Quotulatiousness

June 30, 2020

“The Squadrons Are Coming” – HMS Ark Royal aviation operations

Filed under: Britain, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Aircraft Games Movies
Published 1 Jul 2010

In the Western Approaches, Ark Royal welcomes her air group back aboard, with the occasional hairy approach for newly qualified aviators.

This appears to be footage from episode 3 of Sailor, a BBC television series from 1976 about life aboard HMS Ark Royal.

The Wikipedia entry for HMS Ark Royal (R09) begins:

HMS Ark Royal (R09) was an Audacious-class aircraft carrier of the Royal Navy and, when she was decommissioned in 1979, was the Royal Navy’s last remaining conventional catapult and arrested-landing aircraft carrier. She was the first aircraft carrier to be equipped with angled flight deck at its commissioning; her sister ship, HMS Eagle, was the Royal Navy’s first angle-decked aircraft carrier after modification in 1954. Ark Royal was the only non-United States vessel to operate the McDonnell Douglas Phantom at sea.

[…]

While Ark Royal‘s career spanned 24 years from the time of her commissioning (her name was a household word), she spent as much time in refit; repair and reserve and modernisation as in commissioned service (12 years). It required a lot of effort from her engineers to keep her serviceable between yard periods. Ark Royal had been poorly preserved during its lengthy construction from 1942 to 1955, and much of its machinery was obsolete by its completion, including its dated DC electrics, supplemented later by some AC systems, resulting in a ship which experienced regular defects and mechanical failure. Eagle was a more reliable and well-built ship, and spent far more time at sea than her sister. The scrapping of Ark Royal in 1980, two years after Eagle, marked the end of conventional fixed-wing aircraft operations aboard Royal Navy carriers. She had borne so many innovations, yet her replacement was not equipped with any of these. There was some discussion about preserving her as a museum ship, and some private funds were raised; the MOD would not sanction these efforts.

June 13, 2020

QotD: The liberal media

Filed under: Humour, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

As I have pointed out myself, the more one knows about a subject, the more conservative one becomes towards it. Conversely, the less one knows, the more liberal he becomes, and inclined to embrace “progress” and “reforms.” Even a Communist may prove a very conservative stamp collector, once he learns something about philately. It’s only economics he knows nothing about.

This is a universal principle. Everyone knows something about something, and is very backward on that which he knows. The one exception may be journalists, who know nothing about anything, and are therefore liberal all round.

David Warren, “I’ll be a Welshman”, Essays in Idleness, 2018-03-01.

June 3, 2020

QotD: From “the media’s” point of view

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

But what if they’re right? The media are most often accused of three things: bias, sensationalism and negativity.

Bias. Everyone leans a certain way politically. Ideally, that wouldn’t affect the way a reporter covered a city council meeting or a police news conference. But to tell the truth, I’ve probably worked with 10 times more liberal-leaning journalists than conservative-leaning journalists over the past three decades. The profession attracts people with an affinity for underdogs. That has to have some impact on the stories we choose to do and the ones we don’t.

Sensationalism. It depends how you define it. If we talk to the relatives of a murder victim, are we doing it to make money? I hope we’re there because we’re trying help the community grieve together. But let’s face it, that story is going to be well-read so maybe it will make more money in some click-based, page-view algorithm that I’ll never understand.

Negativity. We don’t make cars crash. We don’t bomb civilians. The world can be an ugly place and these things won’t stop if we ignore them. On the other hand, I haven’t met many reporters who would rather cover a parade than a murder trial. Darker stories seem, by their nature, more important. So maybe we are negative.

But I’ve already fallen into the trap of thinking in terms of “us” and “them.” There should be no distinction. It’s here where the media are their own worst enemies. We tend to think we’re infallible because we’re doing God’s work. But if we want more people on our side, we could do a much better job of showing the public what we do, why we do it and how we do it. We like to crow about open courts, but what about open newsrooms?

Maybe we should trust people enough to let them in on the process. To boil it down to one example, if the police shoot an Indigenous man and we decide to mention his race in coverage, we should tell people why we thought it was relevant and maybe admit that we agonize over such decisions. It might not stop the haters but it would at least give “them” a chance to understand “us.”

Cam Fuller, “Do people really hate us and if so, why?”, Saskatoon StarPhoenix, 2018-03-03.

May 16, 2020

The Wuhan Coronavirus, the excuse for an emergency without end

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

Mark Steyn on the seven-hundred-and-fifty-third day of our captivity:

Emergency without end is the staple of almost every futuristic dystopia — and that’s true for real life, too. So Americans shuffle shoeless through the airports for twenty years while their governments negotiate with the very organization that enabled those attacks — the Taliban — to restore them to power. Is a culture that cannot see off goatherds with fertilizer really going to rouse itself to decouple from a global superpower that supplies everything from its crappy “These Colors Don’t Run” T-shirts to its surgical masks and pharmacy medications?

~For my own part, I have been reading ancient accounts from Occupied France and Vichy for tips on finding workarounds for restraints on the citizenry. As wily and innovative as the French Resistance were, I wonder if their efforts would even be possible in an age when cheap Chinese-made drones can hover unseen and monitor every conversation.

[…]

Even without governors terrorizing those tavern-keepers or hairdressers who defy them, the lockdown has exaggerated the contradictions: The state wants open borders for “migrants” but a security perimeter around the homes of its citizens. Maybe the absurdities become so obvious that there is widespread rejection of them. Or maybe, one by one, the poor put-upon over-surveilled citizenry take a cue from their undocumented non-brethren. Perhaps I should just mug an illegal immigrant and steal his fake ID…

~The emergency is already feeling permanent. It starts with the social norms: Dr Fauci tells us the handshake is gone for good. That’s not a small loss. I don’t care for the suggested replacements, like the lame-o hand-on-heart gesture. I bow from the neck to the Queen — and just last year I did so to her Canadian vicereine, Mme Payette. Her Excellency then stepped forward and gave me a hug. But I don’t suppose she’s doing that anymore…

People ask me why I haven’t been on TV lately. Well, I mainly like going on TV to behave like a person who’s on TV. So, if you notice, on the “Fox & Friends” live-audience shows, I come bounding in like Tigger and do a lot of gladhanding with those on the aisle (including the odd hug), and then I give Steve and Brian manly handshakes and do a little light kissy-kissy with Ainsley. And all that — the basic language of telly for seventy years — is gone, apparently forever.

[…]

The WHO, the Beijing public relations firm whose pronouncements the BBC, The New York Times et al insist on taking as gospel, now says Covid-19 is here to stay — like HIV. With HIV, it wasn’t that difficult to avoid catching it, because it required the exchange of bodily fluids, which is a fairly intense and specific degree of intimacy. With Covid, we are rolling a protective condom down over every routine social intercourse.

A contributor at the Continental Telegraph explains why he no longer supports the lockdown:

First, it turns out that the drastic steps we were taking were based on one model. That no one outside the team using it was allowed to review. We were even told that we couldn’t check the coding because it was so old & patched together that it’s too hard to follow. That’s like saying you can’t check the brakes because you won’t be able to see all the duct tape and Velcro we’re using. Further, we’re told that this software doesn’t provide the same results from one run to the next.

Next, I heard about Dr. Ferguson’s history of wildly overestimating the fatalities from mad cow disease and bird flu (50k compared to <200, 200 million versus <500 respectively). Also, the CDC’s estimate of Ebola deaths in Sierra Leone (1.4 million compared to 8k). And let’s not forget the U.S. Public Health Service’s overshoot on the number of AIDS infections in 1993 (450k versus 17k). At this point I gave more thought to the issue of modeling – prior to retiring I was an actuary and modeling was what I did for a living. A few points about how modeling works: The more complex a system is, the more difficult it is to build a good model. And, more importantly, the more difficult it becomes to test your model and confirm that it accurately mirrors the real world. And this looks like one of the most complex systems to model I’ve ever heard of. How can you test this against reality? I don’t think you can. You can run simulations and confirm it looks like you expected, but that doesn’t mean the virus behaves like your model. Another point about modeling is that the results are extremely dependent on the assumptions you’re using. And in this case two critical assumptions are how infectious the virus is and how lethal it is. We still have a poor understanding of these variables months after we started Lockdown. Then a lot of us noticed that the goal shifted from “flattening the curve” to avoid a catastrophic overflow at hospitals to Lockdown until “fill in the blank” (in some states a vaccine, in others no deaths for 14 days, etc.). And the lockdown rules are inconsistent and illogical – in Michigan you can’t buy plant seeds but you can buy lottery tickets. To add insult to injury, many of the people with their foot on our necks violate the rules (the mayors of Chicago and New York, Dr. Ferguson, etc.). I’m stunned and angry at how little attention the human costs of the Lockdown receive. We know that this will lead to increased suicides, homicides and drug overdoses. Let’s not forget more child abuse, domestic violence, depression, drug and alcohol abuse, the list of miseries goes on a very, very long way (I may write up an article just on this, the Lockdown harpies should have to admit to all the harm they’re so enthusiastically spreading).

April 27, 2020

The NFL may have a problem … everyone seems to have liked the virtual draft better than the “real” thing

Filed under: Business, Football, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

It is usually difficult to muster much sympathy for the National Football League, but the record-setting popularity of the 2020 draft is a huge surprise:

The unique presentation of the 2020 NFL Draft established new all-time highs for media consumption in every category. With over 600 camera feeds from homes across the United States, all telecasts of the 2020 NFL Draft reached more than 55 million total viewers across Nielsen-measured channels over the three-day event, up +16% vs. 2019. An average audience of over 8.4 million viewers watched all three days of the 2020 NFL Draft across ABC, ESPN, NFL Network, ESPN Deportes, and digital channels easily breaking the previous high of 6.2 million viewers in 2019 (+35%).

Each day of the 2020 NFL Draft established new highs as an average audience of over 15.6 million viewers watched Round 1 on Thursday (+37% vs. 2019), over 8.2 million viewers watched Rounds 2 & 3 on Friday (+40% vs. 2019), and over 4.2 million viewers watched Rounds 4-7 on Saturday (+32% vs. 2019).

All seven rounds of the 2020 NFL Draft were presented across ABC, ESPN, and NFL Network – the second straight year that The Walt Disney Company partnered with the National Football League to offer a multi-network presentation of the entire Draft.

“I couldn’t be more proud of the efforts and collaboration of our clubs, league personnel, and our partners to conduct an efficient Draft and share an unforgettable experience with millions of fans during these uncertain times,” said NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. “This Draft is the latest chapter in the NFL’s storied history of lifting the spirit of America and unifying people. In addition to celebrating the accomplishments of so many talented young men, we were pleased that this unique Draft helped shine a light on today’s true heroes – the healthcare workers, first responders, and countless others on the front lines in the battle against COVID-19. We are also grateful to all those who contributed to the NFL family’s fundraising efforts.”

“This year’s NFL Draft clearly took on a much greater meaning and it’s especially gratifying for ESPN to have played a role in presenting this unique event to a record number of NFL fans while supporting the league’s efforts to give back,” said ESPN President Jimmy Pitaro. “The success of this year’s Draft is a testament to the unprecedented collaboration across the NFL, ESPN, and The Walt Disney Co. in the midst of such a challenging time.”

The unique situation of having the vast majority of televised sports activities suspended clearly made a big difference — when you’re the only game in town, you can expect a wider audience — but the online draft seems to have been popular even among people who normally would have tuned in for the event anyway.

April 15, 2020

QotD: The limited utility of the “left-right” scale in political debate

Filed under: Economics, Liberty, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Categorizing a political position according to some simple left-right scale of values leaves something to be desired. Political views cover such a wide variety of issues that it is impossible to describe adequately any one person merely by identifying where he sits on a lone horizontal line.

Use of the single left-right scale makes impossible a satisfactory description of libertarian (and classical-liberal) attitudes toward government. Libertarians oppose not only government direction of economic affairs, but also government meddling in the personal lives of peaceful people. Does this opposition make libertarians “rightists” (because they promote free enterprise) or “leftists” (because they oppose government meddling in people’s private affairs)? As a communications tool, the left-right distinction suffers acute anemia.

Nevertheless, despite widespread dissatisfaction with the familiar left-right — “liberal-conservative” — lingo, such use continues. One reason for its durability is convenience. Never mind that all-important nuances are ignored when describing someone as being, say, “to the right of Richard Nixon” or “to the left of Lyndon Johnson”. The description takes only seconds and doesn’t tax the attention of nightly news audiences.

Don Boudreaux, “Coercivists and Voluntarists”, The Freeman, 1997-08-01.

April 4, 2020

The media’s grasp of modern logistics

Filed under: Business, Economics, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Kurt Schlicter — who, spoiler, isn’t a fan of our news media in general — on the demands by newsbeings for the impossible to be done immediately:

We Americans are truly blessed by having a mainstream media full of brilliant renaissance men, women, and gender non-specific entities who are masters of so many varied and intermittently useful skills and who are eager to share their knowledge with us benighted souls. The pandemic has revealed that every urban Twitter blue check scribbler, MSNBCNN panelist, NYT/WaPo doofus, and barely legal “senior editor” of a website you never heard of, is a Nobel Prize-winning epidemiologist, a master logistician, and a diversity consultant to boot.

[…]

Another hitherto unknown skill that the media believes it possesses is logistics. “Why hasn’t Trump commanded a million ventilators to appear?!” the reporters demand. It’s pretty easy to see where they might have gotten the idea that the moment one articulates a desire to possess something that it magically appears. Capitalism has pretty much made that a reality. If you want something, you can go to a store and get it 24/7, or you can go on Amazon and it’ll be at your Manhattan apartment in 48 hours. Since they have never built anything or transported anything or distributed anything, only benefited from the labor of the unhip people who do those things, it’s only natural that the delayed adolescents who make up our media class imagine that material goods can be simply wished into being. After all, for all practical purposes during normal times, because of the efforts of Americans they look down upon, material goods pretty much can be simply wished into being. But prosperity takes work, not that the media would know.

[…]

Apparently, the media class thinks there are giant warehouses with an endless supply of goods just sitting there, somewhere, waiting. They have no idea about how logistics work, how goods flow quickly from producer to market and how expected resupply levels need a few days to adjust from a 10 percent daily turnover to a 30 percent daily turnover. They have zero appreciation for inventory management because no one they know does unglamorous stuff like that.

It’s all much easier in a socialist command economy. You get nothing and like it. Or don’t like it. Whatever. Here’s your weekly bean allowance. Workers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but access to toothpaste and toilet paper.

The best part is when the media – the same media that was collectively soiling its Dockers because that mean old Trump was barring direct flights from China because of racism and stuff – demands to know why, back in December, Trump was not commanding a zillion Wuhan Flu tests, a zillion masks, and a zillion ventilators be created, while locking down all of America. Leaving aside the whole lack of an enumerated power to do that thing, in what world would have Trump have convinced anyone – least of all the media that was slobbering over his bogus impeachment at the time – that some bat soup-derived pathogen in BumFoo, China, was going to black swan all over America’s economy? The lack of seriousness by the people who presume to be reporting the news to us is more breathtaking than the damn ChiCom grippe.

April 1, 2020

Getting the federal government out of the media business

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

Far from subsidizing the faltering mainstream media, the Canadian government should follow Ted Campbell’s advice here:

Direct subsidies will make many Canadians suspicious that the media has been bought and paid for and is little better than a government PR agency. Government advertising will bring charges of taxpayers’ money being used to publish propaganda. I wonder if tax breaks might help … maybe, as long as they are available, equally, to The Star and Rebel Media, and the North Renfrew Times, too I suppose. But where does it stop? Is my blog a news source? No, quite clearly not, it is almost 100% opinion, but what about blogs like Vivian Krause’s Fair Questions? It looks a lot more like reporting than what I do. In fact, some of her reporting looks a lot better than what the CBC does, doesn’t it? So where would the bureaucrats who draft the laws and regulations and then implement them draw the lines? Let’s assume that the traditional, mainstream media ~ the Globe and Mail and Global TV and so on ~ get tax breaks, and let’s assume that I don’t qualify. Who else does? Who makes that decision? Is it a politician, someone like the current Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault? Is it another the so-called “arm’s-length” boards that act as surrogates for the ministers? Or is it a team of bureaucrats? Who do we trust? None of the above?

The better answer, it seems to me, is to do pretty much exactly the opposite of what Daniel Bernhard recommends:

  • First: defund most of the CBC. Make it a national (and international) radio network (actually, two networks: one English and one French). Sell off ALL of the CBC’s TV broadcast licences and ALL of its TV production facilities and many of its major radio production facilities, too. Keep a fair number of local studios, especially in rural and remote regions, and a handful (five or six?) larger regional news centres and two (one English, one French) national and international newsrooms that will provide both voice and text reports ~ over the air and on the internet, free for all Canadians and totally free of copyright so that any news agency can use them;
  • Second, provide no, zero, nada, zilch funding to any news organization. Watch and see how they shake out in this rapidly changing environment. Remove or reduce most foreign ownership restrictions. Encourage “bundling” ~ allow e.g. telecom companies like Bell and Rogers to own and to integrate newspapers and TV stations and radio stations and internet platforms and entertainment sources, too; and
  • Third, get the CRTC out of the business of the internet and cable. There is a legitimate role for an independent regulator to manage scarcity. Over-the-air radio and TV channels are always in limited (and often in short) supply and they need to be allocated (licensed) to individual broadcasters; that’s a useful job for the CRTC. There is no scarcity of capacity on the landlines, cables and even satellite links in Canada. The market does a first-rate job of regulating them; the CRTC does, at best, a third-rate job.

I am certain that there are useful, profitable business models for media out there. The fact that we don’t seem to have one in Canada is, in my opinion, because of the existence of the CBC, which distorts the market too much, and the constant efforts of governments (national, provincial and even local) to try to “support” commercial favourites. The right move is to stand back and remove the heavy hand of bureaucracy and let the media find its own, profitable business model. There is a very limited role for government but Canada does not need a Ministry of Truth.

March 31, 2020

QotD: How the old “mainstream media” fell for fake news

Filed under: Economics, Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

One of the important side effects of the communications revolution is the proliferation of grifters, con men and hustlers. Things that were impossible thirty years ago, like e-mail scams, remain a constant problem. The internet has made it easy for even the crudest hustlers to reach a broad audience. As a result, the number of hustlers has increased and the types of hustles have also increased. The twitter troll, for example, is an entirely new type of hustle, made possible by the internet.

One reason for this is that the internet has turned into a big stage where anyone can try out their act on the public. In the old days, a carny bimbo would have been confined to a traveling carnival, Hollywood, New York or community theater. Maybe she would have ended up in pornography. It was not an easy way to make a living. Today, she can have a twitter account where she flashes photo-shopped pics of herself. Thirsty losers send her money through PayPal or super chats on her YouTube channel.

The low barrier to entry means every female with a desire for the carny life can get on stage from the privacy of her studio apartment. It’s not just females working the new rackets. In a prior age, Mike Cernovich would have been traveling from town to town selling his monkey mind juice to gullible townies at state fairs. Alex Jones would have been mailing people his mimeographed newsletter, where he explained how space aliens control the Federal Reserve Bank.

Most likely, it is the communications revolution that has caused the news media to commit suicide. In the old days, when the audience was fixed, the focus was on maintaining the facade of objectivity. No one was under any illusions about growing the audience, so they focused on keeping the audience. The internet promised a global market and unlimited market share. A relentless drive for eyeballs gave rise to the clickbait journalists turning the media into fake news.

The Z Man, “Carny Town”, The Z Blog, 2019-12-29.

March 27, 2020

The Wuhan Coronavirus sucks, our data on it sucks … but our media suck most of all

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

The all-hysteria, all the time media will have much to regret once the worst of the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic has run its course:

  • The data we have sucks, and thus any conclusions we are drawing mostly suck too. The data is worse than just being incomplete or bad — if it was randomly distributed, we could live with that. But the lack of test kits and how we have deployed the few we have means that the data is severely biased. We are only testing people who are strongly symptomatic. If there is a normal distribution of outcomes from this disease, we are only testing on the right side of the distribution. We have no idea where the median is or how long the tail is to the left side of asymptomatic outcomes. The only thing we absolutely know about the disease is its not as deadly as the media is portraying as we are missing hundreds of thousands of cases in the denominator of the mortality rates. The media has also been terrible about reporting on risk factors of those who died. When a bunch of people died suddenly in Seattle, one had to read down 5 paragraphs into the story to find that they were all over 70 in an old-age home. Or when prime-of-life people die, facts such as their being type 1 diabetics — a known severe risk factor for this virus (and one that makes it different from the flu) are left out.
  • The media is constantly confusing changes in measurement technique and intensity with changes in the underlying progress of the virus itself. Changes in case numbers have as much to do with testing patterns and availability than they do with the real spread of the disease.
  • While COVID-19 is likely worse than the normal flu, our perceptions of how much worse are strongly affected by observer bias. Frankly, if every news broadcast every night spent 15 minutes reciting flu deaths each day, we would all be hiding in our homes away from flu. They present a healthy man in his thirties dying clearly as the tragedy it is, but the spoken or unspoken subtext is, “this is abnormal so this thing is much worse.” But it seems abnormal because we do not report on the very real stories of healthy young people who die of the flu. My nephew who was 25 years old and totally healthy with no pre-existing conditions died of the flu last month — and no one featured this tragedy on the national news.
  • The data we are getting sucks worse because the media has decided, as one big group, that for our own good they are going to limit all facts about the virus to only the bad ones. There is a strong sense — you see it on Twitter both in Twitter’s policies as well as Twitter group attacks — that saying anything that might in any way reduce one’s fear of the disease should be banned for our own good. One of the more prominent examples was Medium removing an article NOT because it was proven wrong but because it took one side of a very open question and it was obviously decided it was “unsafe” to allow that side to even be aired.

March 22, 2020

“Basically, CBC ended itself. It almost beggars belief”

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Selley notes the abject failure of Canada’s “national broadcaster” to rise to the occasion during the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic:

I scuttled into National Post headquarters Wednesday night to liberate some things from my desk before Postmedia’s meatspace newsrooms officially locked their doors “until further notice.” (I and my housebound colleagues remain at your service in the meantime.) Among my correspondence was a copy of David Taras’ and Christopher Waddell’s new book, The End of the CBC? It argues that Canada’s public broadcaster must rapidly and quite savagely reinvent itself or risk “oblivion.” And it is nothing if not timely reading.

On Wednesday, in a moment history may well note as Mother Corp’s rock bottom, CBC announced it was scuppering all its local television newscasts. Instead it would feed us all Canadians a mixture of national and local news from the same Toronto-based spigot.

Basically, CBC ended itself. It almost beggars belief.

Brodie Fenlon, editor-in-chief of CBC News, took to his blog to explain the decision — but didn’t, really. He talked of “staffing challenges” stemming from employees self-isolating and working from home. “Television is especially resource-intensive, and many jobs are difficult to do at home,” Fenlon wrote. “Our systems are overtaxed.”

[…]

This coronavirus has turned a harsh, bright light on several defects in Canadian society that we’ve been happy enough to ignore. We should be keeping a list of those things, and vowing to address them comprehensively once we’ve beaten COVID-19 back. A full-on top-to-bottom mandate review for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, especially its English TV operations, ought to be on that list — and the status quo must not be an option.

March 18, 2020

What is really driving the Wuhan Coronavirus panic

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

… besides the wall-to-wall hysteria in the mainstream media, I mean. Severian discusses the insights of “perverted old cokehead” Sigmund Freud on anxiety and its effects, then segues to our current, shared, plight:

Photographic portrait of Sigmund Freud, signed by the sitter (“Prof. Sigmund Freud”) by Max Halberstadt (c. 1921)
Wikimedia Commons

Everyone who has thought about it for five minutes knows that something’s not right. […] As y’all have noted, actual hard information on the coronavirus is hard to come by. Is it fully air-transmissible? What are the infection rates? Hell, what are the death totals? And speaking of the death totals, even if you trust China’s figures (which no reasonable person can possibly do), they seem … low. Like, really low. I actually trust Italy’s government to deliver some vague approximation of the truth, and even there, where they’re in full-blown freakout mode, it seems to kill off old folks with compromised immune systems and lung problems at a fractionally higher rate than your garden-variety flu.

So, you know … it’s the flu. Not great by any means, and more infectious (possibly) than some other flus in our recent past, but for all that just the flu. The ongoing sky-is-falling global freakout has next to nothing to do with the actual bug. We live in a deeply anxious age, and that anxiety has to discharge somehow. It’s global hysteria — classic hysteria, Freudian hysteria, an excess of stress that must be discharged by “converting” it into behavior.

The people who are freaking out about it aren’t worried about dying from it. No, really, they’re not. Nor should they be — no reasonably healthy person under age 70 has any reason to be worried about that. Instead, what they’re worried about is powerlessness. We’ve all long suspected that we’re ruled by idiots and grifters. We’ve all long sensed that our “leaders” hold us in deep contempt. And we’ve long known that none of our problems are worth anything to the global pirate capitalist class. The only reason those bastards care if we all drop dead from the plague is that they can’t sell enough iCrap to each other to keep the company stock price up.

We know this. But we can’t say it, and we can’t act on it, because doing so goes against our self-image. Our media, our education system, our “culture” (such as it is) has spent the last half-century telling us what special and unique snowflakes we all are, even as it’s forcing us into ever-greater conformity. We’ve broken all the taboos, transgressed all the boundaries, liberated all the oppressed. If there ever were to be such a thing as “social justice,” then truly we’ve achieved it, here in this best of all possible worlds where you can lose your job for not addressing your co-worker as a wingless golden-skinned dragonkin and 6’2″ dudes with beards down to their collarbones can go wee-wee in the little girls’ room …

… and yet. And yet. And yet feminists (just to stick with a theme), despite running everything for the last 30 years, still can’t get that lousy 25 cent raise. Seven out of every five college girls are sexually assaulted the minute they step on campus, despite boys being as rare as sasquatches on most campuses (and despite the ever-growing clamor for free college for everyone). You’re free to — hell, you’re practically required to — make up your own pronouns, but you’re not allowed to ask just how a degree in “gender studies” could be worth even one dollar in student loan debt, let alone one hundred thousand dollars. We keep agitating for change, keep voting for it, keep tweeting about it … and nothing happens.

That profound sense of powerlessness is exactly, and I do mean exactly, what screwed up Anna O. She hated her father for not allowing her any personal agency. In her heart of hearts she wanted him dead. And yet she knew herself to be a loving daughter, so that overwhelming sense of relief — indeed, of joy — she felt when he kicked the bucket sent her around the bend.

March 12, 2020

QotD: Cryptocurrency versus cash in a modern economy

Filed under: Economics, Law, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The new TV series Ozark has the best explanation of this I’ve seen in popular culture. To paraphrase: Say you have $1 million in cash. What can you actually do with it?

If you try to deposit it in the bank, they will file a report, and you will shortly be explaining to the government where that money came from. Unless you have a good explanation, you will then be desperately trying to hire a lawyer in order to avoid a trip to the pokey.

Nor can you simply buy a house or a car with that cash, which will raise many, many eyebrows at the bank, and then at the government that bank reports to. You basically can’t make any large purchase in cash without raising a lot of questions. This is why drug dealers spend so much effort figuring out how to launder their ill-gotten gains. Unless you can find some way to put the money in a bank without the government getting suspicious, then all you have, in the words of Jason Bateman’s character, is (approximately) “groceries and gas for the rest of your life.”

And that’s dollars, which are indisputably legal tender. Your cryptocurrency will be even harder to spend. Who wants to trade you legal cash for scrip that’s only good for buying on the black market? How do you find that person? What discount will they demand for giving up their cash?

Bitcoin is currently good for transferring money out of failing states like Venezuela, because in those places, the local currency is so worthless that you’re better off trading it for bitcoin, or for that matter, cans of mackerel. But that presumes there are countries elsewhere with stable governments and strong economies where bitcoins can be turned into real goods. If bitcoins become a good way to evade those governments, those governments will ban them, and desperate people will go back to smuggling diamonds and dollars.

Megan McArdle, “Bitcoin Is an Implausible Currency”, Bloomberg View, 2017-12-27.

March 11, 2020

QotD: Orthorexia

Filed under: Business, Food, Health, Media, Quotations, Science, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The American media and our popular culture both celebrate a fear of safe, nutritious food if it is not labeled “organic.” To be consistent then, why don’t we also celebrate anti-vaxxers’ fear of safe vaccines, which are also not “organic?” To be clear, I am not an anti-vaxxer. I am strongly pro-vaccine. Everyone in my house is vaccinated, and I am appalled at the outbreaks of contagious diseases due to anti-vaxxers. But let’s be clear, a Venn diagram of those who obsess about organic food and anti-vaxxers will reveal a major overlap. If you know an anti-vaxxer, he is most likely committed to an organic diet.

Our culture accepts as a scientific fact that organic food is healthier than non-organic food. You can watch TV, read popular magazines, or listen to healthy-living gurus, and overwhelmingly you will be told that organic food is healthier than non-organic food. Recipes tend to call for organic produce and ingredients. And it goes beyond organic foods. Genetically-modified foods are slandered as “frankenfoods” concocted by mad scientists in a laboratory. Further, we are admonished to avoid anything that is not “natural.”

OK then. Vaccines are genetically modified, lab-made, and certainly not natural. Being anti-vax seems a logical extension of the natural, organic lifestyle.

I know several people — including family members — who have so completely bought into the natural-organic hype that they genuinely believe GMO and non-organic foods are poisonous. They would rather starve themselves and their children to death than ingest a gram of non-organic food. They look at the shelves of a regular grocery store and see rows and rows of poison. There is a medical term for this fear of safe healthy food — it’s called “orthorexia.” I am not shocked that some of these individuals are anti-vaxxers. Instead, I am shocked (and relieved) that some of the orthorexics I know actually do vaccinate themselves and their children.

Buck Throckmorton, “Organic Food & Anti-Vaxxers – Does The Fear of Safe Food Lead to Fear of Safe Vaccines”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2019-12-08.

March 8, 2020

Trope Talk: Macguffins

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 6 Mar 2020

Edit: DANG IT YES I MEANT THOR 2 EVERYONE LEAVE ME ALONE

Everybody wants ’em! Very few people get ’em! Sometimes, the things we call macguffins turn out not to be macguffins at all! But what IS the elusive macguffin, and how do we go about understanding, writing, OR acquiring it?

Got a favorite macguffin or macguffin-centric storyline? Drop it in the comments!

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