Quotulatiousness

September 12, 2023

Justin Trudeau should just stay away from India … it’s an ill-omened place for him

Filed under: Cancon, India, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Paul Wells on the latest subcontinental pratfall of Prime Minister Look-At-My-Socks:

Later, word came from India that Justin Trudeau’s airplane had malfunctioned, stranding him, one hopes only briefly. It’s always a drag when a politician’s vehicle turns into a metaphor so obvious it begs to go right into the headline. As for the cause of the breakdown, I’m no mechanic, but I’m gonna bet $20 on “The gods decided to smite Trudeau for hubris”. Here’s what the PM tweeted or xeeted before things started falling off his ride home:

One can imagine the other world leaders’ glee whenever this guy shows up. “Oh, it’s Justin Trudeau, here to push for greater ambition!” Shall we peer into their briefing binders? Let’s look at Canada’s performance on every single issue Trudeau mentions, in order.

On climate change, Canada ranks 58th of 63 jurisdictions in the global Climate Change Performance Index. The country page for Canada uses the words “very low” three times in the first two sentences.

On gender equality, the World Economic Forum (!) ranks Canada 30th behind a bunch of other G-20 members.

On global health, this article in Britain’s BMJ journal calls Canada “a high income country that frames itself as a global health leader yet became one of the most prominent hoarders of the limited global covid-19 vaccine supply”.

On inclusive growth, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development has a composite indicator called the Inclusive Growth Index. Canada’s value is 64.1, just behind the United States (!) and Australia, further behind most of Europe, stomped by Norway at 76.9%.

On support for Ukraine, the German Kiel Institute think tank ranks Canada fifth in the world, and third as a share of GDP, for financial support; and 8th in the world, or 21st as a share of GDP, for military support.

Almost all of these results are easy enough to understand. A small number are quite honourable. But none reads to me as any kind of license to wander around, administering lessons to other countries. I just finished reading John Williams’ luminous 1965 novel about university life, Stoner. A minor character in the book mocks the lectures and his fellow students, and eventually stands unmasked as a poser who hasn’t done even the basic reading in his discipline. I found the character strangely familiar. You’d think that after nearly a decade in power, after the fiascos of the UN Security Council bid, the first India trip, the collegiate attempt to impress a schoolgirl with fake trees, the prime minister would have figured out that fewer and fewer people, at home or abroad, are persuaded by his talk.

But this is part of the Liberals’ problem, isn’t it. They still think their moves work. They keep announcing stuff — Digital adoption program! Growth fund! Investment tax credits! Indo-Pacific strategy! Special rapporteur! — and telling themselves Canadians would miss this stuff if it went away. Whereas it’s closer to the truth to say we can’t miss it because its effect was imperceptible when it showed up.

In a moment I’ve mentioned before because it fascinates me, the Liberals called their play a year ago, as soon as they knew they’d be facing Pierre Poilievre. “We are going to see two competing visions,” Randy Boissonault said in reply to Poilievre’s first Question Period question as the Conservative leader. The events of the parliamentary year would spontaneously construct a massive contrast ad. It was the oldest play in the book, first articulated by Pierre Trudeau’s staff 50 years ago: Don’t compare me to the almighty, compare me to the alternative. It doesn’t work as well if people decide they prefer the alternative. It really doesn’t work if the team running the play think it means, “We’re the almighty”.

September 5, 2023

The worst Prime Minister in Canadian history?

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

My own opinion is that the Trudeaus, taken together, are certainly the worst family to have been political leaders of Canada, but is Justin Trudeau the single worst PM in history?

Like father, like son, a dynastic peril. I should mention at this point that the best short article on Justin Trudeau’s unfitness for office was posted on this site by my wife Janice Fiamengo some two years back. It would be folly for me to try to outdo her writerly excellence, unflappable tact, and marksman-like precision. Here I offer an updated summing-up of why Justin Trudeau is surely unprecedented in the annals of Canada’s ideological destitution. The daily spectacle we are witnessing, the eruption of political sludge and magma from the depths of government policy, puts paid to any promotional salvage operation.

This is a prime minister who has been implicated in numerous scandals and cited for several ethics violations, all to no avail. He has imposed a needless and prohibitive carbon tax upon a groaning nation and propelled the national debt into the fiscal asteroid belt. He is soft on terrorism, having awarded a $10.5 million reparation payment to al-Qaeda terrorist, and the son of Ahmed Said Khadr, Omar Khadr, who had been imprisoned in Guantanamo for killing an American medic in Afghanistan. Trudeau also sympathized with Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a Muslim immigrant from Chechnya, who killed three people and injured another 170, saying, “there is no question that this happened because there is someone who feels completely excluded”.

As noted, this is a prime minister who has bought the media with elaborate financial gifts, who admires the “basic dictatorship” of Communist China, and has made no secret of his fondness for Castro, waxing eloquent in his eulogy for the dead dictator, and who, like his father, has adopted an energy policy intended to phase out the western petroleum industry in the interests of a “just transition” to inefficient green renewables, and thus cripple the economic foundation of the country in perpetuity.

This is a prime minister who mandated draconian COVID-19 protocols — masks, quarantines, lockdowns, vaccines. The entire effort is now known to have been a colossal blunder whose results were ineffective at best and noxious, even lethal, at worst. Concerning the vaccines, Trudeau now claims that he did not force anyone to take them but “chose to make sure all of the incentives and all of the protections were there to encourage Canadians to get vaccinated”. In other words, offer them an incentive they can’t refuse. The “incentives” amounted to interventions like losing one’s job, livelihood, social freedoms, and Charter rights. Even people who did remote work had to be vaccinated; if they were fired, they were ineligible for Employment Insurance.

Giving Trudeau’s protestations the lie, in a Sept. 16, 2021 interview aired on the French-language program “La semaine des 4 Julie“, he referred to unvaccinated Canadians as “extremists”, as people who “don’t believe in science or progress and are very often misogynistic and racist”. “A leader who expresses such detestation for his own people,” Janice writes, “and encourages frightened followers to participate in their dehumanization should not be trusted with the reins of government.” It’s hard to disagree.

We should never forget that this is a prime minister who in February 2022 invoked the dictatorial powers of the Emergencies Act — a Trudeau habit — to crush a peaceful, legitimate, and justifiable protest against the vaccine mandates by a brave and patriotic cohort of the country’s truckers and who authorized the banks to freeze protesters’ accounts, reminiscent of the Nazi 1938 Decree for the Reporting of Jewish-Owned Property issued by Hitler’s government. The mind boggles.

August 30, 2023

Extreme maskaholism alert!

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

In City Journal, John Tierney says we can safely ignore the mask-lovers latest attempt to move us back into the misery of the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic years:

“Covid 19 Masks” by baldeaglebluff is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Unfazed by data, scientific research, or common sense, the maskaholics are back. In response to an uptick in Covid cases, they’ve begun reinstating mask mandates. So far, it’s just a few places — a college in Atlanta, a Hollywood studio, two hospitals in Syracuse — but the mainstream media and their favorite “experts” are working hard to scare the rest of us into masking up yet again.

Never mind that at least 97 percent of Americans have Covid antibodies in their blood as a result of infection, vaccination, or both. Never mind that actual experts — the ones who studied the scientific literature before 2020 and drew up plans for a pandemic — advised against masking the public. Never mind that their advice has been further bolstered during the pandemic by randomized clinical trials and rigorous observational studies failing to find an effect of masks and mask mandates. Scientific evidence cannot overcome the maskaholics’ faith.

It’s tempting to compare them with the villagers in Cambodia who erected scarecrows in front of their huts to ward off the coronavirus — but that’s not fair to the villagers. Their Ting Mong, as the magic scarecrows are called, at least didn’t hurt any of their neighbors. The mask mandates imposed harms on the public that were well known before Covid, which was why occupational-safety regulations limited workers’ mask usage. Dozens of studies had demonstrated “Mask-Induced Exhaustion Syndrome“, whose symptoms include an increase of carbon dioxide in the blood, difficulty breathing, dizziness, drowsiness, headache, and diminished ability to concentrate and think. It was no surprise during the pandemic when adverse effects of masks were reported in a study of health-care workers in New York City. More than 70 percent of the workers said that prolonged mask-wearing gave them headaches, and nearly a quarter blamed it for “impaired cognition”.

A possibly toxic effect of prolonged mask-wearing, particularly for pregnant women, children, and adolescents, was identified in a review of the scientific literature published this year by German researchers. They warn that mask-wearers are rebreathing carbon dioxide at levels linked with adverse effects on the body’s cardiovascular, respiratory, cognitive, and reproductive systems. Writing for City Journal, Jeffrey Anderson summarized their conclusions: “While eight times the normal level of carbon dioxide is toxic, research suggests that mask-wearers (specifically those who wear masks for more than 5 minutes at a time) are breathing in 35 to 80 times normal levels.”

Because of research linking elevated carbon dioxide levels with stillbirths, the German researchers note, the U.S. Navy began limiting the level on its submarines when female crews began serving. The researchers warn that this level of carbon dioxide is often exceeded when wearing a mask, especially an N95 mask, and they point to “circumstantial evidence” that mask usage may be related to the increase in stillbirths worldwide (including in the U.S.) during the pandemic. They also observe that no such increase occurred in Sweden, where the vast majority of citizens followed the government’s recommendation not to wear masks.

No drug with all these potential side effects would be recommended, much less mandated, for the entire population — and a drug that flunked its clinical trials wouldn’t even be submitted for approval. Yet the Centers for Disease Control, disdaining any cost-benefit analysis, continues to recommend masking for all Americans on indoor public transportation, and for everyone living in areas with high rates of Covid transmission. At the start of the pandemic, even Anthony Fauci advised against masks because there was no evidence of their efficacy. But then, in response to media hysteria, he and the CDC went on to recommend masks anyway, and justified themselves by citing cherry-picked data and consistently flawed studies.

August 26, 2023

The Cloward-Piven strategy in action

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

David Solway outlines the “playbook” apparently being followed in the ongoing dismantling of western civilization:

The malignant playbook of the contemporary left is generally considered to be Saul Alinsky’s 1989 Rules for Radicals, and there is certainly much truth to the story of the book’s destructive influence. But the source text for social and political upheaval is Richard Cloward and Francis Fox Piven’s far more detailed and authoritative 1997 manual, The Breaking of the American Social Compact.

The Cloward-Piven strategy seeks to hasten the fall of the free market and the republican structure of government by overloading the administrative apparatus with an avalanche of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis mode and eventual economic collapse. Choking the welfare rolls, for example, would serve to generate a political and financial meltdown, break the budget, jam the bureaucratic gears, and bring the system crashing down. The fear, turmoil, and violence accompanying such a debacle would provide the perfect conditions for fostering radical change.

We see the strategy in action today, forging a situation that was unnecessary from the start via a series of tactical steps, among which: the campaign against productive farming; the so-called 15-minute city herding people into condo-congested urban centers where they are readily supervised and mastered; open borders allowing for a refugee tsunami to alter the character of the nation; a censoring and disinformative media rendered corrupt to the core; the mandating of useless masks or plausibly toxic vaccines; and the implementation of a digital currency in which citizens’ spending can be monitored, restricted, or even frozen. Such phenomena have no basis in even the remotest necessity but are essential in order to prepare the ground for an imminent totalitarian state.

This is the rationale for the so-called COVID pandemic and the bugbear of “Climate Change”. A bad flu season affecting mainly the elderly with comorbidities is not a viral pandemic, as Dr. Vernon Coleman ironically shows. The climate is always changing as a matter of course — the term “climate change” is a gross oxymoron; the thesis of anthropogenic forcing obscures the fact that carbon is material for life and nitrogen for farming. COVID and Climate are tactical phantoms that have nothing to do with reality and everything to do with social control. The Clowardly rePivening put in place by the Democrat Party has only one aim: to create a crisis out of thin air and then seek to defuse it by creating a real crisis that advantages only the Party. It is the diabolical form of creation ex nihilo.

Thus, a ginned-up pandemic is a perfect excuse for mail-in ballots and ballot harvesting, especially if the voter rolls have been flooded with uncountable and counterfeit names and the voting stations have been commandeered. There is no immigration chaos unless a chain system is entrenched and the border is left wide open. There is no such thing as “white supremacy” unless it is apodictically proclaimed and false-flag operations are carried out. There is no need for costly, largely ineffective, and harmful renewable energy installations unless drilling has been rendered illegal and the oil pipelines have been shut down to avoid a bogus climate catastrophe. The bible of the Democrat left begins: Let there be a crisis. And there was a crisis.

H/T to Blazing Cat Fur for the link.

August 7, 2023

Legacy media puzzled at falling levels of public trust in the scientific community

Filed under: Health, Media, Politics, Science, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Given the way “the science” has been politicized over recent years and especially through the pandemic, it’s almost a surprise that there’s any residual public trust left for the scientific community:

Sagan’s warning was eerily prophetic. For the last three-plus years, we’ve witnessed a troubling rise of authoritarianism masquerading as science, which has resulted in a collapse in trust of public health.

This collapse has been part of a broader and more partisan shift in Americans who say they have “a high degree of confidence in the scientific community”. Democrats, who had long had less confidence in the scientific community, are now far less skeptical. Republicans, who historically had much higher levels of trust in the scientific community, have experienced a collapse in trust in the scientific community.

John Burn-Murdoch, a data reporter at The Financial Times who shared the data in question on Twitter, said Republicans are now “essentially the anti-science party”.

First, this is a sloppy inference from a journalist. Burn-Murdoch’s poll isn’t asking respondents if they trust science. It’s asking if they trust the scientific community. There’s an enormous difference between the two, and the fact that a journalist doesn’t understand the difference between “confidence in science” and “confidence in the scientific community” is a little frightening.

Second, as Dr. Vinay Prasad pointed out, no party has a monopoly on science; but it’s clear that many of the policies the “pro science” party were advocating the last three years were not rooted in science.

“The ‘pro science’ party was pro school closure, masking a 26 month old child with a cloth mask, and mandating an mrna booster in a healthy college man who had COVID already,” tweeted Prasad, a physician at the University of California, San Francisco.

Today we can admit such policies were flawed, non-sensical or both, as were so many of the mitigations that were taken and mandated during the Covid-19 pandemic. But many forget that during the pandemic it was verboten to even question such policies.

People were banned, suspended, and censored by social media platforms at the behest of federal agencies. “The Science” had become a set of dogmas that could not be questioned. No less an authority than Dr. Fauci said that criticizing his policies was akin to “criticizing science, because I represent science”.

This could not be more wrong. Science can help us understand the natural world, but there are no “oughts” in science, the economist Ludwig von Mises pointed out, echoing the argument of philosopher David Hume.

“Science is competent to establish what is,” Mises wrote. “[Science] can never dictate what ought to be and what ends people should aim at.”

July 10, 2023

“… the Western world is failing — culturally and economically — because the government now has a hand in so much of society”

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

The Armchair General would almost certainly agree with my frequent lament that the more the government tries to do, the less well it does everything:

There is a famous quote by American journalist and satirist H.L. Menken, which has been deployed by many political writers over the years:

    The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.

It is an enduring quote because it has the ring of truth1, and it certainly fits with the Machiavellian aspect of politics. This attitude was, without doubt, deployed by governments across the world during Covid (and, to some extent, still is).

Your jaundiced2 General would like to propose a related, alternative and rather more plausible soundbite that, I believe, more adequately describes the Western world in the twenty-first century:

    The whole consequence of practical politics is the keep the ignorant populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be kept in comfort) by an endless series of colossal fuck-ups, labelled as crises, caused entirely by the government.3

Every time that you see the media whipping up a frenzy about a “crisis“, you can be 99% sure that the issue in question has been caused by the state — and that the real solution is to remove the government intervention. And that is never, ever the action actually proposed.

Crises of Government Origin
Your jaundiced General refers to these phenomena as “Crises of Government Origin” (COGO), and will form the back-bone of a series of posts titled with that acronym. Many of the issues are interlinked, and most are absolutely critical if we are ever to confront the economic and social issues facing us today.

These include (but are not limited to):

  • the energy crisis;
  • the Climate Warming / Change / Heating crisis;
  • the housing crisis;
  • the NHS staffing crisis;
  • the police shortage crisis;
  • the obesity crisis;
  • the education crisis;
  • the pandemic crisis;
  • the productivity crisis;
  • the activist “charity” crisis;
  • the drugs crisis (Scottish edition);
  • the rape gang crisis;
  • the intersectional and gender crisis;
  • just about any other “crisis” you can think of.

To be sure, the UK government is not the worst in some of these areas — but, since it is in UK that my comfy leather armchair is situated, it is the rampant stupidity of our own governments that I shall concentrate on. And no, not all of these posts will include reminding people that Grant Schapps is a prick.

I can promise that every one of them will include illustrations demonstrating the mind-gargling incompetence of our governments (of all persuasions) and “Rolls Royce” civil service4.

The law is a blunt instrument, and the government is really inefficient at doing anything at all.

Fundamentally, the Western world is failing — culturally and economically — because the government now has a hand in so much of society. And the UK is in the vanguard of this malaise as Sharon White, at the time Permanent Secretary to the Treasury (and currently fucking things up in typically Rolls Royce civil servant fashion at John Lewis), said (in a rare example of her being right) in 2015 at the Institute for Government:

    The UK is “almost the most centralised developed country in the world”.

Indeed it has been observed that, by some measures, the UK is more centralised than Soviet Russia. This is why we are failing.

The Crises Of Government Origin (COGO) series aims to examine some of these failures — large and small. For starters, let’s have a look at Hate Speech laws and why they are so dangerous.

    1. The same applies to Menken’s definition of Puritanism: “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy”.

    2. Caused less by poor mood than incipient liver failure. Now pass the port, would you, old chap. No, to the left, you fool!

    3. Yes, yes — I realise that it needs honing, but it will do for now. Feel free to submit more elegant versions in the comments.

    4. Snork.

July 8, 2023

During the pandemic, governments across the world chose the worst way to respond

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

In City Journal, John Tierney explains why western governments’ almost universal grabbing of extraordinary powers was the worst possible way to handle the public health crisis of the Wuhan Coronavirus:

Long before Covid struck, economists detected a deadly pattern in the impact of natural disasters: if the executive branch of government used the emergency to claim sweeping new powers over the citizenry, more people died than would have if government powers had remained constrained. It’s now clear that the Covid pandemic is the deadliest confirmation yet of that pattern.

Governments around the world seized unprecedented powers during the pandemic. The result was an unprecedented disaster, as recently demonstrated by two exhaustive analyses of the lockdowns’ impact in the United States and Europe. Both reports conclude that the lockdowns made little or no difference in the Covid death toll. But the lockdowns did lead to deaths from other causes during the pandemic, particularly among young and middle-aged people, and those fatalities will continue to mount in the future.

“Most likely lockdowns represent the biggest policy mistake in modern times,” says Lars Jonung of Lund University in Sweden, a coauthor of one of the new reports. He and two fellow economists, Steve Hanke from Johns Hopkins University and Jonas Herby of the Center for Political Studies in Copenhagen, sifted through nearly 20,000 studies for their book, Did Lockdowns Work?, published in June by the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) in London. After combining results from the most rigorous studies analyzing fatality rates and the stringency of lockdowns in various states and nations, they estimate that the average lockdown in the United States and Europe during the spring of 2020 reduced Covid mortality by just 3.2 percent. That translates to some 4,000 avoided deaths in the United States — a negligible result compared with the toll from the ordinary flu, which annually kills nearly 40,000 Americans.

Even that small effect may be an overestimate, to judge from the other report, published in February by the Paragon Health Institute. The authors, all former economic advisers to the White House, are Joel Zinberg and Brian Blaise of the institute, Eric Sun of Stanford, and Casey Mulligan of the University of Chicago. They analyzed the rates of Covid mortality and of overall excess mortality (the number of deaths above normal from all causes) in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. They adjusted for the relative vulnerability of each state’s population by factoring in the age distribution (older people were more vulnerable) and the prevalence of obesity and diabetes (which increased the risk from Covid). Then they compared the mortality rates over the first two years of the pandemic with the stringency of each state’s policies (as measured on a widely used Oxford University index that tracked business and school closures, stay-at-home requirements, mandates for masks and vaccines, and other restrictions).

The researchers found no statistically significant effect from the restrictions. The mortality rates in states with stringent policies were not significantly different from those in less restrictive states. Two of the largest states, California and Florida, fared the same — their mortality rates both stood at the national average — despite California’s lengthy lockdowns and Florida’s early reopening. New York, with a mortality rate worse than average despite ranking first in the nation in the stringency of its policies, fared the same as the least restrictive state, South Dakota.

June 23, 2023

From Operation Barbarossa in 1941 to the disinformation and cover-up over the origins of the Wuhan Coronavirus

Filed under: China, Germany, Health, History, Media, Politics, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Bray outlines the utterly amazing situation between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany on the eve of Hitler launching Operation Barbarossa — where Stalin refused to believe that Hitler would attack Russia despite overwhelming evidence from many sources — to the parallel situation over Covid:

Several sources quite specifically reported to the Soviet government that the Germans would invade around dawn on June 22. Their reports can be found in the Soviet archives in a “folder of dubious and misleading reports”. Then, shortly before dawn on June 22, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Military leaders on the border called in reports of the invasion, and the people they talked to in Moscow declined to believe them. Soviet border troops held their fire, seeing Germans while being ordered to understand that no true invasion could possibly be underway. Stalin knew better, and contradicting Josef Stalin was known to be a fatal mistake. Achieving an entirely avoidable surprise, the Germans destroyed much of the Soviet air force on the ground, parked wingtip-to-wingtip for the convenience of the invader’s bombers.

[…]

An invasion that could have been met with brutal severity from the first moment instead achieved considerable initial success against a supine nation because the Soviet leader, and the chain of subordinates beneath him who were forced to adopt his conception of facts and truth, assumed that things they didn’t wish to believe constituted disinformation. Millions of lives were wasted for that illusion. A society that categorizes inconvenient truths in this way is committing a form of suicide, hiding from hard facts that demand acknowledgment.

Now: In 2021, the lab leak theory was a disgusting lie with “racist roots”.

In June of 2023, the, uh, first people who got sick with Covid turn out to have been, uh, scientists at the lab in Wuhan. BUT THEY PROBABLY HAD SOME BAT SOUP AT THE WET MARKET, IS WHY, or something.

Stupid conspiracy theorists, you people are such MORONS, do you actually bel— okay, that one’s true too.

We’ve somehow developed an industry of professional information barriers, dimwitted parasitical human garbage whose sole function in life is to prevent understanding by pasting “disinformation” stickers on things that you’re not supposed to know.

June 21, 2023

QotD: Working online

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

After a bit of a rocky start, most people I know who suddenly found themselves doing their “work” online quickly realized little work they actually did — and, by extension, since they were the conscientious ones, how trivially little work so many of their coworkers did. Hard on the heels of that was the realization that “work” in a physical workplace, for the vast majority of people, really means “socializing”. There are a LOT of jobs in which one person actually working from home can accomplish in one day what it takes an entire “customer service” department a week to do under “normal” — meaning, “in the office” — conditions.

[…]

For lots of people, the office was their only social outlet. Coffee breaks, water cooler chatter, happy hours … for lots of people, that was pretty much it, socially. “Work/life balance” was always a joke, because all your friends are work friends, so even if you’re “socializing” and not “working”, it’s with the same people from the office, talking about office stuff. And the longer you stayed in the same job, the higher up the corporate ladder you got, the more specialized your position, the worse it got – your rookie customer service reps still had buddies from college to hang out with, but junior managers tended to hang out exclusively with other junior managers, etc. The “professions”, of course, are famously clannish — the only ways to talk to a lawyer or doctor are to hire one, or be one.

Severian, “More Scattered Thoughts”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-10-13.

June 10, 2023

Remember the Freedom Convoy of 2022?

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

The media worked very hard to demonize the grassroots protests that coalesced into the Canadian Freedom Convoy in early 2022, and they’ve continued to push the notion that either the movement was an utter failure or that it was a maple-flavoured January 6 “insurrection” righteously suppressed by our beloved Dear Leader and his stormtroops. Someone using the handle “Kulak” wants to remind you that the convoy wasn’t a failure and in fact was the catalyst for great changes both in Canada and around the world:

A screenshot from a YouTube video showing the protest in front of Parliament in Ottawa on 30 January, 2022.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

I keep encountering this misconception from people who don’t follow Canadian politics …

That somehow the Trucker convoy was defeated.

The Freedom Convoy was the most wildly immediately successful protest in Canadian history, maybe WORLD history.

People remember Trudeau’s crackdown, old ladies having their skulls cracked with batons, Disabled indigenous grandmothers trampled by police horses, Bank accounts frozen and public employees investigated for mere donations …

And there’s a big reason people remember this … It was dramatic, and the media and the regime certainly wanted you to think resistance was futile …

What people don’t remember is what happened in the immediate aftermath: The government caved on absolutely everything within a week for the most important things, and then a month or so for the rest.

First off there was the massive political shift that happened as the convoy was occurring:

Jason Kenny, the pro-lockdown Premiere of Alberta (Canada’s most conservative province) was forced to announce his resignation, and Alberta immediately lifted all its lockdown impositions.

Erin O’Toole the pro-lockdown leader of the Conservative Party was likewise forced to resign, his temporary replacement Candice Bergen (not to be mistaken with the actress) being a longtime rival opposed to lockdowns, and his main rival who replaced her after intra-party elections was Pierre Poilievre, the politician after Maxime Bernier who was quickest to embrace the Truckers and their cry for freedom.

As the convoy was ongoing Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act (the Act which replaced the War Measures Act for invoking Martial Law) … Now these grant the government almost unlimited powers, famously the War Measures Act was invoked by Trudeau’s Father to detain Quebeckers and raid hundreds of homes without warrants during the FLQ separatist crisis of 1972 … the catch is that while the follow on Emergencies Act can be invoked by a Prime Minister Parliament has to sign off on the act’s continued use within one week.

Well skulls were cracked, accounts frozen, and as the week passed things came down to the deadline … On the very last night … Trudeau managed to get sign-off (without the Conservative opposition) from the House of Commons, but it had to go to the Upper House, the Canadian Senate.

NOW. The Canadian Senate is a shameful institution.

It’s like the British House of Lords but without the nobility.

A Senate seat is a lifetime appointment, by the Prime Minister … and that’s it. Little to no review, no democratic input, and this is supposed to be equivalent or superior to our elected House of Commons …

Naturally the go-to use of the Senate is as a spoils system for cronies. Do some shameful favour for a Prime Minister, raise a lot of money for the party, be politically connected to a provincial gov the PM wants to buy off … get a Senate seat.

One of the longest-standing political agreements in Canada is how badly the Senate needs to be abolished … but can’t be because Quebec is nominally overrepresented in the Senate, and abolishing it would cause a constitutional crisis.

H/T to Donna Laframboise for the link.

May 23, 2023

The Diamond Princess – the “worst case virus mill” during the Covid-19 pandemic

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

Dr. Todd Kenyon looks at the data from the situation onboard the Diamond Princess early in the pandemic:

Diamond Princess is a cruise ship owned and operated by Princess Cruises. She began operation in March 2004 and primarily cruises in Alaska during the summer and Asia in the winter along with Australia cruises. Diamond Princess and Sapphire Princess were both were built in Nagasaki, Japan by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.
Photo by Bernard Spragg, NZ via Wikimedia Commons.

The Diamond Princess cruise ship departed Japan on January 20, 2020. Five days later a passenger disembarked, later became ill and tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 infection. On board this ship were 3,711 persons, of which 2,666 were passengers (median age of 69) and 1,045 were crew (median age of 36). Nearly half (48%) of the passengers were said to have underlying disease(s). Passengers and crew began testing positive with some becoming ill, but the passengers were not quarantined in their cabins until Feb 5. Until that time they had been engaging in a variety of typical social activities including shows, buffets and dances. Once quarantined (confined to cabins), most passengers shared cabins with 1 to 3 other passengers. Cabins used unfiltered ventilation and the crew continued their duties and mixed with passengers. Evacuation began in mid February and was completed by March 1.

A total of 712 individuals (19%) tested positive via PCR, and as many as 14 passengers were said to have died, though there are differing opinions as to how many of these deaths should be attributed to Covid. Except for one person in their late 60s, all deaths occurred in those over 70. Not one crew member died. Half of the deaths occurred several weeks after leaving the ship, so it is unclear if they actually died from infections caught onboard. Three ill passengers were given an experimental treatment of Remdesivir once hospitalised on shore; apparently all survived.

The Diamond Princess was termed a “virus mill” by one expert while another remarked that cruise ships are perfect environments for the propagation and spread of viruses. The quarantine procedures inflicted much duress on an already frail passenger base and may have done more harm than good. There was panic and confusion both among passengers and crew, and densely packed passengers sharing unfiltered ventilation were only allowed out of cabins every few days for an hour. Meanwhile the crew continued to prepare meals and mix with passengers, but otherwise were kept confined below the waterline in their cramped multi-resident quarters. Some passengers ignored the quarantine entirely. The so-called “Red Dawn” email discussions among government researchers in early 2020 described the DP as a “quarantine nightmare”. The DP was also termed by this group as representative of a large elderly care home (passengers). Based on all these observations, the DP event should provide a nearly worst case scenario for the first wave of Covid. The question is, how did New York City (NYC) fare versus this “worst case”, and what can we learn from the comparison?

We can start by looking at the infection rate on the DP: 25% of those over 60 and 9% of those under 60 were reportedly infected. On the DP, the case fatality rate (CFR) for those over 60 was 2.6%. This assumes that all 14 deaths of passengers were caused by a Covid-19 infection contracted while on the DP. On the other hand, the CFR for those under 60 years of age was 0.0%, since none in this age bracket died.

Diamond Princess mortality (scaled) compared to New York City all cause mortality. DP week 1 = first week quarantine imposed while NYC week 1 = first week of lockdown orders (week 12, 2020). DP fatalities are scaled based on relative populations of individuals over 65. It is unclear whether the DP fatalities at the tail end of the curve are attributable to C19 infection contracted months prior on the DP. NYC data: www.mortality.watch

April 30, 2023

Sarah Hoyt – “I told you so”

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

At According to Hoyt, Sarah reminds us that she was right and won’t apologize for being right … and will say “I told you so” as often as necessary:

Only infants and the mentally incompetent could look at locking up the vast majority of the population and think it would have NO effect on the economic well being of this country. Worse, only infants, the mentally incompetent and indoctrinated Marxists (BIRM) could think — after the numbers from the Diamond Princess were out there for everyone to read — that either COVID-19 was the end of the world, or that we should put the entire population under house arrest to prevent people dying of it. As though it wouldn’t become endemic anyway.

And it took a particular level of bizarre insanity to believe that COVID-19 would kill you at your favorite restaurant or church but not in Walmart.

We won’t even get into the specialness that caused a bunch of you to tell me that it was okay for the homeless to be congregating in every street corner (and in Denver in proliferating encampments EVERYWHERE with all the shared needles, trash, etc. of such encampments) WITHOUT dropping like flies, because they lived outdoors and were “particularly hardy”. Dudes, if you ever work in any emergency room, you’ll learn that not only aren’t the homeless “particularly hardy” but that they have the most bizarre medieval diseases. Yes, there are jokes about “tooth to tattoo ratio” and that low/high means they live forever, but in truth if you see before and after pictures, you know homeless people tend to die early and hard and not just because most of them are crazy and drug addicted (though that’s a contributing factor.) IF THIS HAD BEEN A REALLY DANGEROUS PANDEMIC, the kind those videos from China — some of which were manifestly fakes, like where people put out their hands to break the fall when they “drop dead” in the street — suggested, the homeless would have first been very sick, then dead.

Also, note the same people then said it was very important to wear masks OUTSIDE WHILE JOGGING because this virus was some kind of magical and could hang suspended in the air outside in a “cloud” so that if you walked through it hours later, you could catch the dread disease.

AND let’s not forget treating us like lunatics when we explained that the masks did nothing, and that yes, they’re used in operating rooms — where they’re changed every few minutes, btw — to PREVENT THE SURGEON from coughing on an open wound.

And I want to award no prizes, and may G-d have mercy on your souls to those that told me that the Diamond Princess‘s numbers were as low as they seemed to be because “They have the best of care in cruise ships”. This when cruise ships are known as floating illness barges and the population aboard is the oldest of any gathering in the nation.

Oh, oh, oh, and a special mention goes to everyone who ran around with their heads on fire because “the ER is at 95% capacity” when it is at 100% capacity every flu season, AND also all the “special wards” built for “overflow” patients saw not ONE patient. All these facts were available and easily looked up.

April 17, 2023

The lingering pandemic of fear

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

Liz Hodgkinson on the pattern of fear that the state, media, and public health messaging instilled into so many people during the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic:

“Covid 19 Masks” by baldeaglebluff is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

The Stoics of ancient times believed that in many cases it was possible to control pain by thought alone. To achieve this, they stoically, as it were, accepted painful or unpleasant sensations, viewing them with studied indifference. As such, the pain often went away of its own accord, although to be fair they did use a painkiller known as theriac, which contained opium.

The opposite is also true, in that you can induce pain or disease by thought alone, causing acute and sometimes lasting physical symptoms. Although ancient and tribal societies understood that the power of suggestion can be so strong that it may make people well or ill, this seems to have been forgotten in modern, mechanistic medicine with its insistence on tests, scans, screens and so on.

Because of this, I am now wondering whether as many people would have gone down with Covid (or what passed for it) if, instead of a flu-like illness being ramped up as the worst and most dangerous disease ever to affect humankind, it had been ignored.

As it was, around 80 per cent – and it may have been more – of the world’s population were gripped by such a fear of the bug that they actually thought themselves into illness. Once the PCR test was introduced, people began testing themselves, sometimes hourly, and if the test showed positive they waited for symptoms to appear. More often than not, they obliged.

Then people became terrified to step out of the house without wearing a mask, even though all the evidence showed that these muzzles were more or less ineffective and that even the surgical-quality ones lasted only a couple of hours, at most. People were also nervous of getting close to anybody else, edging away if somebody came within a few feet of them. Only the other day, as I was in a queue waiting to pay for an item, a masked woman in front of me turned round and said crossly: “Do you mind not standing so close to me?” I wondered about making a quick riposte but decided that there was no way I could penetrate this kind of stupidity.

There was also the handwashing ritual where shops, doctors’ surgeries, solicitors’ and estate agents’ offices, for instance, forced hand sanitiser on to you, and sometimes took your temperature as you walked in.

The cleaning nonsense went even further, with hotels, gyms and other places where people gathered announcing “enhanced cleaning”. This may or may not have halted the virus in its tracks but it certainly increased fear. I still see people in the gym furiously scrubbing down bikes, treadmills and other equipment in case a germ from a previous user has had the audacity to linger on the machine.

April 12, 2023

QotD: Karen

Filed under: Business, Government, Health, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Back in March, I was certain this whole thing [the pandemic] would blow over in a matter of weeks. It’s a Karen-driven phenomenon, I argued, but unlike everything everything else they do, this time Karen’s going to have to shoulder the burden herself. She’ll have fun berating the manager of the local Starbucks for not closing down … until she realizes there’s no place to get a half-caff, triple-foam, venti soy latte frappuccino. Nor is there any place to dump her self-propelled lifestyle accessories kids while she gets exalted at hot yoga and the nail salon, now that school’s out. Give her a week without Starbucks, I said, locked in her house with Kayden, Brayden, Jayden, and Khaleesi, and she’ll demand we never mention the word “flu” again.

In other words, I misunderstood the essence of Karen. Karen is — first, foremost, and always — a victim. I of all people should’ve known better, because I was surrounded by Karens all the time in my personal and professional life. I’ve mentioned this story before, but bear with a quick repeat: At one of my first teaching gigs, at the big directional tech that makes up a lot of “Flyover State”, the department’s women got it into their vapid little heads that they — women — were being systematically excluded from positions of power. The fact that the department chair was a woman, and in fact the whole department, emeritus through first year grad student, was something like 65% female should’ve been their first clue, but nevertheless, they persisted. They got together a blue-ribbon commission, as one does, and studied the shit out of the problem. The much-ballyhooed report revealed …

… that all the positions of authority in the department, every blessed one, was held by a female. At which point, without missing a single fucking beat, they started complaining that being forced to hold all these positions of authority was keeping them from making adequate career progress.

I shit you not.

That’s Karen, my friends.

Severian, “The Civil War That Wasn’t”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-09-09.

March 30, 2023

“Nothing is as permanent as a temporary government program” … except those few that make your life easier

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

At Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander reacts to the US government’s new moves to make telehealth less useful for as many people as possible:

“Live telehealth demonstration” by CiscoANZ is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

Telemedicine is when you see a doctor (or nurse, PA, etc) over a video call. Medical regulators hate new things, so for its first decade they ensured telemedicine was hard and inconvenient.

Then came COVID-19. Suddenly important politicians were paying attention to questions about whether people could get medical care without leaving their homes. They yelled at the regulators, and the regulators grudgingly agreed to temporarily make telemedicine easy and convenient.

They say “nothing is as permanent as a temporary government program”, but this only applies to government programs that make your life worse. Government programs that make your life better are ephemeral and can disappear at any moment. So a few months ago, the medical regulators woke up, realized the pandemic was over, and started plotting ways to make telemedicine hard and inconvenient again.

The first fruit of their labor is DEA-407, which makes it hard for telemedicine doctors to prescribe controlled substances. Controlled substances are drugs like Adderall, Ritalin, Xanax, or Ambien that the government has declared to be potentially addictive. The new rules say that telemedicine doctors can no longer prescribe these (or, in some cases, can prescribe them one time in an emergency).

Why don’t I like this decision? I am a telepsychiatrist. I work with about a hundred psychiatric patients who, for one reason or another, prefer online to physical appointments:

  • Some live in small towns that don’t have psychiatrists of their own
  • Some have agoraphobia, chronic pain, or some other condition that makes it hard for them to go to an office.
  • Some move around a lot and like to be able to see their psychiatrist whether they’re in LA or SF.
  • Some live hundreds of miles away from me, but know and trust me for some reason, and would rather see me than someone closer to them.
  • Some appreciate the fact that I charge lower rates than psychiatrists who have offices, because I don’t have to pay for Bay Area commercial real estate and pass those costs on to my patients.
  • Some work during work hours, and like being able to see me from their office instead of taking half the day off to travel to my location.
  • Some like convenience and dislike inconvenience

As a psychiatrist, a big part of my job is prescribing controlled substances. For example, most guidelines agrees that the first-line treatment for severe ADHD is stimulant medications (eg Adderall or Ritalin). And although psychiatrists hate to admit it, the first-line treatment for temporary crisis anxiety, especially when it’s so bad that the patient isn’t able to listen to your clever plans to solve it with therapy, is benzodiazepines (eg Valium or Klonopin). You can’t be a good well-rounded psychiatrist without the option to sometimes prescribe these drugs.

“Well, your patients will have to find a different psychiatrist, or transition off of them”. Nobody ever finds different psychiatrists. Some of my patients are a bad match for my style or areas of expertise, and I’ve tried very hard to find them different psychiatrists, and it never works. Maybe there are no other psychiatrists in their area. Maybe the psychiatrists in their area don’t take the right insurance, or are too far away from mass transit. Maybe the psychiatrists have six month long wait lists. Sometimes it’s just that my ADHD patients get distracted and forget they were supposed to find new psychiatrists, and I can’t hold their hand literally all the time. As for transitioning off the medications, some patients absolutely cannot function at all without them. Did I mention that if you come off of some of them too quickly, you can literally die?

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