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I had never heard of Noam Dworman before today. Apparently he is the owner of a comedy venue in New York and he does podcasts. I had vaguely heard of the Washington Post columnist Philip Bump, and I had certainly heard of the Washington Post. Woodward. Bernstein. Watergate. Like thousands of others, after seeing ‘All the President’s Men’, I dreamed of being an investigative reporter.
The WaPo is not what it was, judging from Bump’s performance on this edition of Dworman’s podcast. When Dworman called it “Live From The Table: Philip Bump Battles Hard on Hunter Biden” he was too charitable. The main thing Bump battles to do is not acknowledge the steaming great news story in front of his nose and to extricate himself before someone asks a reporter at the Washington Post to investigate the President.
I often think it is a valuable exercise to type out extracts from videos so that what is in them has a better chance to reach the quite large number of people who don’t watch videos. So I tried to transcribe what was said in the last few minutes of this podcast, starting at 1:10:25. There were several places where Bump and Dworman talked over each other, so forgive me if I didn’t get every word. All the bold type was added by me.
NOAM DWORMAN: What do you take from the text message to his adult daughter where Hunter says, “I have to give 50% of my income to Pop”?
PHILIP BUMP: I have no idea what that means. I don’t. I have no idea what that means.
I would have thought it was clear enough.
NOAM DWORMAN: Well, it’s, it’s –
PHILIP BUMP: I know it’s circumstantial evidence and you’d prefer that…
NOAM DWORMAN: What – what could it be?
PHILIP BUMP: I have no idea.
NOAM DWORMAN: Well does it – ?
PHILIP BUMP: I appreciate your asking-
I could not hear whether Bump then says that he appreciates Dworman asking the question or that he appreciates Dworman asking him to be on his podcast, but judging from his repetition of the line later, it was probably him trying to end the session.
NOAM DWORMAN: Has anybody asked her?
PHILIP BUMP: I don’t know. I don’t know.
NOAM DWORMAN: Don’t you think that somebody should ask her?
PHILIP BUMP: “OK, like I’m – I just said I don’t know what to make of it, so I have nothing to say. What do you want me to say?
NOAM DWORMAN: Yeah, but you say, ‘There’s no evidence, no evidence’ but then there’s a text message where he says, ‘I give Pop 50% of my money. That’s – that’s evidence.
PHILIP BUMP: Okay, well, what, fine, fine. It’s evidence.
For a very brief moment I thought that Mr Bump was about to say that the Washington Post would fearlessly grab the story and not let go.
NOAM DWORMAN: So…
PHILIP BUMP:. I appreciate you having me on.
NOAM DWORMAN: It doesn’t…? That something like that…?
PHILIP BUMP: I feel you want me to leave, like just walk out in the middle of this so you can…
NOAM DWORMAN: You can go, but is this the standard, really, is this the way, that the Washington Post handles people who disagree with them?
PHILIP BUMP: When I agreed to be on for 45 minutes and then I get on for an hour and fifteen, then, yeah, after a while I go. Thanks for having me on. [He leaves.]
When Mr Bump was a little boy, did he watch All The President’s Men like I did? Did he dream that one day he would be a journalist at the very same newspaper as Woodward and Bernstein, and that he too would have evidence of Presidential malfeasance put before him, and that he would see it for what it was, and that he would…
…complain that he’d been sitting in the same seat for half an hour more than he was booked for and say, “Yeah, after a while I go.”
Katie Morley is the Telegraph’s “Consumer Champion”. People who feel they have been mistreated by companies write to her and she puts their tales of woe in the paper and threatens the company with even more bad publicity if they won’t put things right. Her articles usually end with a line about how So-and-so company has issued a full refund and apologised.
Usually, but not always. Her most recent piece was this one:
Back in early 2022, I had a serious health scare. While waiting for an operation, I decided that I needed something to look forward to. Both my wife and I love to travel and so, on the spur of the moment, I decided to use our savings to book a £27,000 cruise around the world.
I put a £1,500 deposit on a Cunard World Cruise in 2024 on the Queen Victoria. I thought a trip like this would compensate for everything we missed during the pandemic.
In the meantime, friends asked us to join them on a Christmas cruise in 2022, also on the Queen Victoria. We thought this would give us the opportunity to acquaint ourselves with the ship. However, the whole trip was a disaster from the moment we embarked.
After listing some of the things wrong with this ‘preparatory’ trip on the Queen Victoria, the writer finishes by saying,
We then realised that we could not spend three months aboard the Queen Victoria. Also, as a result of the economic downturn, our savings had reduced drastically and we no longer had the money to pay for the cruise. We are both retired NHS workers and live on our pensions so we decided that we would have to cancel.
As soon as we got back from the cruise in January 2023, we contacted ROL, which we had booked through, saying we wanted to cancel. We were shocked and disappointed when Cunard said that we could cancel without losing our £1,500 deposit, but we would have to book a future cruise for the equivalent amount of money (£27,000), or alternatively, a number of cruises adding up to this total.
Ms Morley did express sympathy for the writer’s health and financial troubles, but her sympathy did not extend to taking up the cudgels on his behalf. She wrote,
…you say you can no longer afford this cruise, yet when I asked, you said you and your wife’s NHS pensions were guaranteed defined benefit arrangements which are still in place. So what had changed since you booked the £27,000 cruise, I asked? You told me you’d invested a significant sum in Vodafone shares, which had tanked, causing you to lose half your money.
I’m sorry if this sounds harsh, but your stock market misfortunes have absolutely nothing to do with Cunard and, as such, I was not prepared to ask it to break its terms and conditions because you had a disastrous flutter and can no longer afford the cruise you booked. If you really can’t go on the world cruise or book alternatives, then I’m afraid you’ll just have to swallow this £1,500 loss and put it down to experience.
What really interested me was the response from the Telegraph readers. I expected them to support Cunard, and they did, but I had not expected so many of them to specifically resent the way that the writer had attempted to garner sympathy by mentioning that he and his wife were retired NHS workers.
The most recommended comment was by Roger Sidney and said, “Love the bit about ‘we are retired NHS workers’. Come one everyone, give ’em a clap!” Someone called Mytwo Penneth said, “Former NHS workers booking £27k cruises and speculating on shares. Then they have the brass neck to get KM involved in an attempt to recover a deposit.” Brian Gedalla said, “Nice to see some backbone from Katie. You could have played “Entitlement Bingo” with this one. Like Roger below, I laughed out loud when I got to the “we are retired NHS workers” line.” There were many other similar comments.
Although I have long since ceased to believe that a command economy is a good way to arrange a nation’s healthcare, my own experiences with the National Health Service have been good. Those people I know who work for it are hardworking, and I did clap during the pandemic, and meant it. My view that it would be desirable to privatise the NHS is only shared by about 2% of British people. Even among Telegraph readers, the great majority still support the NHS model. I do not think that the anger in these replies was motivated by hostility to the NHS per se. But something has changed in Britain when so many refuse NHS workers the automatic deference that this pair clearly expected to receive.
“Horses sweat, men perspire, ladies glow.” To the Guardian’s Steven Morris, responding to a government consultation is another of those famous irregular verbs that changes its form according to who does it.
“Powerful UK gun lobby” my breech. It has lost every legislative battle in my lifetime.
…has been accused of mobilising tens of thousands of shooting enthusiasts to “skew” a government consultation on tightening firearms laws launched after the Plymouth mass killings in 2021.
The British Association for Shooting and Conservation (BASC) and the Countryside Alliance have made it easy for members and supporters to access the consultation from its websites – and advised them on how to reply to each of the 20 yes/no questions posed.
Making it easy for members of the public to respond to a Green Paper or other public consultation exercise is usually just the sort of thing the Guardian supports. The whole point of such things is that anyone with an interest in the subject is encouraged to give their view, and all advocacy groups consider it a core part of their function to tell their members that such consultations are taking place and to advise them what to say. Would anyone really prefer that a democratic country went ahead with a proposed new law without seeking input from all viewpoints?
The answer to that is yes, some would prefer exactly that. Among them is Peter Squires, a professor of criminology and public policy at the University of Brighton. He says,
“Virtually every independent-minded expert agrees on what needs to be done and then the Home Office conducts one of these farcical consultations and allows the self-interested single-issue shooting lobby to school its members through the process of rejecting the proposals.”
The consultation could turn out to be farcical in one of several ways. But if you want to give it a go, here is the link again. The deadline is tomorrow, 23rd August 2023.
We are told climate change is a crisis, and that there is an “overwhelming scientific consensus.”
“It’s a manufactured consensus,” says climate scientist Judith Curry in my new video. She says scientists have an incentive to exaggerate risk to pursue “fame and fortune.”
She knows about that because she once spread alarm about climate change.
The good folk at The Cobden Centre have put together a very good documentary to explain how the fiat money system works, and has some suggestions as to what to do about it. At the instigation of the Sage of Kettering, (full disclosure, his cousin made it), here it is.
I have watched it and it is very good. Ex Nihilo: The Truth about Money. My only quibble is that it repeatedly refers to banks creating money out of thin air, but there is some substance to ‘thin air’, which, after all, can sustain respiration and hold up aircraft.
I haven’t trusted a word the BBC says about much for several decades, but I do remember a time when at least weather reports could be taken at face value.
Now I don’t even know if they are lying about that. Turns out many of the breathless inferno weather reports from southern Europe were being drastically overstated, sometimes by as much as 10 degrees!
Make no mistake, the “nudge unit” is at work, spreading its statist bullshit far and wide.
Either the Independent‘s “Race Correspondent” (who, to add to the comedy, is called Nadine White) has written a report almost designed to be misunderstood, or she is a satirist of genius. I present to you this story:
Juicy! Which one of ’em was it? Will Meghan’s Spotify podcast be coming back so she can discuss it? Sorry to disappoint, but the connection to the current royal family is strong as a cobweb: it seems a catalogue of gems and jewels owned by the Royal Collection “contained more than 40 mentions of offensive racial terms”. The aberrant public catalogue concerning a sub-collection of jewels, cameos, and other small items was actually published fifteen years ago in 2008 but remained on the Royal Collection’s website until the intrepid offence archaeologists of the Independent found it last Thursday. Since the cataloguing and study of the whole collection by historians is an ongoing process, those particular entries could have been written decades earlier. Here is the current webpage. Fear not, it has been purged.
And about that “offensive racial term” in the 2008 version… it wasn’t the n-word the Independent wants you to think it was.
In the latest instance, the offensive terms are mostly used to describe people of African ancestry who appear on the jewels. The words are also included in a number of names of items in the collection.
One brooch is described in the following terms: “Head of a n**** in three-quarter profile to the right, with drop-pearl earring. This type of a n****’s head is found on several sixteenth-century cameos.”
Another item depicting a white person is accompanied by this description and slur: “Athough it uses the dark layers of the stone for the profile, the features are not n*****d’.
Count the asterisks. Four, not five. Ergo it was egro, or in the final example, egroid.
UPDATE 16:20 BST: Someone at the Independent read the readers’ comments. The newspaper has now changed n**** to n***o throughout the article.
…and Piers Morgan is someone who literally his entire career is now fuelled by this sort of nonsense. And as you know I have been on Good Morning Britain four times now. I have always found it to be a deeply unpleasant experience even when I’ve “won”. Because the way it happens – and most people won’t know this – but when you are backstage they keep you separate from the guests that you are supposed to be debating. They try and psych you up. They try and say “You should feel free to interrupt as much as possible” and the one time I was on with Peter Tatchell who for all his flaws I deeply respect and I didn’t want to be a dick and interrupt him all the time they actually basically had a go at me afterwards and that clip was never even put on the internet because it was not seen as being inflammatory enough. So the whole purpose of these shows is to create conflicts and create soundbites and create all this nonsense and Piers Morgan is like a parasite feeding off the carcass of civil discourse.
– about 14 mins from the beginning of a Triggernometry “RAW” live stream from c. March 2021. Piers Morgan, of course, left GMB in a row over Meghan Markle. Earlier this year he appeared on Kissin and Francis Foster’s Triggernometry podcast.
Generally, the story of a lucrative trade established centuries ago is one of brutal colonisation of the unlucky occupants of a suddenly valuable land – and a rising tide of misery thereafter. Our greater consciousness of this fact makes a visit to such a land by a posh, white lady born in India under the Raj inherently, unavoidably tricky.
Evil Joanna Lumley, arranging to be born in India in 1946.
The revelation that the adjective was the European’s secret weapon all along comes as part of a description of a scene in which Joanna Lumley eats nutmeg and says how much she likes it.
Lumley recommends grating it over your green beans with lots of butter. But first she eats a fresh one. “Honestly, it’s divine.” This is what things are when they aren’t “sensational”, “stunning”, “extraordinary”, “ravishing” or – in the case of the bum-cleaning bucket-and-hose set up on the ferry from Ambon – “enchanting”. Empires were built on exploitation – and adjectives.
I cannot help feeling that this statement from Lucy Mangan is problematic itself. If the English, or in the case of the Banda Islands, Dutch, adjective played a significant part in the subjugation of nations, surely that implies that the native adjectives that failed to stand up to the invaders were less puissant, less krachtig? I am not a believer in the popular theory that language determines thought, but since Lucy Mangan seems to be, someone ought to let her know that the theory implies that some languages are just better than others. Or did Mangan mean that Lumley ought to have been using Banda Malay adjectives rather than oppressive English ones? Wait, wouldn’t that be cultural appropriation? It’s so hard to keep up. Maybe she meant that Joanna Lumley’s sin was to use adjectives at all. Only a Raj-born 1946-ite such as Lumley wastes the people’s oxygen with words like “divine”, “sensational”, “stunning”, “extraordinary”, “ravishing” and “enchanted” when “doubleplusgood” is available, to continue the 1984 theme from yesterday’s post on “doublethink”.
Perhaps I err in trying to ascribe meaning to that sentence at all. How bourgeois to think that an anti-colonialist review of a TV travel show published in the Guardian has to withstand analysis. There was an excellent Newspeak word for phrases like “Empires were built on exploitation – and adjectives”, “duckspeak”, meaning speech that issued from the larynx without involving the higher brain centres at all, like the quacking of a duck. Note that so long as the speech was orthodox, to call someone a doubleplusgood duckspeaker was a term of praise.
Tara Reade, the woman who accused Joe Biden of having sexually assaulted her when she worked for him as a Congressional aide, has “defected” to Russia.
I first noticed her direction of travel when I saw a tweet by her in praise of Vladlen Tatarsky. Plenty of people had concerns about his killing without gushing over him in the way she did. I cannot find that tweet now. It was there. Perhaps she deleted it when she read the replies. At any rate, she has now gone fully Putinite.
And her accusation against Joe Biden should still be taken seriously by the authorities. Note that “taken seriously” does not mean “automatically believed”. #BelieveWomen is a literally prejudiced sentiment on a moral par with #BelieveWhitePeople. Nor does it mean “automatically disbelieved”. As a woman and a Putinite, Tara Reade’s report of a crime being committed against her should be taken seriously, because as an anything whatsoever anyone whatsoever should have their report of a crime taken seriously.
The gross disproportion between the way the media lined up not merely to cover but to profess their unquestioning belief in Christine Blasey Ford’s unevidenced accusation of sexual assault against Justice Brett Kavanaugh yet refused to even look at Reade’s considerably more detailed accusation of sexual assault against Joe Biden will never be anything other than a disgrace.
The “gatekeepers of the news” have become stenographers of virtually every dubious or false public health narrative. Nobody (who really matters in the Big Picture) is challenging the never-ending lies, manipulated data and false narratives.
If this lack of skepticism persists, it seems almost a certainty that all the important organizations in the world will continue to be led by people who either aren’t intelligent enough to challenge false narratives or know the narratives are false and simply don’t care.
The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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