Author: Dalwhinnie

Retired, sometime civil servant, sometime consultant, active intellectual, former lawyer, active property manager, and on rare occasions in the past a political activist. He has recovered from the experience.

Retired, sometime civil servant, sometime consultant, active intellectual, former lawyer, active property manager, and on rare occasions in the past a political activist. He has recovered from the experience.

The zombification of San Francisco

This is San Francisco on fentanyl.

 

From Michael Shellenberger

“For over a decade, the city of San Francisco has been carrying out an experiment. What happens when thousands of drug addicts are not only permitted to use heroin, fentanyl and meth publicly, but also enabled to do so? The results are in: hundreds of them die annually. Last year, 712 people in San Francisco died from drug overdoses or poisoning, and this year a similar number are on track to do so.

“Worse, cities around the country, from Seattle and Los Angeles to Philadelphia and Boston, have been copying San Francisco’s approach. Partly as a result of these supposedly progressive policies, 93,000 people in the US died in 2021 from illicit drugs, a more than five-fold increase from the 17,000 people killed by illicit drugs in 2000.”

……

“According to critical race theorist Ibram Kendi, whose views are shared by San Francisco’s progressive policymakers, policies that result in racial disparities are themselves racist. As a result, progressives should view harm reduction-only policies, including Housing First, as racist.

“Indeed, San Francisco is engaged in an unethical refusal to mandate proven medical treatment to drug addicts that is no different from the denial of medical treatment to syphilis sufferers by US government researchers in Tuskegee, Ala., between 1932 and 1972. In those infamous, racist experiments, US health and medical professionals denied penicillin to African American men long after it became clear, in 1947, that the antibiotic saved lives.”

 

More is at https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/more-black-americans-died-from-san 

We knew that

Study finds-

People who eat meat experience lower levels of depression and anxiety compared to vegans

Last night I dined on a rack of lamb chops and some excellent Californian cabernet sauvignon.  A million years of evolution cannot and should not be denied. I like being at the top of the food chain. Why would I ever want to be down the evolutionary scale? People who eat meat have less anxiety than vegans. Of course they do.

https://sapienjournal.org/people-who-eat-meat-experience-lower-levels-of-depression-and-anxiety-compared-to-vegans/

 

Brexit the movie

 

 

This is an altogether a fine movie, filled with political insight. Benedict Cumberbatch plays Dominic Cummings, the architect of the victorious leave vote. The credits say that some portions of the movie are fictional, leaving one to infer that most of it is just how it happened. The portion I am sure is fictional is a scene near the end between Dominic Cummings and the head organizer of the Remain campaign, a Tory working for Prime Minister Campbell. They are in a pub after a long day’s work.  It is becoming clear to the Stay side that they are losing and they are surprised and outraged. They would stay that way for four more years. The Tory political professional running the Stay campaign accuses Cummings of undermining the rule of experts and of opening up political life in England to a set of forces that will be impossible to control.

Broadly speaking, the accusation is true. What kept politics manageable for the ruling classes was a consensus that experts in fact knew more than most people and that their rule was legitimate. This is under challenge in the English-speaking democracies.

Curtis Yarvin, of Mencius Moldbug fame, explains this as the rule of the Cathedral. It is a vitally important concept, and Brexit the movie touches upon it in the exchange between Dominic Cummings and the lead organizer for the Stay campaign.

“The mystery of the cathedral is that all the modern world’s legitimate and prestigious intellectual institutions, even though they have no central organizational connection, behave in many ways as if they were a single organizational structure.

Most notably, this pseudo-structure is synoptic: it has one clear doctrine or perspective. It always agrees with itself. Still more puzzlingly, its doctrine is not static; it evolves; this doctrine has a predictable direction of evolution, and the whole structure moves together.”

I am uncertain whether the term “the Cathedral” has to be conceived as Yarvin does. Yet it is stands as a useful metaphor for the collective inertia of received ideas that dominate political discourse these days.

Watch the Brexit movie. It will get you to the core of the issues. As the referendum approached, there was a telling scene during a focus group being held by the Remain side where some frizzy blonde-haired working class woman entirely loses it, and starts screaming that she is absolutely fed up with being told she is a racist for having a dim view of current rates of immigration, and that she has been fed up with this state of repression for the past twenty years. The meeting descends into chaos. At that point the chief organizer for the Remain side knows for sure that he is going to lose.

I wonder when that point will be reached in Canada.

 

 

Playing with viruses

A beautiful house with a view over the lake was destroyed years ago by the grandchildren playing with matches under the deck, right out of a parent’s nightmare. But what if the grandchildren are adults, scientists, virologists, playing with deadly viruses, with no goal in mind other than seeing what they can do with genetic recombinatory technologies?

Well folks, that appears to be exactly what happened with COVID.

According to an article in  the National Post this morning,

 

Wuhan and U.S. scientists were planning to create entirely new coronaviruses that did not exist in nature by combining the genetic code of other viruses, proposals show.

Documents leaked last month of a grant application submitted to the U.S. Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), reveal that the international team of scientists was planning to mix genetic data of closely related strains, and grow new viruses.

A genetics expert working with the World Health Organization who uncovered the plan after studying the proposals in detail said that if Sars-CoV-2 had been produced in this way, it would explain why a close match in nature has never been found.So far, the closest naturally occurring virus to Sars-CoV-2 is a strain called Banal-52, which was found in Laos last month and shares 96.8 per cent of the genome. Scientists expect a direct ancestor to be about a 99.98 per cent match, and none has been found so far.
The DARPA proposals, which were leaked to Drastic, the pandemic origins analysis group, show that the team had planned to take sequences from naturally occurring coronaviruses and use them to create a brand new sequence, which was an average of all the strains.Explaining the proposal, a WHO collaborator who asked not to be named for fear of reprisals, said that the team planned to “take various sequences from similar coronaviruses, and create a new sequence that is essentially the average of them… They would then synthesize the viral genome from the computer sequence, thus creating a virus genome that did not exist in nature, but looks natural – as it is the average of natural viruses.”The proposal, which was not funded, was submitted by the British zoologist Peter Daszak on behalf of a consortium including Daszak EcoHealth Alliance, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the University of North Carolina and Duke NUS in Singapore.The WHO source said: “If Sars-CoV-2 comes from an artificial consensus sequence composed of genomes with 95 per cent similarity to each other… I would predict that we will never find a really good match in nature and just a bunch of close matches across parts of the sequence, which so far is what we are seeing. The problem is that those opposed to a lab-leak scenario will always just say that we need to sample more… Scientists overall are afraid of discussing the issue of the origins due to the political situation. This leaves a small and vocal minority of biased scientists free to spread misinformation.”

Daszak, a member of the WHO team investigating the pandemic origins, was also behind a letter published in The Lancet, which dismissed suggestions that COVID-19 did not have a natural origin as a conspiracy theory.

So the guy behind the claims that COVID has a natural origin was also the lead in the proposal to create the frankenvirus. There is more to come in this tale of conflicts of interest, bad faith, and cosmic arrogance.

Unfortunately, as I am not the Master of the Universe, I cannot have Daszak hanged for crimes against humanity.

 

Peter Daszak, virologist, and possible author of COVID-19

 

Watch Daszak assert that there is no evidence that the virus leaked from the Wuhan lab, which he claimed was “well built, well designed and well run.” The whole CNN piece is carefully designed to make you believe COVID came from an animal market. But Daszak was interested in not finding the truth if it meant the virology lab leaked COVID, or if evidence led back to his possible involvement in the viral research that created the COVID blend.

 

 

Duggan’s Dew of Kirkintilloch

It is with sadness that we announce the passing of Duggan’s Dew. He died without warning in his sleep sometime on the night of Saturday October 2- Sunday October 3. He was 71 years old. He was a man of many talents, a writer by trade, and a sterling chap. English Canadian at his best. Thought the world was going to hell with the elites pulling the wagon of society to the cliff’s edge.

In that he was attuned with the rest of us at Barrelstrength.

We can only hope that upon his passing he was able to correct his atheism by the sudden influx of new information. I suspect that many more people of a materialist persuasion, like Duggan’s Dew, are in for a big surprise.

RIP brother.

 

On the pleasures of ‘Bullitt’

Bullitt poster.jpg

 

 

“Bullitt” is one of the finest action police movies ever made. Directed by Peter Yates and starring Steve McQueen, Bullitt depicts a police lieutenant (McQueen) charged with protecting a key witness in a Senatorial hearing run by the imperious politician played by Robert Vaughn. The witness unlocks the door of his protective custody hotel room  and is shot by the hit men from Chicago. Who were they and what is going on?

Watching it again after decades of not seeing it, many things struck me, including especially how well it was made. Let’s begin with the less important. San Francisco was still clean. People wore shirts and ties, even the hit men. McQueen’s boss is shown on the steps of a Catholic Church with his family, heading to Mass, when he is presented with a writ of habeas corpus by the Robert Vaughn character. We have come a long way down since then.

What struck me in particular was the density of detail in the film, its groundedness in place and time, and the innovations in film-making. Scenes that we now take for granted were shown for the first time, as near as I can tell.

  • the opening scene where Bullitt meets the senator at a political fundraiser attended chiefly by rich women, all chattering inconsequentially. The chat is audible. The gap between the world of privilege and that of the police is clearly established.
  • The scene where Frank Bullitt is first presented with his girlfriend, the actress  Jacqueline Bisset, who is shown calculating flow measurements and pipe capacities from data tables for her job in an engineering-architecture film. She clearly shows s brains and ambition, and an English accent. Cool cop, English immigrant girlfriend.
  • The scene in the operating room where surgeons and nurses engage in clipped, directed conversation over the body of the young policeman shot in the murder of the witness. A nurse swipes the surgeon’s brow of sweat. Instruments clatter into surgical trays.
  • The scene in the mortuary where the coroner is dictating loudly into the hanging microphone as he describes the wounds that killed the witness.
  • The scene at the airport where shots are exchanged between Bullitt and the murderer as huge jets taxi for take-off, engines screaming. Then the chase moves inside as crowds of passengers jostle to get on planes. (No security lineups in that more innocent era).
  • The car chase, which everyone remembers. There had been nothing like it before then. A good deal of San Francisco would have had to be closed off in order to film it.
  • The cool jazz musical sound track, which was very nineteen sixties.
  • And of course, there is the stoic and manly Steve McQueen, who seems to have about fifty line of dialogue in the movie. He speaks through actions, and very few words.

To my imperfect knowledge, many scenes in Bullitt were innovations that have since become cliches. They are now everywhere, but in 1968 they were new, like the backlit fan turning slowly in Blade Runner. Scene after scene unfolds in detailed depiction of the working environment of the policeman, always with the oily smarm of the Robert Vaughn character issuing threats and blandishments high and low, and the taciturn McQueen ignoring him as he gets on with the job.

Do yourself a favour and watch it again. Or for the first time. Watch it like it was an important movie, as if it had been directed by Hitchcock and you had to study it for an exam in film studies. Your pleasure will not be diminished, to the contrary, it will be increased. Everything in action movies has come to resemble Bullitt, which suggests that Peter Yates, the director, has been under-appreciated.

 

 

Quebec’s refusal to apologize

Legault demands apology for ‘attack’ on Quebec

“Advancing the idea that protecting French is discriminatory, or even racist, is ridiculous,” a furious Legault said at a news conference Friday. “It’s not true we are going to be lectured about this by anyone.

“Regardless of what is said, regardless of what is done in Ottawa, Quebec is a nation, free to protect its language, its values, its powers,” he added, invoking a turn of phrase used by former premier Robert Bourassa after the failure of the Meech Lake constitutional accord.

“I will certainly not apologize for defending our language, our values, our powers,” he said. “It is even my duty to do so as premier of Quebec.”

Am I the only English Canadian who digs Francois Legault’s refusal to back down on Quebec’s legislation barring religious symbols being worn by public servants?

Now I grant you that Legault is somewhat over the top. But as Jonathan Kay has noticed, the French Canadians are proud of being themselves, while English Canadian elite opinion deplores itself and wants to fly the flag at half mast in perpetuity until the Indians forgive us for seeking to educate them in Edwardian-era residential schools. Shame shame!.

Yes the legislation is discriminatory, and the French Canadians have decided that this is necessary for the maintenance of their society. You may consider them wrong in this, and I am likely to agree. But I cannot resist admiration for their unalloyed sense of self and their desire to preserve themselves from the dissolution of multiculturalism.