An alarming number of these have spiraled out of control for many of the same reasons that killed the California bullet train. The decade that followed the financial crisis was a kind of inflection point in the industry; this was when construction projects became noticeably worse and when the long-term implications could no longer be ignored. One of the most cited studies of the U.S.’s declining ability to build reviewed 180 transit megaprojects across the country, revealing that today, U.S. projects take longer to complete and cost nearly 50 percent more on average than those in Europe and Canada.

Having joined Kiewit in 2010, I witnessed these changes first-hand. I have since moved on, but have remained in the broader industry, including working on what are called “strategic pursuits” — the process by which companies compete for megaprojects. This experience has provided insight into the mechanics of how these projects are awarded and why they so frequently fail.

Even if the construction had proceded close to schedule, the economic justification for California’s high speed rail line was never strong … and it’s unlikely the service would have come close to breaking even. It almost certainly would have added significant ongoing costs to Californian taxpayers, and due to the nature of high speed rail services, been effectively a subsidy from working-class Californians to the laptop elites of Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area.

All of that, however, are merely additional reasons to believe the project was doomed from inception. Broadly speaking, all major infrastructure projects in the United States are struggling with paperwork and compliance requirements mostly driven by state and federal environmental regulations passed with the best possible intentions (as the saying goes):

Sepulveda’s numerous lawsuits and stakeholder conflicts are an example of a phenomenon that can be traced back to the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in 1969. NEPA mandates developers to provide environmental impact statements before they can obtain the permits necessary for construction on huge swathes of infrastructure.

Shortly following the passage of NEPA, California’s then-governor Ronald Reagan signed the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) into law, which required additional environmental impact analysis. Unlike NEPA, it requires adopting all feasible measures to mitigate these impacts. Interest groups wield CEQA and NEPA like weapons. One study found that 85 percent of CEQA lawsuits were filed by groups with no history of environmental advocacy. The NIMBY attitude of these groups has crippled the ability of California to build anything. As California Governor Gavin Newsom succinctly put it, “NIMBYism is destroying the state”.

It is also destroying the U.S.’s ability to build nationally. The economist Eli Dourado reported in The New York Times that “per-mile spending on the Interstate System of Highways tripled between the 1960’s and 1980’s.” This directly correlates with the passage of NEPA. If anything, the problem has gotten worse over time. Projects receiving funding through the $837 billion stimulus plan passed by Congress in the aftermath of the financial crises were subject to over 192,000 NEPA reviews.

The NEPA/CEQA process incentivizes the public agencies to seek what is often termed a “bulletproof” environmental compliance document to head off future legal challenges. This takes time, with the average EIS taking 4.5 years to complete. Some have taken longer than a decade. A cottage industry of consultants is devoted to completing these documents, earning themselves millions in fees.

July 1, 2022

Trust “the experts”

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

Chris Bray on the appalling track record of so many of our modern-day “experts”:

So the public health experts are baffled by the consistent failure of their predictive models, and the economic experts are baffled by the consistent failure of their predictive models. It’s like a chef who keeps trying to grill a steak, only to find that he’s burnt another lemon pie. “I SWEAR TO GOD I THOUGHT THIS ONE WAS A BEEF THING.”

These people aren’t stupid, but they’re stupid in practice because they show up to the game with the weight of what they know people in their position are supposed to say and think. Fashionable experts, in-group leaders in their status-compliant position in a field, aren’t reviewing the evidence — ever — but are instead reviewing a performative checklist dotted with social status land mines.

They’re on a team, so they say the team slogans.

[…]

If that’s how expertise works, we no longer have have any. We have actors who play the brow-furrowing expert role, but have no real job beyond intoning the message of the day. It says on this card that we recommend even more Covid vaccines for everyone. Let’s break for lunch!

But, mercifully, that’s not invariably how expertise works. And this is why politicians and trend-policing media figures are so completely baffled by experts like Robert Malone or Ryan Cole, or Geert Vanden Bossche or Clare Craig or Peter McCullough, experts who follow the evidence wherever it goes. Tone and social reception tells you a lot: Does an expert say things that aren’t comforting, that sound a little … not on the team? That person clears the first barrier, and you can start assessing the specifics of what they say. Look for journalists who are offended and triggered, and try to find the person who hurt their feelings. That person may turn out to be wrong, but he won’t turn out to be Paul Krugman wrong.

June 30, 2022

What’s the military version of the saying “Get woke, go broke”?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Health, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray on the largely self-inflicted damage suffered by the US Army during the last few years, leading to (among other things) significant recruiting shortfalls:

The American military is running a social trust test for the larger society, and the results are remarkably clear.

Remember that the Biden administration opened with an ideological assault on the armed forces, ordering a training stand-down to harangue servicemembers about politics.

[…]

While the public framing was vague, the training wasn’t: It ran in a single direction. Servicemembers reporting on their “extremism” training to members of Congress described sessions in which the military warned them against white nationalism and the dangers of far-right sentiment, but didn’t mention Antifa (or ISIS, but whatever), hammering the January 6 narrative but deflecting questions about riots and arson in the summer of 2020. In uniform, troops did “privilege walks” and unpacked their white privilege in supervised discussions. Extremism, it turns out, is only one kind of thing, on a single end of the political spectrum.

Pursuing the theme of politically purified armed forces, three retired US Army generals published an op-ed in the Washington Post calling for a political commissariat in the American military: “In addition, all military branches must undertake more intensive intelligence work at all installations. The goal should be to identify, isolate and remove potential mutineers; guard against efforts by propagandists who use misinformation to subvert the chain of command; and understand how that and other misinformation spreads across the ranks after it is introduced by propagandists.” More domestic political spying will make our institutions healthy, they explained.

[…]

The result of woke leadership, politicized military service, Covid vaccine mandates that decline to take safety concerns and religious objections into account, and wars fought for no point or objective:

[…]

And a generation shrugs.

The military is only the most obvious, most centralized example of a burgeoning withdrawal from institutions crippled by lost trust. Nationwide, undergraduate college enrollment declined by 662,000 in a single year. Meanwhile, public school enrollment in California is imploding. The LAUSD, which was closing in on 800,000 students twenty years ago, is now moving in the other direction, and closing in on 400,000.

Institutions can shit on people, and push them past their limits, and make absurd and unkind demands of them. Until they can’t.

There will be more of this.

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