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“Two decades of the precautionary principle as the key policy tool for managing uncertainties has neutered risk management capacities by offering, as the only approach, the systematic removal of any exposure to any hazard. As the risk-averse precautionary mindset cements itself, more and more of us have become passive docilians waiting to be nannied.” – David Zaruk, writing in an online science website which I hadn’t come across before until a commentator on this blog flagged it. Thanks! March 24th, 2020 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
We are yielding quite a few liberties to the dread virus – to the need to flatten the curve of disease to what the NHS can handle. Steve Baker’s speech says it well. As regards mere money, the government will provide tide-you-over assistance to those whose cash flow cannot outlast these measures. Their loss will still be a net loss (and since all the government’s money is ultimately provided by us, the tide-you-over sum will one day be repaid with interest) but there is help for those facing outgoings with no incomings. How about the liberty account? As we yield many liberties, could the state perhaps yield back a few others they have taken? Might the police who will now ask, “Is your journey really necessary under our latest emergency regulations?”, include all who were previously asking, “Is your remark really permissible under our modern hate speech laws?” Any chance the power of the state, when not enforcing the new rules, could be wholly focussed on fighting things the public consider criminal, not things the politically correct consider offensive? It is a fair question (to the state, but even more to the ‘elite’ apocalypticists): if we yield to the danger of the virus – what will you yield? — March 24th, 2020 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
The ramblings of our Prime Minister this evening, no data, no projections, no reasoning other than the projected incompetence of our nationalised health care system, no laws cited (but they are there), and have been since 10th February 2020, backed up by threats and fear-mongering, announcing restrictions on the UK in an echo of what the Chinese Communist Party is imposing on Uighurs, evidence the triumph of the Chinese Communist Party in crushing the West, without (and indeed on account of not) lifting a finger. And yet the borders remain open, as far as we know, to flights from hotspots such as China, Italy, Spain and Iran. This has all been thought through, and Johnson is content that it be so, is he being played or a player? if we wanted loo roll shortages and economic chaos and inflation we’d have voted in Corbyn last December, a man who is in power in terms of outcomes, but is not in office. March 23rd, 2020 | 54 comments - (Comments are closed)
Ross Clark, Spectator (behind paywall). A couple more:
The more I read, the more it seems to me that randomised testing, as Clark writes, is crucial, not least in reducing hysteria and the effects that hysteria is having, and will continue to have, on our society and business. The costs, in terms of stress, the destruction of businesses and so much effort, needs to be weighed. I have come across a few comments on social media, of the passive/aggressive sort, that “it is so amusing to see all these experts all over social media on epidemics” – the implication being that the mass public should shut up, “stay in your lane” and let the men/women in white coats take charge. The problem with this however is what happens if the experts disagree, or if their policy advice causes so much damage, including to the liberties and welfare of the citizenry, that a democratically elected politician has to make a judgement call? We don’t, rightly, outsource vast coercive powers to everyone who claims to be an expert on something. That’s not how it is supposed to work. March 23rd, 2020 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
Violating lockdown has joined hate speech on the very short list of crimes that the mayor of London does want enforced. He favours having the army deal with lockdown violators. Some 15 years ago, the lieutenant-colonel who was to handle a key part of lockdown if terrorists hit London with a bioweapon was someone I knew well. “Lucky you”, my friends said, when that chanced to come up in conversation. “While we’re being gunned down by the ruthless soldiery as we try to flee the capital, you’ll be able to slip through the lines.” – to which I replied (jokingly – they thought! 🙂 ), “You don’t know her. She’ll shoot down her friends with the others; why do you think she got the job?” I think my friend would have made full colonel if she’d stuck with it, but the time demands on the rest of her life would have been too great and she is now happily pursuing other choices. I don’t know who would be in charge if the army were called in, but I hope they’ll have the same willingness to call Sadiq Khan out – not least because the only consideration that might make him and his kind hesitate to see the crisis as “a terrible thing to waste” is the worry that others might think the same. March 22nd, 2020 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
In Laurence Fox’s case, get you Officially Denounced – and then a payout for being denounced. In the midst of a pandemic, this story, comparatively trivial but not without consequences, may have passed you by. Laurence Fox is an actor and musician. Two months ago he caused rather a stir on the BBC political panel show Question Time. I posted about it here: Has the BBC stopped putting bromide in its actors’ tea? As I said in that post,
In the end Equity had to do more than backtrack. On March 13th the Guardian reported,
I am sure they will be greatly missed.
Narrator’s voice: he didn’t really.
I think that should read “as a result of the decision to apologise to their own member”.
If Mr Loh says that Equity’s apology is nothing to do with him, I assume that means that he has not just resigned from the union’s race equality committee but from the union itself – which in practice would mean that he has resigned from being an actor. A principled decision indeed.
Having lost its race equality committee, Equity might like to see if it can manage without replacing this expensive luxury. March 22nd, 2020 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
March 20th, 2020 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
No; fuckwit lefties of twitter – That the crashcart has arrived and a medic is urgently applying paddles to a patient in arrest does *not* mean a defibrillation session every morning would do us all good. – Guy Herbert March 20th, 2020 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
This is probably one of the few places in the internet, never mind the regular media, where people can get to debate the wonders of socialised medicine without being under the burden of proving that they are not evil. In the UK, we have had since the late 1940s a healthcare system that dominates the field, with a relatively small private sector. The National Health Service, funded from tax and run as a monopoly, with politicians and civil servants allocating resources, was modeled, as so many post-war institutions were, on the idea of state central planning. The narrative of the time was that planning was the way to go, unlike all that messy, chaotic “laissez faire” that had been associated, however wrongly, with the Great Depression and so on. (Here is a good paper on the NHS by the Institute of Economic Affairs.) I can also recommend this book, by James Bartholomew on the many problems with the UK welfare state. The NHS, like many of the other socialised medical systems in much of the developed world, faces the monstrous coronavirus. And so much of the current policy approach – the UK is going into more of a lockdown as of this weekend – is designed, so it is said, to flatten the potential surge of infections and deaths, so that the NHS and other systems don’t collapse. The cost/benefit calculation is being made that it is better to smash the world economy, to force millions into idleness, possibly for months, and tide them over with cash payments funded from vast amounts of debt, than it is to allow the NHS/other to be forced into a nightmare of running out of resources. In some ways I can see the merits of preventing a horrendous surge in deaths; I also think that saving the NHS and other models of healthcare is a sort of virility test of today’s Welfare States. Nothing can be done to admit they have limits, even if that means economic damage on a major scale. That cost/benefit calculation may look just about defensible now, but what about in two months’ time, particularly if there is no real sign of a deceleration in the virus, but if the struggle to buy even basic household necessities leaves a lot of people in real hardship? I assume that farmers and others in the food production business are not being told to stay at home, but such is the level of madness about this situation that I wonder. I’d like to know how locking people in their homes for months is going to be enforced. There are also health considerations to be taken into account by such a lock-down, particularly if it goes on for months on end. Humanity is not designed for prison, and those of us in relatively free societies (“relatively” being the operative word) will move from being restless to downright homicidal of this goes on into the summer and beyond. There aren’t enough police to keep everyone cooped up in their homes. Those bastards in the Chinese Communist Party have a lot to answer for. And yes, COVID-19 began there, and it shows how derelict some of our media/political class has become that is frowned upon to point that out. (The anger is rising, and will have major consequences for our geopolitics.) It would be rather ironic to think that something unleashed by a Communist state, whether by accident or whatever, has put such pressure on Welfare State societies in the West. Final point: I was due to give a talk tonight at Brian Micklethwait’s place about the recent calls for anti-trust assaults on the Big Techs such as Facebook, Google and Amazon, and I was going to look at parallels with the campaign to break up J D Rockefeller’s Standard Oil more than a century ago. One thing you can say about Rockefeller, was that as well as being a brilliant businessman, and philanthropist in the area of healthcare, among others, he also understood the importance of integrated supply chains in commerce. He’d have looked at our current predicament with interest. March 20th, 2020 | 43 comments - (Comments are closed)
There are no limits to our commitment to the euro. – Christine Lagarde, President of the European Central Bank. The linked Guardian article in which I found the quote is titled “ECB U-turn shows it fears coronavirus could destroy eurozone project”. March 19th, 2020 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
At first I thought this was une blague pratique. Apparently not, unless Tim Worstall’s denial is merely evidence that he is in on the joke. He writes in today’s Times:
A similar restriction is being applied in Italy, according to The Local.it:
But what if you do not have access to the internet?
March 19th, 2020 | 74 comments - (Comments are closed)
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