Gordon prefers locally grown seasonal food. Good for him. But he wants to throw you in jail for buying strawberries from Kenya. That’s bad news for you and Kenyan farmers.

Amazingly I agree with something someone from Oxfam says: “the million farmers in east Africa who rely on exporting their goods to scrape a living would see Gordon Ramsay’s assertions as a recipe for disaster”.

Then again, on their website: “we support calls for strong political action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions”.

Hmm.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Civil Liberties, Enviro-Mentalism at 2:14 PM EDT

1 Comment »

If you look around the world, you will find that freer countries tend to be richer, and less free countries tend to be poorer. Meanwhile, rich countries are better equipped to deal with natural disasters because people have mobility and can escape, and buy food from various sources.

That explains the situation in Burma, a military dictatorship.

Food aid, and the kind of infrastructure aid the US Navy provided Indonesia after the tsunami, would help people in Burma in the short term. In the long term, they need to get rid of their oppressive government.

Al Gore, on the other hand, blames global warming.

Posted by Rob Fisher as News at 9:41 PM EDT

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The blog Junkfood Science takes a critical look at media reports of health studies. One exemplary article debunks a study that finds that fat people are at greater risk of heart disease even if they exercise.

Looking at actual incidences of strokes reported, for example, only 1.1% of ‘normal’ weight women suffered a stroke (221 of 19,849), compared to 1.4% of the ‘obese’ women (103/7,126). When reported as a relative risk, that’s a 30% higher risk associated with obesity. But it is an actual difference associated with obesity of 0.34% after 11 years or 0.03% a year difference — clinically meaningless and statistically untenable.

And 0.7% (140) of the ‘normal’ weight women had heart attacks compared to 1.27% (91) of the ‘obese’ women. Reported as a relative risk, it’s an 81% higher risk associated with obesity. But it’s an actual difference associated with obesity of 0.55% over 11 years or 0.05% a year difference — again, not clinically meaningful.

Credible evidence-based medical care does not take an untenable correlation and claim it proof of a causation and then flop it around into a treatment recommendation. The take-home lessons for us are to always ask ourselves what researchers are actually measuring and if they are asking the right questions. Next, always be suspicious of secondary analyses using data from a study that wasn’t designed to answer that question and is trying to splice meaning from untenable findings. Finally, don’t fall for scares based on relative risks or odds ratios, keep the actual data in perspective.

So far, no surprises for me. I’ve always been suspicious of “20% more likely to get disease X” type claims.

But the article goes on to question the benefits of exercise in general. Apparently, some exercise correlates to longer life, but additional exercise does not. In fact, the correlation reverses. This is news to me.

Other articles on the site talk about something I’ve never heard of: the Obesity Paradox. Study after study has found that fat people live longer.

Fat people live longer.

Can everything we are told by government and the media be so completely wrong? I need to read more (and from more sources) to be sure, but I already know that everything we are told about global warming is wrong, so why not health?

Perhaps what happens is that institutions (government agencies; NGOs; charities) start off with an issue, then grow and make that issue so central to their existence that they simply can’t admit they are wrong and end up fabricating, spinning and lying to cover up the holes in the evidence. For some reason, the media goes along with all this. Lazy journalists, presumably.

Hat tip: Counting Cats.

Update: Some papers from the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society that show that if you get fatter when you get older it’s probably a good thing: Association Between Body Mass Index and Mortality in an 80-Year-Old Population; Body Mass Index and Nine-Year Mortality in Disabled and Nondisabled Older U.S. Individuals; Weight, Mortality, Years of Healthy Life, and Active Life Expectancy in Older Adults; Body Mass Index Is Inversely Related to Mortality in Older People After Adjustment for Waist Circumference. (First link followed from another Junkfood Science article.)

Posted by Rob Fisher as Links at 7:35 PM EDT

1 Comment »

I am glad Boris won. He’s been accused of being a joke, and has said that he intends to take the job seriously. I am sure he will continue to be a bit of a buffoon. That’s a good thing. The last thing anyone needs is efficient politicians. The less Boris does the better.

Posted by Rob Fisher as News at 12:19 PM EDT

1 Comment »

Tonight I am going to spoil my ballot paper. London doesn’t need yet another layer of parasites. It has managed without a mayor before. I want my money back.

I can’t quite bring myself to vote for UKIP. I don’t like the EU, and the candidate makes libertarian noises, but I like immigration. I’m also in favour of freeing up planning and building more houses, and the UKIP man is against this.

I’ve read a good argument for simply not turning up, but low turnouts get interpreted as apathy. I’m not apathetic, I want to abolish the office of mayor. There’s no tickbox for that. Of course, I’m not sure how a lot of spoiled ballots would be interpreted. It would be quite funny if there were more of them than votes for the greens or that awful communist woman, though.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Authorised Theft, News at 5:46 AM EDT

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There are so many civil servants, these days. What do they spend all our tax money on? The new OGC logo offers some clues as to what 564 of them get up to.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Authorised Theft at 2:55 PM EDT

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One of the stories on Radio 1’s Newsbeat this morning was about a campaign to introduce concealed carry licenses on Virgina Tech campus. It’s also covered on the website story, although you have to scroll down a bit.

It goes without saying I agree with the campaigners that allowing weapons to be carried would make the campus safer.

What I find interesting is that the BBC is introducing to Radio 1 morning show listeners in their teens to 30s the novel (to them) idea that guns have a self defence role. I think this is new.

Posted by Rob Fisher as News, Self Defense at 5:19 PM EDT

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I won on the Grand National at 10:1. This is unprecedented. I never win anything.

I chose the horse because it was the second favourite but still had good odds. I also chose it because it is called “Comply or Die”, which is an excellent name that sums up the choice you have when dealing with governments.

I used a web bookie called Betfair. Their special feature is that they match up individuals to bet against each other, and just take a small commission. So instead of betting against a monolithic bookmaker, you’re betting on a free market.

You can see prices go up and down in real time. In the case of events like football and Formula one, the market stays open during the event, and as things develop you can see the prices change. So when Lewis Hamilton gets off to a slow start, his odds dramatically rise.

I’m not sure if the odds track the actual chance of certain outcome, but they certainly track the aggregate perception of the chance of an outcome. As such, Betfair markets probably have predictive qualities. I think the idea of using markets for predicting outcomes has been tried a couple of times, for example by the CIA to predict terrorist acts, or some such. Antoine Clarke has written about this, too.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Introspection at 6:42 PM EDT

6 Comments »

Further to the story about the Home Office banning an Israeli politician from visiting Britain, Jameel emailed me a story about criminals in Gaza blowing up a British war monument.

It’s unclear exactly who they are or what they did, but why blow up something like that unless you have an axe to grind with the British? Perhaps the Home Office should keep in mind who its friends are, and are not.

Posted by Rob Fisher as News at 6:28 PM EDT

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I’m reading The Constitution of Liberty by Hayek. In some ways he seems to be making a utilitarian argument for liberty, and I’m not keen on utilitarian arguments. However, it makes sense to understand why freedom from coercion, which I think of as an end in itself, leads to the wider benefits it does. He also does a good job of pointing out the various lesser things that people can mean when they talk about freedom, such as the freedom to do things. In fact I realise I should rename my blog category “civil liberties” to just “liberty”, (pluralised liberties are a different and lesser concept than Hayek’s liberty as freedom from coercion). If I did that it might affect permalinks, though.

Anyway, I’ve long been convinced that what is termed “inequality”, that some people are richer than others, is not a bad thing per se. The argument I’ve heard before comes from Norberg, who points out that if everyone gets twice as rich inequality doubles. Hayek makes a different kind of argument.

If today in the United States or Western Europe the relatively poor can have a car or a refrigerator, an airplane trip or a radio, at the cost of a reasonable part of their income, this was made possible because in the past others with larger incomes were able to spend on what was then a luxury. The path of advance is greatly eased by the fact that it has been trodden before. It is because scouts have found the goal that the road can be built for the less lucky or less energetic. What today may seem extravagance or even waste, because it is enjoyed by the few and even undreamed of by the masses, is payment for the experimentation with a style of living that will eventually become available to all.

This seems obvious especially if you think about consumer electronics. I have a high definition television, a Playstation 3 and a HD-DVD player. They were expensive, (and one of them will soon be obsolete because I have also helped pay for one of the necessary mistakes that all this experimentation leads to) but not as expensive as they were. They will get cheaper and more people will have them, just as they can now buy a DVD player from Asda for £20 while I bought one for £200 soon after they first became available.

Hayek goes further: “There is no way of making generally accessible new and still expensive ways of living except by their being initially practiced by some.”

Indeed, if manufacturers had to wait until *everyone* could afford a HDTV before selling them to anyone, they would never have been developed in the first place. The same applies to central heating and expensive medical treatments.

Hayek goes further still: “There can be little doubt that the prospect of the poorer, ‘undeveloped’ countries reaching the present level of the West is very much better that it would have been, had the West not pulled so far ahead.”

This link between inequality and progress means that if government tries to achieve equality through wealth redistribution, progress will slow because there will be no rich people to sell new and expensive things to. This is important because…

…most of the gains of the few do, in the course of time, become available to the rest. Indeed, all our hopes for the reduction of present misery and poverty rest on this expectation. If we abandoned progress, we should also have to abandon all those social improvements that we now hope for. All the desired advances in education and health, the realization of our wish that at least the large proportion of the people should reach the goals for which they are striving, depend on the continuance of progress. We only have to remember that to prevent progress at the top would soon prevent it all the way down, in order to see that this result is really the last thing we want.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Civil Liberties, Introspection, Reviews at 10:39 PM EDT

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