The college kids thousands of dollars or pounds in debt with a gender studies degree, are the equivalent of the younger sons of Norman lords who were never going to inherit land and had nothing to do but foment rebellion and war
– Ed West
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“It is high time we stopped talking about the Chinese Government as if it were presiding over just “another way of doing things”. For all its economic progress, it is hell-bent on control, not just at home but abroad too. For decades, Hong Kong has been the exception to the rule. It is a hub that has plugged China into the world and the world into China. It was the place where Chinese intellectuals could publish books that couldn’t get through the mainland’s censors. It was the place readers went to buy books or use Facebook. It was where mainlanders went to buy formula milk that wouldn’t poison their babies when it turned out China’s most popular brand was tainted. It was the gateway through which Western capital flooded in to build factories and it is the escape hatch through which the Chinese try to get their wealth out, away from the CCP. But the Chinese Communist Party does not want its citizens to be plugged into the world. All it wants from the world is technology, money and obedience. The least we can do is refuse to grant the CCP any of them.” June 1st, 2020 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
 “Our nation and our civilization were built on production, on building. Our forefathers and foremothers built roads and trains, farms and factories, then the computer, the microchip, the smartphone, and uncounted thousands of other things that we now take for granted, that are all around us, that define our lives and provide for our well-being. There is only one way to honor their legacy and to create the future we want for our own children and grandchildren, and that’s to build.” As “manifestos” go, this is not bad at all and more sense than seems to come out of a lot of certain businessmen these days (particularly those that seem more interested in giving their wealth away, like Bill Gates, than creating it). Here is a follow-up that supports much of what this Silicon Valley rainmaker writes, with some caveats and added points. May 30th, 2020 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Please, gentle Eva, will you bless a little child? Please, mother Eva, will you look upon me as your own? Santa, santa Evita Why try to govern a country when you can become a saint? * STV’s deleted ‘Thank you, Nicola’ video Cute kid A: The children of Scotland… STV launches inquiry into ‘North Korea’ children’s video
(Want to see what these complaints are getting at? Here are a couple of examples: “North Korean children sing ode to Kim Jong Un”, and “Tearful schoolchildren salute Kim Jong-un in North Korea”.)
Who in STV decided this was a good idea? Who made this video? Who wrote the script, who hired the children, who filmed it? Who was paid to show it and who paid to have it shown? Edit: Mr Ed comments,
May 26th, 2020 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Ferguson – or Imperial – coronavirus model is a load of Hooey. But not, or not alone, for the reasons generally given that it’s a tangled mess of code that doesn’t even produce the same answer each time. Nor because its output was so useless that even the originator wouldn’t obey the implied rules from its use when seeking a shag. No, Ferguson failed because his model failed to include human beings in it. Which is really very weird indeed when attempting to model, erm, human beings. May 25th, 2020 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
Finally, in my last post I wrote of confirmation bias among journalists and bloggers. I have noticed the same thing among photographers. The camera doesn’t lie, but photographers can and often do. Their choice of lens can make the same group of people look rashly hugger mugger or responsibly social-distanced, for example. Their choice depends on how they want you to see the world – and who doesn’t want others to see the world as they do themselves? The photographer is sometimes consciously deceiving his viewer but more often is first lying to himself. Attending many photo workshops has proved to me repeatedly that photographers standing in the same location with similar equipment will produce very different images. That difference seems to depend just as much on their metaphorical point of view as their literal one. May 20th, 2020 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
As Ludwig von Mises states in his magnum opus, Human Action, the “market process is the adjustment of the individual actions of the various members of the market society to the requirements of mutual cooperation”. Thus, markets will always be imperfect, but that is precisely why markets exist in the first place! Markets never conform to the “ideal” of perfect competition, but this is completely irrelevant, since under such state of affairs, markets are unnecessary and redundant, since all resources are already perfectly allocated to their most valued uses. Market processes exist precisely because to generate the information necessary to better coordinate the plans and purposes of individuals in a peaceful and productive manner. The entrepreneurial lure for profit and the discipline of loss is what guides such imperfect processes in a tendency towards the creation of more complete information between buyers and sellers. – Rosolino Candela, from Are Markets Imperfect? Of Course, But That’s The Point! May 19th, 2020 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
Musk’s act qualified as economic civil disobedience, especially since he expressly offered himself up for arrest and punishment. His ultimate success was a testament to the power of that peaceful strategy for political change. The government probably wanted to avoid the public controversy that would result from jailing someone like Musk. May 18th, 2020 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The humanist ethic begins with the belief that humans are an essential part of nature. Humans have the right and the duty to reconstruct nature so that humans and biosphere can both survive and prosper. For humanists, the highest value is harmonious coexistence between humans and nature.” – Freeman Dyson, the great scientist and futurist who died recently. As quoted in this fine article over at National Review, by Robert Bryce. Dyson did not buy global warming alarmism, which must have given many in the government-funded science establishment the vapours, (excuse the pun). May 17th, 2020 | 39 comments - (Comments are closed)
To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker. – Frederick Douglass May 17th, 2020 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
The simplest explanation for modern academics’ hostility to 21st century capitalism’s “structures of power” is their complete exclusion from them. – T. Greer, from ‘History is written by the losers’. May 16th, 2020 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
May 15th, 2020 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
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