Is Pharma a Victim of Its Own Hype?

Monday, August 17th, 2009

Is pharma a victim of its own hype? Derek Lowe thinks so:

Consider the public face that our industry projects. Look at the press releases and the advertisements — what’s the impression that you get? That there is a defined process for discovering drugs, for one thing, and what’s more, that we are the master of it. Now, I know that we don’t always send out that message. There are attempts to tell people about how many compounds have to be made, how many projects end up failing. But for the most part, we don’t press-release that stuff.

No, the press releases are for the investors, and for them, we want to project that we’re productive, confident, resourceful. . . in short, that we’ve got things under control. The last thing Wall Street wants to hear about is that you don’t always know which drug targets are the right ones to work on, that you’re not quite sure of the best way to prosecute them, and that (despite continuing efforts) these conditions look to obtain for quite a while to come.

And this attitude is one of the things that seeps out into the general public consciousness. That, I think, is why you get people who are convinced that we could cure a lot of these diseases, but that we just don’t — you know, for all sorts of evil and profitable reasons. They’ve bought into our hype. If we haven’t cured the common cold, that must be because we make a lot more money selling people stuff for it, not because antiviral drug development is flippin’ difficult. (Especially for something like the common cold, but that’s another story).

Now, to some extent, there is a defined process for discovering drugs — well, several defined processes. It’s just that it doesn’t work all that well, not on the absolute scale. No one could look at clinical failure rates of around 90% and say that we’ve got everything covered.

Posted in Business, Economics, Policy, Science | No Comments »

Big Business Goes Big for Health Care Reform

Saturday, August 15th, 2009

John Stossel explains why big business goes big for health care reform:

“What disturbs Americans of all ideological persuasions is the fear that almost everything, not just government, is fixed or manipulated by some powerful hidden hand,” Frank Rich wrote in Sunday’s New York Times.

That manipulation should disturb us. But contrary to Rich, it is not the work of “corporatists” who have sprung up to attack progressive reforms proposed by Obama and the Democratic majority. Manipulation is what we got many years ago when we traded a more or less free market for the “progressive” interventionist state. When government is big, the well-connected always have an advantage over the rest of us in influencing public policy.

Observe: Although President Obama and big-government activists demonize health-insurance companies, the companies “are still mostly on board with the president’s effort to overhaul the U.S. health-care system,” the Wall Street Journal reports; and …

Although the activists criticize Big Pharma, “The drug industry has already contributed millions of dollars to advertising campaigns for the health care overhaul through the advocacy groups like Healthy Economies Now and Families USA. It has spent about $1 million on similar advertisements under its own name,” the Times reports.

Big Pharma and Big Insurance want Obama-style health-care reform?

It’s not so hard to understand. “The drug makers stand to gain millions of new customers,” the Times said.

And from the Journal: “If health legislation succeeds, the [insurance] industry would likely get a fresh batch of new customers. In particular, many young and healthy people who currently forgo coverage would be forced to sign up.” No wonder insurers are willing to stop “discriminating” against sick people. (Forget that the essence of insurance is discrimination according to risk.)

Not that Big Pharma and Big Insurance like every detail of the Democratic plan. Drug companies don’t want Medicare negotiating drug prices — for good reason. If it forces drug prices down, research and development will be discouraged. (Depending whom you believe, Obama may or may not have agreed with the drug companies on this point.)

As for the insurance companies, they worry — legitimately — that a government insurance company — the so-called public option” — would drive them out of business. This isn’t alarmism. It’s economics. The public option would have no bottom line to worry about and therefore could engage in “predatory pricing” against the private insurers.

But despite these differences, the biggest companies in these two industries are on board with “reform.”

It illustrates economist Steven Horwitz’s First Law of Political Economy: “No one hates capitalism more than capitalists.” In this case, big business wants to shape — and profit from — what inevitably will be an interventionist health-care reform. Can you think of the last time a major business supported a truly free market in anything?

Posted in Business, Policy | No Comments »

Electric Chopper

Saturday, August 15th, 2009

The guys at Orange County Choppers have finally gone and built an electric chopper:

On Wednesday, Siemens, the electronics and electrical engineering global powerhouse, unveiled the Smart Chopper it commissioned from the renowned custom motorcycle outfit. Siemens claims the bike has a 60-mile range and a 100 mph top speed. An onboard charging unit can be plugged into any 110-volt socket to charge the bike in five hours, and Siemens says it’ll charge in as little as one hour when plugged into a higher-voltage station. A single-speed, clutch-less transmission delivers the power from a 27-hp electric motor.

Why do they always cite the least impressive stats for an electric vehicle? They don’t have great top speed, or long range, or enormous horsepower figures, but they do accelerate off the line well.

More stats:

The 350-pound bike is long and low, with an massive 300mm (10.5 inches) rear tire. With an outrageous 120-inch wheelbase and overall 45-degree raked front end, you’ll need four lanes to make a U-turn. Sounds like an OCC bike to us.

Of course, the entire bike is outfitted with LED lighting by OSRAM Sylvania, a Siemens subsidiary.

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Everything they taught us was wrong

Saturday, August 15th, 2009

Rory Miller (Meditations on Violence) was giving a lieutenant some close-quarters handgun training when the young officer threw up his hands and said, “I am so angry. Everything they taught us was wrong!”

What he had learned at his basic training were the fundamentals of pistol marksmanship. They weren’t wrong, they were just incomplete. Beginners need to learn safety. It’s stupid to accidentally kill yourself. They need to get some feeling for success and how the weapons work, so they become a stable platform. They learn grip and sight alignment and sight picture and breath control and trigger press.

They learn these fundamentals in a context that makes it easy for the instructor to monitor and easy for the student to correct — good lighting, good footing, hearing and eye protection, safety monitors and not moving.

Those environmental basics are rare as hell in real life. Gunfire is loud and muzzleflash can be blinding in low light. Often not only is the footing bad, but it may be too dark to tell how bad. And you’d better damn well be moving unless you already have good cover. If you do have good cover, think about moving anyway because the threat should try to flank you. And cover geometry can be counterintuitive- cover is often better the farther you are away from it. Said it was counter-intuitive.

There are details that came at a price — when and how to fire from retention; why the weapon should be canted out when at retention. Details that aren’t on the beginning syllabus.

Combat shooting, whether raiding or counter-ambush, is a whole different animal than range training. Honestly, range training is probably closest to assassination skills, which aren’t that useful for good guys.

And there are things that work very well on the range that are ineffective in real life. I was a weaver shooter for decades, trained that way from a pup. But there are three significant flaws in the weaver — it is almost impossible to maintain while moving. It points the biggest hole in your body armor (armpit) right at the threat. Most damning is that according to research no one has been able to pull it off in a firefight. An assassination maybe. I wish I could reference the study (library not here!) but in reviewing all the videorecorded gun encounters he could get (which I had a hard time believing was a lot…), the researcher couldn’t find a single one where the person fired from a weaver, even if he had trained weaver for decades. (Some corroboration from, if memory serves, “Men Under Fire”.)

But that doesn’t make dojo or range training wrong. I go to the range. I practice my dry-fire and failure to fire drills. When I have access to a good instructor, I go to my martial arts classes. Nothing is wrong, but it is incomplete. So when I practice my dry fire, I know what I will see when the projectile hits flesh and I know what it will do to my mind and body- because I have experienced it. Once. When I go to classes I know when I am practicing moving and when I am practicing breaking people. Often, in my experience, the instructor does not know that crucial difference.

Posted in Education, Martial Arts, Rory Miller, War | No Comments »

Drug Compound That Kills Cancer Stem Cells Identified

Friday, August 14th, 2009

Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Broad Institute have identified a compound, salinomycin, that cuts the number of cancer stem cells 100 times more than Taxol, a common chemotherapy medicine, does:

The researchers at MIT and Broad grew cancer cells from breast tumors in a way that increased the number of stem cells. They then used rapid screening techniques to test 16,000 commercially available chemical compounds. They identified 32 candidates before settling on salinomycin as the most potent.

They also tested the compound in mice in two ways. First, they exposed breast cancer stem cells in laboratory dishes to salinomycin and Taxol and tallied how many cells they would need to inject in a mouse to trigger a tumor. It took many more of the salinomycin-treated cells to spur cancer, showing that the compound was inhibiting cancer development, Gupta said.

Second, they induced tumors in mice and treated them with the two drugs. While both drugs exerted “significant anti-tumor effects,” the mice treated with Taxol had a greater proportion of cancer stem cells left in the remaining tumor. Taxol enriched the population of cancer stem cells and salinomycin reduced it, Gupta said.

“We have now a systematic way to look for compounds that selectively kill cancer stem cells,” Gupta said. “We’ve taken a lot of the serendipity out of the equation.”

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Polio surge in Nigeria after vaccine virus mutates

Friday, August 14th, 2009

For years, Africans have spread rumors that vaccines were the Western world’s means to sterilize Africans or give them AIDS. Now, the oral polio vaccine is giving Nigerians polio, because the attenuated virus has mutated back into the deadly form:

This year, the number of polio cases caused by the vaccine has doubled: 124 children have so far been paralyzed, compared to 62 in 2008, out of about 42 million children vaccinated. For every case of paralysis, there are hundreds of other children who don’t develop symptoms, but pass on the disease.

When Nigerian leaders suspended polio vaccination in 2003, believing the vaccine would sterilize their children and infect them with HIV, Nigeria exported polio to nearly two dozen countries worldwide, making it as far away as Indonesia.

Nigeria resumed vaccinations in 2004 after tests showed the vaccine was not contaminated with estrogen, anti-fertility agents or HIV.
[...]
The oral polio vaccine used in Nigeria and elsewhere contains a mild version of the live virus. Children who have been vaccinated pass the virus into the water supply through urine or feces. Other children who then play in or drink that water pick up the vaccine’s virus, which gives them some protection against polio.

But in rare instances, as the virus passes through unimmunized children, it can mutate into a strain dangerous enough to ignite new outbreaks, particularly if immunization rates in the rest of the population are low.

Kew said genetic analysis proves mutated viruses from the vaccine have caused at least seven separate outbreaks in Nigeria.

Though Nigeria’s coverage rates have improved, up to 15 percent of children in the north still haven’t been vaccinated against polio. To eradicate the disease, officials need to reach about 95 percent of the population.

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Secular Quakerism

Friday, August 14th, 2009

Store owner shoots 4 men, 2 fatally, during robbery attempt in Harlem:

They strode into the restaurant supply store in Harlem shortly after 3 p.m. on Thursday, four young men intent on robbery, one with a Glock 9-millimeter pistol, the police said. The place may have looked like an easy mark, a high-cash business with an owner in his 70s, known as a gentle, soft-spoken man.

But Charles Augusto Jr., the 72-year-old proprietor of the Kaplan Brothers Blue Flame Corporation, at 523 West 125th Street, near Amsterdam Avenue, had been robbed several times before, despite the fact that his shop is around the corner from the 26th Precinct station house on West 126th Street.

There were no customers in the store, only Mr. Augusto and two employees, a man and a woman. The police said the invaders announced a holdup, approached the two employees and tried to place plastic handcuffs on them. The male employee, a 35-year-old known in the community as J. B., struggled with the gunman, who then hit him on the head with the pistol.

Watching it happen, Mr. Augusto, whom neighborhood friends call Gus, rose from a chair 20 to 30 feet away and took out a loaded Winchester 12-gauge pump-action shotgun with a pistol-grip handle. The police said he bought it after a robbery 30 years ago.

Mr. Augusto, who has never been in trouble with the law, fired three blasts in rapid succession, the police said, although Vernon McKenzie, working at an Internet company next door, heard only two booms, loud enough to send him rushing to a window, where he heard someone shout: “You’re dead! You’re dead!”

The first shot took down the gunman at the front. He died almost immediately, according to the police, who said he was 29 and had been arrested for gun possession in Queens last year and was the nephew of a police officer.

Mr. Augusto’s other two blasts hit all three accomplices, who stumbled out the door, bleeding.

One of them, a 21-year-old, staggered across 125th Street and collapsed in front of the General Grant Houses, a nine-building complex with 4,500 residents, one of the city’s biggest housing projects. Someone called 911, and an ambulance rushed him to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center, where he was dead on arrival. The police said he had a record of arrests for weapons possession and robbery.

Another wounded man left a blood trail that the police followed to 125th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. The fourth wounded man was picked up, on the basis of witness descriptions, at 128th Street and St. Nicholas Terrace. Both were taken to St. Luke’s.

The names of the men who were shot — two dead and two wounded — were not immediately released by the authorities. The two at the hospital, both 21 years old, were in stable condition late Thursday night, the police said.

Aretae remarks that when he or his libertarian/conservative friends read this, they are inclined to feel a sense of justice and that the store owner acted properly — but he doesn’t understand the progressive point of view:

  • Should this guy have not had the shotgun b/c it was illegal?

  • Should the police confiscate guns like this?

  • Should the guy not shoot to defend his employees who have guns pointed in their faces?

  • Should the law permit self defense, but prohibit the means necessary (guns) to defend oneself against gun-toting criminals?

  • Do we think that more gun rules will stop the criminals from having guns?

I hope I’m not caricaturing the progressive position when I suggest that it goes something like this:

Violence is bad, and violence begets more violence. The store owner could have prevented any further violence by handing over the money. It’s not worth a human life, let alone two human lives.

Consider it secular Quakerism.

Posted in Policy | No Comments »

Soviet Science

Friday, August 14th, 2009

Mencius Moldbug disagrees with the progressive “senior public-health scientists and practitioners” at Effect Measure, and he explains his position:

I hate to break this to you, but post-WWII American academia is in practice an agency of USG [the US Government], because it (a) is funded by USG, and (b) drives USG policy. (Especially in fields such as yours, which exist largely for the purpose of telling USG what to do.)
[...]
Here’s an analogy that may help you understand my perspective. Perhaps you remember a country called the Soviet Union. Now, when you hear that Soviet science proved X or Y or Z, what do you think? You think: X or Y or Z might be true, or it might not. To know, you’d have to look into it.

Even if X or Y or Z was written in the Great Soviet Encylopedia. Even if it was endorsed by a unanimous vote of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Even if Chairman Brezhnev himself declared it to be an ineluctable consequence of dialectical materialism. You say: I’d have to look into it.

And why is this? Because you don’t trust the process by which the Soviet system generated scientific results — despite the many excellent scientists who worked within it. And nor do I. We share (if I may assume) the belief that Soviet science could discover and amplify truth, and also discover and amplify error. Thus: “trust, but verify.”

Now, if we compare (a) the organizational structure of post-WWII Western science, to (b) the organizational structure of pre-WWII Western science, to (c) the structure of Soviet science, we see that (a) looks a lot more like (c) than like (b).

Namely: it is centrally funded and centrally planned, even when conducted in “private” universities. Consensus can be produced by a few bureaucrats — excuse me, public servants — who choose to fund the believers and defund the deniers. Moreover, since these public servants (eg, at NSF or NIH) are scientists themselves, it is terribly easy for one faction to exclude another. There is no effective independent supervision. There is certainly no way to shut down an entire field that has become pseudoscientific.

Whereas before WWII and Vannevar Bush, consensus actually meant something, because the (much smaller) funding of science was decentralized and independent, and most important depended far less on the results of that work. To retain their status and funding, scientists had to convince critical, intelligent, and independent nonscientists. They had far less incentive to exaggerate the public-policy importance of their work. Whereas nowadays, even in my own field (computer science) the typical grant application is richly marbled with preposterous claims of public importance. Everyone does it, so everyone has to.

Thus a reasonable person would expect the type of scientific malfeasance so frequently seen in the Soviet system to emerge in the West.

Posted in Mencius Moldbug, Policy, Science | No Comments »

Empire Off The Grid

Friday, August 14th, 2009

Dean Kamen calls his private island off the coast of Connecticut North Dumpling Island or the Dumplonian Empire. Now that the Coast Guard has switched the local lighthouse to solar power and has cut the power they were feeding the island via submarine cable, Kamen has decided to take his tiny empire off the grid:

But Kamen is determined to use his North Dumpling empire to show that zero-net energy is not only possible now but that it will be very appealing in the future. He has resolved to live off the renewables on the island: a wind turbine and three monster arrays of solar panels, plus Kamen’s beefed-up version of the Stirling engine. It all adds up to a peak generation capacity of just under 25 kilowatts.

To coordinate the different sources, Kamen designed an intelligent system that knows, down to an individual solar panel or light source, how much energy is being produced and consumed on the island and, based on that information, negotiates the relationship between the two in real time. It is this system that he monitors and controls from his basement command center.

Kamen has many strategies to minimize his energy use, but the big breakthrough is the island’s lighting. With the help of his friend Fritz Morgan, chief technology officer at Philips Color Kinetics, in Burlington, Mass., Kamen has replaced every bulb and fixture on his island with light-emitting diodes. That switch cut the power he needed to light his lair by 50 to 70 percent.

Here’s how that peak generation capacity breaks down:

The island’s four arrays of solar panels have a combined peak output of 12.2 kW. A 10-kW wind turbine that looks like a cartoon missile, made by Bergey Windpower Co., perches on a lattice tower 25 meters above the island. The Stirling engine in the basement can contribute another 2 kW if necessary.

The islands high-tech LED lighting would probably cost an ordinary consumer $100,000 — but it doesn’t use much electricity:

An average household dedicates approximately 20 percent of its energy budget to lighting. Here’s how that 20 percent can be manipulated by replacing incandescents with LED lighting. A traditional 60-watt incandescent bulb lasts about 1500 hours and has only a 2.5 percent efficiency because it wastes most of its energy as heat. Its brightness rating is about 16 lumens per watt, which is a measure of how much luminosity your bulb produces for every watt it eats up. A compact fluorescent lightbulb, or CFL, does much better: A 13- to 15-W bulb has about an 11 percent efficiency, emitting around 75 lm/W. The less-wasteful CFL lasts about 10 times as long as an incandescent (a little under two years).

On the downside, CFL bulbs contain mercury, which means they must be treated and disposed of as hazardous waste. Now consider LEDs. The best of these can pump out a whopping 150 lm/W (from the ”raw” chips, not the integrated lamp or system) and function at about 22 percent efficiency. With typical use, that’s at least 11 years without changing a bulb.

What happens when the island gets neither sun nor wind?

That’s when Kamen’s Stirling engine kicks in. Kamen’s reimagining of the 193-year old design is about half the size of a refrigerator, and its job is to convert heat energy into work.

A Stirling engine contains a sealed cylinder, one end hot, the other cool, with a sliding piston that moves the gas back and forth. On the hot side, the gas expands and exerts pressure on a piston; on the cool side, it contracts. Unlike a gasoline or diesel engine, Kamen’s Stirling is an external combustion device. The fuel that heats the gas inside the engine never touches the engine itself. Unlike spark-ignition or compression-ignition vehicle engines, a Stirling doesn’t require that the fuel be mixed with air in a particular ratio. It can run on pretty much any liquid or gas fuel, including diesel, methane, gasoline, or olive oil. Got cow manure? That’ll work, too. The design is ideal in theory, converting fuel to heat and heat energy into mechanical energy, but one problem remains: The machine generates electricity at an efficiency of only 20 percent. The rest is wasted as heat.

But Kamen says the concept of ”waste heat” changes with context. In winter that heat can be diverted to the house, the clothes drier, and the island’s domestic water supply. ”Think of it as a furnace that’s also making electricity,” Kamen explains. Harness the heat from the Stirling while it generates electricity and you can get an efficiency darn near 100 percent, he says.

His own machine typically produces 1 kilowatt of electricity, enough to power 128 LED lights, each equivalent to a 60-W incandescent. The engine sits in a far corner of the basement. At the moment, it’s inactive because the solar panels are generating a steady, incoming stream of 2 kW.
The Teletrol system runs an iron-fisted dictatorship over all of these processes. If there’s any excess power, the system uses it to feed the vast bank of custom batteries lining an entire wall of the basement, 24 big red plastic containers that resemble gasoline canisters. These batteries weigh 144 kilograms apiece, cost between $1285 and $2000 a pop, and must have their chemistry checked periodically with a hydrometer.

They’re also truly and deeply rechargeable. They are lead-acid batteries optimized for what’s called a deep discharge cycle, meaning that their charge can be repeatedly and substantially depleted by 80 or 85 percent. For contrast, most battery chemistries typically tolerate at most 5 to 10 percent depletion on a regular basis. The batteries were made by a company called Surrette Battery Co., headquartered in Springhill, N.S., Canada, and Salem, Mass., which specializes in cells optimized for solar and wind-power charging. Each battery comes with a 10-year warranty.

”Every once in a while, we know we’re going to have to depend on these batteries to run the entire island,” Kamen says. They can power the island for three days continuously in the unlikely case that all sources of energy simultaneously go off-line.

Notice how the waste heat from incandescent bulbs is waste, while the waste heat from his Stirling engine makes it a furnace that’s also making electricity. Hmm…

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Care to Write Army Doctrine?

Friday, August 14th, 2009

Care to Write Army Doctrine? If you’re in the army, at all, you now can:

In July, in a sharp break from tradition, the Army began encouraging its personnel — from the privates to the generals — to go online and collaboratively rewrite seven of the field manuals that give instructions on all aspects of Army life.

The program uses the same software behind the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and could potentially lead to hundreds of Army guides being “wikified.” The goal, say the officers behind the effort, is to tap more experience and advice from battle-tested soldiers rather than relying on the specialists within the Army’s array of colleges and research centers who have traditionally written the manuals.

“For a couple hundred years, the Army has been writing doctrine in a particular way, and for a couple months, we have been doing it online in this wiki,” said Col. Charles J. Burnett, the director of the Army’s Battle Command Knowledge System. “The only ones who could write doctrine were the select few. Now, imagine the challenge in accepting that anybody can go on the wiki and make a change — that is a big challenge, culturally.”

Posted in Technology, War | No Comments »

How to breathe on the Moon

Thursday, August 13th, 2009

Ferrying oxygen to the moon might cost $100 million per ton, so researchers have developed a reactor that can extract oxygen from Moon rock:

NASA has been looking for ways to get oxygen from Moon rock for several years. In 2005, as part of its Centennial Challenges programme, the agency offered a US$250,000 prize to the first team to come up with a piece of kit that could extract five kilograms of oxygen in eight hours from some simulated Moon rock. Despite raising the value of the prize pot to $1 million in 2008 with the help of the California Space Authority, the prize remains unclaimed. In addition, the agency’s ongoing In Situ Resource Utilization programme is currently looking at several different technologies for extracting oxygen from Moon rock.

Now, Derek Fray, a materials chemist from the University of Cambridge, UK, and his colleagues have come up with a potential solution by modifying an electrochemical process they invented in 2000 to get metals and alloys from metal oxides. The process uses the oxides — also found in Moon rocks — as a cathode, together with an anode made of carbon. To get the current flowing through the system, the electrodes sit in an electrolyte solution of molten calcium chloride (CaCl2), a common salt with a melting point of almost 800 °C.

The current strips the metal oxide pellets of oxygen atoms, which are ionized and dissolve in the molten salt. The negatively charged oxygen ions move through the molten salt to the anode where they give up their extra electrons and react with the carbon to produce carbon dioxide — a process that erodes the anode. Meanwhile, pure metal is formed over at the cathode.

To make the system produce oxygen and not carbon dioxide, Fray had to make an unreactive anode. This was crucial: “without those anodes, it doesn’t work”, says Fray. He discovered that calcium titanate, which is a poor electrical conductor on its own, became a much better conductor when he added some calcium ruthenate to it. This mixture produced an anode that barely erodes at all — after running the reactor for 150 hours, Fray calculated that the anode would wear away by roughly three centimetres a year.

In their tests, Fray and his colleagues used a simulated lunar rock called JSC-1, developed by NASA. Fray anticipates that three reactors, each a metre high, would be enough to generate a tonne of oxygen per year on the Moon. Three tonnes of rock are needed to produce each tonne of oxygen, and in tests the team saw almost 100% recovery of oxygen, he says. Fray presented the results last week at the Congress of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry in Glasgow, UK.

To heat the reactor on the Moon would need just a small amount of power, Fray notes, and the reactor itself can be thermally insulated to lock heat in. “It won’t be a problem,” he says. The three reactors would need about 4.5 kilowatts of power — not much more than that used to heat an immersion heater in a domestic boiler — which could be supplied by solar panels or even a small nuclear reactor placed on the Moon.

(Hat tip to Nyrath.)

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What does the decline in homicide rates look like?

Thursday, August 13th, 2009

What does the decline in homicide rates look like? It’s been going pretty steadily downward for the past few centuries:

What we would do is write down a system of differential equations that claimed how two or more groups of people interacted with each other — say, “criminals,” “law-abiders,” and “police” — and fool around with them until they produced a solution that would show cycles or oscillations around an overall downward trend.

Mencius Moldbug reacts to such scientism:

Hari Seldon rides again!

What I would do is to write down a sentence in English. This sentence would say: Europe became generally more orderly from 1500 to 1900, and generally less orderly from 1900 to 2000, especially after 1950.

If you wanted to know why, I would say: because order is a product of coherent state authority, and coherent state authority generally strengthened from 1500 to 1900 and generally weakened after 1900, especially after 1950.

And if you wanted to know why this happened, I would say: read some history. It’s a story, not a spreadsheet.

Much of the confusion arises because “modern” to the ordinary intelligent reader means post-1900 (as in “modernism”), whereas as a technical term it is often used to mean post-1500. Thus, in the “modern” era to the ordinary reader crime has been rising vertiginously — eg, 4700% in Britain.

He goes on:

Presumably you’ve never read any Theodore Dalrymple.

Actually, though, I think a better read would be a bound book of newspapers, English or American, from any year before 1960 or so. Have a look at how they report crime. I believe I’ve suggested this experiment to you before — I hope you’ll try it sometime. Any good library will have one.

For example, I was in a used bookstore once looking at copies of the Napa Valley Journal from 1940. On the top of the front page — German armies were pouring through France. On the bottom of the front page — police had arrested a man who was wanted for passing a bad check in Fresno.

To make it as retarded as possible, what I’m saying is that if you applied pre-1960 standards of journalism to post-1960 crime, every newspaper in America, every day, would look like an issue of the Gotham Globe: MURDER SPREE PARALYZES CITY. And, of course, the public would react accordingly. That’s public opinion for ya.

Heck, during this period, America’s fourth-largest city lost pretty much its entire decent, law-abiding population, who fled due to crime. Said city is now a ruin.
[...]
This isn’t hysteria we’re looking at here. It’s precisely the opposite. It’s anesthesia. How do you anesthetize a population? When it reacts normally, convince it that it’s being hysterical.

A commenter going by Zimmern adds some anecdotal evidence that most of us should be familiar with from talking to our own parents or grandparents:

I know it’s anecdotal and not empirical data, but this post led me to ask my dad about his experience growing up in Washington DC in the 50s and 60s with respect to crime, violence, safety, etc.

People never locked their house doors nor their cars. And people would leave their car keys in the ignition after parking their cars. Not just at home, but when they would park their cars at stores and elsewhere outside the home. And if someone’s headlights were accidentally left on, passersby would just reach in and turn them off out of courtesy. I believe a commenter at Steve Sailer’s mentioned this as well. During high school, he would often hitchhike to school. And he actually hitchhiked across the country and back several times, both with friends and without, to visit friends/relatives, just to travel, just for kicks, etc.

Segregation was still in effect in DC for at least a portion of my dad’s upbringing, and this is a major variable of course, to say the least.

The past is a different country, that’s for sure.

Posted in Mencius Moldbug, Policy | No Comments »

Toby Danger

Thursday, August 13th, 2009

If you grew up on too much Johnny Quest as a kid, might I suggest Toby Danger in “Doomsday Bet” — from the first season of Freakazoid:

I just learned that it wasn’t originally intended for Freakazoid though:

“Toby Danger” wasn’t actually created for “Freakazoid!,” though. Tom Minton, a writer for “Animaniacs” who specialized in parodies of other genres and styles of cartoon (he’d done a famous episode of “The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse” incorporating vicious send-ups of other cartoon series), came up with the idea to do an elaborate parody of “Jonny Quest.” The names would be changed, the character designs would be different, and even some of the characters would be entirely different (instead of Hadji, we got a teenage girl named Sandra Danger), but the inspiration would be obvious. The “Toby Danger” cartoon was written and storyboarded, but it wasn’t put into production because no one could figure out where to put it: the limited-animation, non-cartoony style it required wouldn’t have fit in with the very cartoony style of “Animaniacs.”

Then “Freakazoid!” was suddenly revamped from a straightforward adventure-comedy into an out-and-out comedy, and with very little time to produce the new series, the producers were putting in just about anything they could to get 13 episodes ready in time. So “Toby Danger,” with a script and storyboard ready to go, was put into production and aired as part of the second episode of “Freakazoid!” Some people liked it better than the rest of the show; me, I liked it all.

As storyboarded by Brian Chin and Butch Lukic (who are both caricatured in the cartoon, along with Minton), it’s a great-looking cartoon (though a lot of retakes apparently had to be done because the overseas studio initially didn’t make the animation limited enough), perfectly capturing the style and look of “Jonny Quest,” and all the infamous things like the casual racism (“Heads up, you heathen monkeys!”) and the scream everybody lets out when anything bad happens (“Aieee!”). But What makes “Toby Danger” a great parody is that it goes beyond just mimicking the style and look of the show and actually attacks the themes and messages of the original show.

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Who is most likely to secede?

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

Who is most likely to secede?, Josh Levin asks:

Let’s say there’s an American revolution — who leaves first? Once the feds “start imposing just huge taxes,” Schiff says, the states that have to pay more in than they’re getting back out will pull their stars off the flag. Schiff lists Texas and California as potential pull-out candidates, whereas “Florida probably wants to stay because of all the Social Security money.”

If taxation doesn’t cause a mass revolt, economic polarization could yank everything apart. “The Sun Belt states and the interior West are growing faster than the Midwest,” says secession scholar Jason Sorens. “If they get rich enough, they might see their membership in the U.S. as burdensome if they have to support dying industries in Ohio and New York.”

A place like Texas has the means to support itself as an independent country. What it needs is an ideological spark. Northern Italy’s Lega Nord could be a potential model. Rather than emphasize a linguistic or ethnic difference, the political party has espoused independence for economic reasons. In Italy’s 1996 general elections, the political party won 10 percent of the vote nationwide by calling on rich, conservative northerners to go it alone in a state called Padania. In the last eight years, Lega Nord has moderated its separatist rhetoric as it’s become a part of Silvio Berlusconi’s coalition government. (Still, the party is regularly accused of xenophobia.)

For secession to tear the United States to pieces, somebody has to jump first. “As states leave, more states want to leave,” Schiff says, “which is why the government will try to say you can’t leave, or we’ll invade you.” The Second Vermont Republic’s Thomas Naylor agrees that someone has to set a secessionist example. But Naylor doesn’t believe that the U.S. would try to “enslave free Vermont.” (His farcical suggestion: “They could burn all the maples and destroy all the black-and-white Holsteins.”) If American troops did invade Montpelier, he says, it would destroy America’s moral authority just as attempts to stamp out anti-Communist movements in the Soviet Bloc eventually undercut the USSR.

Posted in Economics, Policy | No Comments »

Mines Could Provide Geothermal Energy

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

Engineers from the University of Oviedo believe that mines could provide geothermal energy — low-intensity geothermal energy, that is, providing heating and hot water for people living nearby:

The study looks into geothermal exploitation of a two-kilometre-long mine shaft, in which the temperature of the rocks 500m below the surface is around 30º C. This is typical of many of the mining areas in Asturias, although it could also be applied to other parts of the world. Water could be forced in through tubes at 7º C and return at 12º C, a big enough heat gain to be of benefit to towns located above the mines.

In Fahrenheit, the 86º rock would heat 45º water to 54º.

Posted in Technology | No Comments »

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