Quotulatiousness

February 8, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

January 20, 2023

Christopher Snowden on our latest “Clown World” alcohol guidelines

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But you know what else poses significant risk?

Lots of morphine and cocaine.

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

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

[…]

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

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

January 19, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

The full quote reads:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

December 15, 2022

The hot new thing for municipal politicians is the “15-minute city”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Elizabeth Nickson on how some of the building blocks of a global police state are being laid at the local level in pretty much every municipality in the western world:

Every single ministry or government department has been writing police-power regulation into their revised policy statements for the last 20 years. It is incremental and surreptitious. I mean come on, if you were going to abrogate democracy, cheat in every election, remove property rights from every citizen, bank that property in multinational/UN hands, you would need a police state, amIright?

That said, the province where I live, which is so crazy, it’s where California gets most of its bonkers ideas, has turned, locally-speaking. The socialists and greens were so confident of sweeping their elections that they didn’t bother to cheat, and as a result most every town and city was taken back by people saying, nope, you’re done. We are going back to basics. Like no more outdoor drug bazaars, silly wasteful green projects, and here’s an idea: let’s respond to our voters and not try to steal everything they have.

This would happen in every single state and county if we managed to stop them cheating. Because trust me, in every election in every jurisdiction, they are cheating.

The catastrophe even reached Davos. When one of their extra-special places is under threat time to roll out the big guns.

Hence 15-minute cities. Get this damn thing done before the slow learners, i.e. city people, wake up.

Therefore Oxford City Council this past week instituted their trial of 15 Minute Cities. This is a UN/WEF project meant to continue the lockdowns by scaring us to death using the nonexistent climate crisis. And if you think this is local to the UK, it’s not. This is being trialed in Brisbane, Portland, Barcelona, Paris and Buenos Aires.

Here are the basic rules. You are allowed out of your neighborhood for fifteen minutes a day and out of your region, 100 days a year. Fifteen minutes is enough to shop, take your kids to school and pick them up. Trespass that and you’re fined. Oxford has approved the installation of electronic traffic filters, placed strategically, which will be able to track your car, wherever it goes. That will cost citizens around $15,000,000. We get to build our own prisons!

The trial lockdown goes into effect January 1, 2024

People voted for this. Or rather they didn’t, but did.

Seems preposterous doesn’t it? Yet those who still read and watch legacy media know about it. They have been selling it hard. When I mean “they”, I mean the massive PR firms paid by WEF and the UN, strategized no doubt by McKinsey.

To refresh, this is what they want: drive people out of rural areas, and place them in 15 minute cities. Take all the resources, and divide them up among multi-nationals who will then tax our use of water, air, minerals, etc. Creating a world of renters, of serfs. You will have a lovely category: Amazon serf, Tesla serf. Bill Gates’ serf.

Pretty much every city council in every city in the world has had 15 Minute Cities pitched to them. Without doubt, every single city council in the world, has some committee and elected officer assigned to the 15 Minute city project. They are “researching” it with your money, which means they are trying to find a way to convince people to sign onto it.

They only got here because we stopped paying attention. No one went to meetings, no one followed what they were doing in committee. We trusted them. As someone pointed out, WEF and the UN during COP26 hold meetings and lectures that show precisely what they are planning to do, that are videotaped and available to anyone who wants to know what they are planning. Views of each? 26 people. 50 tops.

I’d like to advise you to get involved with your local government, because they have undoubtedly gone rogue and are amassing power and attaching funding requirements to each project. Many of them, if green-based, and locally everything is green-based, will be ill-founded, the science can be exploded. At our last virtual meeting here, a man from the real world, with real skills made a presentation showing that our local government was selling a fraudulent idea, and had put itself at risk legally. They had used a flawed study checked by no adult, sloppily researched and written by a university student to create the climate policy. Instead of being an ideal carbon sink, as was claimed, it turned out the islands were much less effective in that regard than other parts of the province.

Our local government had used this study for the past year, to harangue citizens and senior governments to push for more restrictive regulation on islanders.

The New World Order is built on sand, it is feather-weight, it can be blown over by a single honest consultant who can read legislation and do math. Become one. It is super satisfying. And the friends you will make will last beyond the grave.

November 27, 2022

QotD: Gambling is not a “public health” issue

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Health, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

By any conventional definition, gambling is not a public-health issue. It is not an infectious disease. It is not an environmental hazard. And its association with poor health is tenuous and indirect. Losing a lot of money might be bad for your health in some way. But if that is the argument, you might as well redefine compulsive shopping or stock trading as public-health issues, too.

Nevertheless, the public-health lobby is keen to take over this area of policy and PHE ended its days with the following conclusion: “The evidence suggests that harmful gambling should be considered a public-health issue because it is associated with harms to individuals, their families, close associates and wider society.”

By this definition, anything that can cause harm to individuals and / or other people is a public-health issue. This would make every health problem and most social problems public-health issues. It spreads the net across such a vast expanse of human behaviour that it renders the term “public health” totally meaningless. Still, this is very much in keeping with the mission creep of a sector that claims everything from poverty and war to housing and climate change can be public-health issues.

It can be argued that almost everything has an effect on health, but what is the point of making everything a public-health issue? What expertise do people with a masters in public health have that makes them better at solving complex social and economic problems than anyone else? And as we saw during the pandemic, when the public-health lobby spreads itself too thinly, it becomes incapable of doing its day job. The World Health Organisation and Public Health England, for instance, were both far more interested in pushing for nanny-state interventions than in preparing for pandemics.

But if we see the modern public-health movement for what it really is – a paternalistic, bourgeois crusade for moral reform – it becomes obvious why gambling is in the crosshairs. A classic target of puritans, gambling will fit in well alongside the other supposed public-health “epidemics” of our age: gluttony, sloth, smoking and the demon drink. It wouldn’t surprise me if usury and lust were its next targets.

Christopher Snowdon, “No, gambling is not a “public health” issue”, Spiked, 2022-08-25.

October 9, 2022

The Nanny State’s manifold failings

Filed under: Britain, Government, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Christopher Snowden scoffs at the pro-Big Nanny maunderings of Matthew Parris in the Spectator recently:

The London Sweep (from a Daguerreotype by BEARD).
Image from London labour and the London poor: a cyclopaedia of the condition and earnings of those that will work, those that cannot work, and those that will not work, 1851, via the Wellcome Collection.

A few years ago I was on the panel at the Battle of Ideas in London. I can’t remember what the topic was exactly, but it was something like the sugar tax or e-cigarette regulation. Rather than deal with the merits of these policies directly, I noticed that my opponents talked in general terms about the good that government can do, referencing the abolition of slavery and the ban on children going up chimneys.

Given all the regulation of recent decades, I found it telling that they had to go back 200 years to find laws that everyone can agree were jolly good. If I had been presenting the case for anarchism, their arguments might have landed, but since I was making the more modest case that perhaps there might be one or two laws in existence that are unnecessary and illiberal, their approach looked more like a diversionary tactic.

Matthew Parris did the same thing in last week’s Spectator. Thanks to the Royal Mail strike, it only landed on my doormat today, but you can read it here. It is titled “Maybe Nanny does know best”. Confusingly, Parris does not use the term “nanny state” in the conventional sense meaning lifestyle paternalism, but as a catch-all term for any government regulation whatsoever.

His target is Liz Truss whom Parris dislikes even more than he disliked Brexit and Boris Johnson. Unless Rory Stewart or Nick Clegg somehow become Prime Minister, I suspect that Parris will be demanding the head of whoever is in charge of the government until his dying day. He is not impressed by Truss’s “dash for growth”.

Parris’s argument is that Big Government is the friend of economic growth, not its foe. He confesses that he, like Truss, once held the view that the “dead hand of the state” stifled growth and led to inefficiencies but that he has grown out of all that stuff now and, with two gin-scented tears trickling down the sides of his nose, he welcomes his bureaucratic overlords.

Why? Because, a hundred years ago, the government gave women the vote and allowed them to work.

    There was a time not so long ago when a certain group – half our potential workforce – were all but disqualified from contributing to Britain’s GDP. This group were called “women”. Women were generally unable to own property, or to play much more than a menial role in business (let alone politics, where they could not vote). So who helped unleash women’s potential, gave them rights in the workplace, stopped employers throttling their potential by restricting them to mindless occupations? Was it free trade? Was it big business? Was it competition? Was it Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand”? No. Step forward Nanny. Nanny it was – legislation, the House of Commons, the first world war, the state – who commanded these things, driven in part by the forces of democracy.

The idea that women only started “contributing to Britain’s GDP” — i.e. working for pay — after the First World War is historically illiterate. It may have been true of the upper class and some of the middle classes, but for all other households it was a financial necessity for women to work, whether in agriculture, textiles, domestic service, pubs or whatever. It is true that more men were employed than women, but women were pregnant a lot of the time and had an enormous amount of unpaid work to do. They were certainly never “all but disqualified” from working, except in a few sectors such as the police force.

And who was it who banned women from owning property and voting in the first place? It wasn’t Adam Smith. It was the government, or, as Parris, would have it, the “nanny state”. So which nanny state are we supposed to be thankful for — the one that gave women the vote for a hundred years or the one that denied them the vote for hundreds of years?

    Nanny had been busy since the 18th century, when in the Papists Act of 1778 she decreed that Catholics should not be excluded from key parts of the economy. She was still busy in the 20th century, starting with the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919, and later the 1944 Education Act outlawing the barring of married women from teaching.

Again, who excluded Catholics from key parts of the economy in the first place? Who barred married women from teaching? That’s right, it’s our old friend Big Government, the arsonist that Parris treats like a fireman.

August 29, 2022

“What did you do in the Covid War, Daddy?”

Filed under: Books, Cancon, Health, Law, Media, Science — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Janice Fiamengo hopes that the future isn’t female, for the sake of all of us:

If Covid was a war, as it was frequently depicted as being, it was one in which none of the typical masculine virtues required by war were in evidence. Gone was the valorization of stoicism, courage, forgetfulness of self, rational risk assessment, and the curtailment of emotionalism. In their place came generalized anxiety, self-righteous vindictiveness, and the longing for (an unattainable) safety at all costs.

In his book United States of Fear: How America Fell Victim to a Mass Delusional Psychosis, American psychiatrist Mark McDonald noted the disappearance of men from the Covid state as a key factor in our descent into social psychosis. Of course men remained in existence, but their roles were reduced to enthusiastic compliance with even the most trivial of health rules.

As a psychiatrist with extensive clinical experience, McDonald was uniquely positioned to diagnose some of the underlying causes of Covid panic. He notes in the book that women, evolved to be hyper-attentive to the needs of infants and simultaneously aware of their own vulnerability as maternal caregivers, tend to be far more susceptible to anxiety disorders than men. Women evolved over millennia to look to men for protection of themselves and their children (p. 30-31), and men evolved to provide it.

Yet as Covid experts encouraged us all to worry about the safety of our families, with daily case counts and endless updates on (de-contextualized) death numbers, “men failed […] dismally in their duty to provide a sense of safety and security for the women in their lives” (p. 41). When some women insisted fearfully on rules to protect themselves and their loved ones — even irrational rules such as outdoor masking and limitations on how children played together — men, whose traditional role has been to “calm and ground women’s fears” (p. 39), either did nothing or went along. Some men, of course, led the charge.

The emasculation of men had been prepared for a long time, and under Covid it came to fruition. Men could not reassure the women in their lives or stand up to the infantilizing Mother State. They could not speak out to put the Covid threat in perspective. Most of them couldn’t even decide independently whether to go to work in the morning. McDonald is well aware of the social forces that have contributed to the feminization of men — he notes especially how “healthy expressions of masculinity […] have all been redefined as universally unhealthy” (p. 52) — but even he does not fully understand the depth of the anti-male attack that prepared the ground for Covid-enforced male passivity.

For decades now, with the advent of no-fault divorce, mother-favoring custody laws, the determination to stamp out (subjectively defined) alleged sexual harassment, and the mandate to “Believe Women”, it has been made clear to men that their lives and careers remain intact entirely at the pleasure of feminist ideologues or potentially vengeful ex-wives. One wrong move, an inappropriate comment, a gaze that is too intense, a tone-deaf request for a date, a sexual encounter where the woman is left unhappy, or merely having married the wrong woman, can lead — and too often does lead — to the ruination of a man’s reputation, a forced psychiatric evaluation, the garnisheeing of his wages, imprisonment on false charges, and the judicial kidnapping of his children. Scholar Stephen Baskerville has extensively documented the injustices in his devastatingly compendious Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family and his more recent The New Politics of Sex: The Sexual Revolution, Civil Liberties, and the Growth of Governmental Power. For a heartbreaking and fully researched personal account, see Greg Ellis’s The Respondent: Exposing the Cartel of Family Law.

For well over 20 years, it has been made more and more difficult for men to respond as men once did, firmly and unplacatingly, because many men now know that everything they have built in their lives — and their ability to continue to build, to contribute their gifts, to live a normal life, to be a father to their children — now hinges on their avoiding the fury of a state-supported complaining woman. It is this bedrock vulnerability, the reality that even guiltless men can be imprisoned on a woman’s word and can lose their life savings and children, that more than anything else has silenced and paralyzed many decent and brave men.

July 4, 2022

A first, tentative step to reining back the juggernaut that is the modern administrative state

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Law, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Brad Polumbo has words of praise for US Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch:

Panorama of the west facade of United States Supreme Court Building at dusk in Washington, D.C., 10 October, 2011.
Photo by Joe Ravi via Wikimedia Commons.

“Vesting federal legislative power in Congress [rather than bureaucrats]”, Gorsuch writes, “is vital because the framers believed that a republic — a thing of the people — would be more likely to enact just laws than a regime administered by a ruling class of largely unaccountable ‘ministers’.”

But what about those, like dissenting Justice Elena Kagan, who say that federal bureaucrats need wide latitude because Congress is failing to, in their view, adequately address climate change?

“Admittedly, lawmaking under our Constitution can be difficult,” Gorsuch acknowledges. “But that is nothing particular to our time nor any accident.”

“The framers believed that the power to make new laws regulating private conduct was a grave one that could, if not properly checked, pose a serious threat to individual liberty …” he said. “As a result, the framers deliberately sought to make lawmaking difficult by insisting that two houses of Congress must agree to any new law and the President must concur or a legislative supermajority must override his veto.”

With an empowered, unelected bureaucracy, “agencies could churn out new laws more or less at whim”, Gorsuch adds. “Intrusions on liberty would not be difficult and rare, but easy and profuse.”

This isn’t hypothetical speculation — it’s exactly what we’ve seen under the status quo.

For a glaring example, just consider the Centers for Disease Control’s pandemic-era “eviction moratorium”. The federal agency unilaterally declared that evictions nationwide were prohibited in many circumstances by citing an old statute that gave the CDC director the ability to order in specific places “such measures to prevent such spread of the diseases as he/she deems reasonably necessary, including inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination, and destruction of animals or articles believed to be sources of infection.”

They went from that to a nationwide “eviction moratorium”. Stretch, much?

That’s right: Unelected government officials effectively commandeered the nation’s rental market, which caused tremendous dysfunction, trampled over property rights, and sabotaged the supply of rental housing. (For which prices are now surging. Shocker!) And, it was years before the courts finally stopped them and struck down the “moratorium”.

June 18, 2022

Do you remember Julia from 2012?

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

If you don’t remember the amazing life story of Julia Faceless, here’s Chris Bray to refresh your memory:

In 2012, the Obama campaign released a cartoon depiction of the choice America was facing, boiled down to a single figure: The Life of Julia.

Julia was actually, literally faceless, and entirely alone, traveling through life without family, friends, or colleagues. But ahh, like the story about the guy who asks God about the two sets of footprints, Julia wasn’t alone alone: She was supported, at all times, by the endless beneficence of the centralized state, our one true parent and deity, the very lifesource. She was able to begin learning as a child because Barack Obama gave her a HeadStart program; she was able to start a business as an adult because Barack Obama gave her an SBA loan. The God-Patriarch Barack walked with her always, enabling her to live, giving her the substance of her life.

That’s how it works, of course: You need programs so you can do stuff. How can a human being possibly reproduce without government programs to support and subsidize reproduction? It’s a biological impossibility — as is well known, the uterus isn’t even activated until the first government check arrives. You can’t do things on your own, and you certainly can’t do things with the informal support of family, friends, or community. Life requires the empowerment that comes with formalized systems of dependency.

Chris then follows up an earlier post on the administration’s muscular deconstruction of student-led activities and organizations at Stanford with some further evidence that even at the college campus level, deliberate infantilization of adults continues at an ever-increasing pace. Adulting is hard, man!

That’s way beyond you, poor debilitated child. Why don’t you try something that’s within your range of ability, like going for a walk around campus? You know, we have a formal organization that can support you in the attempt. To take a walk. Here. On campus.

The message of stories like this, and the message of the administrative actions they describe, is a message of weakness, fearfulness, debilitation, and dependency: You can’t. Imagine telling a healthy twenty year-old that he shouldn’t try to go camping in the mountains, ’cause it’s probably just way too hard for him. See, Stanford’s student life administrators are helping.

What you’re doing in your late teens and early twenties, whether you go to college or not, is learning adulthood — acquiring habits of independence and resourcefulness that you’ll carry for the rest of your life. (Ideally your parents will already deliver you to legal adulthood with a big part of this training already in place.) The message, don’t try to take a trip to the mountains, it’s too hard for you, is a knife in the heart of that journey. It’s a disgusting and shameful thing to communicate to young adults.

March 12, 2022

Governments hate Bitcoin and other alternative currencies because they hate competition

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Government, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Fifteen to twenty years ago, someone put together a funny-but-disturbing presentation on ordering pizza in the future, where the linked and integrated databases of health, banking, insurance, police, etc. are all available even to the order-taker at a pizza delivery place (the earliest example I found was this one). It was unsettling enough in the early oughts, but as N.S. Lyons illustrates, it’s far closer to reality than to fiction today:

You awake to find that today is special: it’s Stimmie Day! When you roll over and check your phone, you see a notification from your FedWallet app letting you know that another $2,000 in FedCoins has just been added directly to your account by the U.S. Federal Reserve.

To be honest, part of you would love to save that money for the long term, given that things have been getting rather uncertain and actually kind of crazy lately, what with the war and the economy and all… But you can’t, since these FedCoins are coded as usable for consumer purchases only, and will expire and vanish in seven days. So you’d better spend em while you’ve got em!

The latest PlayBox it is then. Everyone says Elden Ring 3 is the hottest VR game on the Metaverse right now, and you’ve really wanted to join in. Since you’re stubbornly old fashioned, you decide to check it out at BezosMart on the way home from work today before you get it delivered by drone to your tiny apartment.

But first you begin your day as you always do, with a quick stop at the local Starbrats’ automated, no-contact drive-through latte dispensary. Opening your FedWallet app and vaguely waving your smartphone at the machine is enough to complete the transaction. $14 in FedCoins are instantly deleted from your digital account at the Fed and recreated in Starbrats’ corporate account, well before the sweet, coffee-flavored milk beverage is deposited into your eager, grasping hands.

Your morning starts to go downhill quickly, however, when you realize that your SUV is almost out of gas. You pull the old clunker, with its antiquated combustion engine, into the nearest open station you can find – it looks pretty run-down – and roll up to the pump. A dull-eyed teenager in a facemask inserts a nozzle into your vehicle and waits for you to pre-pay. You wave your phone at the pump. Nothing happens. You try again. Your phone buzzes, and you look at it. There’s a message from the Fed: “You have already spent more than the $400 maximum weekly limit on fossil fuels specified in the FedWallet User Agreement. Your remaining account balance cannot be used to purchase non-renewable energy resources. Please make an alternative purchase. Have you considered a clean, affordable New Energy Vehicle? Thank you for doing your part to build a more just and sustainable world!”

You have in fact considered purchasing a clean, affordable New Energy Vehicle. But they still aren’t very affordable for you, what with the supply chain shortages. Despite the instant credit the Fed would add to your balance when buying an electric car – plus the permanent ten percent general subsidy you automatically receive on every purchase as a BIPOC individual thanks to the Fed’s Reparations Alternatives for Comprehensive Equity (RACE) program – the down payment on a new car would still be more than you can afford, even with your new stimmie coins.

Well, you’re not going to be able to make it to work at the warehouse on what you have in the tank. How could you be so foolish? You’re going to have no choice but to park here and blow a bunch of money on hailing one of those sleek, incredibly expensive self-driving electric cabs to take you there instead. But, as you’re about to tap the screen to do so, you notice there’s a classic fast-food joint next door. Might as well head there first to unload a little stimmie money. Nothing makes you feel better like a greasy breakfast sandwich.

Entering the establishment and sidling up to the old touchscreen kiosk, you order a McKraken with extra bacon. But when you wave your phone to pay, an error message pops up again. “You have exceeded your weekly purchase limit for complex animal protein, as stipulated in the FedWallet User Agreement. Have you considered purchasing a delicious vegan or mealworm alternative? Thank you for doing your part to build a more just and sustainable world!”

This is a sandwich too far for you during an especially hard week. “Ugh FedWallet is so fucking lame!” you post on Twatter as you idle hungrily in front of the kiosk. “Your message has been flagged for review,” says an immediate notification. “As a reminder, using ableist hate speech may impact your ESG score and future financing opportunities. Thank you for doing your part to build a more just and inclusive world!”

“Omg this is absurd, life was so much better before FedCoin, when we still had cash!” you post again to Twatter, unable to control yourself. “Your account has been locked pending national security review,” says a notification from FedWallet. “As a reminder, the proliferation of false or misleading narratives which sow discord or undermine public trust in government institutions is classified as a potential domestic terrorism offence by the Department of Homeland Security. We value your feedback.”

[Updated because I forgot to link to the original post.]

January 6, 2022

The war on “ultra-processed food”

Filed under: Britain, Business, Food, Health, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Our self-imagined “elites” have a new crusade to prosecute — the crusade against “ultra-processed food”:

In “public health”, the name of the game is to interfere with people’s lives without having your own choices meddled with. This is straightforward with smoking since the philosopher kings of the nanny state don’t smoke. Alcohol is more tricky since most of them drink, but minimum pricing — which was introduced in Ireland yesterday — offers the perfect way to penalise ordinary people while leaving fine wine and craft beer unaffected.

The war on food poses the trickiest problem since its pretext — obesity — is the result of over-consumption and physical inactivity rather than the consumption of any specific type of food. “Junk food” is too narrow since most people interpret it to mean “fast food” from a handful of restaurant chains. And so, in the absence of an obvious dietary culprit, the “public health” lobby is shifting towards a crusade against “ultra-processed food”.

Most people don’t know what this means, but it sounds bad if you have an instinctive objection to industry and modernity. Perhaps it evokes thoughts of “chemicals” and “E numbers”. Certainly, it sounds like the opposite of the “natural”, “organic” and “home made” food so beloved of those who think they are superior to other people. It is, however, a classic “public health” bait and switch. Just as people didn’t realise that a ban on “junk food” advertising would result in adverts for cheese and butter being banned, people won’t realise what a war on ultra-processed food means for them until it is too late.

In a deranged op-ed in BMJ Global Health, some of Mike Bloomberg’s minions from Vital Strategies call for tobacco-style regulation of “ultra-processed food”, starting with warning labels.

    Simply put, ultra-processed foods are foods that can’t be made in your home kitchen because they have been chemically or physically transformed using industrial processes. They are recognisable on the supermarket shelf as packaged foods that are ready-to-eat, contain more than five ingredients and have a long shelf-life. The industrial processing, as well as the cocktail of additives, flavours, emulsifiers and colours they contain to give flavour and texture, make the final product hyper-palatable or more appealing and potentially addictive, which in turn leads to poor dietary patterns.

    With more than half the total calories consumed in high-income countries coming from ultra-processed foods and rapid increases in low- and middle-income countries, these products are exposing billions of people to a higher risk of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, depression and death.

Scary stuff, eh? Alas, they don’t give any examples of ultra-processed foods so let us instead turn to a recently published study about them …

    Baked goods, including cakes, pastries, industrial breads, and soft drinks ranked among the top contributors to sales of UPFDs [ultra-processed food and drinks]

According to the the British Heart Foundation, ultra-processed foods include …

    Ice cream, ham, sausages, crisps, mass-produced bread, breakfast cereals, biscuits, carbonated drinks, fruit-flavoured yogurts, instant soups, and some alcoholic drinks including whisky, gin, and rum.

I’m not sure how hard liquor made the cut, but I suppose if you’re going be a fun sponge you might as well go all the way.

January 2, 2022

Eat the bugs, peasants! Leave the meat for your betters!

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Environment, Europe, Food, Government, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Andrew Orlowski on the self-imagined elite attitudes to the environment and — as a direct result — the growing chorus of journalists pushing the idea of substituting plant-based synthetics and/or insects in place of meat for us proles:

In recent years, media messaging has been emphatically bossy about what we should eat. State micromanagement of taste has increased, too. After government intervention, British staples ranging from sticky-toffee pudding to Sugar Puffs have been reformulated beyond recognition. But the anti-meat crusade demands that something far more radical should happen – it seeks to stigmatise something central to many of our lives, and demands a shift in how we regard nature. As part of this, our media now seek to normalise lab-grown Frankenmeats, and strangest of all, adopt entomophagy – the practice of eating insects.

So what’s behind the war on meat? The apparent justification is the political elite’s great preoccupation of our time – climate change. We’re told that rearing livestock for meat is bad for the environment, and that cows are the worst offenders of all. That’s the assumption behind hit YouTube videos like Mark Rober’s “Feeding Bill Gates a fake burger (to save the world)”, a promotional video for Gates’ synthetic-meat investments, which has racked up nearly 46million views.

But the environmental argument doesn’t look so robust on closer examination. Agricultural CO2 emissions are small – so small that if the United States turned entirely vegan this decade, it would lower US emissions by just 2.6 per cent. In reality, a cow is a highly efficient protein-conversion system, turning protein that we can’t eat into protein that we love to eat. Three quarters of livestock, on balance, improve the environment, enhancing the yield of the land through fertiliser, which would otherwise need to be made synthetically. For example, one of the crimes regularly levelled against beef is water consumption. But the cow loses most of this water the same day – it’s returned to nature. So with environmental claims so weak, there must be some other rationale for the war on meat.

Much of today’s war on meat appears to be driven by venture capitalists, and their client journalists in the media. Ever eager for the next dot-com boom, Silicon Valley has made a bet on lab-grown, synthetic meat. This requires an industrial bioreactor – an expensive chemical process. But lab-grown meat doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Business Insider recently reported that scepticism about the sector is growing, as costs remain higher than those for real meat – and this is before one single laboratory-meat formula has received regulatory approval, let alone passed the consumer test.

Another factor driving the war on meat is the academic blob. For example, Professor Peter Smith, an environmental scientist at Aberdeen University and a leading contributor to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), likes to insist that “we’re not telling people to stop eating meat”, before adding that “it’s obvious that in the West we’re eating far too much”. Have a guess who defines what is “too much”. It’s Smith and his colleagues, not you or me making informed consumer choices.

But the oddest spectacle of all is the relentless promotion of entomophagy at the posh end of the media. The posher the paper, the keener they are on normalising bug-eating.

This is a campaign that has a high hurdle to overcome in most markets, where insects are associated with disease. “Deeply embedded in the Western psyche is a view of insects as dirty, disgusting and dangerous”, a group of academics found in 2014. Many bugs, such as cockroaches, carry disease. Flies like shit, as the saying goes. “Individuals vary in their sensitivity to disgust”, another academic paper acknowledges. “This sensitivity extends to three dimensions of disgust: core, animal reminder and contamination.” Only seven per cent of the US population would countenance the idea of eating insects, even in powdered form, according to one academic study in 2018. Processing insects also raises practical problems, with e-coli and salmonella. “Spore-forming bacteria and enterobacteriaceae have been reported in mealworms and crickets, with higher levels found in insects that had been crushed – likely due to the release of bacteria from the gut”, another study found. It’s easier to clean a cow’s stomach than a cockroach’s.

It should be no surprise, then, that the edible-insect movement has hit a few snags. Blythman recalls the startup, Eat Grub (geddit?), providing the snacks for an insect pop-up in London’s hipster East End. On the menu were “Thai-inspired” creations such as spicy cricket rice cakes and buffalo worms wrapped in betel leaf. “It tasted disgusting, and so I swallowed it whole. Then the legs stuck in my throat”, she recalls. The pop-up hasn’t returned. The following year, Sainsbury’s tapped Eat Grub for its first range of insect products – barbeque-flavoured crickets. Today, the only crickets you can buy at Sainsbury’s are cigarette lighters.

November 8, 2021

QotD: The Nanny State

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

By treating the poor as if they are not choosing their diets in any meaningful sense, people license themselves to start making choices for the poor. John doesn’t realise that his hamburger is killing him, so I’ll just take it away and give him a nice sliced turkey sandwich and an apple and if Johnny is very, very good Mommy will take him to the zoo later. I’ve never understood how the belief that a large swathe of our society is in need of a nanny is reconciled, ideologically speaking, with the belief that we should do everything we can to encourage those people to vote.

Jane Galt, “Suddenly, and for no apparent reason …”, Asymmetrical Information, 2005-05-16.

October 17, 2021

QotD: Like Justin Trudeau, too many western politicians admire China’s “basic dictatorship”

Filed under: China, Government, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The Chinese model, such as it is, has a hypnotic appeal to many (too many) among our technocrats, bureaucrats and the political class. These are our betters, after all, and certainly the people who think they are smarter than everyone else, yet they are constantly constrained by the outmoded mechanisms of representative democracy, rule of law, and liberal state. How envious are they of the Chinese authorities (the Party and the government being largely the same, certainly the same for all practical purposes), which are not restrained by any considerations of accountability or public opinion. The Party can do whatever it wants – build a fast train network, carry out massive infrastructure projects, regulate emissions, direct economic resources, and so on – while the Western governments and administrations get bogged down in petty politics. The Chinese Communist Party is also a meritocracy of sorts, which promotes skill and talent (and of course loyalty, ideological reliability, and personal connections), while too many self-described smart people in our democracies are at the mercy of fickle voters. There is no stability and continuity, no long-term planning, no concern for the “national interest”; ah to be a mandarin instead!

Then there is the Chinese government’s ability to surveil and control their people – for their own good, of course. How many over here would love a Social Credit System, where they can reward and punish people according to government’s priorities, from environmentally-conscious behaviour to public health considerations. In democracies, the people rate their leaders; in China the leaders rate their people. Just imagine how much more effectively our governments and health authorities would be able to to deal with all of us during the current pandemic if they could “see” and “nudge” every individual at every moment and in every situation. The most dangerous virus to come from China recently is not COVID, it’s “socialism with Chinese characteristics” with its siren call of unrestrained power for large sections of our political and economic elites.

Arthur Chrenkoff, “World hearts commies”, The Daily Chrenk, 2021-07-01.

August 11, 2021

“What war is for a soldier, global pandemic is for a health professional – most might never wish for it, but it is what they have been preparing for their whole lives”

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

I spent most of my life avoiding the healthcare profession … not from antipathy but from the awareness that others almost always needed access far more than I did. That changed for me at the end of 2015, although I still avoid bothering any of “my” healthcare professionals for anything that isn’t fairly clearly urgent and I’d like to maintain as low a level of contact with doctors, clinics, hospitals, and other outposts of the profession as much as I can. That said, most of the doctors, nurses, and other professionals in that line of work I’ve dealt with have been professional, competent, and (within normal limits) friendly. This doesn’t mean I don’t take Arthur Chrenkoff‘s concerns quite seriously:

Not actually the official symbol of Britain’s National Health Services … probably.

If it’s up to our health experts – doctors, scientists and researchers, administrators and bureaucrats – we will never return to the “old normal”. If it’s up to our health professionals, COVID restrictions – border closures, lockdowns, masks, social distancing, etc. – will go on and on in the foreseeable future. The advent of COVID and its never ending mutations and strains might, in fact, mark the end of our life as we knew it and herald the “new normal”, ever under the shadow of a rolling pandemic.
Why? Because our health experts and professionals are enjoying it too much.

Before you get outraged at my imputation, let me assure you I don’t mean the medical-industrial complex out there is hooting with joy and cracking up bottles of champagne to celebrate every new variant. By and large – and not being able to peer inside the souls of men and women I prefer to give them benefit of the doubt, though you, my reader, might have a different opinion about just how large in “by and large” is – they are honourable people with best intentions at heart. They want to save lives, prevent needless pain and suffering, minimise risks and banish sickness, save the grandmas from being killed and save the young from unforeseen long term consequences of what for them is generally a mild infection. These people take their Hippocratic Oath seriously, even those who are not medical practitioners and so not explicitly bound by it.

No, by enjoyment I really mean the satisfaction of what ancient Greeks called thymos, and which can be broadly translated into contemporary realities as the the desire to be valued and the desire for recognition.

What war is for a soldier, global pandemic is for a health professional – most might never wish for it, but it is what they have been preparing for their whole lives. It’s their time. It can be frustrating being a health expert during ordinary times; you are just one of many different voices competing to be heard about your priorities, opinions and your vision for a better life for all. Now, you are centre stage. You are important and respected. People, from a next door neighbour to the Prime Minister or the President, seek your guidance, listen to you, act on your input, appreciate your expertise. You finally have influence, real influence, if not actually a degree of control. What you say goes. The media hang on your every word, punters out there are your captive audience, leaders feel more or less strongly obliged to follow – after all, you’re the expert, you know what you’re talking about, you have the answers. Finally, you count, you really count, big time. Years of hard study and years of hard work have come to fruition, previous frustrations fall away. Millions of people appreciate your contribution and are grateful for your public service. You are a hero who is trying to keep the dragons at bay, save people from harm and death. This is not your everyday toil, patient by patient or a demographic by demographic; hell, this is the entire population, the whole humanity. There can’t be anything bigger or more important than that. Professional and public rewards are nice, but it’s not even about that – it’s the satisfaction of job well done, of having made a difference, of having made an impact, having done good.

Once you have tasted and experienced this God-like power to order entire societies according to your best designs, once you acquire this unparalleled position, with its influence and its quasi-saintly public status, do you really want to give it back and retreat again into the previous obscurity when hardly anyone listens to you?

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress