Quotulatiousness

April 12, 2023

Institutional Review Boards … trying to balance harm vs health, allegedly

Filed under: Books, Bureaucracy, Health, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

At Astral Codex Ten Scott Alexander reviews From Oversight to Overkill by Simon N. Whitley, in light of his own experience with an Institutional Review Board’s demands:

Dr. Rob Knight studies how skin bacteria jump from person to person. In one 2009 study, meant to simulate human contact, he used a Q-tip to cotton swab first one subject’s mouth (or skin), then another’s, to see how many bacteria traveled over. On the consent forms, he said risks were near zero — it was the equivalent of kissing another person’s hand.

His IRB — ie Institutional Review Board, the committee charged with keeping experiments ethical — disagreed. They worried the study would give patients AIDS. Dr. Knight tried to explain that you can’t get AIDS from skin contact. The IRB refused to listen. Finally Dr. Knight found some kind of diversity coordinator person who offered to explain that claiming you can get AIDS from skin contact is offensive. The IRB backed down, and Dr. Knight completed his study successfully.

Just kidding! The IRB demanded that he give his patients consent forms warning that they could get smallpox. Dr. Knight tried to explain that smallpox had been extinct in the wild since the 1970s, the only remaining samples in US and Russian biosecurity labs. Here there was no diversity coordinator to swoop in and save him, although after months of delay and argument he did eventually get his study approved.

Most IRB experiences aren’t this bad, right? Mine was worse. When I worked in a psych ward, we used to use a short questionnaire to screen for bipolar disorder. I suspected the questionnaire didn’t work, and wanted to record how often the questionnaire’s opinion matched that of expert doctors. This didn’t require doing anything different — it just required keeping records of what we were already doing. “Of people who the questionnaire said had bipolar, 25%/50%/whatever later got full bipolar diagnoses” — that kind of thing. But because we were recording data, it qualified as a study; because it qualified as a study, we needed to go through the IRB. After about fifty hours of training, paperwork, and back and forth arguments — including one where the IRB demanded patients sign consent forms in pen (not pencil) but the psychiatric ward would only allow patients to have pencils (not pen) — what had originally been intended as a quick record-keeping had expanded into an additional part-time job for a team of ~4 doctors. We made a tiny bit of progress over a few months before the IRB decided to re-evaluate all projects including ours and told us to change twenty-seven things, including re-litigating the pen vs. pencil issue (they also told us that our project was unusually good; most got >27 demands). Our team of four doctors considered the hundreds of hours it would take to document compliance and agreed to give up. As far as I know that hospital is still using the same bipolar questionnaire. They still don’t know if it works.

Most IRB experiences can’t be that bad, right? Maybe not, but a lot of people have horror stories. A survey of how researchers feel about IRBs did include one person who said “I hope all those at OHRP [the bureaucracy in charge of IRBs] and the ethicists die of diseases that we could have made significant progress on if we had [the research materials IRBs are banning us from using]”.

Dr. Simon Whitney, author of From Oversight To Overkill, doesn’t wish death upon IRBs. He’s a former Stanford IRB member himself, with impeccable research-ethicist credentials — MD + JD, bioethics fellowship, served on the Stanford IRB for two years. He thought he was doing good work at Stanford; he did do good work. Still, his worldview gradually started to crack:

    In 1999, I moved to Houston and joined the faculty at Baylor College of Medicine, where my new colleagues were scientists. I began going to medical conferences, where people in the hallways told stories about IRBs they considered arrogant that were abusing scientists who were powerless. As I listened, I knew the defenses the IRBs themselves would offer: Scientists cannot judge their own research objectively, and there is no better second opinion than a thoughtful committee of their peers. But these rationales began to feel flimsy as I gradually discovered how often IRB review hobbles low-risk research. I saw how IRBs inflate the hazards of research in bizarre ways, and how they insist on consent processes that appear designed to help the institution dodge liability or litigation. The committees’ admirable goals, in short, have become disconnected from their actual operations. A system that began as a noble defense of the vulnerable is now an ignoble defense of the powerful.

So Oversight is a mix of attacking and defending IRBs. It attacks them insofar as it admits they do a bad job; the stricter IRB system in place since the ‘90s probably only prevents a single-digit number of deaths per decade, but causes tens of thousands more by preventing life-saving studies. It defends them insofar as it argues this isn’t the fault of the board members themselves. They’re caught up in a network of lawyers, regulators, cynical Congressmen, sensationalist reporters, and hospital administrators gone out of control. Oversight is Whitney’s attempt to demystify this network, explain how we got here, and plan our escape.

May 2, 2020

Drawing some conclusions from our Wuhan Coronavirus experiences

Filed under: China, Economics, Environment, Government, Health — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Catallaxy Files, Justinian the Great provides an expanded list of nine lessons we should learn from our still ongoing Wuhan Coronavirus (aka “Chinese Batflu”, “Kung Flu”, “Bat-biter Bronchitis” and other names our betters insist we not use):

1. Models are not infallible.

When dealing with complex subject matter involving lots of uncertainties, unknowns and data gaps, modelling will almost certainly be wrong. That doesn’t make them worthless but nor does it mean they should be elevated to infallible status and acted upon as though they constitute proof of something.

If we can’t get epidemiological models right involving trajectories of months what is the chance of climate models being correct considering they involve substantially greater uncertainty, unknowns and data problems involving trajectories of decades to centuries?

[…]

2. Experts can get it wrong.

The pandemic has shown that epidemiologists and health experts the world over have got COVID-19 wrong at one stage or another.

The most famous example is the Imperial College model that forecast 2.2m deaths in the United States and over 500,000 deaths in the UK. Critics have argued this was never plausible but it was the catalyst for UK lockdown policy.

[…]

3. Experts can disagree

Experts can disagree and this is normal in science (and policy making).

During the pandemic, health experts across the world have disagreed over epidemiology models (e.g. R0) ranging from thousands of deaths to millions, over treatments (i.e. the efficacy of anti-virals and anti-malarials), over who and how to test (targeted (symptomatic) versus broad based (even antibody testing), how to record cases and fatalities (e.g. Italy counting deaths with COVID the same as due to COVID, Belgium recording deaths suspected to be COVID related but not verified), the origin and nature of the virus (laboratory/synthetic or wet market/natural), over what the public health response should be (full lockdowns, targeted lockdowns, Sweden (minimal) or something in-between), and the susceptibility of children to the virus, leading to divergence on school closures.

[…]

4. The Precautionary Principle – No such thing as a free lunch

The COVID-19 crisis is a classic case of the precautionary principle in action. The policy measures put in place have been justified by the worse case scenarios of epidemic models forecasting mass deaths and hospital systems in collapse. These scenarios have been hyped up by an alarmist media presenting such scenarios / predictions as established fact.

Part of the problem stems from politicians abdicating responsibility for decision-making and hiding behind health experts as human shields. These experts have nothing to gain and everything to lose from underestimating the epidemic. No-one wants to be blamed for hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths.

[…]

5. If you can’t trust the WHO in a pandemic why would you trust the IPCC on climate change?

The neo-liberal (in international relations terms) notion that the UN (and other international institutions) are independent actors working altruistically for the global good has been blown to bits during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The conduct of the WHO and its complicity with China throughout the pandemic has demonstrated what realists have always known, i.e. international institutions are not independent actors, but instead reflect the interests of great powers in the international system.

[…]

6. If you can’t trust the Chinese in a pandemic how can you trust them on climate?

The COVID crisis also demonstrates why should not trust a communist dictatorship to act truthfully, transparently or ethically, much less put global interests above national interests even in times of an international crisis.

If we can’t believe China about infection rates, how can we believe their carbon accounting? If we can’t trust China to reduce the spread of a virus, how can we trust China to reduce the growth in CO2 emissions? If we believe China has captured/corrupted the WHO how do we know it hasn’t captured/corrupted the IPCC? If China will prioritise national interest in a health crisis, why won’t China prioritise national interest in a climate crisis? If we don’t believe China action/excuses in a pandemic why would we believe China action/excuses on climate change? If we can acknowledge China is trying to exploit the health crisis geo-strategically (i.e. South China Sea military manoeuvres) and geo-economically (belt and road and coercive threats), why will it not exploit climate change in the exact same way?

April 8, 2020

If the Wuhan Coronavirus panic feels oddly familiar … there’s a good reason for it

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

Warren Meyer explains why his skepticism about the dangers of the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic kicked in quickly because it followed a very familiar pattern:

I have been skeptical about extreme global warming and climate change forecasts, but those were informed by my knowledge of physics and dynamic systems (e.g. feedback mechanics). I have been immensely skeptical of Elon Musk, but again that skepticism has been informed by domain knowledge (e.g. engineering in the case of the hyperloop and business strategy in the case of SolarCity and Tesla). But I have no domain knowledge that is at all relevant to disease transfer and pathology. So why was I immediately skeptical when, for example, the governor of Texas was told by “experts” that a million persons would die in Texas if a lock-down order was not issued?

I think the reason for my skepticism was pattern recognition — I saw a lot of elements in COVID-19 modelling and responses that appeared really similar to what I thought were the most questionable aspects of climate science. For example:

  • We seem to have a sorting process of “experts” that selects for only the most extreme. We start any such question, such as forecasting disease death rates or global temperature increases, with a wide range of opinion among people with domain knowledge. When presented with a range of possible outcomes, the media’s incentives generally push it to present the most extreme. So if five folks say 100,000 might die and one person says a million, the media will feature the latter person as their “expert” and tell the public “up to a million expected to die.” After this new “expert” is repetitively featured in the media, that person becomes the go-to expert for politicians, as politicians want to be seen by the public to be using “experts” the public recognizes as “experts.”
  • Computer models are converted from tools to project out the implications of a certain set of starting hypotheses and assumptions into “facts” in and of themselves. They are treated as having a reality, and a certainty, that actually exceeds that of their inputs (a scientific absurdity but a media reality I have observed so many times I gave it the name “data-washing”). Never are the key assumptions that drive the model’s behavior ever disclosed along with the model results. Rather than go on forever on this topic, I will refer you to my earlier article.
  • Defenders of alarmist projections cloak themselves in a mantle of being pro-science. Their discussions of the topic tend to by science-y without being scientific. They tend to understand one aspect of the science — exponential growth in viruses or tipping points in systems dominated by positive feedback. But they don’t really understand it — for example, what is interesting about exponential growth is not the math of its growth, but what stops the growth from being infinite. Why doesn’t a bacteria culture grow to the mass of the Earth, or nuclear fission continue until all the fuel is used up? We are going to have a lot of problem with this after COVID-19. People will want to attribute the end of the exponential growth to lock-downs and distancing, but it’s hard to really make this analysis without understanding at what point — and there is a point — the virus’s growth would have turned down anyway.
  • Alarmists who claim to be anti-science have a tendency to insist on “solutions” that have absolutely no basis in science, or even ones that science has proven to be utterly bankrupt. Ethanol and wind power likely do little to reduce CO2 emissions and may make them worse, yet we spend billions on them as taxpayers. And don’t get me started on plastic bag and straw bans. I am willing to cut COVID-19 responses a little more slack because we don’t have the time to do elaborate studies. But just don’t tell me lockdown orders are science — they are guesses as to the correct response. I live in Phoenix where it was sunny and 80F this weekend. We are on lockdown in our houses. I could argue that ordering everyone out into the natural disinfectant of heat and sunlight for 2 hours a day is as effective a response as forcing families into their houses (initial data, though it is sketchy, of limited transfer of the virus in summertime Australia is interesting — only a small portion of cases are from community transfer. By comparison less than a half percent of US cases from travel).

April 6, 2020

The Precautionary Principle – “If it saves only one life…”

Filed under: Economics, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

A guest post at Catallaxy Files on the madness of taking the Precautionary Principle as your guide:

Slide from a presentation by Patti Gettinger, 2011-07-11.
Original slideshow at https://fr.slideshare.net/regsgridlock/the-precautionary-principle-8656034

In the unprecedented trampling of rights characterised by the response to the global pandemic of COVID-19, the common justification is that it will save lives, as though no measure is too great to save even one life.

This has echoes of the Precautionary Principle, which has pushed aside ubiquitous risk management principles in such areas as climate change, invariably to justify unlimited spending which risk management principles would otherwise limit. In other words, it’s a principle which can be used to justify any measure. And here we are.

One fundamental difference between the competing principles is the concept of marginal benefit, which, simply put, is the point where the benefits of an action no longer outweighs the cost. Our new “rules” from the newly formed National Cabinet, of which no legal or constitutional standing exists, has far surpassed the point of marginal benefit.

A person fishing off the coast alone in a small boat is in breach of the rules, as is a person playing golf alone, or a person sunbathing on a rock in the outback, yet in none of these examples can any measurable likelihood of spreading it or catching the disease be identified. These situations would fail any risk management approach, but not the Precautionary principle. Any risk, that is, any potential risk that can not be confidently identified as absolute zero, is a risk not worth taking, but that is not how we live our lives, because we understand that everything involves risk. Driving a car, catching public transport, having a job, not having a job, leaving your house or indeed staying in it involves some level of risk.

Also central to risk management is the concept of mitigation; the potential actions that can reduce, transfer or eliminate identified risks. In the case of COVID-19, many mitigation measures have been identified, and implemented. Such mitigations implemented are travel bans (belatedly), banning large crowds (belatedly), temperature screenings, washing hands, social distancing, pandemic announcements (belatedly, again), face masks (very belatedly), and fit-for-purpose hospitals (you guessed it). All of these easily demonstrate a benefit greater than worst-case scenario costs, yet after being bystanders for weeks, leaders across the globe then overreacted far beyond the demonstrable benefits. At least benefits to us.

March 27, 2020

Sensible risk management is not compatible with the “precautionary principle”

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

David Zaruk wrote last week for Science 2.0 Europe:

Two decades of the precautionary principle as the key policy tool for managing uncertainties has neutered risk management capacities by offering, as the only approach, the systematic removal of any exposure to any hazard. As the risk-averse precautionary mindset cements itself, more and more of us have become passive docilians waiting to be nannied. We no longer trust and are no longer trusted with risk-benefit choices as we are channelled down over-engineered preventative paths. While it is important to reduce exposure to risks, our excessively-protective risk managers have, in their zeal, removed our capacity to manage risks ourselves. Precaution over information, safety over autonomy, dictation over accountability.

  • Whatever happened to “Keep out of reach of children”? Now we cannot be trusted and all products must be child-safe.
  • Whatever happened to “Handle with care”? Now safety by design has removed the need for individuals to exercise common sense or risk reduction measures.
  • Whatever happened to trust? Now individuals are no longer left with the capacity to make their own decisions in managing personal risks.

“These are good things” precaution advocates would retort “since people often make mistakes and bad things can better be prevented!”. While continuous improvement of safety systems has its value, the bigger the fences, the less autonomously the individuals will react (creating a society of docile followers). The precautionary approach implies a lack of trust in individuals’ capacities to make their own (rational) choices. The over-engineered risk-management process would remove any situation where choices could be made. Fine for cases where there are no trade-offs, disruptions or loss of benefits (when the sheep have plenty of grass in their field), but in times of crisis (exposure to hazards), when precaution is your only tool, then sacrifice is the only solution.

[…]

When the public now sees everything of modern life (work, school, public events …) cancelled in a knee-jerk precautionary impulse, is it any wonder they are panicking? Enter the opportunist to sell you the silver solution or the naturopath detox remedy to put your mind at ease. Enter the quack to tell you to drink bleach. Enter the racist who will use the fear to mobilise outrage. Exit rationality and risk management.

With no bullets left in the risk-management gun, the only thing left to do is run … or as it is more commonly called: apply the precautionary principle. Precaution should only be applied after other risk management measures have failed but given how horribly inadequate our capacities to govern have become, it is the only strategy our regulators have come to know.

Slide from a presentation by Patti Gettinger, 2011-07-11.
Original slideshow at https://fr.slideshare.net/regsgridlock/the-precautionary-principle-8656034

H/T to Johnathan Pearce for the link.

July 11, 2018

Environmentalists against science

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

At Catallaxy Files, Jeff Stier looks at situations when activists who normally fetishize their devotion to science will go out of their way to fight against scientific findings that don’t co-incide with their preferences:

The debate over regulation often devolves into a debate about “too little” versus “too much” regulation, split along the ideological divide. Too little regulation, goes the argument, and we are exposed to too much risk. Too little, and we don’t advance.

This binary approach, however, represents the dark-ages of regulatory policy. It was more frequently relevant when our tools to measure risk were primitive, but today’s technology allows much more precise ways to evaluate real-world risks. With less uncertainty, there’s less of a need to cast a broad regulatory net.

Regulation not warranted by countervailing risk just doesn’t make sense. That’s why a pseudoscientific approach, dubbed the “precautionary principle,” behind much of today’s regulation is so pernicious. This dogma dictates that it’s always better to be safe than to ever be sorry. The approach is politically effective not only because it’s something your mother says, but because it’s easier to envision potential dangers, remote as they may be, than potential benefits. Uncertainty, it turns out, is a powerful tool for those who seek to live in a world without risk.

But what happens when regulators can get a reasonably good handle on benefits and risks? Some potential risks have been eliminated simply because the basis for the concern has proven to be unwarranted. For more than two decades, the artificial sweetener, saccharin, came with a cancer warning label in the U.S.But it turned out that the animal experiment which led to the warning was later found to be irrelevant to humans, and the warning was eventually removed.

Warning about a product when risks are not well-understood is prudent. But it would be absurd to continue to warn after the science tells us there’s nothing to worry about.

Today, an analogous situation is playing out in the EU, where activists are using outmoded tests not just to place warning labels on silicones, a building block of our technological world, but to ban them outright.

The playbook is predictable: as the scientific basis for a product’s safety grows, opponents go to increasingly great lengths to manufacture uncertainty, move the goalposts and capitalize on scientific illiteracy to gain the political upper-hand.

We’ve seen these tactics employed in opposition to everything from growing human tissue in a lab, to harm-reducing alternatives to smoking, such as e-cigarettes. Now, the effort to manufacture uncertainty is playing out in the debate over the environmental impact of silicones, which are used to in a wide range of consumer, medical, and industrial products.

Fortunately, in the case of silicones, regulators in a number of countries, including Australia, have put politics aside and adhere to appropriate scientific methods to inform their decision-making.

June 21, 2017

“Donald Trump and Al Gore [are,] politically speaking, […] brothers from different mothers”

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

Here’s Shikha Dalmia with an opinion to offend both left and right equally:

Donald Trump and Al Gore would no doubt cringe at the thought that politically speaking, they are brothers from different mothers. After all, what do the Republican president and the Democratic presidential wannabe have in common besides the fact that they are both old, white, pompous dudes who live in mansions and hate Hillary Clinton?

Whether they realize it or not, they both believe in the precautionary principle — the notion that even a small chance of a catastrophic event requires sweeping measures to avert it. Nor do they care about the costs of these “sweeping measures” — both in terms of money and individual liberty.

Their only disagreement is about the events in question: Trump invokes this principle in his crusade against Islamist terrorism — and Gore and his fellow global warming warriors against climate change.

Dick Cheney famously declared that if there was even a “1 percent chance” of another 9/11-style attack by al Qaeda, “we have to treat it as a certainty in our response.” For all of Trump’s criticisms of the Iraq War, he has a natural instinct for this kind of excess. No sooner did the dastardly Manchester attack occur than Trump reiterated, as he had in his inaugural address, that this “wicked ideology must be obliterated.”

[…]

Given that the odds that Americans will perish in any terrorist attack — not just those involving Islamists — on U.S. soil is 1 in 3.6 million per year — if the trends of the last four decades are any indication, such draconian steps to avert another 9/11-style event won’t make Americans substantially safer. But they will make them substantially less free.

Liberals understand this when it comes to dealing with global terrorism. Al Gore himself gave a great speech in 2006 lamenting all the constitutional protections that the war on terrorism was claiming and expressed alarm that the executive branch had been conducing warrantless surveillance of telephone calls, emails and other internet communication inside America.

But when it comes to global warming, Gore’s ideological blind spots are more dazzling than the sun. He condemned Trump’s pullout from the Paris agreement as “indefensible” and “reckless.” Likewise, the ACLU, which has been heroically fighting Trump’s travel ban and other constitution-busting moves, bizarrely tweeted that the withdrawal would be a “massive step back for racial justice.”

But the fact of the matter is that a pre-emptive strike against climate change will be no less damaging for justice, racial or otherwise.

December 1, 2015

A Canadian “Swatter”

Filed under: Cancon, Gaming, Law, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Cory Doctorow on the intersection of adolescent rage and police militarization, complicated by an international border:

“Obnoxious” is the online name of British Columbia teenager who spent years destroying the lives of women who had the audacity to create popular, lucrative channels on Twitch in which they streamed their amazing video-game play.

Obnoxious would get their IP addresses, dox them, DDoS them, try to blackmail them into befriending him and then to performing on-camera sex-acts for him, he would order pizzas and other crap to their homes, and then he would swat them.

“Swatting” is when you call someone’s local police force and pretend that you are a crazed gunman/bomber in their house, so that the cops show up locked and loaded, fingers on the trigger. At best, you terrorize your victim and her family; at worse, you get the police to murder one or more of them.

Jerks and people with emotional problems have used bomb threats and similar methods for decades. I went to a school where one kid — who was already in and out of residential psychiatric facilities — would routinely call in bomb threats. The precautionary principle applied — we’d go stand on the lawn and the cops would search the building — but there was none of today’s auto-immune disorder, no MRAPs parked on the lawn and cops in Afghanistan-surplus military gear hup-hupping through hallways with their fingers on the triggers.

Shutting down “Obnoxious” proved to be nearly impossible. The jurisdictional problems of getting Canadian cops to care about crimes in America, combined with American cops’ ignorance of “cyber” and tendency to blame the victims (a cop told one survivor of repeat swattings was told to stop playing games and “just pick up a book” to avoid more trouble), combined with the diffused nature of the crimes meant that Obnoxious operated with near-total impunity as he attacked more and more women.

September 8, 2015

Pessimism and doom-mongering still sells books and movies

Filed under: Books, Environment, Health, Media, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Gregg Easterbrook reviews The End of Doom by Ronald Bailey:

Outside your window, living standards are rising, crime is declining, pollution is down, and longevity is increasing. But in pop culture, we’re all doomed. The Hunger Games films have been box-office titans, joined by World War Z, Interstellar, The Book of Eli, Divergent, The Road, and other big-budget Hollywood fare depicting various judgment days. Over in primetime, the world is ending on The Walking Dead, The Last Ship, The 100, and Under the Dome.

The same outlook obtains in nonfiction literature. Books that foresee doomsday — Collapse by Jared Diamond, The End of Nature by Bill McKibben, The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett among them — win praise from commentators and sell briskly. Books contending that things basically are fine don’t do as well. One might think that optimism would be marketable to contemporary book buyers, who live very well by historical standards, but it doesn’t seem to work that way. Readers prefer material that depicts them dwelling in the final generation. Perhaps declining religious belief in Armageddon has been replaced by an expectation of some natural-world version of the event.

Into this adverse market steps The End of Doom by Ronald Bailey, an impressively researched, voluminously detailed book arguing that the world is in better shape than commonly assumed. Bailey deflates doomsday by showing that human population growth does not mean ecological breakdown; that food supply increases faster than population and probably always will; that, far from depleted, most resources are sufficient to last for centuries; that air pollution in the United States is way down; and that cancer is in decline.

Specialists will argue about some of the studies Bailey cites to support these contentions. So much environmental research exists today, for example, that one can find a study to prove practically anything. But in the main, Bailey’s selection of research is fastidious and convincing.

Bailey spends too much time, though, on discredited trendy bleakness from the 1960s and 1970s — such as Paul Ehrlich’s global-famine predictions and the 1972 Club of Rome report. One can practically hear dead horses saying, “Stop flogging me.” The End of Doom redeems itself with a clever chapter on how precautionary principles boil down to this rule: never do anything for the first time. “Anything new is guilty until proven innocent,” Bailey writes, but he goes on to chronicle how many new ideas denounced as dangerous turned out instead to make life less risky.

April 6, 2015

When the Precautionary Principle meets wine corks

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

In Reason, Baylen Linnekin talks about wine corks and over-cautious would-be regulators:

We flew into Lisbon and drove across the Spanish border to San Vicente de Alcantara, near Caceres, where DIAM makes many of its corks. Once there, our daylong activities included a detailed tour of the DIAM factory and a visit to the nearby cork forest where DIAM obtains cork, which is made from the bark of the eponymous tree.

As I learned on the DIAM tour, the company’s agglomerated corks are made from natural cork that’s first pulverized. The impurities are then removed. Finally, the pure cork that remains is glued back together into the familiar wine cork shape.

Agglomerated corks have two key benefits over competing corks. First, they cost less than natural corks. Second, they eliminate the problem of cork “taint,” a musty taste caused by the presence of a substance found in cork, TCA, that often ruins wines before they’re ever opened.

Sounds great. Still, concern was raised by a wine writer last month, who suggested, quite wrongly in my opinion, that agglomerated corks may be illegal.

How’s that?

The writer, Lewis Purdue of Wine Industry Insight, suggested that the binding agent used by agglomerated cork makers could be leeching into wine. That agent, TDI, is listed as a potential carcinogen. If it were to migrate from cork to wine, that would be bad.

But testing by DIAM and others has shown no detectable level of TDI in wine, meaning there’s no evidence the substance migrates from cork to wine. DIAM also says, firmly, that no such migration occurs.

“Of course we guarantee there’s no TDI migration,” said François Margot, a sales manager with DIAM, told Wine Business writer Cyril Penn.

In that case, there’s no problem, says the FDA. As the FDA explains, agency rules generally permit food packaging to come into contact with food so long as it’s not “reasonably expected to result in substances becoming components of” food.

Why any fuss over agglomerated corks? It stems not from any FDA interest but, rather, from a push by competitors of agglomerated cork makers.

I dislike the kind of composite corks produced by companies like DIAM, but they’re still better than the plastic or other non-cork wine bottle closures a lot of American wineries are using these days.

December 3, 2012

The not-so-hidden Agenda 21

Filed under: Books, Bureaucracy, Environment, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:07

In the Libertarian Enterprise, John Walker talks about the UN’s Agenda 21:

In 1992, at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (“Earth Summit”) in Rio de Janeiro, an action plan for “sustainable development” titled “Agenda 21” was adopted. It has since been endorsed by the governments of 178 countries, including the United States, where it was signed by president George H. W. Bush (not being a formal treaty, it was not submitted to the Senate for ratification). An organisation called Local Governments for Sustainability currently has more than 1200 member towns, cities, and counties in 70 countries, including more than 500 in the United States signed on to the program. Whenever you hear a politician talking about environmental “sustainability” or the “precautionary principle”, it’s a good bet the ideas they’re promoting can be traced back to Agenda 21 or its progenitors.

When you read the U.N. Agenda 21 document (which I highly encourage you to do—it is very likely your own national government has endorsed it), it comes across as the usual gassy international bureaucratese you expect from a U.N. commission, but if you read between the lines and project the goals and mechanisms advocated to their logical conclusions, the implications are very great indeed. What is envisioned is nothing less than the extinction of the developed world and the roll-back of the entire project of the enlightenment. While speaking of the lofty goal of lifting the standard of living of developing nations to that of the developed world in a manner that does not damage the environment, it is an inevitable consequence of the report’s assumption of finite resources and an environment already stressed beyond the point of sustainability that the inevitable outcome of achieving “equity” will be a global levelling of the standard of living to one well below the present-day mean, necessitating a catastrophic decrease in the quality of life in developed nations, which will almost certainly eliminate their ability to invest in the research and technological development which have been the engine of human advancement since the Renaissance. The implications of this are so dire that somebody ought to write a dystopian novel about the ultimate consequences of heading down this road.

September 10, 2012

Extending the state’s say in private decision-making

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:55

Barbara Hewson on recent legal developments in Britain which extend the state’s ability to interfere in the private lives of adults:

For centuries, the High Court has claimed an ‘inherent jurisdiction’ to take care of the persons and property of those who could not look after themselves. This power covers minors and wards of court, as well as adults who lack mental capacity. It originates in an ancient Crown Prerogative, going back to feudal times (1). But in a little-noticed legal development, some judges of the Family Division have started to claim an ‘inherent jurisdiction’ over the lives of adults in full possession of their faculties.

This is a disturbing trend. These rulings are given at private hearings. Parliament, the public, and indeed the Ministry of Justice, are none the wiser. The problem, at base, is a constitutional one. Our judges are unelected, and are not supposed to make laws. That is parliament’s function.

Parliament has said that people become adults at age 18 (2). Most people think that the point of reaching adulthood is that you get to decide where you live, and who your friends are. If you make unwise decisions, that is unfortunate, but it is not a basis for the authorities to intervene. However, last March, in a case called ‘DL’, the Court of Appeal said that the High Court is entitled to disregard adult decision-making (3).

[. . .]

Judges of the Family Division of the High Court have been seduced by what Frank Furedi has called ‘the fatalistic sociology of the precautionary principle’. This views all human beings as innately powerless, vulnerable and at risk (7). And if to be at risk is a condition of life, then everyone becomes a legitimate target of judicial intervention and protection. This refusal by the courts to acknowledge adults as self-determining agents has ominous implications for liberty and the law.

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