Lammy is cancelling jury trials for all but the most serious criminal cases. There is always a tweet, or, in Lammy's case, about eight... Jenrick has dug

Only cases of alleged murder, rape or manslaughter will be decided by a jury under new proposals to cut court backlogs.

The groundbreaking study found that suicidality dropped for transgender youth receiving hormone therapy by nearly 70%, with only 7 patients of 432 discontinuing treatment.

CJEU issued a judgment, stating that Member States have an obligation under EU law to recognise a same-sex marriage concluded in another Member State.

The American Society for Quality www.asq.org Page 1 of 5 Making the Case for Quality Ferrari’s Formula One Handovers and Handovers From Surgery to Intensive Care Great Ormond Street • Hospital for Children (GOSH) benchmarked its handoff from cardiac surgery to the intensive care unit against pit stop techniques of the Ferrari Formula One race car team. Process improvements • resulted in increased patient safety and decreased error rates. This case study is • excerpted from chapter 10 of Benchmarking for Hospitals: Achieving Best- in-Class Performance Without Having to Reinvent the Wheel, by Victor E. Sower, Jo Ann Duffy, and Gerald Kohers. At a Glance . . . Seldom does a hospital receive front page coverage in the Wall Street Journal, especially in an article about Ferrari racing crews, and seldom are a hospital’s physicians invited to speak to boards of directors of multi- million dollar corporations. Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children (GOSH), London, England, did both. Why? Because they had successfully benchmarked their handoff from cardiac surgery to the intensive care unit (ICU) against pitstop techniques of the famous Ferrari Formula One race car team. About the Hospital GOSH has long been recognized for its care of children from throughout the world. Founded in 1852 during a time of high infant mortality and malnutrition, GOSH was the first children’s hospital in the English-speaking world. According to Sir Cyril Chantler, Chairman of GOSH Board of Directors, “GOSH cannot be average.”1 This echoes the mission of the hospital: To improve the health of children by being a leading centre of excellence in Europe for special pediatric services and for research, evaluation, and education in the field of child health.2 The 335-bed hospital has 315 doctors, 900 registered nurses and healthcare assistants, and 135 allied healthcare professionals, representing the widest range of children specialists under one roof in the United Kingdom. GOSH is the largest pediatric epilepsy surgery center in the United Kingdom, the second largest in Europe, the largest unit treating children’s brain tumors (over 100 per year), and the largest pediatric intensive care unit in the United Kingdom (48 beds, plus eight high dependency beds and five transitional beds). The rating of excellent is the highest possible rating given by the independent Healthcare Commission. Only six trusts out of 157 in the United Kingdom received this rating with GOSH being one. The rat- ing is based on the level of care delivered to hospitalized children in five areas: access to child-specific service, access to care near their homes, appropriate levels of trained staff, staff having child-specific training, and opportunities for staff to maintain their skills. Why Focus On the Handover? External and internal drivers made GOSH aware of dangers in handover procedures. In the mid-1990s in Bristol, England, there was very high mortality for surgery in congenital heart disease followed by contentious public inquiry. One of the important findings of a subsequent study was that the journey from the operating room to the intensive care unit (ICU) was high risk. This external environment impetus to change was followed by an internal driver for change. Interest in human factors led staff physician, Professor Marc de Leval to question whether staff-related factors, such as exhaustion, were more important than patient-related factors, such as the position of the coronary arteries. De Leval reviewed all the arterial switch procedures done in the United Kingdom over a two-year period with by Victor E. Sower, Jo Ann Duffy, and Gerald Kohers August 2008 a psychologist watching the operation. Once again, the journey from the operating room to the ICU was demonstrated to be a high risk factor. This knowledge created a heightened awareness of the danger. Staff came to accept that there was an element of danger associated with what they were doing so they were recep- tive to change. Moving From the Operating Room To the ICU So many things can go wrong, and sometimes do, as the tiny vulnerable person is transferred from the surgery to intensive care. Moving the little body from one bed to another is only one part of the complex set of movements that must take place. Wires, equipment, people, and information move about in an intricate dance where a misstep can place the child in mor- tal danger. Within 15 minutes all the technology and support systems, including ventilation, two to four monitoring lines, mul- tiple vasodilators, and inotropes, are transferred two times: going from operating theatre system to portable equipment to intensive care systems. Intimate knowledge of the patient gained during a procedure lasting up to eight hours must be transmitted from the surgical team to the intensive care unit team. How Was the Benchmark Selected? In the GOSH case, there was no survey or directed search for a benchmark to guide changes in the changeover procedure. The proverbial light bulb went on as two tired doctors, Alan Goldman and Martin Elliott, sat down to relax after lengthy surgeries. Martin Elliott, MD, FRCS, Professor of Cardiothoracic Surgery, University College London, and Chairman of Cardiothoracic Services, recalls: “I’d done a transplant, then an arterial switch in the morning and we were both pretty knackered [exhausted]. The Formula One came on TV just as we were sitting down . . . at the end of surgery, and we just realized that the pit stop where they changed tyres and topped up the fuel was pretty well identical in concept to what we do in handover—so we phoned them up.” The two doctors recognized the importance of teamwork in transforming the highly risky pit stop operation into one that was both safe and quick. They wondered: “If they can do it, why can’t we?” In Formula One motor racing, the pit stop team completes the complex task of changing tires and fueling the car in about seven seconds. The doctors saw this as analogous to the team effort of surgeons, anesthetist, and ICU staff to transfer the patient, equip- ment, and information safely and quickly from the operating room to ICU. Initiating the Program The GOSH benchmarking effort was not driven from the top down nor can it be tied to an individual person or team. A number of individuals contributed to birthing this change initia- tive. Awareness of the need to look at human factors in cardiac surgery was initiated by de Leval. The idea that a pit stop was a good parallel to what happened in a handover can be attributed to Goldman and Elliott, while the development of a more formal protocol was led by human factors expert Ken Catchpole, MD, Senior PostDoctoral Scientist, Nuffield Department of Surgery, John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, UK. What served to unite them was a common interest in reducing error and improving quality. Benchmarking to improve handoffs also fit well with the mission of the hospital. Moreover, it was supported by both the culture of the department and organizational structure of the hospital. What Was Learned From Benchmarking? GOSH doctors visited and observed the pit crew handoff in Italy. While visiting the Formula One pit crew the GOSH doc- tors became interested in the way they addressed possible failure. The crew sat around a big table analyzing and reanalyzing, ask- ing, “What could go wrong?” and “What are we going to do if it does go wrong?” and “How important is it if it goes wrong?” Everyone’s ideas were given equal weight until the group ranked them using the failure modes and effect analysis (FMEA). This anticipatory planning made the pit crew more prepared than the medical team whose strategy tended to be waiting until something went wrong to work out what they should have done. Observing the pit crew, the GOSH doctors noted the value of process mapping, process description, and trying to work out what people’s tasks should be. They learned the keys to a suc- cessful pit stop: The routine in the pit stop is taken seriously•฀ What happens in the pit stop is predictable so problems can •฀ be anticipated and procedures can be standardized Crews practice those procedures until they can perform •฀ them perfectly Everyone knows their job, but one person is always in charge•฀ Following the trip to Italy, the GOSH team videotaped the handover in the surgery unit and sent it to be reviewed by the Formula One team. The GOSH research team and observers from the Formula One team analyzed the film and noted a great difference in the process map (flowchart). The handover process of the pit crew was a very short process map compared to the hospital’s process map. The process in the hospital was much, much longer because the level of complexity of the medical process was much greater. From the analysis came a new 12-page handover protocol (a short version, showing the four main stages of the new protocol, is shown in Figure 1). A copy of the protocol was laminated and put by the bedside. If a staff member had not received training in the new process or if someone needed a quick refresher, the posted protocol could be read through in five minutes, leading to understanding of what needed to be done. Other aspects of the Formula One training process noted by the GOSH researchers were the repetition of filming from differ- ent angles and the multiple rehearsals of the handover. These rehearsals ensured that each person knew their responsibilities down to the smallest details. The GOSH observers were struck The American Society for Quality www.asq.org Page 2 of 5 by not only how fast, but also how quiet and disciplined the pit crew was. Every crew member knew the role and responsibili- ties and kept out of the way of others as they fulfilled their roles. To help the medical team manage the same feat, a dance chore- ographer was involved to help the team position themselves to stay out of the way of others. They also learned to recognize the need for space around where they are standing. This meant that the movement around some of these events in handovers was modified. Working with the choreographer also introduced the discipline of quietness and calm. Professor Elliott noted that the handover team tended to talk a lot. After the new process was introduced the handover became one of the quietest activities in the hospital, especially during hand-off briefings. While the main theme changes were more sophisticated pro- cedures and better choreographed teamwork, another aspect of the Formula One handover process easily transferred to the hospital setting. The lollipop man is the one who waves the car in and coordinates the pit stop. He maintains overall situation awareness during the pit stop. In the old hospital handover there was no one like the lollipop man so it was unclear who was in charge. Under the new handover process, the anesthetist was given overall responsibility for coordinating the team until it was transferred to the intensivist at the termination of the handover. These same two individuals were charged with the responsibil- ity of periodically stepping back to look at the big picture and to make safety checks of the handover. Ferrari caused the hospital to view its own practice from a com- pletely different perspective. Ferrari didn’t tell them exactly what needed to be changed or how to make the change. The hospital, however, was able to take what Ferrari did well and adapt it to fit their situation. What Wasn’t Transferable? Some aspects of the Formula One handover were not transfer- able to the medical handover process. When the consultant from Formula One went to GOSH and looked at the whole handover process, he said it would be best to engineer out parts and get new equipment. He noted the complex technical problems with the handover. In the operating room, the child is connected to a lot of equipment and statically powered through an AC cord with wires. There is a ventilator, which is a special anesthetic ventilator, on the operating table, which is very stable. Moreover, there is equipment to control the baby’s temperature. So when the infant needs to be moved from the operating table, all this equipment must be disconnected and converted from AC to DC power. At that point there is no ventilator so the anesthetist must use a bag to blow the lungs up and down. The child is moved to a cold trolley, covered with a blanket, and wheeled down a cor- ridor. Upon reaching the intensive care unit, everything has to be once again dismantled and remantled and reconnected to other monitors and a ventilator. The Formula One consultant asked, “Why don’t you just have one thing that does both and has its own power supply and its own ventilator?” This was obviously what needed to be done, but it turned out not to be feasible since manufacturers were not interested in producing the needed equipment. They were not interested because the market is very small (only children) and hospitals would never be able to replace all its beds at the same time due to the exorbitant cost of the proposed new equipment. While the Formula One crew can count on using technology to improve their handover process, the hospital team could not; they had to rely more on human beings and less on state-of-the-art technology. The lack of resources as well as inherent differences in the nature of the handover meant that the transferability of multiple rehearsals and exhaustive contingency planning was not possible. Adequate time and money allowed motor car racing to have rehearsal after rehearsal after rehearsal. In healthcare those resources are scarce, so one of the things GOSH had to do was design a new process that was simple, easy to learn, and didn’t need a lot of practice. The reason the motor car racing team can do everything in such a short period of time is that The American Society for Quality www.asq.org Page 3 of 5 Figure 1 Summary of the new handover protocol.3 Phase 0: Pre-Handover The Patient Transfer Form is completed by the anesthetist and collected from theatres at least 30 minutes before the patient is transferred to the ICU. The receiving nurse ensures the bed space is set up according to the monitoring, ventilation, and other requirements specified on the Patient Transfer Form. The receiving doctor ensures that all appropriate paperwork is ready. Phase 1: Equipment and Technology Handover On arrival the team transfers the patient ventilation, monitoring and support from portable systems used during the transfer to the ICU systems. Consultant Anesthetist Pump Ventilator Anesthetic Registrar PumpDrain Urine Nurse Nurse ODA Monitor CCC Reg/ Nurse Surgeon Power SAFETY CHECK: The anesthetist checks the equipment and that the patient is appropriately ventilated and monitored and is stable. The receiving nurse and doctor are identified and confirm their readiness. Phase 2: Information Handover The anesthetist, then the surgeon, speak alone and uninterrupted, providing the relevant information about the case, using the Information Transfer Aid Memoir. SAFETY CHECK: The receiving nurse and doctor should use the Information Transfer Aid Memoir to check that all necessary information has been obtained, and ask appropriate questions. Phase 3: Discussion and Plan The surgeon, anesthetist, and receiving team discuss the case as a group. The receiving doctor manages the discussions, identifies anticipated problems, and anticipated recovery is discussed. The ICU Team now has responsibility for patient care and confirms the plans for the patient. The American Society for Quality www.asq.org Page 4 of 5 everything is very carefully choreographed and each person is very well rehearsed in performing the small number of tasks assigned. They complete their work very accurately in precisely 6.9 seconds. The GOSH handover takes somewhere between 8 and 15 minutes because they are dealing with a living person, not a piece of machinery. While the Formula One team could identify all of the contingencies and practice how to deal with them, this was not possible for the GOSH team. There are too many permutations of what could go wrong for the healthcare team to practice every contingency. Although it was true the GOSH team could emulate Formula One’s handover process in some aspects, they could not address all possible contingencies in their training program. The healthcare handover team had to be far more flexible than the motor car racing team because of the complexity of the surgical handoff. Benchmarking against the Formula One team pushed the hospital to anticipate problems rather than wait until something goes wrong to deal with it. The GOSH researchers tried to build into the process the importance of anticipating and being prepared to respond . . . even if they didn’t know quite what would happen, even if they couldn’t rehearse every little detail. Gauging the Gains A number of broad categories were measured. Technical errors were monitored and scored. Information omissions were moni- tored and scored, as was the duration of the handover. Team performance, leadership and teamwork, task management work space and equipment, and situational awareness were all observed and analyzed by psychologists. It is clear that gains have been achieved; for example, error rates have continued to go down. In order to see whether improvements are being sus- tained there are plans to repeat the study. The real gain for patients was safety. Results showed that the new handover procedure had broken the link between technical and informational errors. Before the new protocol was introduced, patients who had experienced less than perfect equipment had a higher rate of information omissions in the briefing. With the new protocol, just because someone made a mistake with the equipment didn’t make it any more likely that somebody was going to forget to relay an important piece of information to the ICU team. Before the new handover protocol, approximately 30 percent of the patient errors occurred in both equipment and information; after- ward, only 10 percent of the patient errors occurred in both areas. Even though it was not perfect, the hospital did improve. Separating the time when the equipment was changed and the information was exchanged into different stages in the protocol severed the link between errors in equipment handling and briefings. Dr. Catchpole found the hospital’s reaction to the success of the benchmarking effort interesting. People did not react to the improvement in handover by saying, “This is great, we don’t need to do anything more.” What they did say was, “This is great, but we can do even better.” Future Challenges The real problem facing the GOSH cardiac unit in the future is keeping the new handover process in place. The European Working Time Directive and normal staff turnover means new members are added to the team over time. Some of them are inexperienced and need training. Even the more experienced ones who come to GOSH from other hospitals need retraining because handoffs are done differently in the cardiac unit at GOSH. Training is always time consuming and therein lies the challenge. Another type of challenge is replicating the handover in other areas of the hospital. There are more hand-offs now because of changing working hours, changing staff rotation systems, and less-experienced junior staff due to shorter working hours. According to Professor Elliott, there is an ongoing challenge to “review our practice and see if we can do it any better and institute new handoff procedures whenever we need them. . . . We will continue to monitor error. Our aim is to have error at zero, or as close to zero as possible in every area we are capable of measuring it.” He continued, “You know how close we are already? Miles away. You never get to zero, but just having it as an aspiration keeps it immersed in the culture.” References 1. Annual Report 2005/2006, Chairman’s Foreword, www.gosh. nhs.uk 2. www.ich.ucl.ac.uk/patients_fam/ppweb/didyouknow/index. 3. Catchpole, K., M. De Leval, A. McEwan, N. J. Pigott, M. J. Elliott, A. McQuillan, C. MacDonald, and A. J. Goldman. 2007. Patient Handover from Surgery to Intensive Care: Using Formula 1 Pit-Stop and Aviation Models to Improve Safety and Quality. Pediatric Anesthesia, 17(5), 470–478. For More Information This case study is excerpted from chapter 10 of •฀ Benchmarking for Hospitals: Achieving Best-in-Class Performance Without Having to Reinvent the Wheel, by Victor E. Sower, Jo Ann Duffy, and Gerald Kohers. Included in the book are additional details on organizational •฀ support, obstacles faced, and results at GOSH, plus four more benchmarking case studies. The excerpted version offered here is provided for readers of •฀ ASQ’s Healthcare Update. To subscribe, visit www.asq.org/healthcare/update_info.html. •฀ About the Authors Victor E. Sower (Ph.D., University of North Texas) is professor of operations management at Sam Houston State University. He The American Society for Quality www.asq.org Page 5 of 5 is a Senior member of ASQ, a Certified Quality Engineer (CQE), member of the Quality Management and Healthcare divisions of ASQ, and member of the Health Care Management Division of the Academy of Management. He previously co-authored two books and has published articles in journals such as Quality Management Journal, Health Care Management Review, Benchmarking for Quality Management & Technology, and Quality Progress. He recently co-edited a special edition on benchmarking in services for Benchmarking: An International Journal. Jo Ann Duffy (Ph.D., The University of Texas at Austin) is professor of management and director of the Gibson D. Lewis Center for Business and Economic Development at Sam Houston State University. She is editor of the Journal of Business Strategies and past president of the Southwest Academy of Management. She has published articles on patient satisfaction, service quality, and productivity in Health Care Management Review, Benchmarking: An International Journal, Journal of Operations Management, Journal of Service Marketing, Journal of Aging Studies, and Journal of Gerontological Social Work. Gerald Kohers (Ph.D., Virginia Tech) is professor of informa- tion systems at Sam Houston State University, where he has been a faculty member since 1994. He has consulted with numerous hospitals in quality assessment and improvement efforts and con- tributes in publishing the quarterly Hospital Quality Newsletter. Kohers has also assisted in conducting quality control workshops. In addition to having more than 60 refereed proceedings/presen- tations at regional and national academic conferences, he has published numerous peer-reviewed articles in diverse areas such as corporate finance and investments to healthcare, including one in Health Care Management Review.

1. Britain is one of the world's richest countries. So why do a third of its children live in poverty?(tags:uk poverty children )2. Brexit costing the UK up to £90bn in lost tax a year, new analysis shows (People are around £3k per year worse off)(tags:uk europe OhForFucksSake )3. Footage of Japan's new train zooming down the track at 310mph leaves spectators speechless(tags:trains magnets Japan video )4. Four pivotal ages in your brain's development revealed in new scientific study (0-9, 9-32, 32-66, 66-83, 83+)(tags:development brain age ) comments

Brain scans on thousands of people reveal the dramatic shifts the brain goes through between birth and death.

Footage has captured the moment Japan's new train on a maglev rail system flew past gathered reporters and onlookers, at a speed of over 300mph

Exclusive: Britons also up to £3,700 worse off, leading to calls for the Labour government to improve relations with the EU

Child poverty has reached a record high in the United Kingdom as the country’s cost of living soars and its social security safety net falters following years of government austerity.

1. Russia Today and the Fremen Mirage(tags:politics society war history Russia Ukraine )2. Thorium-uranium Conversion Makes Breakthrough(tags:thorium nuclearpower China )3. Dance teacher Melissa Revell wins payout after yoga course triggers emotional breakdown(tags:mentalhealth yoga )4. Valve Issues Black Ops 7 Refund Over Undisclosed AI Materials(tags:ai games fraud valve )5. Top MAGA Influencers Accidentally Unmasked as Foreign Actors(tags:twitter usa politics fraud )6. The voice of the New York subway is now transgender(tags:LGBT transgender voice newyork video )7. How top level mathematicians are using AI(tags:AI mathematics )8. Disney loses the rights to Roger Rabbit characters, as they revert to original author of novel(tags:Disney intellectual_property )9. Leftist and Moderate Democrats Are Trying to Be More Alike(tags:democrats usa politics economics )10. College Students Furious When Their Course Is Taught by AI Instead of a Professor(tags:university ai OhForFucksSake ) comments

Students at the University of Staffordshire have spent the past two years learning to code from AI-generated course material.

Members of the left and the center seem to have concluded that, to win elections, each side needs to become more like the other.

Over at the Erdos problem website, AI assistance is now becoming routine. Here is what happened recently regarding Erdos problem #367 https://www.erdosproblems.com/367 : 1. On Nov 20, Wouter van Doorn produced a (human-generated) disproof of the second part of this problem, contingent on a congruence identity that he thought was true, and was "sure someoneone here is able to verify... does indeed hold". 2. A few hours later, I posed this problem to Gemini Deepthink, which (after about ten minutes) produced a complete proof of the identity (and confirmed the entire argument): https://gemini.google.com/share/81a65aecfd70 . The argument used some p-adic algebraic number theory which was overkill for this problem. I then spent about half an hour converting the proof by hand into a more elementary proof, which I presented on the site. I then remarked that the resulting proof should be within range of "vibe formalizing" in Lean. 3. Two days later, Boris Alexeev used the Aristotle tool from Harmonic to complete the Lean formalization, making sure to formalize the final statement by hand to guard against AI exploits. This process took two to three hours, and the output can be found at https://borisalexeev.com/t/Erdos367.lean EDIT: after making this post, I decided to round things out by making AI literature searches on this problem, which (after about fifteen minutes) turned up some related literature on consecutive powerful numbers, but nothing directly relating to #367. https://chatgpt.com/share/6921427d-9dc0-800e-b798-be8fc94a9240 https://gemini.google.com/share/0d296454bea0

💬 37  🔁 10034  ❤️ 14620

A new feature on Elon Musk’s X has given deeper insight into the online “America First” movement.

Players are unhappy about the use of IA assets.

Melissa Revell was ‘retraumatised’ and now cannot look after herself or exercise

In early November, the experimental operation of a 2-megawatt liquid-fuel thorium-based molten salt reactor (TMSR), led by the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), achieved the world's first thorium-uranium nuclear fuel conversion in Wuwei, Gansu province.

It’s a truism of pop history that wealthy “civilised” states are always at a disadvantage, when fighting against poorer but tougher adversaries, whether those enemies are steppe horsemen, desert tribes, guerillas, or religious fanatics. In more modern times, the weakness of democratic nations (attempting as they do, to adhere to the Law of Armed Conflict, and being wary of heavy casualties), is contrasted the strength of dictatorships (who don’t need to worry about such things). There is a belief that people who live in harsh conditions, which is usually the case in autocratic states, are somehow tougher, morally purer, more willing to endure hardship, than the supposedly effete, weak, and over-educated peoples who live in wealthier countries. This is a very ancient idea, and likely originates with Herodotus. In his eyes, the Persians rose to power, as a tough, martial, people whose nobles were taught to “ride a horse, bend a bow, and tell the truth.” By the time of Xerxes’ invasion of Greece, however, the Persians had become softened by luxury, which the founder of Persian imperial power, Cyrus, had warned them against. When one of his generals suggests conquering lands other than Media, he replies: Go ahead and do this, but if you do so, be prepared no longer to be rulers but rather subjects. Soft lands breed soft men; wondrous fruits of the earth and valiant warriors do not grow from the same soil. By contrast, the Spartans, tough, unpolluted by luxury, virtuous, lead the Greek resistance, which eventually prevails. They are a true master race, a tiny minority who train only for war, whilst holding down a vastly more numerous population, as slaves. They subject their boys to a ferociously brutal training regime, as well as compulsory buggery by older warriors, and throw deformed babies into a ravine. Theirs is a badass system, which produces badasses. Tacitus writes similarly, in his Germania and Agricola. The Rome of his time was not a democracy, but nevertheless, in his eyes, it was decadent, its elites prone to every manner of vice. The Germans, by contrast, were tough, virtuous, brave men, who drowned homosexuals in bogs, and lived simple, manly, lives, very much like the idealised soldier-farmers of the early Roman Republic. In his biography of his father in law, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, he makes the point that the Britons were corrupted, and rendered subservient, by being introduced to wine, baths, and the pleasures of civilisation. Any number of subsequent writers have attributed the fall of the Roman Empire to its growing decadence and effeminacy, exemplified by emperors such as Nero and Elagalabus, both of whom married their boyfriends, and in the case of the latter, preferred to be treated as a woman than as a man. Frank Herbert in the novel Dune, makes great use of this trope. The Emperor’s elite soldiers, the Sardaukar, are trained and winnowed out, in a harsh prison planet. That makes them into almost unbeatable soldiers, but after centuries of victory, they are starting to go soft. The Fremen, the people of the Arrakis desert, are by contrast, completely uncorrupted by civilisation, and all that they require is to be manipulated, and organised into an army, by the Atreides family. Once they accept Paul as both a god, and a military leader, they become an unbeatable army, despite their small numbers, eventually killing sixty one billion people, across the universe. The original novel ends with Paul triumphant as the new emperor, the Fremen jihad about to be launched, but at the same time concerned, that if Arrakis becomes a paradise, the Fremen in turn will grow soft. On close examination, Fremen society is far too violent to survive (duelling to the death is endemic among them). Their tiny numbers would make universal planetary conquest impossible, and there is no society where every man is a warrior (and the women and children are almost as good as the men as warriors), as this would cause economic collapse. In practice, the Fremen warriors, like the Spartans, would have to be supported by an immense servile population, which would ultimately revolt, as Sparta’s slaves did. This is supported by real history. Despite its defeat in Greece, Persia remained a superpower, ruling over huge numbers of Greeks in its domains, and defeating a subsequent Athenian invasion of Egypt. Seventy years after Herodotus wrote, Sparta suffered crushing military defeat, the loss of most of their slaves, and they would decline to the status of a tourist attraction for rich Romans. Rome remained a superpower for centuries after Tacitus. Professor Bret Devereaux calls these beliefs “The Fremen Mirage”, a popular view of history, summed up by the aphorism, “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times”, which actually has very little grounding in reality. https://acoup.blog/category/collections/the-fremen-mirage/ but which continues to endure. “Civilised” democracies are in fact, quite capable of crushing expansionist dictatorships on the battlefield, something demonstrated by the outcomes of World War II, the Yugoslav civil war, and both Gulf Wars. However, the persistence of the Fremen Mirage colours perceptions of the conflict in Ukraine. Ukraine is an imperfect democracy, supported by other democracies, facing an invasion from a dictatorship. Russian soldiers are generally far readier to commit war crimes, and to wilfully target civilians, than are their Ukrainian counterparts, and quite plainly, Russian leaders are willing to sacrifice men and munitions at a rate that would almost certainly lead to the downfall of any government in a rich world democracy, which did the same. In the eyes of men like Donald Trump, JD Vance, Douglas McKinnon, this all proves that a final Russian victory is inevitable, and Ukraine should settle for whatever terms it can get, while terms are still being offered. This is nonsense on stilts. The Special Military Operation has now been ongoing for almost four years. Russia has suffered in excess of one million casualties. They control less of Ukraine now than they did in the Summer of 2022. They have advanced about twenty miles into the Donbas over that period, capturing a number of mid-sized towns that have been reduced to rubble, at horrendous cost. Russia has sacrificed thousands of tanks, guns, armoured vehicles, hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign exchange reserves, and is seeing its oil industry (its main source of revenue), being steadily destroyed by Ukrainian missiles. By way of comparison, at a similar point after the start of Operation Barbarossa, the Red Army was crossing the River Oder. A willingness to commit war crimes does not denote an army that is more effective, but rather, an army that lacks discipline. It is horrible for Ukrainian civilians to have to endure random attacks, from Russian missiles, drones, and glide bombs, and to face casual murder and rape, but such behaviour does not in any way assist Russia to win this war. It would make more sense, in addition to being more ethical, if Russia were to focus its attacks on military targets, rather than practising deliberate terror. Nor does the willingness of Russia’s government to endure heavy losses prove military superiority in any way. Russia is a county that faces an acute demographic crisis, and throwing away the lives of hundreds of thousands of young men (and inducing many more to flee the country), in support of a needless war of choice, is evidence only of extreme stupidity and cruelty. The war has reached a crisis point, with a United States government which plainly feels it has more in common with the world’s autocracies, than with its democratic former allies. Hanging tough, and giving Ukraine the support it needs to continue fighting, is a necessity on the part of this country, Canada, and our European allies. As Kissinger put it, “In crises, the most daring course is often safest.” Sean F