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A landmark study that endorsed a simple way to curb cheating is going to be retracted nearly a decade later after a group of scientists found that it relied on faked data. – Stephanie Lee, writing A big study about honesty turns out to be based on fake data. I admit that I LOL’ed. Next time someone tells you about The Science™, just because it is from a peer-reviewed & duly published paper does not necessarily make it true. August 24th, 2021 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
 “President Biden’s tax plans might soon make Europe look like a capitalist heaven by comparison. He wants to raise the long-term capital-gains tax from just below 24% to above 43%. Switzerland has no such tax. In Britain, inventor of the welfare state, it is 20% and in Germany 26%. On income tax, the U.S. may soon top the scale. Mr. Biden wants a top marginal income-tax rate of just below 40%. Add state and local income taxes, like California’s 13.3% for top earners, and wealthy U.S. taxpayers could pay more than their European counterparts.” – Josef Joffe, Wall Street Journal ($) I have been covering this news story about the tax proposals in my regular day job in the banking and wealth management/media sector. Joe Biden, who has been having such a shit-show lately over Afghanistan, is equally terrible over tax and the economy, and also a bit two-faced. This is a man who, let it not be forgotten, was a senator for Delaware for many years. Delaware is a bit like a mini-“Switzerland”, one of those states that is favoured by corporations and creators of trusts (South Dakota, New Hampshire, Nevada and Alaska are similar). The US is going to have to familiarise itself with the “Laffer Curve” all over again. August 23rd, 2021 | 37 comments - (Comments are closed)
So many libertarians, such as the good fellows at Reason magazine for example (who I do like, I hasten to add), have a simplistic, dare I say dualistic notion about bad-things-done-by-private-business and bad-things-done-by-the-state. One is met with “so start up a rival company” the other with “an outrageous example of state overreach that must be opposed politically.” And in an ideal world, yes, that makes sense. We do not live in anything resembling an ideal world. In an era when three (two really) credit card companies and a handful of payment processors have an off-switch for pretty much any on-line business they take a dislike to (unless they are called Apple or Amazon), as more and more of the economy goes virtual, what we have is turn-key tyranny for sale to the highest bidder, and the highest bidder is always going to be a state. I am uncertain what the solution is, but as we do not live in a ‘free market’, not convinced “so go set up your own global credit card and payment processing network” adds anything meaningful to the discussion. It is a bit like saying when the local electric provider turns off the power in your office (or home) because they disapprove of what you are doing “so go set up your own electric supply company”, as if that would be allowed to happen. Fascism is the organised attempt to introduce socialist planning with the consent of big business – Edward Conze (1934) August 22nd, 2021 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
Michael Rectenwald has written a very interesting essay Living in the Age of Covid: “The Power of the Powerless” that raises many very alarming parallels, musing on the original essay by Václav Havel The Power of the Powerless.
Read the whole thing. August 21st, 2021 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
The BBC isn’t part of a free and pluralistic media, unafraid of questioning power. It is part of a State policy communication strategy which aims to convince the public to accept the authorised reality. Among these propagandist outlets the BBC is perhaps the most servile by virtue of its Charter and its reliance upon State funding. The commercial broadcasters are also limited by Ofcom regulation and their dependence upon government advertising. The alleged pandemic saw the State become the UK’s leading advertiser. When we consider that their second-biggest source of advertising revenue are the pharmaceutical corporations, the notion of an “independent” mainstream broadcast media in the UK is laughable. August 21st, 2021 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Very interesting chat between CNN’s international correspondent Clarissa Ward in Afghanistan and Freddie Sayers of Unherd. This is great stuff and why independent media is so valuable. August 20th, 2021 | 54 comments - (Comments are closed)
I find it very likely that most future historians will put the date of the real beginning of the collapse of the current political and geopolitical order right here, right now, at the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Just as with any other big historical process, however, many others will point out that the seeds of the collapse were sown much farther back, and that a case can be made for several other dates, or perhaps no specific date at all. This is how we modern people look at the fall of the french ancien regime, after all. Still, it is quite obvious that the epoch of the liberal technocrat is now over. The bell has well and truly tolled for mankind’s belief in their ability to do anything else than enrich themselves and ruin things for everyone else. How long it will take for their institutions to disappear, or before they end up toppled by popular discontent and revolution, no one can know. But at this point, I think most people on some level now understand that it really is only a matter of time. – Malcom Kyeyune (who is a strange sort of Marxist btw) August 20th, 2021 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
The fifth stage is the crisis which has resulted not so much from Brexit as from Covid. Brexit was a revolt of a new Country party against the Court party of almost all assembled authorities, including both Labour and Conservative authorities. After some dithering, Johnson chose to side with Country. Hence 2016. But Covid has broken all of the traditions of opposition I have sketched thus far. For it is the Conservative Party – no matter how reluctantly – which stands at the head of a unified Court party which has done more than anyone since Walpole has done to ignore the Country, and not only ignore it, but oppress it. Johnson has presided over the establishment of an entirely technocratic politics of problem-and-solution which is, alas, not a politics at all, but the substitution of technique for politics. In this situation, the Government appears to be as committed as the opposition is to a unified politics of Universal Lockdown and Universal Vaccination and Universal Carbon Elimination in which no one is defending any aspect of the old order (including the church or universities) or even liberalism itself. The Conservatives have no longer got anything to defend. They have capitulated to their enemies and done it with a grotesque hyper-Disraelian-Bismarckian-Maoist-Malthusian flourish by way of forcing us to take the knee, take the mask and take the jab. They are not Tory, not liberal, certainly not even ‘austere’. They have found a magic money tree. They are presumably waiting for the seas to turn into lemonade. They are locking us into a magnificently communist-corporate hybrid order which will make the public-private partnerships of Blair and Brown look extremely pallid. If this continues then the only conservative thing about the Conservatives will be their inclination to hold on to their name. This is an excellent essay specifically about the grotesquely misnamed Conservative Party in the UK, but some of it applies to other notionally ‘conservative’ groups elsewhere, particularly in the Anglosphere. August 19th, 2021 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
The catastrophising narrative continues. The government gives with one hand and takes away with the other regarding lifting restrictions and permitting travel. NHS colleagues continue their handwringing and attention seeking. Having basked in the limelight and affections of the nation and wallowed in the cult of the ‘clap for our carers’, they seem unable to loosen their hold on the pandemic. I, frankly, sense a great deal of disappointment that the pandemic is receding and a sense of relief each time the likes of Neil Ferguson predicts another wave as he has just done. Does nobody understand that this man has never been right about anything, ever? We need, constantly, to remind ourselves and anyone who will listen that all the above was for a virus that the vast majority of people were unlikely to become infected with, from which recovery (not dying) is approximately 99% and those who do die, tragically, are the usual suspects: the very old, the obese and the medically compromised. The outcomes of our response to COVID include a bankrupt country, record waiting lists for NHS treatment, some remarkable statistics regarding suicide and a host of other problems regarding child abuse, domestic violence and mental health problems. China did not do this to us…our own government did. – UNN Opinions: it is time to stop blaming China. August 19th, 2021 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Mark Steyn wrote the other day,
Good question. But why only ask it about the army? While many here are distrustful of governments in general, most agree that if a government must exist at all it exists for the purposes listed in the preamble to the Constitution of the United States:
I wish I could say “President Biden is failing at all these objectives”. Mere ineffectiveness would be so nice. He is worse than useless on every one of them. He is worse than the British government on every one of them, which is quite an achievement. ‘America is back’, all right, back to 1975. That affects us, too. Sharks attack when they smell blood in the water. In a spirit of open-mindedness I invite American readers more familiar with their local situation than I am to suggest any mitigating factors which might raise Mr Biden’s score to zero on any of: forming a more perfect union, establishing justice, insuring domestic tranquility, providing for the common defence (Yanks could spell in those days), promoting the general welfare (promoting welfare dependency doesn’t count), and securing the blessings of liberty to himself and his posterity… on second thoughts, I must grant that he is doing OK at keeping Hunter Biden out of jail. August 18th, 2021 | 67 comments - (Comments are closed)
A 2016 BBC article describes how to spot vote fraud in African elections – in Gabon, Togo, Niger and suchlike places. ‘Vote rigging: How to spot the tell-tale signs’ says to watch out for such things as high turnout in specific areas, or discrepancies in votes versus ballots issued, and notes that delays in the result may be innocent but are suspicious. An older 2010 article I recall added to that list such things as anomalous ratios between 2nd and 3rd-party candidates. (A tin-pot-dictator style election where the favoured candidate gets 99% of the vote is sure to be suspected, but less attention may be paid to whether a given area’s ratio between the most popular losing candidate and long-shot third-party candidates actually makes sense.) This kind of statistical evidence is apparently good enough to have the BBC sometimes condemning, sometimes pointedly suspecting black politicians in black countries. When it comes to white politicians in western countries, by contrast – Biden in the US, for example – a different standard is used. That election also showed large anomalous statistics and ratios in several specific areas (Milwaukee, for example). As for ballot/vote ratios, Montgomery, PA was not the only place where vote updates changed many votes but fewer ballots, and it too had a very implausible Trump-to-3rd-party-candidate vote ratio. But phrases like ‘no evidence’, ‘judge dismissed’ and ‘not proved’ seem to crowd out thoughts of statistics in the BBC as regards the white, western election, despite some of the oddities being even more obvious from a UK perspective. Of course, no one can be made to see who has resolved in advance to keep their eyes shut, and nothing can be ‘proved’ if your standard of proof is set high enough – certainly not vote fraud (a point carefully analysed here – along with links to further statistical oddities). But using one standard of proof when the accused is black and another, higher one when he is white is the classic definition of racism. Sadly, while there may be some readiness within the BBC to confront anti-black colour-prejudice, I fear there is none when the colour is orange. Although the BBC have suddenly and strongly gone off Joe Biden, and are walking back their post-inauguration praise of him, I doubt the effect will extend back to last November. And I have to concede that, at a time when the BBC have abruptly stopped trusting Biden, reminding them of Biden’s October 23rd 2020 remark about having
is offering them information from a now-discredited source. 🙂 But at least black Africans can be sure the BBC will keep an eye on their election statistics, even if in a manner less than perfectly respectful of their equality to ourselves. (Added later) A similar prejudice is visible in the fact that the US spends almost two-and-a-half billion dollars annually to support honest elections in various foreign states – and did so in 2020, much of it on procedures specifically designed to maintain election integrity in the face of the pandemic. This analysis shows the many ways the 2020 US presidential election failed the standards that the US required of the foreign recipients of those funds. August 18th, 2021 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Taliban is getting its message out on social media, too, giving live updates on its seizure of power. A man claiming to be an official representative has had an active account on Twitter since 2017 and has over 280,000 followers. He has had a lot to tweet about in recent days. This might seem unusual, considering how censorious Twitter usually is. It has punished people for stepping out of line on numerous issues from transgenderism to Covid-19. Most infamously, it banned the sitting US president, Donald Trump, earlier this year. Even more extraordinarily, the ban largely related to Trump’s behaviour off the platform. Many months on, as the Taliban tweets freely about its progress, Trump is still banned. August 17th, 2021 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
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