Observations – Notebooks

Looney Tunes

First published at New Catallaxy blog, 10 February, 2023

Spy balloons over Barbados in 2016!

Our man in Barbados

Not quite a Chinese Spy Balloon (hereafter CSB), but a very good illustration of the principles involved in this kind of spying.

It’s a product of the Google Loon project, development of which commenced in 2011 as a cheap alternative to satellites to provide worldwide internet connectivity by using balloons. (I’ll refer to the balloons as “Loons.”) This is a longer video about Loon, but the principle of navigating balloons is explained from 3:57 through to 4:59. (Unfortunately, I couldn’t get it to stop automatically.) It uses a ballonet, a ballon within a balloon. Air is pumped into or evacuated from the ballonet, changing the buoyancy of the system, and giving it the capability to rise or fall. The Wikipedia entry gives an altitude range of 18km to 25km, or from about 60,000ft to 80,000ft. Because of the often extreme variation of wind speed and direction at different altitudes, the direction and speed of drift can be controlled to some extent.

This site displays global wind pattern animations for various altitudes. From the menu, you may change the height, given in hPa, from the surface (about 1013hPa) up to 10hPa, corresponding to about 25km. 500hPa is about 5km. It’s very pretty. Pressure at 65,000 feet is about 57hPa, so there is no exact correspondence in the animation to the purported 65,000ft altitude of the CSB.

Loons have no means of propulsion; they drift with whatever winds they encounter at their altitude. This is unlike a dirigible or airship, which has propellor propulsion, and an elongated shape to minimise cross-section in the direction of travel. The Loon is a spheroid, wider than it is high, at full expansion. In this it differs from a normal weather balloon, or indeed a CSB. The Chinese, in the Global Times, have unhelpfully referred to the balloon as an “airship,” a designation for which the images give no support. None of the images I have seen show anything but a sphere with a dependent array of solar panels and, no doubt, antennae. This balloon probably contains a ballonet, because the same article refers to the object’s “limited self-steering capability.” The U.S. Defense Department is not persuaded.

But a U.S. defense official rejected such claims, telling The Post that it lingered near sensitive sites including Malmstrom Air Force Base, which has a nuclear missile silo field. The Washington Post

The offical did not attempt to explain the means by which this mal-lingering was achieved.

This whole episode has been an exercise in more-or-less calculated media and political insanity. The scariest possibility out of this lunacy is that there were senior Pentagon officers who actually believed that this was a “Chinese spy balloon.” That possibility is very remote, but the alternative is terrifying in another way; men who knew the reality were complicit in whipping up anti-China hysteria. This in the context of senior commanders having recently set the date for war with China as soon as 2025.

Now a second CSB has been spotted passing over Latin America—searching for lost U.S. nuclear missile silo fields, no doubt. Lingering somewhere in this madhouse, and encouraging this inflammatory circus, there may be those who seek to turn attention away from the war in Donbas, because they see that war as a distraction from, and the run-down of weapons stocks as a danger to, preparation for war with China. Motives may be even more pacific; wanting to end a bloody conflict that was never going to be “won,” and which risks setting Europe on fire. Even so, inflaming relations with China in order to achieve immediate aims is potentially suicidal. Still, even as the U.S. has the firewall of Europe and the Atlantic between it and Russia, having the firewall of Taiwan, Japan and the Pacific between it and China may encourage the taking of such risks.

Looney Tunes indeed.

How To Cheat At Tennis

First published at NewCatallaxy blog on 30 January, 2023

The term “line ball” is sometimes used to indicate an argument that could go either way. In tennis, though, any part of a ball that does hit any part of the line, is “in.” At the highest level of tennis, players flirt with the lines all the time, and there are many “line balls,” or, as they now seem to be called, close calls. The latter I discovered when watching broadcasts of the Australian Open matches. I also discovered, to my great surprise, that there were no longer any linesmen, or even any lineswomen. The Hawk-Eye system is automatically making the calls. And if anyone has questions about the call, there is an instant replay of the bounce of the ball, and super closeups of the impact mark of the ball on the court. Isn’t technology wonderful?

Looking for information about Hawk-Eye turns up these sources, among surprisingly few others:

and the wiki entry, Hawk-Eye.

The replay in “instant replay,” is not, strictly speaking, a “replay.” It’s actually a “preplay.” There are 10 (in some reports 12) cameras in the Hawk-Eye system. None of them are anywhere near the lines. The cameras are arrayed around the court in high positions looking down on the play. They record at up to 340 frames per second, and feed that information to the associated computers. [What they are looking at is the ball strike and the subsequent trajectory of the ball. On that basis, the entire trajectory of the ball, including the bounce, is predicted. The ball could, in fact, be called “out” before it crosses the net.] As was pointed out in comments, the previous sentence is, as far as can be determined from inadequate documentation, incorrect. It is only the ball tracking on the approach to the bounce that is taken into account. [See comment by Sancho Panzer.]

That explains why Hawk-Eye never shows any actual footage of the ball in the vicinity of the line. It’s a simulation. This will be obvious to cricket lovers. Hawk-Eye for tennis is a development of the original product for cricket. Those balls do not go through the batman’s leg and on to, or past, the wicket.

For something upon which so much rests, there is a paucity of public information about the system. The software is proprietary, and not even the mathematical modelling has been revealed. Not many questions about calibration seem to have been answered, and things like the number of cameras differ in different reports. In an article in New Statesman from 2015, Harry Collins discussed the accuracy of the system, and the secrecy surrounding it.

So we telephoned the firm to talk about [accuracy] and we hit a wall. As sociologists of science we had spent decades chatting with scientists about this kind of thing but suddenly we were told this information was private and lawyers were on call.

Hawk-Eye had been creeping in through the outside courts for a few years, but in 2021 Covid-19 was the rationale for its full-scale introduction across all matches in both the Australian and US Opens. Think how many Covid deaths were prevented by getting rid of all those linesmen around the court.

Let’s suppose that there is a lot of money to be won or lost in betting on the results of major tennis matches. Now imagine that some disreputable but technically adept persons manage to gain access to the software of the system. These nefarious people introduce into the system a bias factor that can be invoked from the control system, or better yet, remotely. The bias is only applied to very close calls to reverse them, with the direction of the reversal depending, of course, on the player.

Who would notice? Players are being conditioned to mistrust their own perceptions and go with the Hawk-Eye call. For example, at the Aussie Open in 2021, Dominic Thiem said, “If the electronic call is out, the ball is out, so there’s no room for mistakes. I like it.” Spectators, live and remote, are shown the “definitive” animation almost immediately. A major match between the world’s top players will often come down to matters of millimetres, and those are the very players who are aiming close to the lines more often.

One of the videos referred to above mentions International Tennis Federation testing of the system in 2006. “Results showed the system to have a mean error of only 2.6mm when compared to a high-speed camera located on the playing surface.” So why not just use the high-speed camera? A competitor, Foxtenn, has done just that. Their high-speed cameras watch the lines, and their replays feature not just the simulation of point of impact, but the actual footage of the ball. But the imagery is coming from a computer, so anything is possible.

That’s the general problem. The world is presented to us as digital information mediated by computers, and all the virtue can be hacked out of the virtual. Once you accept that you must take on faith the video imagery that you see, just as you must the digital photo images, destination Dystopia is much closer.

O Advent Tree!

First published at NewCatallaxy blog, 24 December, 2022

The buds begin to appear towards the end of November, just before Advent. Thoughtfully, the trees vary in their timing, some retaining their vibrant heads of blossom well into January, but for the most part, their display is at its most spectacular in the third and fourth weeks of Advent with a show that always thrills me. And how did they know that red and green are the colours we would come to associate with Christmas? What reds, orange-reds and green they are. They fairly burst with joyful colour.

It’s Brisbane, and the trees are, of course, Poincianas, named after Phillippe de Longvilliers de Poincy, who was a governor of St Kitts. Officially, they are Delonix regia, and are also known as flame of the forest or even flame tree, but we have a better candidate for that. The name which probably suits them best is flamboyant. They go by many names across India and S.E. Asia.

Keep your pines and firs, with their un-snowed-upon branches gracelessly upright, desperately needing baubles and drapes of tinsel to convey festivity. I’ll walk outside and, where the passion for subdivision and six-packs has not destroyed them, look across the suburban hills to pick out the splashes of red, even yet, with contributions from the occasional flame tree still afire with the fading remnants of its peculiarly intense red.

I know Advent is penitential, but, but… what a season it is. If we must forgo a springtime Easter, we have at least subtropical summer Christmas. Praise God!

O come, O come, Emmanuel!

A Small Price (for us) To Pay

First published at NewCatallaxy blog, 23 December, 2022.

On 25th of March, 2022 (keep the date in mind) Sergei Shoigu, the Russian Defence Minister, released figures for Russian army casualties in the month-long war, or “special military operation,” in Ukraine. 1,351 Russian servicemen had been killed, and another 3,825 wounded. NATO sources put the number killed at between 7,000 and 15,000.

On 22nd of September, Shoigu updated the figures to 5,937 Russian servicemen killed. Neither of these numbers included Donbas militiamen, or the Chechen forces, or mercenaries of the Wagner Group. Up to that time, much of the fighting in northern Donetsk and in Luhansk had been conducted by the Donbas militias, who had been carrying the main burden of the fighting with the Ukrainian army since 2014, by the mercenary Wagner Group, and by forces comprised primarily of Chechens under a Chechen leader. Both of the latter were engaged in the fighting around the city of Bakhmut, a vital supply link for Ukrainian forces which had been shelling the city of Donetsk since the war broke out in 2014.

At the same time, Shoigu put the Ukrainian losses at 61,207 dead and 49,368 wounded. The precision with which the Ukrainian losses are given is clearly spurious. Aside from the necessary inaccuracy of the sum of multiple estimates, they present of ratio of dead to wounded of 6:5, where a very rough rule of thumb would be more like 1:3 or 1:4.

Mediazona is a dissenting Russian media outlet founded by two members of Pussy Riot, so there is no question as to their dissent. Their services are sought out by, for example, the BBC, especially for anything detrimental to the Russian government. For the BBC, Mediazona did research on Russian casualties from information on funerals and various other notifications of deaths. On the 3rd of September, they claimed to have identified 6,024 Russian servicemen killed. By the 16th, the BBC was reporting 6,476 killed. The most remarkable thing about this is how close it is to the official Defence Ministry number. To give this some context, the CIA, Estonian Foreign Intelligence and MI6 were asserting that 15,000 Russian troops had been killed. Such estimates were dwarfed by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence, which was claiming to have “liquidated” 55,100 Russian fighters. The take-away here is that the official Russian figures on their own casualties are reasonable, and that the Ukrainian figures are one of those forms of propaganda which consists in looking through whichever end of the telescope best fits the pre-determined story.

The Ukrainians do not provide their own casualty figures. These numbers are classified. However, in November, the Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley said that Russia’s armed forces had suffered 100,000 killed and wounded, and that Ukraine’s casualties had probably been similar. Given that the U.S. is the major sponsor of and major arms supplier to the Ukrainian war effort, Mark Milley must know exactly what Ukrainian casualty figures are, or he must explain to the Administration why he doesn’t. So his “probably” is obfuscation. While this announcement didn’t get a lot of traction, another did.

The sanctions so enthusiastically applied against Russia by the EU and the UK have rebounded very badly against the countries applying them, especially the UK and Germany, which is discovering how dependent its economy is on cheap Russian energy, and why Angel Merkel was so keen to push through Nord Stream 2 over the persistent and ruthless opposition of the US. Meanwhile the Russian economy is strengthening, much to the surprise of The Economist.

The EU needs all the money it can get, and the bureaucrats who govern are hungry for the €300 billion of frozen Russian central bank assets, and the €19 billion of assets seized from private Russian citizens, always referred to by these bureaucrats as oligarchs. There is, however, a difference between “freezing” and “seizing.” Brussels has not been able to find a legal way to take ownership of these funds, and some member states are rightly concerned about the precedent such a seizure would set. In the latest attempt to construct a framework for plundering these resources, Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, made an ill-advised broadcast in which she said, “It is estimated that more than 20,000 civilians and more than 100,000 Ukrainian military officers have been killed so far.”

This revelation caused a storm in Ukraine and elsewhere. The EU PR gurus addressed the problem by editing the offending sentence out of the video, and re-releasing the edited version.

One expects of government bureaucrats a certain facility in the plundering of funds; that’s their day job. But this well of comedic talent in Brussels is something unexpected, and it evoked gales of laughter across the internet. Take three. The numbers that von der Leyen had given were only estimates, a spokeswoman said, and estimates of “dead and wounded,” at that. Unfortunately, she said “killed.” What about the 20,000 civilians? Were they “killed,” or “killed and wounded”?

The bottom line here is that Ukraine, in the estimation of the EU, has lost 100,000 men killed. That number is somewhere between a third and half of the entire Ukrainian army, although there have been repeated call-ups of the increasingly elastic category of fighting-age men.

Many Western readers may have realised that they, and by extension all of us, are suffocating in a miasma of misinformation and disinformation that is generated and re-generated by the news industries of the West. They may struggle to maintain their composure under the barrage of lies about climate change, CO2, “free” renewable energy; they may have despaired at the enthusiastic abandonment of hard-won Western civil liberties and traditions of the rule of law when Covid-19 came; at the loss of all reason, caution or medical ethics in the coercive application of mRNA “vaccines.” Yet many of these same readers have suspended all scepticism concerning Russia’s “unprovoked and unjustified” war in Ukraine. This cohort may well embrace every story from the Ukrainian military, and cheer at every video of a Russian tank being destroyed or Russian troops being killed by drone-directed artillery. So be it.

Yet both General Mark Milley and Ursula von der Leyen assert, for every Russian body over which we might care dance a jig, there is at least one Ukrainian body. In fact, if we pay attention to those numbers for which there is considerable agreement between the Russian Defence Ministry and sceptical indirect investigation, there is a shocking imbalance of casualties in Russia’s favour. Col Douglas McGregor, practically the lone ex-military voice in the US that is critical of the Western response, agreed with von der Layen’s estimate, and added an estimate of 400,000 casualties in total. He added that the recent fighting, and consequent Ukrainian casualties had been so great that the number of deaths was probably closer to 120,000. His own estimate of the ratio of Russian to Ukrainian deaths is one to eight, which would put total Russian deaths in combat at around 15,000.

Shortly after those casualty figures released by Sergei Shoigu on the 25th of March, a tentative agreement for a cease-fire and settlement was reached between representatives of Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul. As described in an earlier post, this agreement was sabotaged in an aggressive campaign of war-mongering lead by then British P.M. Boris Johnson. The cost in lives of this sabotage is terrible enough, but the economies of Europe in particular, and the U.S. to a lesser extent are being devastated by the sanctions designed to cripple the Russian economy, which has withstood these attacks handily. The conditions offered then by Russia will not be repeated. Russia, and Putin, have learned their lesson, not least from the revelations by Angela Merkel on Western and Ukrainian attitudes to the Minsk agreements. A full-scale Russian war effort is about to commence with the freezing of the Ukrainian soil, and all that has happened before will pale in comparison.

As this is being prepared, Poland, the most enthusiastic EU supporter of war in Ukraine, is on the brink of mobilisation, having announced that up to 200,000 Poles will be summoned for military training next year. Poland, it must be said, has irredentist claims on Ukraine dating from the 14th century, and particularly on Galicia and Volhynia in Western Ukraine, which were part of Poland from the Polish-Ukrainian war of 1918-19 until the joint German-Soviet invasion of 1939. The outcome of Polish military intervention in Ukraine (in which 1,700 Poles are said to have died already) may not be what Western puppeteers anticipate.

Decisions about war are the most immediately consequential decisions that any government makes. They are now, and always have been, taken by small coteries of men, and increasingly women keen to get into the business of wielding power of the lives of populations; from the ineffectual Ursula von der Leyen to the ruthless and cynical Victoria Nuland. Any polity which lacks the information or the power to demand accountability and rationality from such men and women cannot claim to be self-governed. And here we are, in spite of our remoteness from the theatre, doing what we can to bring about the total destruction of Ukraine.

It’s a Vaccine, Jim, But Not As We Know It.

Published at NewCatallaxy blog on 20th September, 2021.

Who knew the term “non-sterilising vaccine” six months ago? If you did not, you are in plentiful company. Maybe the woke young, who know everything, knew about it, but for oldies like me, a vaccine was a vaccine was a vaccine. It protected you from the thing you were vaccinated against, and because you couldn’t catch it, you couldn’t pass it on.

That’s old fashioned. The CDC definition of terms includes [my emphases]:

Vaccine: A preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.
Vaccination: The act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce protection from a specific disease.

These definition were introduced by the CDC…let me see… “Page last reviewed: September 1, 2021”…weeks ago. Before then, the definitions were (26th August, 2021; page last reviewed: May 16, 2018):

Vaccine: A product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease.
Vaccination: The act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce immunity to a specific disease.

Science moves so fast.

The hey-day of vaccines was the 50s and 60s, and the stars of the show were smallpox and polio vaccines. Both diseases are caused by viruses, and, like the common cold, measles and herpes, those viruses are particular to humans – they have no other hosts. That characteristic makes it possible, even if not practical, to eliminate the disease.

Some years ago, the WHO announced the death of smallpox. (It wasn’t quite dead, but it was on life support in labs about the place, just in case, heaven forbid, some other rogue state decides to use its lab supply to produce biological weapons.) But to eliminate a virus, you have to have a sterilising vaccine; or, in terms most people understand, one that works.

Think of it this way. There are measures you can take to prevent disease; for example, a healthy diet and plenty of exercise, along with plenty of sunlight to top up your Vitamin D levels. These are prophylactic measures, but they’re non-sterilising prophylaxis. You can still get crook. It’s just that, compared to an obese person, or a person suffering from some immunodeficiency, or a person with a heart ailment, you have much less chance of catching whatever disease happens to be doing the rounds. If you do get sick, though, and you have good medical treatment available to you, you come under a therapeutic regime in the care of your doctor and, if it’s severe enough, hospital staff. The purpose of the therapies is to reduce the severity of the disease. The therapy may be non-sterilising (addressing the symptoms only) or, thanks to modern medical advances, sterilising (as penicillin was initially.) These are unexceptional health-care measures (though particular therapies will vary greatly in effectiveness), and the same general principles have applied for millennia before the advent of vaccines. In the case of prophylaxis and the ameliorating of symptoms, the aim is to reduce the likelihood of contracting disease, and, should that fail, to reduce the severity of the disease.

The story we are now hearing about the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines is that they do just this, and only this. But that was not always the story.

When SARS-CoV-2 vaccines were first touted, soon after our international border was closed, they were to be the definitive solution to Covid-19, eliminating all concerns about the virus and allowing us to get back to “normal.” That story is still essentially the public version of vaccine reality, as promoted ceaselessly by the media, Chief Medical Officers and Ministers of the Crown. But, quietly, the notion of getting back to normal has been nudged, prodded and shouldered off the stage. Normal has become new normal, a horse of a different colour. New normal starts with vaccinations, but somehow masks are here to stay, along with anti-social distancing, perspex shields and lines on the floor in shops and supermarkets, QR codes at every doorway, and a general level of hostility and suspicion.

The cracks in the foundations began with the surge of adverse events, as reported by VAERS, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, in the U.S., and the Yellow Card system in the U.K. Nobody believes that these systems are accurate reflections of the actual numbers of such events. All agree that these are under-reported, but no-one knows by how much.

The Emergency Use Authorisation (EUA) from the U.S. FDA for Pfizer and Moderna vaccines was issued in December of 2020, for persons older than 15 and older than 17, respectively. In May of 2021, the Pfizer EUA was extended to adolescents 12 to 15 years of age. In the same month, the CDC recommended that children from 12 years old should have the vaccine. At the time, the CDC’s own best estimate of Infection Mortality Rate for the 0-19 years age group was 3 per 100,000 infected; 0.003%.

At the end of June 2021 that the FDA added a myocarditis warning to the vaccine fact sheets. Studies noted that the risk was greatest in younger males.

While this was happening, it was gradually becoming obvious that vaccinated people were getting sick, and vaccinated people were dying. Obvious, that is, unless you were getting your information from the nightly news. If it were to turn out that similar numbers of vaccinated and unvaccinated were becoming ill and were dying, what would happen to the vaccine push? Fortunately for politicians and drug companies, scientists determined that the vaccinated people were much less likely to become ill, and much less likely to die. Sighs of relief all round. That in spite of, for example, a study of an outbreak in Barnstable County Massachusetts, which found that 74% of those who tested positive were fully vaccinated. Only five of those required hospitalisation, but four of them were fully vaccinated.

So what do these vaccines actually do, or more precisely, what do they not do, as opposed to what we were told they would do? They are to some yet-to-be-determined extent, prophylactic. The deeply-ingrained acceptance of vaccination, in general, in Australia arises from their original promise: effectively complete prophylaxis. We didn’t take earlier vaccines in order to make our bout of smallpox or polio less dangerous to some uncertain extent. When the Covid-19 vaccines were introduced, no-one who was hectoring us to take them was saying that we would still get infected, would still pass the virus on, would still get sick, but not as badly, and would still die, but not as many of us.

Yet that is the reality, and the new story was brought centre-stage without a blush or a hint that it was a brand-new narrative. Nothing to see here, folks. Are we so used to being lied to?

How, then, does the vaccine differ from any other protocols of incompletely effective prophylactic measures and possibly incompletely effective therapy if the disease is contracted? It differs in this; that the vaccine is a threat to your health and your life.

If there are protocols of proven effectiveness in prevention and treatment of Covid-19, and there is an abundance of evidence to suggest that this is the case, then those who suppressed such protocols are culpable for a considerable measure of the suffering, debility and death that has been wrought by Covid-19. They are also culpable for every sickness, debility and death from the vaccine.
If I am denied accurate and complete information about the risks of the vaccine, including appraisals of rushed vaccine roll-outs in the past, or about the availability of alternatives, I am denied the possibility of informed consent. That is a denial of one of my most basic human rights in a supposedly free society.

Active, ceaseless, recalcitrant suppression is the hallmark of our political “leaders,” CMOs, legacy media and especially social media. The medical profession has largely cowered in silence, when they have not actively been part of the suppression and the touting for the vaccines. If the protocols are shown to be effective, all of these people have blood on their hands.

It’s not up some some lesser crested cockatoo on TV, or the CMO of the Administrative State, or the Prime Minister, to decide what risks I take with my life and health. Were I a serf, that decision would rest with the Lord of the Manor. If the elites lording it over us think that they can take those decisions for us, it makes crystal clear what their view of us plebs is. But I insist that I am a citizen, and I insist on making those decisions about myself for myself, and I insist on the information I need to make that decision.

There is a crucial difference between the risks I run from SARS-CoV-2 and the risks I run from a vaccine. I can minimise the risks I run from the virus. I know enough about its habits and its preferences to adjust my behaviour to try to avoid it. I can take advantage of the now commonplace changes to workplaces and spaces. I can take advantage of online orders and contactless pickup. Or I can take my chances in shops and malls. Most importantly of all, I could, until last Friday, find a GP who will offer me the best alternative prophylactic and, should I become infected, therapeutic protocols that have been determined by his colleagues around the world.

But there is nothing I can do to neutralise the risks of the vaccine; except refuse to take it.

As a postscript, I acknowledge Alex Berenson, whose Substack post wended its way to me and alerted me to the change in the CDC definitions. He also pointed out that the so-called vaccine is in fact a therapy.

The Forgotten Vaccine

This article was published in Quadrant Online on 14th September, 2021.

A paywalled article in the BMJ begins,

…the US National Institutes of Health infectious diseases chief, Anthony Fauci, appeared on YouTube to reassure Americans about the safety of the…vaccine. “The track record for serious adverse events is very good. It’s very, very, very rare that you ever see anything that’s associated with the vaccine that’s a serious event,” he said.

This was written in 2018; the YouTube appearance was in October 2009, and the vaccine was the 2009 H1N1 Swine Flu vaccine.

[B]y October 2009 the new vaccines were being rolled out … in the UK, with prominent organisations, including the Department of Health, British Medical Association, and Royal Colleges of General Practitioners, working hard to convince a reluctant NHS workforce to get vaccinated. “We fully support the swine flu vaccination programme … The vaccine has been thoroughly tested,” they declared in a joint statement.
Except, it hadn’t. Anticipating a severe influenza pandemic, governments…had made various…arrangements to shorten the time between recognition of a pandemic virus and the production…and administration of that vaccine… [An arrangement], adopted by countries such as Canada, the US, UK, France, and Germany, was to provide vaccine manufacturers indemnity from liability for wrongdoing…

By 2018, the incidence of narcolepsy in young people throughout Europe as a result of vaccination, primarily with Pandemrix, was sufficiently well established to give rise to lawsuits in which the manufacturers’ confidential concerns about the vaccine were brought to light.
A 2012 article at orthomolecular.org, with the relevant citations in Swedish and Finnish, outlines the sequence of events.

On 25 September 2009, the European Medicines Agency (EMEA) approved Pandemrix…In Sweden, Finland, Norway and Iceland, the authorities explicitly set the goal of vaccinating the entire population…
Mass vaccination started in Finland and Sweden in October 2009. … [T]he authorities initiated an enormous public relations campaign… Solidarity became the slogan: “Be vaccinated to protect your fellow citizens.” … In Sweden, 60% of the population had been vaccinated, while in Finland 50% was covered.
In August 2010, Finland reported an increased occurrence of narcolepsy in children and youngsters vaccinated with Pandemrix. On 1 September 2010, Finland stopped all Pandemrix vaccinations.
On 1 September 2011, the Finnish National Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) … stated…, “The increased risk associated with vaccination amounted to six cases of narcolepsy per 100,000 persons vaccinated in the 4-19 age group during the eight months following vaccination. This was 12.7 times the risk of a person in the same age group who had not been vaccinated.”…
This statement was made almost exactly two years after the THL’s earlier statement…that it would be safe. [My emphases]

It will be pointed out, accurately, that on those figures from 2011 the risk of 4-19 year olds contracting narcolepsy from the vaccine was 0.006%. Keep that figure in mind.

In Sweden, at least 150 children are now [2012] suffering from narcolepsy caused by Pandemrix vaccine. In Finland, the number is approximately 100. … Narcolepsy is a disease with lifetime consequences, and the risk that Pandemrix may have caused other neurological illnesses has not yet been excluded.

By November of 2020, a Medical Xpress web article noted:

The Swedish Pharmaceutical Insurance has so far approved 440 of 702 narcolepsy claims linked to Pandemrix, paying out a total of 100 million kronor (9.8 million euros, $11.6 million) in compensation. [My emphasis]

The current population of Sweden is 10 million; of Finland 5.5 million.
In the U.K., according to The Guardian in 2017, a High Court decision opened the way for “about 100 people in the UK with narcolepsy” allegedly caused by Pandemrix to claim compensation under the Vaccine Damage Payment Act. The Court rejected an appeal by the Government to withhold payments.
In Ireland, however, the State admitted no liability in settling a 2019 case brought by a then 26 year old woman. Another case was settled by mediation, without admission of liability, for €990,000. An Irish narcolepsy support group claims over 70 children are affected.
Narcolepsy sufferer Meissa Chebbi, 10 at the time of her vaccination, is quoted in the Medical Xpress article. “I’m not going to take the (COVID) vaccine until after about five years when we know what the risks are.” This is the voice of bitter experience. The John Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center puts it this way. “A typical vaccine development timeline takes 5 to 10 years, and sometimes longer, to assess whether the vaccine is safe and efficacious in clinical trials, complete the regulatory approval processes, and manufacture sufficient quantity of vaccine doses for widespread distribution.”
Just to get back to that extremely low risk of narcolepsy; 0.006% in 4-19 year olds. In April of 2021, the CDC’s own best estimate of Infection Mortality Rate for the 0-19 years age group was 3 per 100,000 infected; 0.003%.

The Urgent Need For Quotas

Published at Catallaxy Files on 30/03/2021

I was always opposed to the idea of quotas for women in Parliament. I operated under the delusion, not so much that selection on merit was a better idea, but that selection on merit could actually occur. Given the selection processes for the major parties, this was always a tenuous notion. But the revelation in Parliament over the past couple of weeks are so disturbing that it is no longer an option to be blind to the reality, and it can no longer be argued that the situation will correct itself through the good offices and goodwill of the parties, factions and people involved.

Accordingly, it is time for definite proposals for quotas for women in Parliament. Clearly, the necessary changes will not take place overnight, but ambitious targets are required. With sufficient will, the current parlous situation of Parliament can be corrected over the course of three Parliamentary terms. For maximum effectiveness the first opportunity must be seized: that is the next Federal election.

At the next election, I propose a quota of 25% of winnable seats to be allocated for women. At the following election, that should be 17.5%, and at the one after, 10%. More than any other conceivable measure, this would fix the current toxic environment in Federal Parliament. These are tough goals, but if respect for Parliament is to increased from its present lows, they are essential.

The Burden of Proof and the Pell Case

[Originally published by Quadrant Online on 30th December 2019. Published in Quadrant Magazine March 2020.]

The conviction of the guilty is just; it is the unremarkable business of a just criminal jurisprudence; but the conviction of the innocent strikes at the heart of Justice. If it happens through error or negligence, it is bad enough; when it happens by design, it is an abomination that corrodes trust in the law itself.

Maimonides in the 12th century, in this commentary on Exodus 23:7 (Keep far from a false charge, and do not kill the innocent and righteous, for I will not acquit the wicked) concluded, “it is better and more satisfactory to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent man to death once in a way.”

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The Pope’s Commission

[First published at The Orthosphere.]

Faithful Catholics are expected to accept that, although the Pope is elected by the Conclave of (eligible) Cardinals, the One who really selects the Pope is the Holy Ghost Himself: the cardinals are His catspaws, so to speak. It is a grave offence to leak the proceedings of the Conclave (which is why such leaking is so rare), but if the preceding is to be accepted, the machinations in the Conclave are irrelevant. Therefore, I can appreciate both the smile and the squirm of orthodox Catholics who, in these very pages, see the so-ordained Pope described as … ahem … Pope Fruit Loops I.

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Restoration as revolution

[This item was first published at Catallaxy Files. The version here is slightly modified.]

About a week ago, Steve posted the article Jordan Peterson trashes the left once again. He quoted from an article by Joy Pullman, called (big breath) The Left Is Actually Afraid Of Jordan Peterson Because He’s Leading A Revolt Against Their Corruption. It was published in The Federalist. Pullman starts her article by commenting on an earlier piece from The Atlantic, by Caitlin Flanagan . I had previously read, with amazement, Flanagan’s article. It seemed to me to be schizophrenic. The quote that Pullman utilises in her second paragraph encapsulates its central weirdness. I’ll quote her here again.

They “began listening to more and more podcasts and lectures by this man, Jordan Peterson,” she writes. “The young men voted for Hillary, they called home in shock when Trump won, they talked about flipping the House, and they followed Peterson to other podcasts — to Sam Harris and Dave Rubin and Joe Rogan. What they were getting from these lectures and discussions, often lengthy and often on arcane subjects, was perhaps the only sustained argument against identity politics they had heard in their lives.”

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