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Insulin is expensive in the USA. “The average list price of one unit of insulin in the US is $98.70, compared to $12 in Canada and $7.52 in the UK.” Then why do not people simply buy it from wherever it is cheaper? Because it is illegal to import it. Why is it not made more cheaply by competitors? Because the FDA have not approved this. President Biden claims to want to lower insulin costs but continues to support state violence that restricts access to medication. January 4th, 2022 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Yesterday’s Sunday Times carried a story to break your heart: “âLife in a boxâ: young autistic man confined in hospitalâs former file room”. The first thing to say is that the headline is clickbait. It gives the impression that he’s locked in a cubbyhole. In fact quite a lot of money has been spent by the state to construct a purpose-built apartment with bedroom, bathroom, “snug room”, lounge, an unlabelled room, and a garden. It is not a dungeon. But it is a jail – this young man, referred to as “Patient A”, is has been confined there alone for years. In terms of lack of privacy his “secure apartment” at Cheadle Royal Hospital is worse than a conventional jail: he is monitored by closed circuit TV at all times.
Why is he imprisoned? Because he is violent. After a relatively happy and normal childhood his behaviour began to deteriorate in adolescence, until…
The Sunday Times report is much better than its irresponsible headline would suggest. It goes on to describe in depressing detail the failure of various treatments. The young man continues to attack the hospital staff, with the result that they are no longer willing to play football or computer games with him. Ever more isolated, he gets worse. It’s horrible. But what would you have them do? His mother wants him to be released into supported housing in the community. This was due to happen, but at the last moment the care provider lined up for him pulled out. “They said his behaviour had become too challenging,” Nicola [his mother] said. “But his behaviour is challenging because of where he is.” I hate to say it but her second sentence, while undoubtedly true, does not solve the problem described in the first. Can an organisation be forced to take on the care of someone who constantly attacks their staff? To an extent, that is what is happening now at Patient A’s secure apartment at Cheadle Royal Hospital. The state does what it is obliged to by law. But care in the community for a potentially violent patient requires more intelligent and responsive supervision than keeping someone in prison. No company providing paid care is willing to provide that level of supervision for Patient A. It has been established that his family cannot do it; part of his mother’s torment is that she herself was the person who started his imprisonment by calling the police while her son attacked his grandmother. In any case, though supported care in the community has transformed many lives for the better, it can go horribly wrong. One of the comments mentions the case of Jonty Bravery. He was the man who threw a six year old boy from the roof of the Tate Modern gallery because he wanted to be on the TV news. He caused the child life-changing injuries. Before the attack Bravery had been living in just such a placement, with two-to-one care, no less. Back and forth the arguments go… I was going to ask, “What is the Libertarian solution to this?”, but forget Libertarianism – what is any solution to this? January 3rd, 2022 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
Doctors Fiona Godlee and Kamran Abbasi, editors of the British Medical Journal (BMJ), have written an open letter from from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg:
Do read the whole thing, which is quite an important step in both fighting censorship by social media and in fighting Covid-19. These aims are not in opposition. I stopped my excerpt there for what some may call a trivial reason: to leap to the defence of blogging. While I sympathise with the irritation felt by the editors of the BMJ at hearing their venerable journal, founded in 1840, described as a “news blog” I have to say that there are some blogs I would trust more than some newspapers, even some older than the BMJ. For instance I found out about this matter via Not the Bee. Yes, that’s 2021, folks, when a link from the “truth is stranger than fiction” non-satirical spinoff of an American Christian satirical website (even as a Christian myself, those are weird words to put next to each other) takes me to an open letter from the editors of the august British Medical Journal in which they angrily respond to a so-called “fact checker” working for a social media site who thinks the best way to combat the conspiracy theory that “they” might be suppressing news about inadequacies in the testing of vaccines is to suppress news about inadequacies in the testing of vaccines. December 23rd, 2021 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
I never knew this:
That was a tweet from HumanProgress.org which linked to a fascinating article at “99% Invisible”. Apparently it’s a podcast about “all the thought that goes into the things we donât think about”. I am usually too impatient to listen to podcasts, but if the accompanying articles are as revelatory as this one, I will bookmark the site. The article title is “The Infantorium”. It opens by describing a long-gone amusement park in Minneapolis called “Wonderland”:
At that, many readers will wonder what sort of parents can they have been, to allow their own children to be shown at a fair when they were in peril of death? The answer is desperate parents who had no alternative:
Very well then, but what sort of man makes a profit from this deplorable business? That, too, has a surprising answer. The leading exhibitor of premature babies was a man calling himself Dr Martin Couney. He got his start in London:
In the state of medical science as it then was, for such a high proportion of premature babies to live was little short of a miracle. So I see nothing wrong in Couney making a profit, as he did at first. Some may say, OK, maybe that was acceptable in the early days of incubator technology, but surely these baby-shows died off as soon as proper hospitals and doctors acquired incubators? Nope. For decades most of the proper hospitals and doctors turned down the incubators which Couney repeatedly tried to donate to them for free. Follow the link to see why. And this Christmas remember the name of Martin Couney, the charlatan and fake doctor who bankrupted himself saving thousands of childrens’ lives:
December 19th, 2021 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
A brand new medRxiv pre-print study entitled: âThe BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 reprograms both adaptive and innate immune responsesâ has graced our world. This paper is so important and it provides evidence to support what many prominent immunologists and vaccinologists have been saying for a long time, including myself. These COVID-19 mRNA injectable products are causing, yes, causing, immune system dysregulation – and not just in the context of the adaptive system, but in the context of the innate system. Not only that, but these findings provide very good reasons as to why we are seeing resurgences of latent viral infections and other adverse events reported in VAERS (and other adverse event reporting systems) and perhaps more importantly, why we should under no circumstances inject this crap into our children. December 17th, 2021 | 48 comments - (Comments are closed)
On December 17th the Times reported,
The report goes on to say that “the audience were not aware that the lecture was a parody. Indeed, it was such a success that the hoaxers were frightened and would have kept the joke to themselves, if it had not been revealed” and that now “[the hoaxers] are not popular in Ithaca, especially as a large part of the faculty and undergraduates of Cornell University were hoaxed.” A lecture given to “a packed and brilliant audience” at an elite American educational institution turned out to be a fake? Surely you jest? Well, I do, but not in the sense that this hoax lecture did not happen, but in the sense that the December 17th of the report was December 17th 1921. The lecture was on the topic of dreams in Freudian psychology and was given by a person who claimed to be a friend and pupil of of Freud. One can see why lines such as “A dreamer does know what he dreams, but he does not know what he knows and therefore believes what he does not know” went down well with the audience. Alan Sokal and the trio of Peter Boghossian, James A. Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose are heirs of a well established tradition, but it is a sad sign of the times that the absurd statements they produced to mimic the prevalent academic style of their time were merely ugly, whereas the equivalent in 1921 had something of the beauty of the later paintings of Claude Monet. December 17th, 2021 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
“MPs back Covid passes in England amid large Tory rebellion”, the Guardian reports.
However the Times gives a different number,
As ever, politics makes strange bedfellows:
Whatever the exact number, Steve Baker’s tireless work made it by far the biggest rebellion of Boris’s premiership. But not, of course, big enough. December 14th, 2021 | 33 comments - (Comments are closed)
“New Zealand smoking ban: young to be barred from ever buying cigarettes”, the Times reports.
December 9th, 2021 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
Yarvin hilariously beleives that âmandatory covid tracking appsâ are the way out of this, because âthe state needs a precise, high-frequency idea of everyoneâs location ⊠to know who is infecting whom.â You shouldnât worry about this, unless âyour government is ⊠a nest of perverts, clowns, thieves and rascals,â which our governments very clearly are. Yarvin writes that âA regime which is unnecessarily intrusive for perverse or nefarious reasons will do other bad things for perverse or nefarious reasons,â and we know this is true, because our governments are already doing perverse and nefarious things under the pretence of containment. In Germany, Corona hysteria has been a means of driving stodgy conservative boomers into the arms of lunatic socialist parties, of enforcing ever greater reliance on culturally destructive technology and making the smart phone a mandatory daily accessory, of pouring billions of Euros into the coffers of scamming manipulative pharmaceutical enterprises, of stifling not only political but cultural expression, and of turning our cities into drab humourless work camps. We arenât in charge, our enemies are. I donât care if it means dying of the bubonic plagueâthese people and their dumb hygiene house arrests are to be opposed now and forever. December 9th, 2021 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
Despite âa pretty much unlimited budget to run trialsâ they didnât run one for masks âbecause they knew that they donât workâ. In effect, âthe trial was Scotland versus England. And we found they donât work.â For this government insider the implications are now too serious to remain silent because âwe are lying when we say masks work. They are a signal, a psyop. And weâve criminalised not wearing them. Masks also transfer the blame onto individuals for the epidemic spreading. We have people counting the unmasked on public transport, policing each other. It is deeply unethical that we have set people against each other in this way. It allows the creation of an âout groupâ to blame.â He points out that it is the government we should be blame for not increasing healthcare capacity. December 8th, 2021 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
Old rules die, new ones are born. Belarus border crisis: EU suspends asylum rules to speed up deportations Omicron variant: EU should encourage compulsory vaccines, says Ursula von der Leyen Both Times reports are behind a paywall, but the headlines make the point well enough. As the late Brian Micklethwait – I still cannot quite believe that I am writing that – said in a post called “On the future of photography in public (and on what I think of the EU)”:
December 2nd, 2021 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
As explained by the Wikipedia article on the official nomenclature for variants of SARS-CoV-2, the use of letters of the Greek alphabet to refer to the different variants of Covid-19 was chosen by the World Health Organization specifically to avoid referring to variants by their country of origin, as practised by certain naughty former US presidents. We have had the Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon, Zeta, Eta, Theta, Iota, Kappa, Lambda, Mu and Nu variants. I guess the WHO didn’t anticipate the list would go past thirteen. “Omicron variant reaches Britain”, reports today’s Sunday Times. Only the fourteenth letter of the Greek alphabet is not Omicron. It’s Xi. Edit: In the comments TomJ says that actually two letters have been skipped. The variant all the papers were calling “Nu” the day before yesterday was hastily renamed “Omicron”. Allegedly they jumped over “Nu” because it sounds like “new” and they jumped over have “Xi” because it is a common surname, a story to which I might give an iota of credence if it came from someone other than the World Health Organisation. The excellent investigation by the Sunday Times Insight Team, China, the WHO and the power grab that fuelled a pandemic, is unfortunately behind a paywall, but here is an excerpt:
The Xi variant, indeed. Pity there isn’t a Greek letter called Pu. November 27th, 2021 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
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