Power Line U Is Back, with ‘A Plague of Models’—Banned by Amazon!

I’m pleased to announce a new short course for “Power Line University,” featuring my old writing partner Ken Green, with a webinar here this Wednesday at 4 pm Pacific time, focused on his brand new book, A Plague of Models: How Computer Modeling Corrupted Environmental, Health and Safety Regulations. The book has been banned by Amazon, so you know it must be hot!

As everyone who followed the COVID story knows, much of the initial panic was based on computer models that claimed millions would die if we didn’t lock down, mask up, and cripple our economies. But this is only the latest in a large number of examples of what ought to be called “policy-based evidence making,” at the very least. There are lots other examples of bad modeling that produce perverse policies (climate change, anyone?)

So this Wednesday at 4 pm Pacific, join me and Ken (at this Zoom link) as he gives an overview of the book, and sets the stage for some follow up seminars in future weeks that will delve further into particular issues, including COVID and climate change. For now, here’s a short excerpt from the introduction:

I hope, that after the nightmare years of 2020-2022, many people will find the thesis of this book conforms to their own personal experiences, of having their lives, livelihood, health, and home lives whipsawed half to death based on speculative computer models taken by policymakers as the veritable Word of God. Or, in modern parlance, The Science!

As the title suggests, this book is about a plague that has infected and corrupted the world’s largest, most prosperous, most technologically advanced, most liberal democracies, leading to a massive expansion (and I would say corruption) of the regulatory state, especially in areas of environment, health, and safety (EHS).

The plague of models is not a biological plague, though it certainly involves biological plagues. It is not viral, bacterial, fungal, protozoal, parasitic, nor prionic. It is not COVID-19, and it wasn’t Polio, or Tuberculosis, Ebola, Herpes, Mononucleosis, E. coli, or Salmonella, Measles, Mad Cow Disease (BSE), or any of those very real, very observable, and often life-threatening diseases. Though, as we will explore, the plague of models has indeed infected and tainted the public policies intended to manage these problems.

Nor is the plague of models a plague of space aliens, illegal aliens, Critical Race Theory, high-fashion models, low-fashion models, or horribly bad direct-to-streaming movies, though, the latter category is somewhat related.

No, this is a plague that strikes fear in the hearts of men, inducing panic: literally! A plague of abstract, computerized models has corrupted how we, as humans, distinguish large threats from small threats; distinguish true threats from false threats; differentiate acute threats from chronic threats, perceive imminent threats versus distal threats, and so on. This is a plague that leads people to confuse actual, tangible, measurable, empirical reality with imaginary computer constructs.

The plague of models drives policymakers and the voting public to bounce from one proclaimed threat to another, like a frenetically bouncing pachinko ball in an infinitely tall pachinko-machine from hell, issuing a clanging, jingling, bell ringing audiovisual fountain of regulations that have tied Western societies into giant red-tape sticky-balls of nearly omnipresent regulations. . .

This is the world we now inhabit, a world of endless fears driven by utterly opaque abstract, computerized threat-models that an ever more authoritarian “science” invokes to tell us what we must do. Usually that’s to take some urgent action we’d rather not take, with everything we have, all at once, to forestall a predicted Armageddon. If we don’t do this, or stop doing that, or fail to do this other thing, at this precise rate in this precise place, in this exact way, well, we’re all going to sicken/die/lose things we love/be judged badly by our gods, ancestors, descendants, posterity or our nosy neighbor. Houston! We have a Crisis! And 2020/21, dear readers, could have been reasonably named the Year of the Crises.

So, what fears has the plague of models brought us? ‘The list of fears is very long, but in broad categories, we’re now afraid of:

• chemicals in the air we breathe;

• chemicals in the water we drink and the food we eat; chemicals in the soil, the oceans, the clouds (yes, the clouds); too much sunlight; too little sunlight;

• the wrong kind of light (radiation);

• running out of stuff; drowning in wasted stuff; killing off animal species;

• being overrun by animal species; causing mutations to animal species;

• Not finding animals where they’ve historically lived;

• Having animals fetching up in places they have NOT historically lived; and, of course…

• diseases of a zillion sorts, with viruses top-of-mind at present.

Another sample from the book itself, to help get you acquainted with the style of the author, which I assure you will find entertaining as well as informative.

Sorry to disappoint you! But I assure you the webinar won’t, so please join us.