There is something strange about this piece to a British ear.

We do understand that Americans have a curious aversion for caring for their sick, but that is their choice.

No, what is strange is the Amercian conception of rights.

They say it is their right to carry guns, have free speech and be tremendously fat. They also say it is their right to murder anyone anywhere on the planet.

How they justify this is not by some, strange appeal to reason.

Amercians generally don’t think in that way.

No, Americans appeal to the Constitution. What was written on that piece of paper is what they believe.

Amusingly enough, the words were written in the age of enlightenment, when man stopped treating holy books as the word of God.

Instead, Americans worship the word of the Constitution.

I am no anthropolgist, but understand that even the most primitive societies would care for their sick.

Americans, being the most advanced people on the planet, do things differently.It doesn’t seem to be working very well, but then neither does America.

So it’s all El Salvador’s fault. I used to think it was due to US medical costs being double those elsewhere,
but apparently not.

Yes, that is certainly true that many Americans think that rights are what is written down on a particular piece of paper, be that a religious text or the US constitution.

Indeed, the last form of rights is very convenient indeed, as no rights are ascribed to any of the many peoples Americans have self-righteously harmed.

As for the famous American freedom of speech – it is one of the miracles of American life that bribing a politican (I mean giving a campaign contribution) is protected as free speech.

I am all form freedom of speech, – perhaps more Americans could use it to say something interesting.

John,

What actually happened seems to be much worse than what you have said.

Reports in the UK press from reliable journalists say that the family went back to Libya, as did many others from the Libyan community in Manchester, with the encouragement of the security services.

Their mission was to fight Gadaffi, and the UK helped them to do so. Having been radicalised by anti Gadaffi clerics, these Libyans then returned to the UK.

I thought the same and did a quick google search.
It would appear that the blacks moved out and the hispanics moved in.

Are there any studies on the effect of secondary education – i.e. IQ tests before entering and on leaving – to test the effect of different school types on IQ? I would expect that there would be some.

What planet are you on? The UK’s economic performance is hopeless compared to that of Germany.

The comment about the productivity of hairdresers was nonsense.
Productivity is not a measure of business efficiency or anything similar.
It simply meausres gross value added per hour – this is an economic term and roughly means profit before wages and depreciation.
In the case of the hairdressers, their productivity is determined almost entirely by the market price for haircuts.
The market price of haircuts is, of course, determined by market forces within the economy – and has nothing much to do with the efforts of the hairdressers themselves.
Productivity is thus best thought of as a macro eonomic statistic, and caution should be used when using it on smaller units of the economy.

The answer to your question is that UK libel law is a complicated thing and lawyers will argue over what words mean. In particular, there is a concept called (I seem to remember) something called an innuendo meaning, which is where someone can bring a libel action based not on the actual words, but on an alleged meaning.

I suspect that might be what happened in this case, but do you own research, as I am not a lawyer.

Andrew Joyce has made some interesting points in this article. I have a couple of things to add.

1 Milton Friedman, who was an influential figure on Mrs Thatcher, was responsible for the disastrous monetarist experiment from 1979 to 1983 (arguably it was abandonned in 1981). Friednman had a high profile as an advocate of the 1980s free-market agenda.There is a revealing youtube video of Friedsman speaking to a Jewish audience explaining how capitalism was good for the jews. Needless to say, the arguments are rather different than the message he put out to the public.

2 Mrs Thatcher’s visit to Israel was quite remarkable, in that she was guest of honour and gave a speech at the King David Hotel in 1986. This, of course, was the very same place that the Irgun had bombed, in an attack against the British in 1946. Of course there was no apology from any of the guests.

3 Mrs Thatcher’s links with Israel date back to her first visit in 1965, as a guest of Anglo-Israel Friendship League of Finchley.

https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106406

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Thatcher-and-Israel-503040

She also stayed at the King David Hotel, this time less than 20 years after what was the worst terrorist action against British people until the Lockerbie incident, which she does not seem to mention.

Have some fun googling, especially the Israeli press, which is rather more frank than anything you will see in
the UK media on Mrs Thatcher’s relations with Israel.

Israel has not won any war without US support. The US refused to support the Suez adventure, in 1956, thereby ending that Israeli war before it started.

Steve, I have not given this much thought, so don’t take this too seriously, but I really doubt that the statistics can ever be good enough.

It might be useful to compare the evaluation of teachers with the evaluation of new medicines.

The latter is well understood and companies are required to test their new drug against a placebo in two double blind trials. The size of the trial depends on the expected difference in effectiveness of the new drug – to measure a small difference, you need a very large trial.

A small drug trial might consist of a couple of hundred patients. That is around the same number of pupils that a teacher might teach in a year, but generally drug trials are a good bit larger.

There are some obvious differences, though. One is that in a drug trial, the drug group and placebo group will be very similar – recruited from the same centres, treated in the same way etc etc.

That won’t happen in a school – inevitably, one teacher’s class will be different from another in various ways.
What this means is that a multi-factor model will be required, which means much larger numbers in order to achieve the same statistical accuracy.

Then, there are other issues. With a drug trial, the treatment of each patient is independent of each other. That is not the case in school classes. For example, if one pupil goes crazy, it can affect the entire class.
So, the trial will have more noise.

The bottom line, so far as I can see, is that the teachers can never manage to teach the required sample sizes.

I don’t understand how Bloomberg meets the description of finance capitalist or vulture-capitalist. His company sells the eponymous Bloomberg terminals to banks and other financial institutions. He is in the business of selling financial information – not lending money or doing anything remotely predatory.

Gilad is, of course, right to question why anyone of the Labour leadership contenders should submit to the BOD’s demands. The answer, of course, is that their demands come with an unsubtle threat – do as they say, or the BOD and their allies will destroy the Labour party in the same way that they destroyed Corbyn.

the surge in the cuban vote didn’t ring true to me – maybe it was genuine, but more likely their vote was bought or rigged

That is, of course, what happens. Lots of pros take lots of shots and we only see the one that goes in.

That’s crazy.

Most people in the US have no idea about Israel, not having passports, never mind having been there. Nor do they have much experience of Jews.

What Americans do is watch TV and have ideas planted in their heads from birth.

How is that relevant?

I haven’t yet read this article, but my answer is definitely yes.

I came to that conclusion after watching a youtube video, where Friedman is speaking to a US, Jewish audience.

His message was twofold.

First, that his style of capitalism was based on what was good for the Jews.
Second, Jews should get on board and abandon left-wing thinking.

He was clear that,with his pro-capitalist rhetoric, he was advocating for financial based economies, which were good for middlemen, and hostile to industrial sectors, where there was little Jewish involvement.

Within the financial sector, he wanted new entrants to challenge the incumbents – this being, again, what is good for the Jews.

Previously, having studied economics at university, I was well aware that Friedman was highly disingenuous.
His arguments on the crash, for example, blamed government intervention based on the government not intervening to boost the money supply. Quite how he sold that as argument for free markets, I don’t know.

Later, he achieved influence in Israel and the UK to carry out real world experiments, based on his ideas on the money supply. Both ended disastrously,

Yes, he was extremely smart.

He used a technical subject to argue for a cause, knowing that he would not be challenged and practically no one would understand any criticism.

He also had the advantage of selling a medicine that would feel good for years, with the side effects arriving a generation later.

Deregulate debt markets, create booms in consumption and the public will be happy and not realising that there would be a cost.

Naturally, his constituency would not bear that cost, despite benefiting hugely from the boom.

More likely, he knew his audience and was saying what he thought would influence them. It might not have convinced you, but he was a professional communicator and highly effective.

From my perspective as an observer, thousands of miles away from the US, John Derbyshire seems to be someone who has invested in an idea of Trump, which bears little relation to any kind of reality.

Trump managed to persuade many that, all appearances to the contrary, he was a man with some higher purpose.

Now, when Trump has left office with no achievements and a trail of disasters, Derbyshire ponders what it was that he was so excited to have voted for.

I do understand why people wanted there to be a Messiah, but deciding that it was Trump – well, that is hard to credit.

Yes, I agree. Robert Anton Wilson said some very interesting things about GS. He trained himself to write and, later, to speak without using the verb ‘to be’. The effect was to change his way of thinking from being to doing – no more ‘I am this’, ‘You are that’. Instead, ‘I do this’, ‘You do that’.

Regards, jamec

Some observations on this piece.

I am from the UK, don’t have any particular connection with the US and am watching developments from a distance.

What the article illustrates, to me, is that there is an endless stream of conflicts in the US. They all seem to involve contentious individuals or groups on social media, who are of no consequence in themselves, but which seem to be proxies.

So, we have a story about this Trump supporter and the US authorities prosecuting him for what appear to be minor offences. He is either a real, or perceived, proxy for other players who the US authorities cannot target directly.

Does that make sense and what do others think?

You seem to be denying what is staring you in the face – Trump targeted the evangelicals and they were his most important voting block.

You might wish that were not the case, because you don’t want to associate yourself with them, but that does not change the facts.

Well done, Jonathan. More light needs to be shone on The Guardian.

Kevin, I don’t know that much about you and what you write about – having seen your stuff, I generally ignore it.

The reason for that is my calculation is that there is no use in my spending time on it.

The positions that you seem to take on all issues are, in an objective sense, far away from the consensus.

That doesn’t, of itself, mean that any given one is wrong, but it does suggest, very strongly, that you are attracted in some way, on issues which have no common factor, to positions that are only held by a minority.

On any given topic, regardless of the facts, I would confidently predict that your take would be very much a (statistically) unusual one.

Maybe you would agree with me on that – I think it is a reasonable comment, based on your journalistic output, that you always adopt such positions.

Now, the question is what does that mean? One possibility is that you are discovering one hidden truth after another, and your minority positions are rational assessments of reality.

More likely, though (to me) is that these positions do not reflect reality (maybe there are some exceptions) but reflect how you market yourself to a fanbase – a crank writing for cranks.

So, your content has a high chance of being wrong and, when you do randomly hit the bullseye, I will get the same message from someone more reliable.

Majority of One – here is a simple question for you. If you were to put money on Barrett’s stories being right, would you expect to be in profit or not? I would expect you would be losing consistently.

Reverend, I hope you are feeling better, now.

“Whatever you may think of the value of IQ tests it is surely relevant to a conversation about equality that as many as 16% of our species have an IQ below 85 while about 2% …”

He has managed to get every statement completely wrong.

That is because he is using rhetoric, that he was taught at school, and no factual content.

Majority, my question was about the topic of the thread, from which you had strayed.

If you remember, my assertion was that most of what Barrett posts was wrong.

You went off on some tangents of your own, so I asked you the question – which was another way of asking you about your perception of Barrett’s hit rate.

You ducked it and made some excuses, which are hardly going to convince anyone.

So, since you are defending Barrett, is he mostly wrong or not?

This is a suggestion for Andrew Joyce, who I hope will be reading this.

There is a woman, called Blythe Masters, who would make a very interesting subject for one of his articles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blythe_Masters

She was a very important figure in banking, at JPMorgan, and at the centre of various high-profile controversies – credit default swaps, commodities manipulation etc.

Now, what always struck me, was that her rise at JP Morgan was meteoric. That company would often recruit woman from her background (Oxbridge, privately educated) to their London office, but for one to rise right to the top of a US investment bank was unusual to say the least.

So, what has all of this to do with Andrew Joyce? Well, I suggest that he might be interested in her father, who had a very interesting story indeed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Levett

I have seen no mention of him in connection with her rise – his connections may explain her rise.

I don’t think so – having 2 or more children gives much better odds of having a good one.

This is not the picture of a person being forcibly restrained by the police. She is raising her head and looking towards a camera. There is very little force being applied by the policemen.

So, where do they go instead?

Yes, so something funny was going on with Scott Adams. That figures, as he was quite high profile, but didn’t really have anything to explain why.

Well, you don’t sound like someone who has ever been offered a bribe or is ever going to be.

If you were, you would know what is involved, which is that the bribe usually comes with a threat, often implied.

So,when someone offers an official money to do someone a favour, saying no isn’t an easy option.

And, once a person has accepted a small bribe, he is in no position to challenge anyone else. So, a corrupt organisation rots and ultimately fails.

There are no laws of economics, so nothing is for certain, but history can guide as that when there are motivated buyers and motivated sellers, it takes a lot to stop them from trading. We saw that in the Soviet Union, where consumers craved Western goods. With drugs, the desire to consume is so much more, that buyers and sellers will find a way. That might mean using barter, another currency, fake transactions or whatever else one might imagine. So, that is what would happen, if history is any guide.

https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2015/07/12/jews-the-ss-empire-windrush-and-the-origins-of-multicultural-britain/

@Ron Unz

Ron, this is a side issue, but I am very interested in what was going at the Wuhan Lab.

My understanding is that the US were very closely involved in the research, having trained some of the Chinese researchers in the US.

They also funded some of it, and although the amounts were only token, it suggests further cooperation and involvement.

My question is why they were doing this. One supposed reason is that the US were off-shoring banned research.

That might be part of the reason, but surely, they had dozens of other labs that they could have used.

Then, why would they want to share this research with China? I really don’t see any obvious reason, so it seems likely to me that they had some reason based on intelligence and spying.

One obvious motive would be to get close to Chinese scientists.

Another would be to establish a paper trail for viruses. For example, US researchers could direct the Chinese to develop a particular virus in Wuhan. The Chinese would sequence it and then the US researchers could prouduce the virus is secret in their own labs, there being no need for the virus ever to leave Wuhan.

So, Wuhan would give the US deniability.

I wonder what other people think

Well, what are the similarities?

1 Marxism was an ideology – a theory of everything based on class.

2 Its adherents used that ideology to achieve political ends – from revolution, overthrowing governments, undermining countries to petty objectives, such as advancing careers in universities or getting rivals fired.

3 The ideology was unfalsifiable. Of course it became discredited, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, but a true Marxist could still carry on believing in inevitable crises of capitalism.

4 Marxists had the power to make accusations against enemies, singling them out as targets for other Marxists.

5 Marxism was highly factional and with personality cults – different Marxists would claim to be the true Marxist and denounce others, in battles to achieve the status of true Marxist.

So, what then are the similarities with CRT? Well, CRT, too has an unfalsifiable theory of racism, oppression.
As for the other points – I can see plenty that is similar. No countries have been overthrown by CRT, yet, but plenty of people have lost their jobs or been cancelled.

Maybe, you agree.

Jonathan, I suspect that the reason why the UK govt is now keen to vaccinate children under 16 (as most other developed countries have been doing since June/July) is that it has now received a large delivery of vaccine from Pfizer.

My understanding is that the UK had a supply problem from June.

https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/uk-news/953170/how-pfizer-shortage-will-impact-vaccine-rollout

Yes, that is what happens.

‘Breggin makes a good case for blaming the team responsible for this predicament. He puts it right on the international partnership between US scientists and the PLA/PRC.’

I would be very surprised if the US and China were not carrying out research into such viruses in other sites in secret.

Anything discovered in the WIV would be sequenced and could be reproduced in another lab away from
inspection.

And, if that virus were ever to be released on to the world, there would be full deniability as it would have been documented as having been discovered in WIV jointly by the US and China.

You have linked to Richard Poe, who is a prize loon.

‘The speed of sound is .343 km per second or approximately 1 mile per second.’

That is 1/5 of a mile per second.

Yes, it was a limited admission and a redirection. She did seem very uncomfortable, though.

Who cares about Zoe Williams?

Well, what can I say?

The author has clearly swallowed Cumming’s story.

He is a brilliant mind who was thwarted by pygmies, who the author adds, are in the pay of the Jews.

Well, that’s quite a tale.

The actual achievements of Cummings are less impressive.

He had a role in education policy, where he made a lot of noise and, after several years, his minister Gove made some exams a bit harder and changed the grades from letters to numbers.

Then, Cummings brought us Brexit and Boris Johnson, selling them to the British public with help from the Conservative press.

So, what has the great man done recently?

Not much that I can see beyond boating to the gullible about bringing down Johnson and promising revelations that never seem to arrive.

His audience is dwindling but at least the author seems like the story.

The author is talking about stock market promoters, who call themselves economists.

The best source on Andrew Wakefield is the journalist Brian Deere.

https://briandeer.com/