Tony Fauci recently won a million dollar Israeli prize for “speaking truth to power” – doubly ironic as Tony Fauci was the person with the power, and he is not in the habit of speaking the truth.
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Like the Soviet Union, the United States has developed a system in which some social classes and races are officially favoured, and some are disfavoured, reflected in post-war legal innovations like affirmative action. Affirmative action was originally introduced as a counter-measure to segregation, either of the official or unofficial variety, but as with many things its purpose evolved as bureaucracies grew. Today, government interference in private institutions is aimed at the goal of equality — not the liberal concept of equality of opportunity, but the more ambitious equality of outcomes, or “equity”. Under this theory, each racial group should have equal representation in elite intuitions, which means that, depending on their race, Americans must achieve different scores to attend certain colleges. Equality is achieved through inequality. If this sounds illiberal, indeed un-American, that is because it is not unlike the “nationalities policies” created by communist revolutionaries, and under which the Russian majority were officially discriminated against in certain positions. – Ed West, from America has become its worst enemy. August 4th, 2021 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
 If the peer reviewer at one journal says no to a scientific study, the researchers will generally move on to another, less prestigious journal, and will keep going like that until they can get the study published. There are so many journals that everything gets published somewhere in the end, no matter of how poor quality. The whole system of peer-review builds on trust. The guiding principle is the idea that bad studies will be caught out over the long term, because when other people try to replicate the results, they won’t be able to. There are two big problems with this line of thinking. The first is that scientific studies are expensive, so they often don’t get replicated, especially if they are big studies of drugs. For the most part, no-one but the drug company itself has the cash resources to do a follow-up study to make sure that the results are reliable. And if the drug company has done one study which shows a good effect, it won’t want to risk doing a second study that might show a weaker effect. The second problem is that follow-up studies aren’t exciting. Being first is cool, and generates lots of media attention. Being second is boring. No-one cares about the people who re-did a study and determined that the results actually held up to scrutiny. – Sebastian Rushworth, writing about How to understand scientific studies (in health and medicine) August 3rd, 2021 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
“There’s a reason that Her Majesty’s government can now afford, politically speaking, to experiment with policies that are native to stratified east Asian states. It’s the very same reason why the Democratic Party here in the States can attempt to spend multiple trillions of dollars during just six months of unified government without any obvious public dismay. Catastrophes are accelerants of government expansion, and the pandemic will go down in history as one in a series of quantum leaps into a more statist world — a world in which governments feel increasingly emboldened to attempt the previously unthinkable.” – Cameron Hilditch, writing in National Review. Quick observation: there would, from a free market sort of view, be nothing necessarily wrong if an insurance company, for example, varies its premiums on clients who have proof that they, for example, keep fit, eat a healthy diet and so on. But that is a transaction freely entered into, and subject to the competition of a market place. Social credit systems on the Chinese model are not like this, however. There is no choice, no opportunity to opt out. If I got a pound every time someone went on about Boris Johnson’s damned “libertarian instincts”, I’d be a resident of Monaco by now. We left the EU to get out of a form of creeping statism, and we get this. At least, I suppose, we can eventually vote the current government, led by this albino circus act, out of office, but for things to improve, there has be a shift in the culture in the UK – and elsewhere – of what is acceptable and and about the importance of liberty and autonomy. August 3rd, 2021 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
This is nothing less than the highest circulation newspaper not just in Germany but all Europe publicly repenting their role in spreading state propaganda and fake news. This is from 28 May 2021, and yet I only heard about this today; the fact it was not front page news across the world is very revealing indeed. (turn on translation subtitles if you do not understand German. Also, partial transcript here in English and French) August 2nd, 2021 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
Writing books about “current affairs” is tricky. If you write your book while whatever you are writing about is not yet over, you are liable to be wrong-footed by later events, especially if you thought it was over. But if you wait until you are sure that whatever it is has finally finished, your book is liable to be lost in a throng of rival books on the same subject, written by people all of whom, like you, know that it’s now or never, and at a time when whatever happened is now pretty much obvious to all. But what if you are spot-on about what is happening while it is still happening, but you wait until the dust settles? Then you miss your chance to have been “prophetic”. “That’s what I said!” works far better if you actually did say it, loud and clear, before it all became obvious. Stephen Davies latest book, entitled The Economics and Politics of Brexit: The Realignment of British Public Life, is a rather cunning answer to this dilemma.
Davies has written a book about a process which still has a way to go, but also about one of the consequences of this process which is already very clear. The larger process is the political realignment which Britain is now still in the thick of. But one of the many consequences of this realignment has now been pretty much settled. → Continue reading: Stephen Davies on Brexit and political realignment August 1st, 2021 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
Until Brexit, “Green Molly” a.k.a. Molly Scott Cato was a Green Party MEP. She is currently the Green Party External Communications Coordinator and Speaker on Economy and Finance. On July 29th she tweeted,
She was referring to this Guardian article. Thus far, I agreed with her. The Guardian article by Sarah Marsh is unashamedly emotional, but it derives its power to convince by letting named ordinary people speak for themselves. However Ms Scott Cato thinks that humans speaking to other humans about their own brush with death or the deaths of their relatives is not a good enough persuasive strategy. She continued,
In a sense Ms Scott Cato is right. She does need information crimes. Her party and the worldwide Green movement (of which parties with “Green” in their name are a minor part) have a vision for humanity that goes far beyond trees and whales, and they know they will not get the public to comply if gadflies and malcontents are allowed to bring up information that contradicts the official line. In particular they need information that shows how many of their previous predictions never came to pass to be criminalised. Related: “George Monbiot comes out in favour of censorship”, a post I made in January about Mr Monbiot’s article “Covid lies cost lives – we have a duty to clamp down on them”. And found via Instapundit today, “‘Health misinformation’ should be a federal crime, First Amendment law professor says”. July 31st, 2021 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Vast majority of adults still wearing face masks in public, ONS data shows” Last night, I went to a social event of over a hundred people. No masks. I just walked down the street, went to supermarket, saw maybe 1 in 5 wearing a mask, probably less. Where is this vast majority? Not where I live, that’s for sure. WTF is going on? July 30th, 2021 | 44 comments - (Comments are closed)
(Nor, indeed, have I ever yet said it as well.)
Those who read instapundit will already have encountered Maimon Schwarzschild’s evidence to the Orange County Board of Education, but I’m happy to give further visibility to “what oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed”. We’ve often said what we think about CRT here, but I don’t recall a paragraph that covers all the bases, touching each concisely and clearly, as well as the above. (If you do, by all means link to it in the comments – it might be good to gather several effective summaries in one place.) The name Schwarzschild (like the name Maimon) is not that common. I wonder if Maimon is related to Karl Schwarzschild, the first man to solve Einstein’s equations. Karl computed the solution for a simple (non-rotating, uncharged) spherical mass (today, it’s famous as the basic black hole solution – ‘the Schwarzschild solution’ – but Chandrasekhar computed ‘the Chandrasekhar limit’ in the same year, to pass the time on a ship travelling from India to Britain, so Karl did not yet know a black hole was even theoretically possible). Karl did this work while serving in the Germany army, less than a year before his death during WWI. As to why Karl’s (surviving) descendants and collaterals are now to be found in the United States, not Germany, well Maimon also testified that:
The sacrifice of Jewish fathers like Karl for the fatherland in WWI proved a weak reed indeed for their children in WWII. Having ancestors who fought against slavery won’t protect anyone from charges of ‘toxic whiteness’ either, any more than family experience of past racial hatred will protect Maimon from woke hatred today. July 29th, 2021 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
“And the propaganda continues. Implausible figures and bogus narratives actively staged by human bots. Who is behind for this? The same happened with CCP promotion of lockdown.” This has been a recurring theme over the last last few years but has gone into overdrive as of late. July 29th, 2021 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
July 28th, 2021 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
Teacher training in Louisville, Kentucky is succumbing to the woke bandwagon of “maths is racist”. I’ve already said what I wanted to say about “maths is racist” – but I noticed a remark of a rightly-disgusted observer of this latest example. Trying to imagine how any maths lesson could be racist (since “no matter your color, religion, sex, or anything else, 2+2 will always equal 4”), she said she “would call math racist” only if the questions were like:
I read that – and instantly remembered an incident from Christabel Bielenberg’s autobiography ‘The Past is Myself’. Some months into Hitler’s first year in power, she and husband Peter were dining out. At another table, three Jews were quietly finishing their meal. Six SA men strolled into the establishment. One of them spotted the Jews and loudly alerted his fellows.
Despite what Christabel had learnt from her father, there was not a fight. The sudden upstanding protest of a very nordic-looking couple gave the stormtroopers pause, the Jews were eager to leave and swiftly did so, and it all calmed down. As she sat down again, Christabel took in the body language of all the other German diners. Their poses said, as loudly as an open declaration, that, though many of them might not have positively welcomed their dining experience being enhanced with a floor-show of SA Jew-baiting – might indeed have disliked the prospect, her computation of
would not have been altered by the addition of any of them to that equation’s right-hand side.
When the racism that calls itself anti-racism comes to your town, and you have to decide whether to stand up for Secoriea or kneel to her murderers, then you too (unless your state of mind is one that will win the Victoria cross – and maybe even if it is) will make these mental calculations – and they will be no more racist than any other kind of maths. Both racism and resisting it lie in actions, not calculations. —- (The above quotes from ‘The Past is Myself’ are from memory, as I do not have the book in front of me while writing this. It is well worth reading.) July 28th, 2021 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
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