Utopia, you are standing in it!

(1)  According to the Spectator (UK), a report (in Norwegian) by the Norwegian public health authority now argues their lockdown was probably unnecessary as voluntary social distancing efforts were already effective enough.

Norway is assembling a picture of what happened before lockdown using observed data – hospital figures, infection numbers and so on – to assess the situation in the country in March. At the time, no one really knew. It was feared that Covid was rampant with each person infecting two or three others – and only lockdown could stop this exponential growth by cutting the R number to 1 or lower. But the country’s public health authority has published a report with a striking conclusion: the virus was never spreading as fast as had been feared and was already on the way out when lockdown was ordered. ‘It looks as if the effective reproduction rate had already dropped to…

by Javier Birchenall (University of California, Santa Barbara)

This is Part F of the Economic History Society’s blog series: ‘The Long View on Epidemics, Disease and Public Health: Research from Economic History’ The full article from this blog was published in ‘Explorations in Economic History’ and is available here

1910 advertising postcard for the National Association for the Prevention of Tuberculosis. 

Tuberculosis (TB) is one of the oldest and deadliest diseases. Traces of TB in humans can be found as early as 9,000 years ago, and written accounts date back 3,300 years in India. Untreated, TB’s case-fatality rate is as high as 50 percent. It was a dreaded disease.  TB is an airborne disease caused by the bacteria Mycobacteriumtuberculosis. Tuberculosis spreads through the air when a person who has an active infection coughs, sneezes, speaks, or sings. Most cases remain latent and do not develop symptoms…

Clearly, liberal democracy is at a crossroad. Many are dissatisfied with the state of political affairs in their national countries. The news is filled with stories of uprisings in Chile or Bolivia, riots in Hong Kong or Paris, or mass movements in Catalonia or England. People take up the streets for the cause they believe in, may it be climate change, global inequality and poverty, national identity,  political corruption and so on… All these various social movements share a common belief that the current democratic arrangements do not work. As most recent elections in Western democracies have shown, the political landscape is fragmented at an unprecedented scale. In France’s 2017 presidential elections, four candidates each obtained roughly one fifth of the total votes. In Spain, after four elections in as many years, no party is yet again able to claim an absolute majority in the lower Chamber…

There is a particular delight in watching the hard-green-left tear each other apart, which is precisely the result of Michael Moore’s Planet of the Humans.

The film – produced by Moore and made by Jeff Gibbs – has been uploaded to YouTube to allow all and sundry to get the message: renewable energy is the greatest economic and environmental fraud of all time. STT first covered it here: Blood & Gore: Mike Moore’s ‘Planet of The Humans’ Unmasks The Power & Money Behind Renewables Scam

Characters like James Delingpole have spent the last decade attacking heavily subsidised and hopelessly unreliable wind and solar, as the result of crony capitalism gone mad. Tackling the cynical profiteers and pointing to the pointlessness of sources that are entirely dependent upon the weather and time of day, Delingpole has been a bugbear to renewable energy rent seekers and climate cultists, alike.

For his troubles he’s…

Nice interview of Prof Joshua Angrist of MIT:

As a teenager growing up in Pittsburgh, Joshua Angrist became fed up with high school and said his goodbyes to it after his junior year. Today, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he’s a top researcher in labor economics and the economics of education — with work that includes a series of famed studies of policy choices for K-12 schooling.

Much of his work has been based on ingenious “natural experiments,” that is, episodes in which two or more groups of people were randomly exposed to different policies or different experiences. Such occurrences are an opportunity for Angrist and his co-authors to use the tools of econometrics to assess the effects of those differences — whether that’s a large classroom versus a small classroom or education at a charter school versus education at a conventional public school.

Angrist’s first natural experiment looked at…

BUILDING THE BOMB

Albert Einstein signed the letter. Years later he would regret it, calling it the one mistake he had made in his life. But in August 1939, Adolf Hitler’s armies already occupied Czechoslovakia and Austria and his fascist thugs were arresting Jews and political opponents throughout the Third Reich. Signing the letter seemed vital. His friends and fellow physicists, Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner, had drafted the note he would now send to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The scientists had seen their excitement over the recent breakthrough discoveries of the deepest secrets of the atom turn to fear as they realized what unleashing atomic energies could mean. Now the danger could not be denied. The Nazis might be working on a super-weapon; they had to be stopped.

In his famous letter, Einstein warned Roosevelt that in the immediate future, based on new work by Szilard and the Italian…

Nazi Germany

In 1938 Otto Hahn, a German chemist, was the first to succeeded in breaking up (fissioning) a uranium atom into lighter, atomically speaking, elements by bombarding it with neutrons. At the time, the idea seemed preposterous, even to him, and he doubted his own test results, but after overcoming his reservations he published it in a scientific journal. It was soon realized that this process could yield enormous amounts of energy. Leo Szilard, a physicist of Hungarian descent, already considered this possibility while staying in London in 1933. Hahn’s discovery, however, clinched the argument for Szilard, now working in the United States, and he was horrified by the possibility that Nazi Germany could develop such a bomb. He then convinced Albert Einstein to approach President Roosevelt to initiate an American atomic research program.

The American scientists were sure from the start that they were in a race against…

Chancellor of Germany Joseph Wirth (2.from left) with Krassin, Georgi Chicherin and Joffe from the Russian delegation.

The Rapallo Accord

In April 1922, long before Hitler and the Nazis, another treaty was signed between the Soviet Union and the Weimar Republic in which both countries gave up any territorial and financial claims against each other. The treaty also contained several secret clauses that dealt with cooperation in the fields of armor, military aviation, and gas warfare. Both countries were to benefit from this arrangement. Germany had the capability to develop these fields on its own, but it was impossible to do this in Germany itself, under the nose of the observant Versailles Treaty’s overseeing committee. The Soviet Union was remote enough for this purpose, and anyway there were no foreign forces on its land to report what really went on. Among other things, German engineers worked in the Soviet Union…

Credit: NASA
Looks like game over for the Planet Nine idea. Unavoidable observational biases may be at least partly to blame.
– – –
Planet Nine is a theoretical, undiscovered giant planet in the mysterious far reaches of our solar system, says The Conversation (via Phys.org)

The presence of Planet Nine has been hypothesized to explain everything from the tilt of the sun’s spin axis to the apparent clustering in the orbits of small, icy asteroids beyond Neptune.

But does Planet Nine actually exist?

(0) Israel today celebrated its first day with zero new cases.

(1) Via Instapundit, SSRN (Social Science Research Network, a preprint server similar to arXiv.org, medrxiv.org, biorxiv.org and chemrxiv,org) has a article in press about the Swedish COVID19 epidemic. 

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3609493

Their per capita death rate is an order of magnitude larger than neighboring Scandinavian countries. It is tempting to attribute all this to Sweden’s Sonderweg (“road alone”) — but this article makes a case that at least part results from factors unrelated to Sweden’s decision not to go on lockdown.

Not only is half of Sweden’s mortality concentrated in just the capital city Stockholm, but over 70% of Sweden’s mortality is in nursing homes. As the article explains, in Sweden the elderly tend to stay at home for as long as possible, assisted by home helpers assigned by the public healthcare system. (Independent assisted living facilities do exist, apparently mostly…