… Is there, in fact, more lunacy in the Current Year, or is it just louder? He argued that there’s more. I argue that there’s not. Victorians, for instance, were world-class eccentrics. Just to stick with the breakfast cereal theme, consider that Kellogg’s corn flakes were based on some weird theory of digestion that was designed to combat the scourge of masturbation. No, really — the Sylvester Graham referenced in that article is the guy behind graham crackers, which were designed for similar reasons. See also “Fletcherism”, which counted Thomas Edison among its adherents. And that’s just food! Water, electricity, magnetism, you name it, there’s some weird Victorian health fad attached to it. Throw in the peccadilloes, sexual and otherwise, of just the widespread missionary movements, and you’ve got all the crazy you can handle, and then some.
Contrast this to the Current Year, where, much like breakfast food, what seems to be a bewildering variety of lunacy can be boiled down to just a few basic types. “Wokeness” is a madlib with just two variables: ____ is either racist or sexist, pick one. (I suppose you can combine them, but you’ll notice that doesn’t happen nearly as often as you’d predict, because the blacks hate the gays and the feminists hate everyone, so going full retard ends up getting you in a lot of trouble with your coreligionists).
Severian, “Mail Bag / Grab Bag”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-11.
June 15, 2024
QotD: Is there more craziness these days or is it just the volume turned up to 11?
June 10, 2024
The FDA has a jaundiced view of psychotherapy involving the use of MDMA (aka “Ecstasy”)
Colby Cosh indulges in a minor “I told you so” after the FDA’s expert panel recommended against the agency permitting any medical use of MDMA, despite some experiments indicating it does have therapeutic value:
Ball-and-stick model of the 3,4-methylenedioxy-methamphetamine molecule, also known as MDMA, or ecstasy, a well-known psychoactive drug. Based on the crystal structure of MDMA hydrochloride, as determined by X-ray diffraction.
Color code: Carbon, C: black, Hydrogen, H: white, Oxygen, O: red, Nitrogen, N: blue.
Image by Jynto via Wikimedia Commons.
Hopes for research into therapeutic uses of psychedelic drugs received a setback last week, one that your correspondent saw tripping (geddit?) up the road in advance. An expert panel published its official advice to the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on permitting medical use of MDMA, the synthetic nightclub enhancer that we’re afraid the kids probably still aren’t calling “ecstasy” or “molly”.
There is long-recognized potential for MDMA to be combined with classical psychotherapy in treating emotional disorders, notably post-traumatic stress (PTSD), and now there are some small, limited studies showing evidence of positive effects.
But the FDA’s scientists weren’t very impressed with this evidence, and they voted almost unanimously against creating a therapeutic exception to the illegality of ecstasy, which the U.S. Controlled Substances Act classifies as a “Schedule 1” drug, right next to heroin. The panel’s advice isn’t binding on the agency, which is crawling in somewhat good faith toward recognizing the understudied medical potential of psychedelics. But the vote emphasizes the inherent problems that drugs face, once they are defined in law as “recreational”, in winning over skeptical scientists.
Reason magazine’s great drug-war correspondent Jacob Sullum has a thorough discussion of the issues. The existing research, despite some impressive headline results, has garden-variety issues with dropout rates, follow-ups and occasional researcher shenanigans. But the big problem, which defies easy technical solution, is with scientific blinding of the research subjects.
Scientific trials of the modern kind are predicated upon separating illusory placebo effects from genuine treatment effects. Researchers expect that a high-quality study will have a control group that receives sham treatment or none at all, and good practice requires that experimenters and their guinea pigs are both blind to who is in what group.
News flash: most people can tell whether they’ve been really given a psychedelic drug. Indeed, most doctors can tell whether they’ve given a patient a genuine psychedelic drug, and how much of it. Many placebo-controlled trials on psychoactive drugs, perhaps most of them, thus suffer from an alleged problem of broken blinding. (Have a glance, for example, at Table 2 in this review of blinding procedures in psychedelic studies.)
June 8, 2024
Eco-terrorism – it’s all over Canada
Elizabeth Nickson on the strong likelihood of any given wildfire in Canada being not just man-made but deliberately set for political reasons:
“Forest fire” by Ervins Strauhmanis is licensed under CC BY 2.0 
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A Google Earth satellite video is making the rounds on twitter. it shows the moment an arc of fires began in northern Quebec, the smoke rising. It looks like people calculated the prevailing winds so that the smoke would blow south. Then connected via sat phone, they lit them. It’s another psy-op from our gracious overlords. We aren’t afraid enough, despite every nasty limiting idiotic play they have visited upon us in the last four years. Monkey Pox failed, more plague warnings were greeted by a shrug. But this one, the world bursting into flame? Be very very afraid.
Justin Trudeau lost no time in announcing that the fires were from “climate change” and the carbon tax, which is impoverishing everyone not in government or on lush pensions, is just the beginning of the restrictions he must institute or we are all gonna die.
The stupidity and cruelty of this is almost unimaginable. But fires have worked over and over again to terrify people into quiescence. The rumours that they were deliberate were the stuff of fantasy until people started getting arrested. Alberta shows that almost 60 percent of fires in that province are human caused. And in Canada, as of today, we have arrested dozens. They will be released, their bails paid by a high-priced lawyer because most of them act as agents of the hyper-rich, paid through a cascade of environmental NGOs. The richest people among us are burning the forests in order to force compliance.
When I moved back to the country 20 years ago, the movement adopted me because I was writing for the Globe and Mail and Harper’s Magazine. I interviewed hundreds of local activists, the ones who, with the inspiration of RFK, Jr. had shut down the biggest industrial forest in the world in an action called “The War of the Woods“. They were mostly ordinary people, socialists and scientists of one stripe or another and deeply profoundly committed to saving the earth. The fact that they had eliminated the principal source of funding for health care and education — forestry — their own in fact, went right over their heads. It didn’t matter. “Climate Change” was an existential threat and those trees must stand to suck up “carbon”, or CO2, as it used to be known.
I met Denis Hayes too, the founder of Earth Day, head of the Bullitt Foundation in Seattle, founded by the heiresses to Weyerhaeuser. He excitedly told me how he created the storm of protest that led to Bill Clinton shutting down the western forests of the U.S., during the same period that Clinton was giving away American manufacturing to China. The result was devastation in forested communities from northern California to the Canadian border. Hayes, a tall, attractive Ivy Leaguer married to a woman whose father won a Nobel in chemistry, slithers through every institution. When I hung out with him, his target was Bill Gates’ climate initiatives and clearly, he has succeeded.
His “work” turned the forests into a tinderbox. Today, the 9th of June, 2023, a full thirty years too late, the Wall Street Journal editorial board finally acknowledges that sustainable forestry management may be the principal cause of the forests burning down. Holly Fretwell, a fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center, and professor at Montana State, gives, in this book, a thoroughgoing analysis of how wrong-headed and destructive “green” has been in the forests. Also this book by me, and a follow-up policy paper, also by me. These were not popular opinions, but they were, in fact, right. It is not “climate change” burning down the forests, it is government in the hands of brutal greens, in pursuit of an impossible goal.
May 30, 2024
QotD: Is a “Pickup Artist” just an amateur method actor performing “fake it until you make it” drills?
Which forces us to consider a second question: How much of Game’s “success” is just practice? I’d wager very long money that no one, in the history of seduction, has ever said “I hit on fifteen girls a day, but I never seem to get anywhere”. And that of course is the very first thing the Game gurus have you do — just approach girls, dozens of them every day. Practice any skill for an hour a day and you’re bound to get a lot better pretty quickly. If you stink at golf, for instance, go hit a bucket of balls every day after work; in a month you’ll be dramatically better than you were, even if — make that especially if — you were terrible to start with.
Then throw in the marketing-style success rate. A 5% sales increase might not seem that big, but it’s millions of dollars. So, too, “scoring with 5% of your approaches” is a stunning success rate compared to 0%, especially since, you know, it’s sex, which our culture has taught us is the only meaningful standard.
Finally, though I will cheerfully admit to never having been a PUA, or anything close to it, I’ve read a fair amount of their stuff, and it seems to me that what they’re teaching is “how to fake self-confidence”, which is to say, they’re teaching Method acting. The theory is that you “fake it ’til you make it” — that is, by acting self-confident at all times, eventually you’ll really be self-confident. That virtue is as virtue does, and vice versa, goes back at least to Aristotle, so I’m certainly not going to argue with it. I’m simply going to point out that self-confidence, though of course very real, is more than just a set of behaviors, though our culture makes it very difficult to distinguish the two … and, worse, makes both of them very difficult to distinguish from “just being an asshole”.
Severian, “Mental Middlemen II: Sex and the City and Self-Confidence”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-06.
May 26, 2024
“Naked ‘gobbledygook sandwiches’ got past peer review, and the expert reviewers didn’t so much as blink”
Jo Nova on the state of play in the (scientifically disastrous) replication crisis and the ethics-free “churnals” that publish junk science:
Proving that unpaid anonymous review is worth every cent, the 217 year old Wiley science publisher “peer reviewed” 11,300 papers that were fake, and didn’t even notice. It’s not just a scam, it’s an industry. Naked “gobbledygook sandwiches” got past peer review, and the expert reviewers didn’t so much as blink.
Big Government and Big Money has captured science and strangled it. The more money they pour in, the worse it gets. John Wiley and Sons is a US $2 billion dollar machine, but they got used by criminal gangs to launder fake “science” as something real.
Things are so bad, fake scientists pay professional cheating services who use AI to create papers and torture the words so they look “original”. Thus a paper on “breast cancer” becomes a discovery about “bosom peril” and a “naïve Bayes” classifier became a “gullible Bayes”. An ant colony was labeled an “underground creepy crawly state”.
And what do we make of the flag to clamor ratio? Well, old fashioned scientists might call it “signal to noise”. The nonsense never ends.
A “random forest” is not always the same thing as an “irregular backwoods” or an “arbitrary timberland” — especially if you’re writing a paper on machine learning and decision trees.
The most shocking thing is that no human brain even ran a late-night Friday-eye over the words before they passed the hallowed peer review and entered the sacred halls of scientific literature. Even a wine-soaked third year undergrad on work experience would surely have raised an eyebrow when local average energy became “territorial normal vitality”. And when a random value became an “irregular esteem”. Let me just generate some irregular esteem for you in Python?
If there was such a thing as scientific stand-up comedy, we could get plenty of material, not by asking ChatGPT to be funny, but by asking it to cheat. Where else could you talk about a mean square mistake?
Wiley — a mega publisher of science articles has admitted that 19 journals are so worthless, thanks to potential fraud, that they have to close them down. And the industry is now developing AI tools to catch the AI fakes (makes you feel all warm inside?)
Fake studies have flooded the publishers of top scientific journals, leading to thousands of retractions and millions of dollars in lost revenue. The biggest hit has come to Wiley, a 217-year-old publisher based in Hoboken, N.J., which Tuesday will announce that it is closing 19 journals, some of which were infected by large-scale research fraud.
In the past two years, Wiley has retracted more than 11,300 papers that appeared compromised, according to a spokesperson, and closed four journals. It isn’t alone: At least two other publishers have retracted hundreds of suspect papers each. Several others have pulled smaller clusters of bad papers.
Although this large-scale fraud represents a small percentage of submissions to journals, it threatens the legitimacy of the nearly $30 billion academic publishing industry and the credibility of science as a whole.
May 25, 2024
Fathers of Light and Darkness – Rockets and Explosives – Sabaton History 126 [Official]
Sabaton History
Published Feb 7, 2024There are many inventors whose creations have been turned into weapons of war. A couple that really stand out are Alfred Nobel and Wernher von Braun. Today we’ll take a deep dive into their stories and the paradox of using destructive weapons for good, or creative weapons for destruction.
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May 24, 2024
Bernie Sanders finally finds a group of rich people who he thinks shouldn’t have to pay
As Tim Worstall points out, Bernie Sanders’ latest campaign is starkly at odds with his usual “make the rich pay” schtick:
“Bernie Sanders” by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 
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It’s possible to think that Bernie Sanders, Senator that he is, is more than a little confused. Well, he’d not be the first elderly politician to suffer that fate. Nor the first socialist. It is necessary for me to be fair here though — one of his honeymoons he took in the Soviet Union. Which makes perfect sense to me — after all, there was bugger all else to do there other than your own wife.
However, here we’ve got him complaining about the cost of the new miracle drugs:
Bernie Sanders has urged Denmark to rein in its most valuable company, Novo Nordisk, and force it to slash prices on popular weight loss and diabetes treatments Ozempic and Wegovy, taking his fight to lower “outrageously high” drug prices in the United States to the company’s doorstep as its profits soar amid ongoing struggles to meet booming appetite for the revolutionary drugs.
Hmm, dunno how well that’s going to work with the Danes really. Yes, to some extent they’re milder than when they tried to rape and pillage the entirety of Europe but not wholly. My brother worked out in Afghanistan (feeding the troops) and he had a Danish unit rotate through. So he tells me their senior sergeant type carried a double bladed axe on his backpack — it didn’t come back clean from every patrol either. They’re not all equality and gender rights these days, you know?
So, we can imagine a certain portion at least of the Danish population celebrating this rapine of Medicare’s pockets by the simple expedient of selling a weight loss drug that actually works — which is, when we come to think of it, something of an innovation. Fen-Fen didn’t work after all. Hey, you know, Vinland failed but we’ll get ’em this time? We’re charging high prices because we can?
A second pass at the argument would be that the drugs are in fact incredibly cheap. When it was shown that the same drug — semaglutide — works in stopping (that’s “stopping” as in ceased, stopped, dead, like Bernie’s career would if it were ever proven he had taken part in an act of voluntary capitalism) chronic kidney disease. So much so that the very day they announced the trials on the drug were being stopped a year early, so obvious was the success, the share prices of all the dialysis provision companies dropped 20 and 30%. That is, at near whatever price, this drug is a money saver. Which is, you know, good. J Foreigner turns up with this thing that saves America, Americans, lives and money and yet Bernie whines — so like a socialist, eh? Capitalism with markets makes us the humans who are living highest on the hog, ever, but they really never do stop whining about it, do they?
But Bernie’s real complaint is that Americans are paying more to burn off the cheeseburgers than everyone else has to. But from everything else Bernie says about anything at all this is at it should be — the rich should pay.
Back to our basics. The basic drug development problem is that the development of a drug is a public goods problem. It costs $2 billion to get a drug through the FDA and gain approval to actually sell it. Yes, of course we should slaughter much of the regulation that makes it cost that much (personally, against character type, I only recommend capture and humane release for the actual bureaucrats) but that’s another matter. It does. But if everyone can just copy the drug at that point then no one will spend $2 billion. So, OK, patents, so the developers have a decade (the patent is two decades, it takes a decade to gain approval) to make their $2 billion back then anyone can copy it. The price falls to manufacturing cost plus normal profit level and we’re about as good as we can get. This is not a perfect system but for mass market drugs it’s about as good as we’re going to get.
May 22, 2024
Scott Alexander reviews The Others Within Us
At Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander discusses teh new hawtness in psychotherapy as expounded in Robert Falconer’s new book The Others Within Us:
Internal Family Systems, the hot new1 psychotherapy, has a secret.
“Hot new psychotherapy” might sound dismissive. It’s not. There’s always got to be one. The therapy that’s getting all the buzz, curing all the incurable patients, rocking those first few small studies. The therapy that was invented by a grizzled veteran therapist working with Patients Like You, not the out-of-touch elites behind all the other therapies. The therapy that Really Gets To The Root Of The Problem. There’s always got to be one, and now it’s IFS.
Sufficiently new and popular therapies are hard to get. Therapist training starts slow – the founder has to train the second generation of therapists, the second generation has to train the third generation, and so on. IFS says they have a 10,000 person wait list for their training program. So lots of people have heard great things about IFS, maybe read a manual or two, but never tried it or met anyone who has.
What I gather from the manuals: IFS is about working with “parts”. You treat your mind as containing a Self — a sort of perfect angelic intellect without any flaws or mental illnesses — and various Parts — little sub-minds with their own agendas who can sometimes occlude or overwhelm the Self. During therapy, you talk to the Parts, learn their motives, and bargain with them.
For example, you might identify a Part of you that wants to sabotage your relationships. You will visualize and name it — maybe you call her Sabby, and she looks like a snake. You talk to Sabby, and learn that after your first break-up, when you decided you never wanted to feel that level of pain again, you unconsciously created her and ordered her to make sure you never got close enough to anyone else to get hurt. Then you and the therapist come up with some plan to satisfy Sabby — maybe you convince her that you’re older now, and better able to deal with pain, and you won’t blame her if you get close to someone and have to break up again. Then you see a vision of Sabby stepping aside, maybe turning off the Windmill Of Relationship Sabotage or something like that, and then you never sabotage your relationships again. It’s more complicated than that, but that’s the core.
All of this is the classic version everyone learns from the manual. Before we get to the secret, let’s examine two big assumptions in more detail.
First, this isn’t supposed to be just the therapist walking you through guided imagery, or you making up a story you tell yourself. The therapist asks you “Look inside until you find the part that’s sabotaging your relationship”, and you are supposed to discover — not invent, discover — that your unconscious gives it the form of a snake called Sabby. And you are supposed to hear as in a trance — again, not invent — Sabby telling you that she’s been protecting you from heartbreak since your last breakup. When you bargain with Sabby, it’s a two-way negotiation. You learn — not decide — whether or not Sabby agrees to any given bargain. According to Internal Family Systems (which descends from normal family systems, ie family therapy where the whole family is there at once and has to compromise with each other), all this stuff really is in your mind, waiting for an IFS therapist to discover it. When Carl Jung talked about interacting with the archetypes or whatever, he wasn’t being metaphorical. He literally meant “go into a trance that gives you a sort of waking lucid dream where you meet all this internal stuff”.
(After reading the IFS manuals, I tried most of their tricks for initiating this sort of trance and meeting Sabby or whoever. I got nothing. I notice most of the patients with great results are severely traumatized borderlines, ie the same people who often get multiple personality disorder after the slightest hint from a therapist that this might happen. We’ll get back to this analogy later.)
The second assumption is that everything inside your mind is part of you, and everything inside your mind is good. You might think of Sabby as some kind of hostile interloper, ruining your relationships with people you love. But actually she’s a part of your unconscious, which you have in some sense willed into existence, looking out for your best interests. You neither can nor should fight her. If you try to excise her, you will psychically wound yourself. Instead, you should bargain with her the same way you would with any other friend or loved one, until either she convinces you that relationships are bad, or you and the therapist together convince her that they aren’t. This is one of the pillars of classical IFS.
The secret is: no, actually some of these things are literal demons.
1. Some people object to me calling it “new” – it was developed in the 1980s, and has been popular since the early 2010s. Still, the therapy landscape shifts slowly, and even an exponentially-growing therapy takes a long time to get anywhere.
May 20, 2024
At what point did “quiet genocide” become the preferred option for the climate cultists to “save the planet”?
The Daily Sceptic‘s Chris Morrison on the not-so-subtle change in the opinions of the extreme climatistas that getting rid of the majority of the human race is now the preferred way to address their concerns:
The grisly streak of neo-Malthusianism that runs through the green movement reared its ugly head earlier this week when former United Nations contributing author and retired UCL Professor Bill McGuire tweeted that the only “realistic way” to avoid catastrophic climate breakdown was to cull the human population with a high fatality pandemic. The tweet was subsequently withdrawn by McGuire, “not because I regret it”, but people took it the wrong way. McGuire is the alarmists’ alarmist, suggesting for instance that human-caused climate change could lead to more earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The Daily Sceptic will not take his views the wrong way. They are an illuminating insight into environmental Malthusianism that does not get anything like the amount of publicity it deserves.
Every now and then Sir David Attenborough allows the genial TV presenter mask to slip to reveal a harder-edged Malthusian side. Speaking to BBC Breakfast in 2021, he suggested that the Earth would be better off without the human race, describing us as “intruders”. In 2009, Attenborough became the patron of the Optimum Population Trust and told the Guardian: “I’ve never seen a problem that wouldn’t be easier to solve with fewer people.” In 2013, he made the appalling remark that it was “barmy” for the United Nations to send bags of flour to famine-stricken Ethiopia. Too little land, too many people, was his considered judgement.
Any consideration of the refusal of food aid these days brings to mind the 19th century Malthusian Sir Charles Trevelyan, the British civil servant during the Irish famines who saw the starvation as retribution on the local population for their moral failings and tendency to have numerous children. He is said to have seen the great loss of life as a regrettable but unavoidable consequence of reform and regeneration.
Anti-human sentiment is riven through much green thinking. In 2019, Anglia Ruskin University Professor Patricia MacCormack wrote a book suggesting humans were already enslaved to the point of “zombiedom” because of capitalism, and “phasing out reproduction is the only way to repair the damage done to the world”. Green fanatics can be a joyless crowd – it is not enough to declare a climate crisis, now they want a “nookie” emergency. As the economist and philosopher Robert Boulding once remarked: “Is there any more single-minded, simple pleasure than viewing with alarm? At times it is even better than sex.”
May 17, 2024
“Once a mind is infected with Climate Change, bioweapons are just another kind of carbon credit”
Jo Nova presents evidence of a university professor — a vulcanologist — who perhaps has more sympathy for the volcanoes he studies than the human race:
Let’s just say, hypothetically, that someone wanted an excuse to reduce global population, or limit competing tribes and religions, there’s a scientific hat for that. Climate Change is the ultimate excuse for mass death — done in the nicest possible way and for the most honorable of reasons. But isn’t that what they all say: Jim Jones, the Branch Davidians, Heavens Gate — death makes the world a better place?
The cult that pretends it isn’t a cult sells itself as “science”. I mean, what the worst thing you can think of? Would that be one degree of warming, or the Black Death?
In Bill McQuire’s mind the catastrophe is not when billions of innocent people die.
One hundred years from now, what would our great grandchildren prefer: that the world was slightly cooler or they were never born at all? If you hate humans it’s a terrible dilemma …
Bill McGuire, vulcanologist, accidentally put his primal instincts in a tweet last weekend:
Thirty years of telling us that humans are bad has consequences. As Elon Musk said” They want a holocaust for humanity.” It turns out a televised diet of one-sided climate projection by mendicant B-Grade witchdoctors might be a dangerous thing for mental health. If only Bill McQuire had seen a skeptic on TV?
Predictably the McGuire tweet spread far, and got crushing replies so the Emeritus Professor deleted it, as all cowards do, yelling at us:
To which the winning reply was:
May 16, 2024
The replication crisis and the steady decline in social trust
Theodore Dalrymple on the depressing unreliability — and sometimes outright fraudulence — of far too high a proportion of what gets published in scientific journals:
Until quite recently — I cannot put an exact date on it — I assumed that everything published in scientific journals was, if not true, at least not deliberately untrue. Scientists might make mistakes, but they did not cheat, plagiarise, falsify, or make up their results. For many years as I opened a medical journal, the possibility simply that it contained fraud did not occur to me. Cases such as those of the Piltdown Man, a hoax in which bone fragments found in the Piltdown gravel pit were claimed to be those of the missing link between ape and man, were famous because they were dramatic but above all because they were rare, or assumed to be such.
Such naivety is no longer possible: instances of dishonesty have become much more frequent, or at least much more publicised. Whether the real incidence of scientific fraud has increased is difficult to say. There is probably no way to estimate the incidence of such fraud in the past by which a proper comparison can be made.
There are, of course, good reasons why scientific fraud should have increased. The number of practising scientists has exploded; they are in fierce competition with one another; their careers depend to a large extent on their productivity as measured by publication. The difference between what is ethical and unethical has blurred. They cite themselves, they recycle their work, they pay for publication, they attach their names to pieces of work they have played no part in performing and whose reports they have not even read, and so forth. As new algorithms are developed to measure their performance, they find new ways to play the game or to deceive. And all this is not even counting commercial pressures.
Furthermore, the general level of trust in society has declined. Are our politicians worse than they used to be, as it seems to everyone above a certain age, or is it that we simply know more about them because the channels of communication are so much wider? At any rate, trust in authority of most kinds has declined. Where once we were inclined to say, “It must be true because I read it in a newspaper”, we are now inclined to say, “It must be untrue because I read it in a newspaper”.
Quite often now I look at a blog called Retraction Watch which, since 2010, has been devoted to tracing and encouraging retraction of flawed scientific papers, often flawed for discreditable reasons. Such reasons are various and include research performed on subjects who have not given proper consent. This is not the same as saying that the results of such research are false, however, and raises the question of whether it is ethical to cite results that have been obtained unethically. Whether it is or not, we have all benefited enormously from past research that would now be considered unethical.
One common problem with research is its reproducibility, or lack of it. This is particularly severe in the case of psychology, but it is common in medicine too.
QotD: Modern parenting in open-concept houses
But the real crime of most new construction isn’t the exterior details. It’s inside, and it’s walls. They’re missing.
Open floorplans are bad. They’re bad for entertaining and they’re bad for families. Sure, that photo looks great (if you’re allergic to color and texture) and the HGTV hosts love ’em, but imagine actually living in that room with children. Seriously, just try: how fast are the cushions coming off those couches? How fast are your neutrals drowned beneath colorful toys and backpacks? (Unless you’re inflicting the same sad beige color scheme on your children.) How much visual clutter can a room of that size accumulate, and how much help will a small child need just figuring out where to start tidying up?
How many times do you have to ask the monster truck vs. dinosaur battle by the fireplace to pipe down so you can talk to Daddy over here by the stove, for Pete’s sake?
There’s a school of American parenting that says every moment with your child should be spent intensively nurturing his or her precious individual development. At lunch, for instance, you should make eye contact with your ten-month-old and describe the texture and flavor of each food (perhaps in French!) while Baby carefully grinds it into her hair. Your child’s quiet drawing time will surely be enhanced by his mother hovering at his elbow: “Tell me about your picture, honey! Uh-huh, and how do we think the villagers feel about Gigantor devouring them? Gosh, you sure gave him some big teeth!” An open floorplan is a tremendous boon to this sort of parenting: your child is always visible, so you can always be engaged.
It is completely impossible to raise more than maybe two children this way.
I don’t know which way the causation goes — do parents who were already inclined to be a little more laid-back and hands-off find their lives have room for more kids, or does sheer number of children force you to alter your tactics? — but either way, small families and intensive parenting go together, and they live in an open-concept house with 1.64 children.
Walls and doors, on the other hand, are God’s greatest gift to large families. Of course it is wonderful to be together. It’s important to have spaces that will fit everyone. (We were very sad when it was no longer possible to pile everyone into a king-size bed, even with elbows.) But it’s just as important to be able to be apart: because your little brother is practicing piano while you’re trying to do algebra, or a blanket fort combines poorly with an elaborate board game, or just because LEGO spaceships are a noisy business and your mother is reading to your sisters. (Or, God forbid, reading a book herself.)
Because at the end of the day, houses are just the stage where life happens. This isn’t to say that the stage-dressing is irrelevant — there is real worth and value to surrounding ourselves with order and beauty, and understanding how your house or neighborhood got to be that way can illuminate new things about the world. But ultimately, what matters most is how you make it a home.
Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: A Field Guide to American Houses, by Virginia Savage McAlester”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-12-05.
May 14, 2024
Tesla versus the German green activists
It’s not surprising that environmental activists would dislike a large factory, but this weekend’s attempted storming of Tesla’s Gigafactory in Germany must have raised a few eyebrows:
Tesla Gigafactory Berlin-Brandenburg, 28 July 2023.
Photo by Michael Wolf via Wikimedia Commons.
Grünheide is a small town in Brandenburg and the site of Europe’s only Tesla factory. It is a rare bright point in a German economy that is otherwise rapidly deindustrialising thanks to fruitless Green environmental policies, and so it has become a flashpoint for leftist activism. You might think that the German left would have no problem with Tesla, as e-vehicles are an important pillar of the energy transition, but here you would be very wrong. Happy fairy tales about the bright future of electromobility emanate primarily from the leftist political establishment; their activist militias have different ideas, often preferring broad crusades against everything related to industry, capitalism and profit.
The Grünheide factory employs 12,000 people and contributes millions of Euros every year in taxes, which is bad enough from the activists’ point of view. Still worse, production has caused some water pollution, and Tesla plans to expand the factory, which will entail cutting down some trees. A bunch of “water justice” advocates and forest saviours have therefore crawled out of their Berlin squats and made their way to Grünheide to defend humanity from the scourge of car production.
One of them is a 25 year-old named Luis, who we read “has been committed to climate protection since 2019” and who is “concerned about drinking water”. He also doesn’t like the fact that Brandenburg has moved heaven and earth to stimulate the local economy by incentivising Tesla to set up their factory:
Luis is bothered that many special permits were granted for the construction of the electric car factory. Tesla sometimes constructed its factory on the basis of premature approvals: “You can just tell how interested the state of Brandenburg was in having Tesla set up shop here.”
It is terrifying indeed, the extent to which regional politicians will go to attract industry and employment to their states. Somebody must put a stop to this.
Back in March, when we were all reading long think-pieces about the grave threat posed by the “extreme right” and hundreds of thousands of dim idiots were taking to the streets to denounce non-existent Nazis, a gaggle of arsonists (or, in media patois, “activists”) calling themselves the “Volcano Group” burned down an electricity pole, stopping production at the Grünheide facility for days and cutting off power to various nearby villages. Because the Volcano Group are on the left, this was not an example of escalating political violence or the fruit of brutalised social media discourse.
Yesterday, our activist heroes returned to further their bold stance against industrial production, which is something nobody has ever thought of doing before. Some of them hail from a group called “Turn off Tesla’s tap.” They have partnered with “Disrupt,” which the Süddeutsche Zeitung calls a “platform” but which appears to be little more than a Twitter account with 1,784 followers, which is so deeply reviled they have had to turn off comments on all of their posts.
May 13, 2024
Unravelling the actual origins of Covid (aka Wuhan Coronavirus)
In Spiked!, Matt Ridley outlines some of the more recent admissions-against-interest of the people who used to accuse you of tinfoil-hattism and peddling conspiracy theories when the topic of the origins of Covid came up:
Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Wikimedia Commons.
Two of the key figures in the story of Covid’s origins gave away vital new information last week before the US Congress.
One of these figures is Ralph Baric, the University of North Carolina professor who invented ingenious techniques for genetically altering coronaviruses. He effectively taught scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China how to do “gain of function” experiments with bat-derived sarbecoviruses to make them more infectious or lethal in humanised mice. The other figure is Peter Daszak, the highly paid president of the non-profit, EcoHealth Alliance. Over many years, EcoHealth Alliance has channelled large sums of US taxpayer money to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for “gain of function” experimentation, and for finding new sarbecoviruses in bats.
Up until now, Baric and Daszak have taken slightly different approaches to (hardly) helping the world understand what went on in Wuhan before the Covid-19 outbreak in November 2019. Baric has remained largely silent, refusing to do interviews or sign up to articles in the scientific press. He remained silent last week, too, but the Congressional Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released the transcript of a lengthy closed-door session it held with him in January.
Daszak, by contrast, has adopted a high profile, organising round-robin letters defending his friends and colleagues in Wuhan, giving interviews, writing articles and getting himself appointed to not one but two commissions investigating Covid’s origins, despite a glaring conflict of interest. He appeared before the subcommittee on 1 May.
Both men reluctantly admitted under oath to points that markedly strengthen the already strong hypothesis that the pandemic began with an accident in a laboratory in Wuhan. But before considering what they said, it might be worth briefly looking at the relationship between the two.
In comments on a draft of a grant proposal written in 2018, which were made public last year, Daszak boasted of how cheap it is to do experiments in Wuhan because they use a lower biosafety level (BSL-2), without negative-pressure work cabinets. Baric responded that US scientists would “freak out” at that. So a newly released email Baric sent to Daszak on 27 May 2021 smacks one’s gob somewhat. Responding to Daszak’s insistence that the Wuhan Institute actually used safer versions of these low safety standards for its experiments, Baric wrote:
Your [sic] being told a bunch of BS. Bsl2 [with] negative pressure, give me a break. There [sic] last paper mentioned bsl2 [with] appropriate PPE. This last part was the first and only time this was ever mentioned, never in earlier papers, and in the latest paper never defined either. I have no doubt that they followed state-determined rules and did the work under bsl2. Yes China has the right to set their own policy. You believe this was appropriate containment if you want but don’t expect me to believe it. Moreover, don’t insult my intelligence by trying to feed me this load of BS.
Baric clearly does not have a high regard for the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s safety standards, or indeed for his virus-hunting grantrepreneur colleague, Daszak. Nor do some other scientists who have nonetheless defended Daszak in public. Thanks to freedom-of-information revelations, we now know that “Dastwat” and “EgoHealth” are just two of the epithets used about him by his friends. With friends like that …
Both men still insist, however, that the pandemic began naturally – but, to borrow from Mandy Rice-Davies, they would say that wouldn’t they? Before the subcommittee, where even the Democrats gave him a pasting, Daszak was forced to concede some key points on which he had previously stonewalled or said the opposite.
Firstly, he had to concede that a lab leak was possible. Yet back in 2020, Daszak told Democracy Now that “the idea that this virus escaped from a lab is just pure baloney. It’s simply not true … So it’s just not possible.”
May 9, 2024
“The ability to believe entire gargling nonsense is strong in the [environmental] sector – as with this particular claim that we’re going to run out of rock”
Tim Worstall really, really enjoys kicking the stuffing out of strawman arguments, especially when they touch on something he’s very well informed about:
Some environmental claims are not just perfectly valid they’re essential for the continuation of life at any level above E. Coli. None of us would want the Thames to return to the state of 1950 when there was nothing living in it other than a collection of that E. Coli reflecting the interesting genetic and origin mix of the population of London. Sure, the arguments from Feargal and the like that a river running through 8 million people must be clean enough to swim in at all times is a bit extreme the other way around. One recent estimate has it that to perform that task for England would cost £260 billion — a few swimming baths sounds like a more sensible use of resources than getting all the rivers sparkling all the time.
Some are more arguable — violent and immediate climate change would be a bad idea, losing Lowestoft below the waves (possibly Dartford too) in 2500 AD might be something we can all live with. Arguable perhaps.
But some of these claims are wholly and entirely doolally. So much so that it’s difficult to imagine that grown adults take them seriously. But, sadly, they do and they do so on our money too.
Wow. According to this research 40% of the 1.5C C02 budget could be used just for digital & internet use/infrastructure & 55% of the earths carrying capacity for minerals & metals for the same use.
The internet alone could use 55% of the Earth’s carrying capacity of metals and minerals? Well, to take that seriously is insane. That is not mere hyperbolic insult, that actually is insane. I write as someone who has written an entire book on this very subject (available here, for free, save your money to buy a subscription to this excellent Substack instead). There is no metal or mineral that we’re even going to run short of — in the technical, not economic, sense that is — for tens of millions of years yet. As the average lifetime of a species is perhaps 2 million years that should see us out.
So, clearly, they’re using some odd definition of how many minerals and metals we’ve got that we can use. I thought they’d do the usual Club of Rome thing (no, read the book to find out), confuse mineral reserves with what’s available and thus insist we all died last Tuesday afternoon. Rather to my surprise, no, they didn’t. They went further into raging lunacy.
It’s not wholly obvious as they don’t really quite announce their assumption, it’s necessary to track back a bit — and that’s a problem in itself. A top tip about scientific papers — if they say “As Bloggs said” then what that really means is that many people accept what Bloggs said as being true and also useful. You do not have to reprove Einstein every time you do physics, you can just say “As is known”. You’ve only got to reprove Al if that’s what you’re really trying to do.
Thus, if a definition is a referral back to something else, elsewhere, then you can be sure that the definition is a building block being used by others in their own papers. It’s a generalised insanity, not a specific one.
So, what is that limit?
Here we quantify the environmental impacts of digital content consumption encompassing all the necessary infrastructure linked to the consumption patterns of an average user. By applying the standardised life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology, we evaluate these impacts in relation to the per capita share of the Earth’s carrying capacity using 16 indicators related to climate change, nutrients flows, air pollution, toxicity, and resources use, for which explicit thresholds that should never be exceeded were defined
Now this is in Nature Communications. So it’s science. Even, it’s Science. It’s also lunatic. For, tracking back to try to find what those “resources use” are that will be 55% used up by the internet. It’s possible to think that maybe we’re going to use too much germanium in the glass in the fibreoptic cables say, or erbium in the repeaters, or … specific elements might be in short supply? As the book wot I wrote above points out, that’s nonsense. So, what is the claim?
Tracking back we get to this:
Resource use, mineral and metals MRD kg Sb eq Abiotic resource depletion (ADP ultimate reserves) 2.19E+08 3.18E-02 JRC calculation based on factor 2 concept Bringezu (2015); Buczko et al. (2016) Resource use
That’s from Table 3.
Which takes us one stage further back. This paper here is talking about Planetary Boundaries and as with the building block idea. PBs — I assume — make the assumption that Bringzeu, and Biczlo et al have given us a useful guide to what those PBs are. Which is why they just use their method, not invent a new one. But that, in turn, also means that other people working on PBs are likely to be using that same definition.
[…]
Note what they’re doing. Humans should not take out of that environment more than nature puts back into it each year. That’s some pretty dumb thinking there, as we don’t, when we use a metal or mineral — except in very rare circumstances — take it off planet. We move it around a bit, no more. But the claim really is that we should abstract, for use, no more than is naturally added back each year.
So, the correct limitation on our minerals use is how much magma volcanoes add each year.
No, really, humanity can use no more earth than gets thrown out of a volcano each year. That’s it. To use more would mean that we are depleting the stock and that’s not sustainable, see?
