Here is a rant about how “current day” ideas injected anachronistically into science fiction spoils things a little. He is certainly very animated, but he does not quite hit the nail on the head. I replied: Separate pronouns, body type and voice options are pretty normal in RPGs … | Continue reading
“At least a few people seem finally to be catching on that the basic idea behind “homelessness” advocacy is to exploit an issue that brings forth great human empathy to generate vast taxpayer funds and then to not solve the problem. The spending continues and increases without li … | Continue reading
…”once again the reintroduction of National Service is being mooted by think tanks, this time as a thinly veiled mechanism for enslaving the young. Leave aside the point that, far from bolstering conservative values, the diversity commissars of the Civil Service would turn it int … | Continue reading
Prior to this, in November 2018, academics at Queen Mary University of London were due to publish a study in the Lancet that found schemes like ULEZ make no difference to children’s health. It took the LEZ (Low Emission Zone), the precursor policy to ULEZ, introduced in 2008, whi … | Continue reading
I had never heard of Noam Dworman before today. Apparently he is the owner of a comedy venue in New York and he does podcasts. I had vaguely heard of the Washington Post columnist Philip Bump, and I had certainly heard of the Washington Post. Woodward. Bernstein. Watergate. Like … | Continue reading
Here are three articles I saw over the last couple of days, one about Canada, one about the UK, and one about Ireland. Jordan Peterson writing in the Telegraph: As a professional, practicing clinical psychologist, I never thought I would fall foul of Canada’s increasingly censori … | Continue reading
I’m sure that vaccination might be the right thing for some – assuming that we are talking about an effective vaccine that doesn’t do more harm than good. Oh, right… As you were. As they admit, it isn’t something we should be concerned about, URTIs happen every winter and every w … | Continue reading
Katie Morley is the Telegraph’s “Consumer Champion”. People who feel they have been mistreated by companies write to her and she puts their tales of woe in the paper and threatens the company with even more bad publicity if they won’t put things right. Her articles usually end wi … | Continue reading
“It is likely that the central bank will assist/require the banks to provide the same interest rates and terms on replacement Scottish pound mortgages and loans as you had on your old sterling ones.” – Dr Tim Rideout, from an article in the National with the title “How a Scottish … | Continue reading
“We often read critics of either ideological stripe bemoan the lack of originality in our art, our music, and most certainly, our movies. Old franchises suffer from Woke narratives smuggled into stories that should never have been revived. Nostalgia is the only thing that motivat … | Continue reading
Tory councillor arrested for ‘hate crime’ after sharing video criticising police A Conservative councillor was arrested for an alleged hate crime after re-tweeting a video criticising how the police treated a Christian street preacher. Cllr Anthony Stevens, 50, from Wellingboroug … | Continue reading
Nadine Dorries is right in regard to Rishi Sunak: he is an unelected nonentity who is leading his government to annihilation at the next election. She is wrong about almost everything else. She is behind the disastrous Online Harms Bill, and she seems to have a strange crush on B … | Continue reading
Shocking details of corruption and suppression in the world of peer-reviewed climate science have come to light with a recent leak of emails. They show how a determined group of activist scientists and journalists combined to secure the retraction of a paper that said a climate e … | Continue reading
The Register’s Rupert Goodwins is right to describe the Bill as “stupid” but, I regret to say, probably mistaken in describing it as “dead”. It has long since passed the Commons. Its progress through the Lords is almost complete. But a few more sharp thrusts like this one might y … | Continue reading
…“some stories stand out. The one that confuses me is the call for Britain to trial some form of ‘universal basic income.’ What exactly do people think we’ve been doing for the past two years?” – Sam Ashworth Hayes, in the Daily Telegraph (£). | Continue reading
From the Wikipedia entry for Lin Biao: Lin became instrumental in creating the foundations for Mao Zedong’s cult of personality in the early 1960s, and was rewarded for his service in the Cultural Revolution by being named Mao’s designated successor as the sole Vice Chairman of t … | Continue reading
“Horses sweat, men perspire, ladies glow.” To the Guardian’s Steven Morris, responding to a government consultation is another of those famous irregular verbs that changes its form according to who does it. UK gun lobby accused of helping to ‘skew’ consultation on tightening laws … | Continue reading
“What strikes you when reading about any number of NHS scandals since then isn’t so much the systemic failures, it’s the instances of individual cruelty to patients. Bereaved parents repeatedly told the Ockenden report about a lack of compassion from staff and some even said they … | Continue reading
It’s always a fun rhetorical trick. There are nutters out there, yes. So, I’m going to claim that anyone who disagrees with me is one of those nutters. QED, I’m right. Thus neatly avoiding the rational opponents of my beliefs. – Tim Worstall | Continue reading
Putin’s objectives are not an enigma, a mystery, or a riddle. As McKew emphasizes, they have been spelled out again and again in speeches, books, editorial, official documents, journal articles, conferences, interviews, and even in fiction. They have also been written in blood. [ … | Continue reading
Well worth watching… | Continue reading
The greatest trick technocracy ever pulled was convincing the world that it is associated with competence. Technocracy presents itself as government by people who know what they are doing – the ‘adults in the room’, the ‘wise minority in the saddle’ guiding the herd, and so on. I … | Continue reading
The crux of the objection was that I considered the actions of West Yorkshire Police to be akin to an organised crime gang engaged in a kidnap. It’s a strong allegation, which demands some justification, so here goes. Kidnap is a common law offence, made up of four distinct eleme … | Continue reading
But now, Facebook is censoring accurate information about the relationship between industrial wind energy development and the increase in whale deaths off the East Coast. Yesterday, Facebook and Instagram censored my post linking whale deaths to wind energy off the East Coast of … | Continue reading
Since Day One of Russia’s invasion, Ukraine and others have been demanding F-16s. Rare is the day that Garry Kasparov does not take to Twitter to condemn Joe Biden for withholding these supposedly war-winning weapons. But are they potential war winners? Many years ago I asked a m … | Continue reading
We are told climate change is a crisis, and that there is an “overwhelming scientific consensus.” “It’s a manufactured consensus,” says climate scientist Judith Curry in my new video. She says scientists have an incentive to exaggerate risk to pursue “fame and fortune.” She knows … | Continue reading
West Yorkshire Police must now justify the officers’ actions in terms of lawful arrest and proportional force. Failure to do so would significantly undermine public trust, especially among people with autism and other disabilities. – Robert Jessel Unless there is far more to this … | Continue reading
It was managerialism that emerged as the true winner of the 20th century’s ideological battles. As Orwell prophesied in 1945: “Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralised society which will be neither ca … | Continue reading
Sorry for the disturbance in the force, the mystic code gods are working out how to unfuck the blog That’ll teach me to press the “update” button | Continue reading
Highly recommended… | Continue reading
“Arms contractors get lumped in with tobacco, oil, alcohol and other so-called `sin stocks’ that are regarded as a threat to society. Yet, Ukraine’s predicament has shown that the biggest threat to Western freedom is Putin himslef and without the West’s support for Kyiv, Russia m … | Continue reading
Let’s start with the fact that empires were not invented by the modern European nations whose advanced ships and guns were more effective in maintaining them than forced marches and pikes. Stronger nations have colonised weaker ones since the beginning of recorded history; indeed … | Continue reading
Who actually has the power in a capitalist and free market economy? Quite clearly it’s us as consumers. Even something – as here – as trivial as an ad for a beer can lead the capitalists, the producers, losing substantial amounts of money. Billions off the market capitalisation i … | Continue reading
“Donald Trump indictment: Why these charges are most serious ones yet”, writes Sarah Smith, the BBC’s North America editor. How will these people react when they hear detailed evidence that Donald Trump knew there was no evidence of electoral fraud? That he was told again and aga … | Continue reading
The good folk at The Cobden Centre have put together a very good documentary to explain how the fiat money system works, and has some suggestions as to what to do about it. At the instigation of the Sage of Kettering, (full disclosure, his cousin made it), here it is. I have watc … | Continue reading
A scrimmage in a Border Station — A canter down some dark defile —Two thousand pounds of education Drops to a ten-rupee jezail —The Crammer’s boast, the Squadron’s pride,Shot like a rabbit in a ride! I thought of Kipling’s poem Arithmetic on the Frontier when I saw this picture: … | Continue reading
A FEW months ago I wrote here about how William Hague had become a Davos poster boy. I explained how influence and groupthink could turn a libertarian Thatcherite into a globalist, authoritarian technocrat. Shortly afterwards, Hague completed one of the most astonishing U-turns i … | Continue reading
There are many cases of fact-checkers spreading disinformation that then results in censorship. Facebook censored stories claiming Covid-19 might have come from a lab. Last week, Public documented the role played by Anthony Fauci in creating junk science to create a fake debunkin … | Continue reading
“Really, think about this: A 4.6 billion-year-old planet with an 8000-mile diameter, with a molten core (heat, etc.), with an atmosphere that is only 50 miles/240,000ft thick (being rather generous), that orbits a star only 93 million miles away with 330,000 times the earth’s mas … | Continue reading
We say “freedom of speech.” That’s not really what it is. It’s freedom of thought. People who can’t say openly what they think for too long are forced into a shadow world. Either they give up the right to have their own view of the world and accept into what society or the govern … | Continue reading
“One of the few sensible things Noam Chomsky ever said was that if you want to understand the world, read the New York Times backwards; that is, start at the end of the story and read up.” Steven F Hayward, making this comment in a long and damning critique of “climate crisis” vi … | Continue reading
The Ukrainian search for an inspiring and usable past—a search for brave historical warriors whose legacy might be appropriated for the sake of inspiring the heroic warriors of the present—is to be respected, even as some of the figures who have been lionized are not always figur … | Continue reading
A very interesting chat about the rapid development of military AI… | Continue reading
Anyone who gloated about the “de-banking” of Nigel Farage over his account will now realise, or they should have anyway, that the sword is double-edged: Monzo initially refused to tell Ms Miller why her “True and Fair” party account would be closed in September. After the BBC con … | Continue reading
A few days ago, Patrick Crozier of this parish wrote about the decision by Coutts, a UK bank that is part of NatWest Group, to end an account of former UKIP leader Nigel Farage. At the time, Farage speculated he may have been targeted for cancellation of this account (he was offe … | Continue reading
It wasn’t farmers and factory workers who came up with the idiotic COVID responses — nor was it they who originated the more or less criminal idea of conducting “gain of function” research on making dangerous viruses more dangerous. It wasn’t shopkeepers and bus drivers who thoug … | Continue reading
Two unanticipated events in 2016 completely shocked our ruling class: the election of Trump in the U.S. and the Brexit vote in the U.K. Our elites did not respond by examining the disconnect between their core assumptions and the will of the people. Instead they decided that, sur … | Continue reading
“Today’s DEI and ESG grievance industries are blowin’ in the wind. Three steps to redemption: Forget merit and striving for the highest level. Push equity over excellence. Feel virtuous. There are uproars because we don’t have enough female crash-test dummies—or paper straws, tri … | Continue reading