We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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It can be hard to keep the narrative consistent.
It appears that BLM enthusiasts love anti-police murals but just hate the idea of a mural claiming that âBlack preborn lives matterâ. Evidently the limit on whose lives can be said to matter is strictly defined indeed.
So why is the Marie Stopes clinic renaming itself? It is true that the current racial ratios of US terminations would gladden the heart of the clinic’s eugenicist nazi-sympathising founder. But if that doesn’t bother BLM supporters, why should it bother the clinic?
Yesterday in Fulham, I observed a group of ten or so men and woman striding purposefully down North End Road. They were dressed in black uniforms, with ‘tactical’ vests displaying FF Force on one side and ‘Forever Family’ on the other… and they are a Marxist militia adjunct of BLM UK. This is entirely illegal.
Upon encountering a long line of schoolchildren lined up outside a MacDonald’s, they started doing down the line chatting with the more ethnically diverse children (which was more than half of them given the area). Interestingly, the 100% English barrow boys (and girls) ignored them (they were all busy selling things at the street market) but I observed several middle eastern passers-by glaring at the militia as they interacted with the children.
2020 is starting to have a rather 1930s feel about it. The pressure cooker is starting to shake.
As President Obamaâs chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said in 2008, âYou never want a serious crisis to go to waste. I mean, itâs an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.â
The Daily Mail reports,
French parents are to be BANNED from home-schooling their kids as part of Emmanuel Macron’s fight back against Islamic extremism
Parents who home-school their children could face up to six months in prison under new measures to combat Islamic extremism in France.
The bill, which was unveiled on Wednesday, will make it a crime for children to be taught at home.
It is an attempt to stop children from being influenced by religious radicals, the Times reported.
It comes after the murder of French teacher Samuel Paty, who was beheaded last month after showing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed to his class during a lesson on free speech.
Samuel Paty was murdered by Abdoullakh Abouyedovich Anzorov, an 18-year-old Muslim Russian refugee of Chechen ethnicity.
Not home schooled then. Certainly not home schooled in France. But what about the perpetrators of other Islamic terrorist attacks in France? The relevant Wikipedia article does not make it easy to tell, since someone has decided to remove the names of the terrorists. But so far as I know none of the perpetrators of the biggest terrorist outrages in France were homeschooled. Like their counterparts in the UK they were typically products of their country’s state education system who first turned to petty crime and then were “redeemed” by Islam.
In the old days, peers were put to death, not expelled. In Edward VI’s time, the Venetian ambassador, dining with some six or so Englishmen, was astonished to learn that all but one of them had at least one ancestor who’d been executed for high treason. The ambassador started talking about how amazed he was at just one exception – but was promptly kicked under the table by his neighbour, who whispered in his ear, “You’re embarrassing the poor fellow – it means he’s not quite a gentleman.”
It seems Lord Ahmed of Rotherham is not quite a gentleman either. Today, the Lords Conduct Committee stated that he has done what a Lord Ahmed of Rotherham who desired to oppose stereotypes would have refrained from doing. They are treating his sexual assault of Ms Zaman on 2 March 2017 as fact. They add
at no point in the process did Lord Ahmed show any remorse or take any responsibility for any aspect of his conduct towards the complainantâŠ
Of course, it never seemed to me that Nazir Ahmed of Rotherham was that plausible a candidate for either gentleman or lord.
– In 2009, texting on his phone while driving his Jaguar on the M1 motorway, he killed a man. He was given a 12 week prison sentence but served only 16 days. He blamed his conviction on a Jewish conspiracy.
– Also in that year, Dutch politician Geert Wilders was invited to the House of Lords by three peers of the realm to show his film FITNA, but was prevented from entering Britain by the Home Office (perhaps I should have tagged this post ‘immigration’, as well as ‘UK affairs’?). To give his party colleagues (PM Gordon Brown and Home Secretary Jacqui Smith) cover for that decision, Ahmed threatened to lead 10,000 Muslims to the Palace of Westminster to prevent Wilders from entering it, and to take the people who had arranged it to court if Wilders was let in.
Nothing about this breaking story on the BBC last I looked. I’m sure they’ll mention it sometime.
Goering (shouting): “Why did you not kill 200 Jews instead of destroying so many valuables!”
Heydrich (defensively): “36 Jews were killed.”
[Words uttered during ministerial discussion with a representative of the German insurance industry after Kristallnacht.]
Kristallnacht was pretty-well the last of the Nazi’s anti-Jewish exercises that were more incentivised than directly commanded and supervised. They had learned the habit in their pre-power days. As the party court (the Uschla) reported afterwards, old party comrades understood that “certain hints meant more than their mere verbal contents”, so when told that “von Rath’s murder was a crime of Jewry as a whole … every party comrade should know what to do”, they went out and – to the great annoyance of Goering when he realised the economic impact – did a fantastic amount of property damage while only killing, by later standards, a derisory number of Jews.
BLM operate the same way. The stormtroopers broke glass and smashed things up, only burning Jewish property when they had fire engines standing by, because fire could spread to ‘aryan’ properties, whereas BLM don’t care if black-owned businesses burn. But with the exception of that very peculiar way of not making racial distinctions, BLM have shown the same common tendency of an incentivised but loosely-commanded Western/European mob to do a lot of property damage for each life they take.
Inflation adjusted, I think the direct financial cost of Kristallnacht far exceeded that of all BLM’s destruction to date. On the other hand, by murdering the eight-year-old black girl Secoriea Turner, the black man David Dorn and various others, it looks like BLM can get into the ballpark of Heydrich’s figure just in killing ‘Lives That Matter (TM)’ – and if you also count lives that don’t matter then maybe they can compete with the higher number that were actually murdered during 9-10 November 1938.
However, BLM needed many nights of rioting to achieve this, whereas ‘Crystal Night’ was done in a day and a night. So I leave it to readers to decide “the point of precedence between a louse and a flea” – or to take Dr Johnson’s advice not to bother – as my focus here is on the specific similarities of technique I’ve mentioned.
(Just a ‘seasonal’ thought prompted by the time of year. I apologise to any who are distressed by the very dark humour of this ‘Godzilla versus King Kong’-style comparison.)
Even though most of its conclusions were known well before the US election took place, something tells me that the Graun would not have published anything even slightly resembling this most interesting piece by Musa al-Gharbi before November 3rd: “White men swung to Biden. Trump made gains with black and Latino voters. Why?”
While on that subject, allow me to shoehorn in two quick thoughts I have had about the current situation in America that I have not had time to expand into full posts.
Thought No.1: Hunter Biden’s laptop has not gone away.
Thought No.2: Joe Biden’s mental decline is not going to reverse itself.
Jack Ma, founder of Chinese e-commerce colossus Alibaba, might want to watch his back. An affiliate business of Alibaba, called Ant Financial, was due to float on the stock market last week but the IPO was suddenly pulled, leaving investment bankers who had underwritten the deal fuming. It also makes me wonder whether China’s President, Xi, is getting resentful about the power of the house that Jack built, so to speak.
Wall Street Journal has this story (item is paywalled, so here are four paragraphs):
Chinese President Xi Jinping personally made the decision to halt the initial public offering of Ant Group, which would have been the worldâs biggest, after controlling shareholder Jack Ma infuriated government leaders, according to Chinese officials with knowledge of the matter.
The rebuke was the culmination of years of tense relations between Chinaâs most celebrated entrepreneur and a government uneasy about his influence and the rapid growth of the digital-payments behemoth he controlled.
Mr. Xi, for his part, has displayed a diminishing tolerance for big private businesses that have amassed capital and influenceâand are perceived to have challenged both his rule and the stability craved by factions in the countryâs newly assertive Communist Party.
In a speech on Oct. 24, days before the financial-technology giant was set to go public, Mr. Ma cited Mr. Xiâs words in what top government officials saw as an effort to burnish his own image and tarnish that of regulators, these people said.
I would not be in the least surprised to see Jack Ma either end up as an exile in the West, or disappear.
As a media figure who works in the wealth management market, I often read reports about how China is kicking the West’s arse in generating gazillions of new billionaires. About how the country is overtaking the West, blah, blah. If that is the case, it is interesting that Chinese people try to get out, given half a chance, or suffer a worse fate. It is hard to see how a country that operates like this can really prosper in the long term, however mighty it looks now. People who fear that success makes them a target are not going to bother.
The Indian news channel News 18 reports:
On April 1, 2016, Bihar was declared a dry state. The JD(U)-led government enforced a five-year jail term for first-time offenders. In 2018, the law was amended to introduce a fine for first-time offenders. The sweeping victory in 2015 was attributed to the support of women who felt addressed by Nitishâs push for prohibition in Bihar.
In America a century ago women hoped that prohibition would stop so many wives being beaten by their drunken husbands. But National Geographic tells the story of how
Women campaigned for Prohibitionâthen many changed their minds
As then in the US, so now in Bihar:
However, the factor may have worked against him this time.
A female voter in Muzaffarpur said, “Liquor is still being sold illegally in the state. Those selling it are getting prosperous by the day and those consuming it are getting ruined. Alcohol is being sold under wraps and consumed in every other house. Families are being devastated. The police are party to this as well. They allow alcohol to infiltrate borders. My son earns and wastes all the money in drinking. There has been no alcohol ban.”
And
In a letter to the state government last year, the Confederation of Indian Alcoholic Beverage Companies quoted data from Bihar police, National Crime Records Bureau and ministry of transport and highway to press home the point that the liquor ban in Bihar has not reduced crime. The letter states that the ban has also boosted the sale of bootlegged alcohol, fetching profit margins of 400 per cent, while the lucrative opportunity has led to the rise of a powerful liquor mafia.
Half of rural women in Bihar are illiterate. I cannot blame them for not knowing the story of how prohibition turned out in a faraway country a hundred years earlier:
How Prohibition Put the âOrganizedâ in Organized Crime
Kingpins like Al Capone were able to rake in up to $100 million each year thanks to the overwhelming business opportunity of illegal booze.
Modern-day prohibitionists in the rich world have no such excuse. Nor do Indian politicians such as the aforementioned Nitish Kumar, Chief Minister of Bihar. They can read. They have the internet. They can easily find out how this story always ends.
On Saturday, the establishment media did something incredibly irresponsible. In the midst of the most contentious election in modern history, instead of acting as neutral observers of the political process, they decided to embrace the undemocratic role of kingmaker by prematurely calling the election for Joe Biden. Yes, in normal times it has been a time-honored tradition that the media act as the unofficial scorekeeper in presidential elections, but this role has no official standing, despite the desperate attempt by the media to usurp that role for itself.
These are not normal times and the media’s action amounts to an attempt to short circuit the official and legal process of selecting the president. The outcome of this election is still very much in doubt. The electoral margins are razor thin, votes are still being counted, recounts will be held in a number of states, and there are legal challenges that have yet to work their way through the courts. Regardless of the false claims of the media, the election process is not yet over.
The media is compounding its own malfeasance by making the false claim that there is no evidence of election fraud and by suppressing any reports of the many problems with the vote counting. Although it may be true that there is yet to be any proof of election fraud, this is not the same as there being no evidence of fraud. Evidence and proof are not the same things. And the proper bodies to judge any evidence are courts of law. In our constitutional system, neither the news media nor the laughably misnamed “independent fact checkers” of the social media have any place deciding the merits of the evidence of fraud taking place in this election.
Of the many actual pieces of evidence of election fraud surrounding the vote counting, the most damaging are the cases of GOP poll watchers, in violation of election laws, being kicked out of the vote counting rooms in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Atlanta. It was in these very Democrat-controlled cities that partisan political machines in charge of the vote counting, now behind closed doors, somehow managed to find enough additional votes to flip the vote counts in their respective states from being in favor of Donald Trump to being in favor of Joe Biden. The media has become wilfully blind to this clear violation of the law.
Any ballots counted during the period when GOP observers were locked out of the counting rooms are now tainted and legally suspect. If the courts eventually do throw out these votes, as they should, the fault would not be on Donald Trump for bringing a legal challenge, but on the Democrats for attempting to use their partisan political machines to control the vote counting.
One final point. If Joe Biden wanted to ensure that any victory would be seen as legitimate by Trump’s supporters, he should have immediately joined the Trump campaign in demanding that GOP poll watchers be allowed to observe the vote counting, as they are entitled to by law. The fact that he remained silent, as did the entire Democrat establishment (including their media allies) makes him complicit in any illegal activities that occurred behind those closed doors and will forever taint any claim that he has on being legitimately elected as president.
– Nick Forte, re-posted from The Pelican Report
Must say this is a catchy tune by Austin Forman.
This joke-post is the kind of thing that should normally appear on The Babylon Bee satire site or similar, alongside such stories as “CNN calls Arizona 2024 for Biden” and “Trump locks himself in Oval Office, Swallows Key” (and I’d be only too pleased if they used any or all of mine gratis). However I felt we could all do with a little humour in these endlessly uncertain times. đ
=== BREAKING === BREAKING === BREAKING ==== BREAKING ===
Breaking: Biden broke Benfordâs Law
In a controversial ruling, the US Supreme Court has found that Biden vote totals in key districts violate Benfordâs law, which states that numbers the American people can be required to believe should start with 1 more often than 2, 2 more often than 3 and so on.
US liberals were not slow to denounce the court’s ruling. “The crucial vote came from Amy Coney Barrett – the NINTH justice!”, raged Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “By Benfordâs law, she should forbid us to believe herself.” Replying, Justice Barrett said that 5-4 rulings were more in accord with Benfordâs law than 9-0 ones, pointedly adding that she looked forward to many more such.
In a more nuanced version of AoC’s argument, a trio of California-based federal judges urged the decision be left to Justice Roberts (whose balanced, middle-of-the-road submission weighed the statistical improbability of the vote totals against the statistical improbability of orange hair in a president), on the grounds that Benfordâs law should weight the first justice far above the ninth. However it was then put to them that, since they themselves served on the ninth circuit, these judges’ argument also overturned itself. Advised that the analysis of self-referential statements belonged to another, yet more abstruse, branch of mathematics than Benfordâs law, one of the judges promptly shot himself in despair, while the other two endorsed Kamala Harris’ statement that the size of the supreme court must immediately be raised from the unacceptable number 9 to a more Benford-friendly total.
President Trump immediately went on televison to boast of being “number one” – but took the fifth when a New York Times reporter claimed that Trump’s true wealth violated Benfordâs law. “You tell the American people you are worth ten billion dollars, but I know from my secret IRS source that the true value is only nine billion!” Meanwhile, Joe Biden also appeared on TV to explain that Benfordâs law had no relevance to elections but, despite help from both his wife and the teleprompter, became hopelessly confused – which caused many Americans to say he was a good representative of the average guy, since Benford’s law confuses them even more than lockdown rules. (Later, professors at the University of California presented a statistical analysis demonstrating that counts of Biden’s gaffes obeyed Benfordâs law, which therefore showed that whatever he had been trying to say was the truth.)
Elsewhere in academia, Professor Lawrence Tribe, expert in constitutional law, pointed out that there was no mention of Benfordâs law in the constitution or any amendment. “I find it disgusting that biased justices feel they can casually re-‘interpret’ the constitution to suit modern ideas. This law was not even suggested until a century after the constitution was ratified, and not given a mathematical proof till over a century after that. The founding fathers never even imagined such a thing!”
The NeverTrumper ‘Lincoln Project’ denounced the ruling’s indirect endangering of the 9th amendment (which says that the enumeration of certain rights in the constitution shall not deny or disparage others retained by the people) as a typical example of the way in which Trump’s “pyrrhic” victories were defeats for true conservatism, and promised to spend the vast sums they raised in this election cycle on overturning the result.
LATE UPDATE: The New York Times has published a special insight article on Benfordâs Law, explaining that mainstream media’s calling of the election for Biden came first, so outweighs the USSC ruling, which came second. It is rumoured that social media giant Mark Zuckerberg tried to agree – but was censored by the Facebook algorithm he put in place days ago to suppress any mention of Benfordâs law. Here in the UK, media concurrence was marred by a Guardian article’s repeated references to ‘Benthamâs law’, suggesting they thought the USSC had ruled that Trump’s re-election would made for the greater net happiness – which, Guardian commenters said, was not the case for them.
—
So much for satire. Anyone who would rather have had a serious discussion of Benford’s law can start with this intuitive example, then look at this application of it to huge amounts of data. (The really keen can download these Excel-oriented DIY instructions.) FWIW, my earlier comment on the story that prompted this is here.
[ADDED LATER: for those who read the comments and follow their links, it is worth being aware that Benford is normally used on the first digit of the data, but Mebane used it on the second digit (different ratios, as 0 is now included) and uses the more demanding ‘false discovery rate’ test, not just ordinary chi-squared (I agree with checking the higher bar of the FDR). The issues of the technique’s value at various granularities, and usefulness beyond identifying some places to look further at, are prudent to be aware of. (Returning to humour, it is also ‘prudent’ to be aware that Mebane himself was swift to go on the web and deny everything the moment the question arose of applying this to the Trump 2020 election instead of to the Bush elections of 2000 and 2004. The man holds an academic post, which he would doubtless rather retain – another thing it might be prudent to be aware of. đ )]
They’re like the Tsarist government, happy that they’ve seen off the 1905 Revolution
– Tim Newman
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