Quotulatiousness

July 21, 2023

“Gender refers to the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys that are socially constructed”

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

David Craig kindly relays the official word from the World Health Organization to us benighted peons who haven’t yet learned about recent scientific discoveries about sex and gender:

For readers confused about the difference between gender and sex, I have wonderful news. The admired and respected World Health Organization (WHO) has helpfully come up with an explanation. There may be some cynics who feel the extract below is nonsensical, woke gobbledygook, but I subscribe to the officially imposed mantra that there are close to a hundred genders. Otherwise I would probably be banned and cancelled and deplatformed and debanked etc etc.

But cynics should be careful what to say, write or tweet as anyone who contradicts what the WHO decrees would be guilty of spreading medical disinformation thus risking social media excommunication. Moreover, when the British government inevitably signs up to the legally binding new WHO treaty in May 2024, about which TCW has warned on several occasions, for example here, anyone disagreeing with WHO edicts might be committing a criminal offence.

Anyway, here is the WHO’s explanation of the difference between gender and sex.

    Gender refers to the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys that are socially constructed. This includes norms, behaviours and roles associated with being a woman, man, girl or boy, as well as relationships with each other. As a social construct, gender varies from society to society and can change over time.

    Gender is hierarchical and produces inequalities that intersect with other social and economic inequalities. Gender-based discrimination intersects with other factors of discrimination, such as ethnicity, socioeconomic status, disability, age, geographic location, gender identity and sexual orientation, among others. This is referred to as intersectionality.

    Gender interacts with but is different from sex, which refers to the different biological and physiological characteristics of females, males and intersex persons, such as chromosomes, hormones and reproductive organs. Gender and sex are related to but different from gender identity. Gender identity refers to a person’s deeply felt, internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond to the person’s physiology or designated sex at birth. […]

April 21, 2023

The Neo-Prohibitionists have taken over the World Health Organization

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Health, Media, Politics, Wine — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Christopher Snowden illustrates some of the deliberate lies promulgated by the World Health Organization’s anti-alcohol activists:

The incompetent and corrupt World Health Organisation has produced a “guide for journalists” to help hacks report on issues related to alcohol accurately. Not entirely unpredictably, it is a catalogue of anti-drinking tropes, half-truths and brazen lies. The very first words are “No amount of alcohol is safe to drink” and it doesn’t get any better thereafter.

The health benefits of moderate alcohol consumption really stick in the craw of the neo-temperance lobby and so that is where the WHO starts:

    Isn’t drinking some alcohol good for your health?

    No, there is no evidence for the common belief that drinking alcohol in moderate amounts can help people live longer by decreasing their risk of heart disease, diabetes, stroke or other conditions.

No evidence?! Even a casual follower of the science knows that there is at least some evidence. Those who are more familiar with the literature know that there is a huge amount of evidence built up over decades, tested and re-examined from every angle precisely because so many people in ‘public health’ don’t want to believe it.

    It is inaccurate to say that “experts are divided” on whether there is no amount of healthy alcohol drinking. The scientific consensus is that any level of alcohol consumption, regardless of the amount, increases risks to health.

This is just a lie. That is not the consensus, and the only reason there isn’t unanimous agreement that moderate drinking is beneficial to health is that anti-alcohol academics such as Tim Stockwell have made it their life’s work to cast doubt on the evidence.

    While several past studies did suggest that moderate consumption could, on average, promote health benefits …

Note that this immediately contradicts the claim that there is no evidence.

    … newer research (1) shows that those studies used limited methodologies and that many of them were funded by the alcohol industry (2).

The first reference is a short commentary by some WHO staffers which doesn’t discuss methodologies at all. The second reference is a study which found that only 5.4 per cent of research papers in this area were funded by the alcohol industry and concluded that “the association between moderate alcohol consumption and different health outcomes does not seem to be related to funding source.”

The WHO must hold journalists in low esteem if it thinks they won’t check up the citations like this.

    The dicussion [sic] about possible so-called protective effects of alcohol diverts attention from the bigger picture of alcohol harm; for example, even though it is well established that alcohol can cause cancer, this fact is still not widely known to the public in most countries (3).

The “bigger picture” is overall mortality. When all the risks are taken into account, including the small risks from a few rare cancers, do moderate drinkers live longer than teetotallers? Yes. Yes, they do.

February 23, 2023

Doctor Who – long-term sleeper agent for the WHO?

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

I haven’t followed the TV series for a very long time (“my” Doctor was William Hartnell, then Patrick Troughton and by the time I watched another episode there’d been two more Doctors), but I still have fond memories of the show. Along comes Caroline Kaye to suggest that I was an unwitting victim of globalist propaganda:

The BBC science fiction television series Doctor Who has been a part of British popular culture since 1963. It is centred on the Doctor figure, a scientist who works to save civilisations, help people in need and to prevent evil forces from harming people. Remember that description.

A Doctor Who fanatic once told me that the “Who” of the Doctor’s name obliquely refers to the other WHO, the World Health Organisation. There appears to be something in this, however implausible. I find the strange coincidences between fiction and reality curious and uncanny.

The Doctor is a scientific adviser to the organisation UNIT, standing for United Nations Intelligence Unit, which happens to be based in Geneva, home of the WHO. UNIT has its military element in the form of “the brigadier” who liaises with the government and occasionally has to reach out to Geneva to “gain authority” when government does not co-operate.

The most famous Doctor Who monsters will always be the Daleks. In the story Genesis of the Daleks (1975), the Doctor’s nemesis is Davros, the creator of the Daleks. Davros sounds rather like Davos, the home of the World Economic Forum, the WEF.

In the story, the Doctor is tasked with preventing the creation of the Daleks and faces a moral dilemma when confronted with the means to destroy them. He ponders in a renowned scene, “Have I the right [to destroy them]?” Declining to destroy the Daleks, the Doctor escapes, and the Daleks continue on their path of evil.

Doctor Who‘s other famous monsters, the Cybermen, are cyborgs – amoral, unfeeling transhuman creatures of our nightmares; surely the creations of mad or evil persons. Yet the idea of cyborgs and transhumanism is being pushed enthusiastically by the WEF, inspired by the ideas of Yuval Noah Harari who sees human beings merely as “hackable animals” to be augmented as necessary.

The WHO acronym is the emblem of an organisation supposedly formed, like the Doctor, to help people and protect them. Instead, in the last three years we have seen, at the behest of the WHO, the poorest and weakest of the world economically hammered, a swathe of unnecessary deaths from a treatable coronavirus, worldwide harms and deaths through forced vaccination, all of which break every human right established in the wake of WWII. This is outlined in devastating detail by Toby Green and Thomas Fazi in their book, The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor – A Critique from the Left.

Now the WHO is preparing a new treaty which ultimately will result in signing member states becoming legally subordinate to the WHO. It is designed to subsume us all into a malleable collective. In other words, as per the sprawling EU project, our politicians will be able to blame the WHO for mandating medical treatments, lockdowns and prevention of travel, all of which could happen at the whim of the director general. Or more likely, its biggest, unelected, non-medically trained funder Bill Gates.

February 3, 2023

A spectre is haunting Ontario politics: the spectre of [Shock! Horror!] American-style healthcare!

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

Everyone in Canada has heard alarming stories of people in the United States being presented with five- or six-figure bills for hospital care, and any hint that one of our provincial healthcare systems might move in that direction scares the pants off almost everyone. Politicians know this well, and salivate at the chance of deploying charges that their opponents favour “American-style” changes to our system because it’s a guaranteed vote-winner. None of it has to be true — very few Canadians know much about US systems aside from the horror stories — but it’s always effective.

In The Line, Harrison Ruess makes the sensible point that there are more healthcare systems in the western world than those of Canadian provinces and our closest neighbour:

Toronto General Hospital in 2005.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

First, to be emphatic on this point, we need to be realistic about where our system ranks globally.

It is truly bewildering to me the lengths that otherwise smart and empathetic Canadians will go to to defend the status-quo approach to health care in Canada. The results we get, versus the money we spend, is simply not brag-worthy. The argument that our system works great, if only we threw more money at it, doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

Is our health care okay? Sure. Decent? Probably. Is it great? Hardly. Could we do better? Yes, much. Do we need to spend more? Maybe a tad, but not likely much, if any. To wit:

    According to OECD data, on life expectancy Canada ranks 16th. On mortality rates from avoidable causes, we’re 23rd. On cancer survival rates we range from 13th down to 18th, depending on the cancer type. On the number of one-year-olds vaccinated for diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis, we rank an abysmal 37th (even the U.S. is higher here at 27th. Gulp.). One area where we do rank closer to the top is spending as a proportion of GDP, where we sit seventh.

World Health Organization (WHO) data wasn’t any more flattering, where Canada’s health care ranked 30th in overall performance despite being 10th in spending. The Commonwealth Fund ranks Canada 10th out of 11 in performance and 6th out of 11 in spending. In report after report Canadians aren’t getting the outcomes we need or want based on the money we’re spending on our current system.

Besides for reasons of nostalgia, why would anyone spend their energy defending these sorts of results? “We’re 16th! We’re 16th!” is hardly a chant you’d hear at a rally. It’s time to do better. And I get the feeling most people recognize this – certainly when you get onto Main Street.

Ipsos polling from December 2021 reported that 55 per cent of Canadians are “somewhat satisfied” with their health care, alongside 22 per cent that are “somewhat dissatisfied.” I.e. three quarters of Canadians find themselves in the middle of the road on the quality of our health care. This seems about right — mediocre support for mediocre health care. (The strongly satisfied and strongly dissatisfied were about even, at 12 per cent and 10 per cent respectively.)

But today Canadians are also, rightly, very worried. Leger polling in January 2023 showed that 86 per cent of Canadians are worried about the state of our health care.

March 30, 2021

Leaky labs and the WHO’s whitewash efforts

Filed under: China, Health, History, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh outlines some of the historic “diseases escaping from the lab” events that certainly allow us to be … dubious about the WHO maintaining the line that the Wuhan Coronavirus was “unlikely” to have escaped from the biological lab in Wuhan:

The original SARS virus, which terrorized Canada in 2003, has escaped from laboratories and infected humans at least six times since its successful suppression in the wild — once in Singapore, once in Taiwan and four times from one laboratory in Beijing.

And then there’s the great enigma in the history of infectious disease (maybe the second greatest — I for one would still really like to know what the English sweat was). How in blazes did the H1N1 flu virus come back? A strain of H1N1 was responsible for the Spanish flu of 1918-19; it lingered in human populations and continued to evolve until it was seemingly supplanted by a cousin, H2N2, which swept the world during the 1957-58 “Asian flu.”

H1N1 just plain vanished for two decades, then reappeared rather puzzlingly in Russia in 1977, causing a “Russian flu” pandemic and 700,000 deaths. This strain wasn’t especially lethal, but it knocked those too young to have natural immunity to H1N1 flat on their rears. Since then, H1N1 has been endemic in humans — it is incorporated as a matter of course into seasonal flu vaccines — and modern genetic analysis shows that the 1977 strain of H1N1 was, DNA-wise, pretty much a carbon copy of H1N1 strains from before the Asian flu years.

The “Russian flu” therefore almost certainly cannot have reappeared naturally, since it had undergone almost no discernible evolution. It probably crossed into Siberia from (wait for it) mainland China, which was then not yet a WHO member state. Some analysts think this may have happened because of a lab leak. Others think it more likely that it was a botched effort to create an H1N1 vaccine from old samples; H1N1 had crossed over to a small number of humans in the United States in 1976, creating the famous “swine flu” scare.

Still others ask: uh, is the difference between a lab leak and a botched vaccination experiment particularly meaningful? The general public may not know it, but a pandemic originating in a research laboratory isn’t just a hypothetical. It has not only happened, but there’s a decent chance that you, personally, have suffered from the resulting disease.

September 18, 2020

Was the Wuhan Coronavirus (aka Covid-19) created in a Chinese lab?

Filed under: China, Health, Science — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Rowan Jacobsen profiles the scientist who believes, based on her own research, that the Wuhan Coronavirus was not a naturally occurring mutation and was instead deliberately created in a Chinese government lab:

It wasn’t long before she came across an article about the remarkable stability of the virus, whose genome had barely changed from the earliest human cases, despite trillions of replications. This perplexed Chan. Like many emerging infectious diseases, COVID-19 was thought to be zoonotic — it originated in animals, then somehow found its way into people. At the time, the Chinese government and most scientists insisted the jump had happened at Wuhan’s seafood market, but that didn’t make sense to Chan. If the virus had leapt from animals to humans in the market, it should have immediately started evolving to life inside its new human hosts. But it hadn’t.

On a hunch, she decided to look at the literature on the 2003 SARS virus, which had jumped from civets to people. Bingo. A few papers mentioned its rapid evolution in its first months of existence. Chan felt the familiar surge of puzzle endorphins. The new virus really wasn’t behaving like it should. Chan knew that delving further into this puzzle would require some deep genetic analysis, and she knew just the person for the task. She opened Google Chat and fired off a message to Shing Hei Zhan. He was an old friend from her days at the University of British Columbia and, more important, he was a computational god.

“Do you want to partner on a very unusual paper?” she wrote.

Sure, he replied.

One thing Chan noticed about the original SARS was that the virus in the first human cases was subtly different — a few dozen letters of genetic code — from the one in the civets. That meant it had immediately morphed. She asked Zhan to pull up the genomes for the coronaviruses that had been found on surfaces in the Wuhan seafood market. Were they at all different from the earliest documented cases in humans?

Zhan ran the analysis. Nope, they were 100 percent the same. Definitely from humans, not animals. The seafood-market theory, which Chinese health officials and the World Health Organization espoused in the early days of the pandemic, was wrong. Chan’s puzzle detectors pulsed again. “Shing,” she messaged Zhan, “this paper is going to be insane.”

In the coming weeks, as the spring sun chased shadows across her kitchen floor, Chan stood at her counter and pounded out her paper, barely pausing to eat or sleep. It was clear that the first SARS evolved rapidly during its first three months of existence, constantly fine-tuning its ability to infect humans, and settling down only during the later stages of the epidemic. In contrast, the new virus looked a lot more like late-stage SARS. “It’s almost as if we’re missing the early phase,” Chan marveled to Zhan. Or, as she put it in their paper, as if “it was already well adapted for human transmission.”

That was a profoundly provocative line. Chan was implying that the virus was already familiar with human physiology when it had its coming-out party in Wuhan in late 2019. If so, there were three possible explanations.

For the record, my strong suspicion is that she is correct about the origins of the virus, but I don’t think it was deliberately released by the Chinese government. I think if it had been deliberate, it would have been much more directly “weaponized” in both delivery mechanism and targeting.

August 18, 2020

Don’t worry your pretty little heads, normies, the enlightened ones are planning “The Great Reset” for 2021

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

Mark Steyn on how the great and the good of the world are figuring out the road ahead of us:

… most of the chaps who matter in this world are people you’ve never heard of — by which I mean they are other than the omnipresent pygmies of the political scene: In a settled democratic society such as Canada, for example, if you wind up with an electoral contest between a woke mammy singer with a banana in his pants and a hollow husk less lifelike than his CBC election-night hologram whose only core belief is that he has no core beliefs other than that party donations should pay for his kids’ schooling, you can take it as read that the real action must be elsewhere.

A lot of those chaps you’ve never heard of turn up in this video from the “World Economic Forum” — ie, the Davos set. After five months of Covid lockdown, you’ll be happy to hear that all the experts have decided that 2021 will be the year of “The Great Reset”:

I see my chums at the Heartland Institute headline this the “World Leaders’ ‘Great Reset’ Plan“. But, if by “leader” you mean an elected head of government accountable to the people, there is a total dearth. Indeed, it’s a melancholy reflection on the state of “world leadership” that the nearest to anyone accountable to the people in this video is HRH The Prince of Wales, in whom one day in the hopefully extremely far distant future the executive authority of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, etc will be nominally vested but which cannot be exercised without the consent of the people’s representatives. Yet even that token accountability is, as noted, in the future. So right now he’s just another guy who’s a “world leader” because he gets invited to Davos and you don’t — and, even if you were minded to show up anyway, you’d need a private jet because all the scheduled flights have been Covid-canceled and the world’s airports are ghost towns.

As is the custom among our big thinkers, the blather is very generalized. “Now is the time to think about what history would say about this crisis,” says the head of the IMF. If you say so. Personally, I was thinking that now is the time to eat a meal in a restaurant, if they weren’t closed.

But, why is it history’s job to say something about this crisis? Why, don’t you “world leaders” of the here and now say anything about it? “It is imperative that we reimagine, rebuild, redesign, re-invigorate and re-balance our world,” declares the UN Secretary-General.

That’s almost a full set, but he forgot “redefined”. “Possibilities are being redefined each and every day,” says the chief exec of British Petroleum, who as is his wont sounds like he’s in any business other than petroleum.

There is, of course, an inscrutable Oriental, who is chairman of something called the “China Green Finance Committee”. He’s there as a not so subtle reminder not even to bring up the subject of China, whose lies amplified by their sock puppet at the WHO are the sole cause of the present crisis – and whose death-grip on our future is the thing that most urgently needs to be reimagined, rebuilt, re-balanced and redefined. As I’ve mentioned many times over the spring and summer, twenty years ago we were told to forget about manufacturing — from widgets to “These Colors Don’t Run” T-shirts, that’s never coming back; from now on, we’re going to be “the knowledge economy”. Yet mysteriously, with the 5G and the Huawei and all the rest, China seems to have snaffled all that, too.

July 30, 2020

“Muzzling” scientists only ever happens under Conservative governments…

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Government, Health, Media, Politics, Science — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

… so even though the circumstances might look remarkably similar to the layman’s eyes, Justin Trudeau can’t possibly be accused of doing the same thing as that evil, anti-science Stephen Harper:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper speaking at the Annual Meeting 2012 of the World Economic Forum at the congress centre in Davos, Switzerland, January 26, 2012.
World Economic Forum photo via Wikimedia Commons.

In fact, Grant Robertson reports, the Trudeau regime effectively shuttered a small, cheap (less than $3 Million dollars ~ petty cash in Canada’s government) research and early warning team called the Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN) which

    was among Canada’s contributions to the World Health Organization, and it operated as a kind of medical Amber Alert system. Its job was to gather intelligence and spot pandemics early, before they began, giving the government and other countries a head start to respond and – hopefully – prevent a catastrophe. And the results often spoke for themselves.

Unfortunately, by the time the COVID-19 pandemic was getting started, just when the GPHIN should have provided “early warning,” it had been told, by the Trudeau regime, to focus on domestic issues. But global pandemics don’t often start in Canada, do they? The GPHIN sifted through data from around the world, often from places like China, Iran and Russia which hide or manipulate medical information, conducting something akin to military reconnaissance so that Canadian (and global (WHO)) officials could “see” what might be headed our way.

Did Justin Trudeau give the order to “muzzle” the GPHIN scientists? No, of course not … no more than Stephen Harper gave the order to “muzzle” scientists in Environment Canada. The decision to “refocus” the GPHIN on useless, domestic busywork was likely made by an Assistant Deputy Minister who was acting on yet another demand from the Treasury Board Secretariat to justify every programme dollar … again.

You should be glad that the Treasury Board Secretariat casts a sceptical eye on every single government programme and is a constant thorn in the side of operational people (like I was when I was serving and like the GPHIN folks were, too). They, skilled, hard-working civil servants, are just trying to ensure that your tax dollars are not being wasted. They are good people doing good work. But sometimes the wheat gets tossed away with the chaff. That appears to have been the case with the GPHIN. In retrospect, it seems almost criminally stupid to have deprived Canada of a valuable medical reconnaissance agency just because there had not been an “attack” recently. But that appears to have been the bureaucratic justification ~ it’s like me saying that since my house hasn’t burned down recently we should disband the fire department.

Did Justin Trudeau muzzle scientists? No.

Did Justin Trudeau’s government disable a valuable (and cheap) “early warning” system just to make its own wild spending look a little less careless? Yes, that’s what the Globe and Mail‘s investigation says ~ and we have paid a horrendous price in lives for that decision.

This story, it seems to me, is very much like the “Harper muzzles scientists” stories from a few years ago … but minus the massive media attention. It appears very evident, from Mr Robertson’s investigations that bureaucrats, acting on their own, internal priorities, emasculated the GPHIN just when we needed it most. That, bureaucratic action, was I believe what was, mainly, behind the “Harper muzzles scientists” stories, too. But in the 2010s much of the mainstream media was in a sort of undeclared war against Stephen Harper and so the claims of climate activists became “news” and opinions were treated as facts.

June 20, 2020

“What did you do in the Wuhan Coronavirus war, Daddy?”

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

Chris Selley metaphorically dons the garb of a war correspondent to report on how the Canadian government systematically mishandled the epidemic “war”:

Toronto General Hospital.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

At first, comparisons to wartime seemed a bit silly. All we were being asked to do, after all, was stay indoors. As the World Health Organization was declaring a pandemic 100 days ago, the commanders had everything under control: the borders, the epidemiology, the strategy, support for shuttered businesses and their employees. Traditionally, wartime puts those of us left on the home front to work whether we like it or not. This was entirely the opposite: the worst we would have to put up with — in theory, assuming government aid was as advertised — was the indignity of idleness. Collective inaction would flatten the curve, the forces of COVID-19 would be beaten back, and summer would be saved. Peace in our time.

And then it instantly turned to quagmire. Canadians watched slack-jawed as COVID-19 breached our most fundamental defences. You don’t need Sun Tzu’s perspicacity to inform people arriving in Canada of their responsibility to self-isolate, and exactly what self-isolation means — go directly home, do not stop for groceries, do not receive visitors. I just did it, right there, in half a sentence. But we couldn’t manage it: Where information was distributed at all, it was excessively complex even as it failed to deliver the central message. Provincial forces threatened mutiny. Alberta Commander-in-Chief Jason Kenney stormed into the Edmonton airport demanding answers. It took weeks to sort out.

[…]

If it didn’t seem like a war before, it sure did once the real live army was drafted in to bail out long-term care homes in Ontario and Quebec that had descended into horrifying squalor. We learned the appalling details from leaked military reports. And now, in an almost poetic act of military pigheadedness, the Ottawa Citizen reports the Armed Forces are trying to hunt down and punish the leakers.

The war must go on. But sitting here in still-locked-down Toronto, stewing in my own bile, I cannot say this is filling me with patriotic fervour. I find myself simultaneously envious of other provinces that are in the process of reopening, and sympathetic to their residents: If it weren’t for the two sick men of the federation [Ontario and Quebec] dominating the narrative, they would likely have reopened much earlier.

Indeed, jealousies have bloomed as weeks turned to months. Apartment dwellers envy other apartment dwellers who have balconies. All apartment dwellers envy homeowners. Everyone envies cottage-owners. Some cottage-country mayors have told cottage-owners to stay put and keep their infestations to themselves. People cooped up with their kids sometimes envy those with time to themselves; singletons who have had enough alone time to last a decade occasionally envy those trying to juggle kids with working from home. The pleasant novelty of Zoom-based socializing faded ages ago, as everyone realized that Zoom-based socializing sucks.

More than 8,200 Canadians are dead, most having lived long lives but many having died in grim and lonely circumstances. In future, considerably more deaths and distress will be associated with the lockdown itself. The psychological effects of this will be studied for decades. If war isn’t quite the right analogy, it’s certainly closer to a war than anything that has been contested on Canadian soil in my or my parents’ lifetime, and it will come at a greater cost to the whole of society than any actual war that Canadian forces have fought over that time. It’s a terrible shame that as a nation, we didn’t win.

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).

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 29, 2020

“The war on ultraviolet radiation because it might help Trump is an educational moment”

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

Arthur Chrenkoff on the sudden decision that the World Health Organization is the ultimate arbiter of what we’re allowed to say on social media platforms like Twitter and YouTube:

There is of course no evidence that the video represents any disinformation. It relates to legitimate scientific research by a medical company conducted in association with a respected hospital to develop a novel treatment of possibly crucial importance in the current conditions and into the future. The only problem with the video is that is indirectly supports Trump’s flight of fancy speculation about using light and chemicals to “disinfect” the body. Ergo, according to a NYT journalist it represents a problem and YouTube agrees. YouTube now has a standing policy of removing COVID information that goes against the World Health Organisation’s guidelines. Putting aside the question of the WHO’s credibility in the wake of the pandemic, we are not talking here about some guy in a tinfoil hat talking about 5G towers spreading the virus; this is a video relating to ongoing, respectable scientific research. Will it work? Probably not. But perhaps neither will any of the 150 or so COVID-19 vaccines being currently developed around the world. We won’t know until we know. But in the meantime, scientific news should not be censored, period.

[…]

Goldsmith and Woods are correct in pointing out not only the greater role that governments have been playing in regulating speech but more importantly how much of that effort has been embraced and driven by the big tech — and by the private individuals enabled and encouraged by the big tech — what I have previously called the “democratised censorship”. The difference is that people like Goldsmith and Woods think that’s a good thing.

The dirty little secret is that a great number of leftists, progressives and even centrist technocrats and activists look at China, with its authoritarian government, social credit score system, ubiquitous surveillance, and the ability to “get things done” and done quickly and supposedly efficiently (in China, bullet trains run on time, I hear), and pine for such a system to be applied in their own countries — as long as, of course, they are the ones in power and decide what is right, important and valuable. The left’s objections are rarely against authoritarianism and its means and methods per se, just with the possibility that someone else — like Trump — is the one behind the wheel, implementing their, not the left’s, agenda.

The war on ultraviolet radiation because it might help Trump is an educational moment. One could say, first they came for crazy conspiracy theorists and I said nothing because I’m not an anti-vaxxer or anti-5G activist — and so on. The problem with censorship is that it keeps creeping up on everyone else. And those who do the censoring — who decide what the ignorant masses should and shouldn’t be allowed to read — are not some detached and impartial spiritual beings but people with political agendas. People who think that ideas and beliefs of one half of the society are harmful and offensive. People who will censor news that doesn’t fit the agenda and support the narrative.

And then they came for ultraviolet radiation… You have been warned.

February 23, 2020

China’s government and the coronavirus epidemic

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

In Quillette, Aaron Sarin shows how the Chinese government has systematically failed to respond adequately to the epidemic which broke out late in 2019in Wuhan and risks “losing the Mandate of Heaven”:

As of this writing, the epidemic’s death toll is still rising, and many of these deaths can ultimately be traced to the paranoid rigidity of the Xi Jinping administration. By late December 2019, doctors in Wuhan were already sounding the alarm over cases of what appeared to them to be SARS. Instead of listening to their warnings, the authorities summoned eight of these doctors for a dressing-down. They were warned of the punishments they could face for “rumour-mongering.” News of their detention was broadcast to tens of millions: a clear message to anyone else who might have been thinking about discussing viruses in public.

The Party’s leaders actually knew enough to be worried by this point — they alerted the World Health Organisation on December 31st — and yet still they hid the truth from the public. This neurotic obsession with secrecy has certainly cost lives. If the medical community had been informed of the outbreak back in December, hospitals could have stockpiled the necessary supplies. But now there are drastic shortages, and patients are dying in hallways and waiting rooms.

Even the critics of authoritarian dictatorship will usually agree that the system beats democracy for sheer efficiency, but the coronavirus debacle has turned that old wisdom on its head. Where we might have expected cold and methodical governance, we have found dithering bureaucrats, unable to take a step in any direction, paralysed by what Xu Zhangrun calls “systemic impotence.” Weeks went by and citizens swarmed in and out of Wuhan, picking up the virus and transporting it to the far corners of the country. Local government officials stayed quiet, wary of the heavy hand of Xi Jinping. On January 23rd, a citywide quarantine was finally announced, but eight long hours passed before it was enacted — time enough for a million or more to flee the city.

The Wuhan lockdown was repeated in other parts of the country (most recently the southern megacity of Guangzhou), and some observers praised the speed with which new hospitals were constructed from scratch. These very visible displays of its power aside, the Party has moved far too slowly at every stage of the crisis. Diagnostic testing required samples to be sent all the way to a laboratory in Beijing, and this delayed the distribution of testing kits to many of the hospitals in Wuhan. Even when testing kits were available, patients still found themselves trapped in a Kafka-esque web of bureaucracy. According to Reuters, the tests have been refused to people who fail to make it through a complex reporting system involving hospital authorities, district authorities, city health authorities, and disease control officials.

None of this should come as a surprise. The cliché about the efficiency of authoritarian systems was always, on closer analysis, something of a low-resolution image. In the old days of the Soviet Union, speedy industrial growth obscured the reality of a fragile system largely devoid of autonomous decision making. During the 1920s, the Communist Party’s state planning committee Gosplan was established with the impressive-sounding mission of creating a series of five-year plans to govern the economy. But over the next 70 years, the vast majority of these plans were radically revised and rewritten, or more frequently ignored altogether in favour of Joseph Stalin’s arbitrary dictates. Indeed, Gosplan actively tried to avoid making decisions at all, because committee members knew Stalin would have them shot and replaced if their ideas produced unwelcome results. In the end, fear saps the efficiency of all authoritarian regimes, and the Chinese Communist Party is no exception.

Li Wenliang has emerged as the most vivid symbol of the Party’s latest failure. Li was one of the Wuhan doctors disgraced for discussing the coronavirus on social media. A few days after his police warning, he contracted the virus himself, and on February 6th he died. It was during the period of Li’s short illness that the Party apparently realised its error and decided to absolve the doctors, but still the central government would accept no blame for the tragedy. Instead, the Supreme Court (which is controlled by the CCP) scolded the local government in Wuhan — an unusual move, no doubt designed to create a scapegoat for surging public anger. The truth is that the city’s officials had been faced with an impossible job. They obediently followed orders, and now they will be punished for it.

November 19, 2015

Is a possible cure for old age now in sight?

Filed under: Health, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Matt Ridley on recent developments in the search for ways to ameliorate the effects of aging:

Squeezed between falling birth rates and better healthcare, the world population is getting rapidly older. Learning how to deal with that is one of the great challenges of this century. The World Health Organisation has just produced a report on the implications of an ageing population, which — inadvertently — reveals a dismal fatalism we share about the illnesses of old age: that they will always be inevitable.

This could soon be wrong. A new book, The Telomerase Revolution, published in America this week by the doctor and medical researcher Michael Fossel, argues that we now understand enough about the fundamental cause of ageing to be confident that we will eventually be able to reverse it. This would mean curing diseases such as Alzheimer’s, heart disease and osteoporosis, rather than coping with them or treating their symptoms.

Let me show you what I mean about fatalism. The WHO report on ageing and health, for all its talk of the need for “profound changes” to health care for the elderly, actually urges us to stop trying to cure the afflictions of old age and learn to live with them: “The societal response to population ageing will require a transformation of health systems that moves away from disease-based curative models and towards the provision of older-person-centred and integrated care.”

Yet it also subscribes to the somewhat magical hope that illnesses of old age can be “prevented or delayed by engaging in healthy behaviours” and that “physical activity and good nutrition can have powerful benefits for health and wellbeing.” This is largely wishful thinking. There is no evidence that, say, Alzheimer’s can be prevented by a certain diet or activity. A lack of activity and poor nutrition can worsen health at any age, but the underlying chronic diseases of old age are caused by age itself.

When I asked Dr Fossel what he thought of the WHO report, he replied: “In 1950 we could have talked (and did) about ‘active polio’ in the sense of keeping polio victims active rather than giving up, but the very phrase itself implies that one has already given up. I would prefer that we cure the fundamental problem. Why talk about ‘active ageing’, ‘successful ageing’, and ‘healthy ageing’ when we could talk about not ageing?”

October 28, 2015

The WHO’s lack of clarity leads to sensationalist newspaper headlines (again)

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

The World Health Organization appears to exist primarily to give newspaper editors the excuse to run senational headlines about the risk of cancer. This is not a repeat story from earlier years. Oh, wait. Yes it is. Here’s The Atlantic‘s Ed Yong to de-sensationalize the recent scary headlines:

The International Agency of Research into Cancer (IARC), an arm of the World Health Organization, is notable for two things. First, they’re meant to carefully assess whether things cause cancer, from pesticides to sunlight, and to provide the definitive word on those possible risks.

Second, they are terrible at communicating their findings.

[…]

Group 1 is billed as “carcinogenic to humans,” which means that we can be fairly sure that the things here have the potential to cause cancer. But the stark language, with no mention of risks or odds or any remotely conditional, invites people to assume that if they specifically partake of, say, smoking or processed meat, they will definitely get cancer.

Similarly, when Group 2A is described as “probably carcinogenic to humans,” it roughly translates to “there’s some evidence that these things could cause cancer, but we can’t be sure.” Again, the word “probably” conjures up the specter of individual risk, but the classification isn’t about individuals at all.

Group 2B, “possibly carcinogenic to humans,” may be the most confusing one of all. What does “possibly” even mean? Proving a negative is incredibly difficult, which is why Group 4 — “probably not carcinogenic to humans” — contains just one substance of the hundreds that IARC has assessed.

So, in practice, 2B becomes a giant dumping ground for all the risk factors that IARC has considered, and could neither confirm nor fully discount as carcinogens. Which is to say: most things. It’s a bloated category, essentially one big epidemiological shruggie. But try telling someone unfamiliar with this that, say, power lines are “possibly carcinogenic” and see what they take away from that.

Worse still, the practice of lumping risk factors into categories without accompanying description — or, preferably, visualization — of their respective risks practically invites people to view them as like-for-like. And that inevitably led to misleading headlines like this one in the Guardian: “Processed meats rank alongside smoking as cancer causes – WHO.”

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