My stay there also gave me the opportunity of boasting that I had lunch and dinner with Charlie Chaplin.
I had met him staying with Paul-Louis Weiller at La Reine Jeanne and he had invited me to look him up if I were ever near Lausanne, so one day I did precisely that: found his name in the telephone book—in those days the concept of “ex-directory” was unknown in Switzerland—and dialed his number. Rather to my surprise, he answered the telephone himself; still more to my surprise, he remembered me and invited me over to lunch. My greatest astonishment was when, on arrival at Lausanne station, he was there in person on the platform to meet me. Nobody seemed to recognize him; he bundled me into what seemed quite an ordinary car and drove me himself to the house. With his wife Oona and several lovely daughters we had a delicious barbecue on the lawn, he personally doing most of the cooking. This was quite fascinating to watch: there, again and again, were all the little mannerisms that one knew so well from his films—the quick shrug of the shoulders, the cocking of the head to one side, the lightning smile, gone almost before it appeared. And he had a wonderful fund of stories; one that I well remember was his chance meeting with the evangelist Aimée Semple MacPherson in a Marseille hotel. Both were alone, so he invited her out to dinner; and the evening ended in his bedroom. Just as she was about to join him in the bed, she knelt down by its side and prayed for a good fifteen minutes. He did a wonderful imitation of how he reached out an arm and lethargically tousled her curly hair as she did so.
Is crossing the street not one of the few areas of human activity where we can concede there is a significant amount of agency involved? https://t.co/F6gaRJWWoU
— Thomas Chatterton Williams 🌍 🎧 (@thomaschattwill) March 26, 2021
I just saw a report that only 11.6 million people watched Biden's State of the Union address. Trumps equivalent first address drew 48 million viewers.
I have never been a fan of State of the Union addresses and usually do not watch them. But a drop from 48 million to 11.6 million is pretty alarming as an indicator of public disengagement from Establishment Politics and the mainstream media.
Hoping it not to be true, I search for the facts. I am not sure I have them but CNN is reporting that actual viewership was 26.9 million. A decline of 44%. Woof. Not as bad as first reported but still pretty bad.
The CNN does its duty as the party organ for the DNC, attempting to explain it all away. "Nothing to see here. Move on." They lead with the bad news.
Nielsen estimated that 26.9 million people watched the speech across 16 cable and broadcast networks on Wednesday night.
Former President Donald Trump's equivalent address to Congress in 2017 averaged 48 million viewers.
And his State of the Union address last year, shortly before the pandemic, averaged 37 million viewers.
And then try and downplay it.
The pandemic accelerated what has already been evident for years: Gradual erosion in live TV audiences in the United States.
Simply put, as more people spend more time watching on-demand programming, the public is less inclined to watch live events. Sagging ratings for award shows like the Emmys and the Oscars have underscored this trend.
Additionally, Nielsen's live-TV estimates don't account for all the ways an event like a presidential address is delivered all across the internet, not to mention radio and other formats.
There is some soggy center to the first argument, even less to the second and none at all to the third. They did their best. But it comes across as a reprise of the old Hide the Decline scandal when the establishment worked so hard to creatively disguise a truth blurted out accidentally by their own side in the AGW debate.
Watch your thoughts. They become words. Watch your words. They become deeds. Watch your deeds. They become habits. Watch your habits. They become character. Character is everything.
The hardest part was not letting him know that I knew this. I had to resist the temptation of reading his serve for the majority of the match and choose the moments when I was going to use that information on a given point.
It is not what you know. It is how well you use what you know.
I kind of despise the motives of many in the mainstream media, politics, government bureaucracies, entertainment, etc. who so eagerly but deceptively try to divide Americans, support racism, and declare themselves against our noble and nearly unique experiment in freedom.
But occasionally, as the battle sways back and forth between the entrenched establishment interests pushing versions of authoritarianism and communism and all the rest of us who are still committed to the ideals expressed in Constitution, there are moments of stiletto humor. Times when the truth is so obvious it can no longer be denied.
The mainstream media has been fervently fighting for the interests of their side. Through much of 2020 the New York Times among many other mainstream media outlets were pushing the story that Governor Cuomo was doing a superb job of protecting New Yorkers from Covid-19. Puff pieces galore and disgusting sycophancy everywhere.
The only thing missing was the facts and all the facts from even the earliest days told a different story. The New York response was misguided, wasteful, ineffective and ultimately profoundly damaging, making a bad situation much worse.
In fairness to Cuomo, New York was one of the first half dozen states to be badly hit. There was a lot of learning going on, especially regarding intubation and ventilators. But it was also obvious that some policies were being pursued which were going against medical advice and strong opposition, such as housing Covid-19 patients in long term care facilities with the elderly. There was much sound reason and even evidence to suggest that this would be catastrophic.
Then, to add moral deviance to unbridled and dangerous arrogance, the Cuomo administration began trying to hide the numbers which revealed how deadly their policy had been. Bloggers and right leaning media (both of them) investigated and published the news of the catastrophe and the attempted deceit. The NYT, the Washington Post, NPR, all turned a blind eye claiming that all these reports were mere claims "without evidence."
But the dam has broken, the evidence is seeping out, the truth is out there. And now those mainstream media partisans are in a bad corner.
The Daily Caller is one of the new media seeking to fill the void of truthful factual reporting left when the mainstream media shifted to their DNC partisan model. I am not sure actually that they are filling the void so much as simply attempting to supply a counterweight to the unadulterated misinformation of the former mainstream media. They do report things that the MSM won't but they also report things which seem questionable.
Regardless, they earned this one. They reported the truth about the New York Covid-19 disaster, Cuomo's role in creating the disaster, and then his attempt to cover up how bad a disaster it had been.
We at the Daily Caller would like to take this time to congratulate NYT for just now breaking the story we broke a year ago.
Petty? Perhaps. But a lag of a year for the NYT to get around to reporting the truth. I think the Daily Caller gets a pass. A little schadenfreude is occasionally earned.
My new position was that of Middle East Regional Adviser to Information Policy Department, which was a good deal less distinguished than it sounds. In essence the job was to cooperate with the Central Office of Information in the circulation of pro-British propaganda to the Arab world, by means of the press (we ran an Arabic language magazine), the radio (quite apart from the BBC Arabic Service, we distributed vast quantities of recorded tapes to radio stations all over the Middle East), and by cultivating Arab journalists in London. In this last activity I possessed one huge advantage: soon after I left Oxford my father had made me a member of Buck’s Club, which was regularly patronized at lunchtime by Harold Macmillan, then Prime Minister. Every week I would telephone his private secretary Philip de Zulueta, and ask him on what days his boss would be lunching at Buck’s; I would then invite an Arab journalist on the appropriate day, taking care to place him where he had a good view of the long central table, which members arriving on their own automatically joined. Around half-past one the Prime Minister would come shuffling in and silently take “ his place at this table, his neighbors—if they were already in conversation—hardly bothering to notice him. Suddenly my own guest would stop in mid-sentence and stare across the room. “Tell me,” he would say incredulously, “is that not your Prime Minister?” I would glance around nonchalantly. “Oh yes,” I would say, “he comes here quite often.” For any Middle Eastern Head of Government to behave in such a way—and then to be effectively ignored—was obviously unthinkable. Reactions were invariably gratifying; the best response I ever received was the question “But where are his motorcycles?”
From I didn't watch Biden's speech last night by Anne Althouse. She is making a point I think about with some frequency. In the 17-person Democratic primary race there were plenty of positions from moderate center to far left (Sanders and Warren). Democrats went for the center with Biden, pretty explicitly rejecting the far left (though Sanders has always had a small but fervid base.)
There were many positionings and messagings that Biden was the traditional moderate center everyone could trust.
Democrats ended up going with Biden despite his poor showing in the various state primaries. He was like a candidate saved because is everyone's second choice but is saved by the fact no one could agree on the many alternative first choices.
Regardless of how extensive anyone considers the various issues around the 2020 election, most surveys indicate that a solid majority consider the election at least questionable, usually even among those identify as Democrat.
All this suggests that Biden should be governing from the center and through political norms (such as avoiding an overuse of Executive Orders when proper legislation from Congress would be the norm. That clearly is not happening. It appears we have an election result, and really a governance and policy platform, not amenable to either traditional Democrats or Republicans. Our system seems to have failed to keep government policy aligned with national consensus. In different words and different emphasis, Althouse is expressing something similar.
From Althouse:
I see — reading the NYT this morning — that he made "costly proposals" that "amount to a risky gamble that a country polarized along ideological and cultural lines is ready for a more activist government." Was that something America voted for last autumn? Obviously, not. It doesn't seem fair to spring this on us now.
Invoking the legacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Mr. Biden unveiled a $1.8 trillion social spending plan to accompany previous proposals to build roads and bridges, expand other social programs and combat climate change, representing a fundamental reorientation of the role of government not seen since the days of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society and Roosevelt’s New Deal.
He should have had to run on that plan. Why did he beat Bernie? If this was to be the plan, we deserved a chance to vote for Bernie — or not. But the moderate, Biden, was pushed to the fore, pushed out in front of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who forthrightly represented this kind of government. Maybe one of them would have beaten Trump, but the Democratic Party edged them aside and gave us the seemingly innocuous Biden. It was an offer to get us back into balance, back to normal. It was a con.
Bait-and-switch is not a good basis for building a trust-relationship.
We ultimately have free speech because it is the fastest and most effective way to arrive at an understanding of ultimate realities. Precluding people from speaking freely allows ignorance, division, and fear to fester, explaining why authoritarians are so virulently opposed to free speech. If everything is divided, it is fertile ground for the authoritarian with a "well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong." (H.L. Mencken)
In Biden's address to the joint congress last night, there was a curious rhetorical passage.
BIDEN: "No amendment to the constitution is absolute. You can't yell 'fire' in a crowded theater." pic.twitter.com/JliS8DxJrb
Biden is a law school graduate. He not only ought but almost certainly does know better. "You can't yell 'fire' in a crowded theater" was never the law, it was an analogy used by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in a very bad 1919 Supreme Court decision which was later overturned in 1969.
Never the law
An analogy
In support of a decision which was overturned 52 years ago
Why is our President being so mendacious? Even for the non-lawyer, the "You can't yell 'fire' in a crowded theater" argument was widely debunked nearly 10 years ago in It’s Time to Stop Using the ‘Fire in a Crowded Theater’ Quote by Trevor Timm in the November 2, 2012 Atlantic Magazine.
The most generous explanation for the President's lie is that the "You can't yell 'fire' in a crowded theater" falsehood is that it is simply too convenient.
You see this all the time with the wonderful and useful site Quote Investigator. Readers write in trying to either understand a quote, or more frequently, to know who actually made the statement. Churchill, Twain, Mencken, some ancient Greek or Roman, Gandhi and others are frequently and lazily identified as the originator of a quotation when in fact they were not. QI finds out the truth.
QI does a wonderful job but what they frequently find is that among our more popular quotations, there is no one who originated the quote. It is a function of emergent order. Someone says something that resonates. Someone else turns the words just a little. Someone else later refines it yet further. Eventually it is honed into a well turned quote expressing a sentiment which resonates with everyone and is widely quoted. But the quote was the result of an evolutionary social process. As can be seen in today's lead QI article on the vivid quote Politician: Straddling the Fence With Both Ears To the Ground.
"You can't yell 'fire' in a crowded theater" was never the law. The law is that free speech can only be circumscribed when it "is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action." "Kill the bastard" shouted while amongst armed ANTIFA rioters violently protesting against a jury decision and directed towards a police officer surrounded by the mob would be illegal speech. Yelling 'fire' in a crowded theater is protected free speech unless it is "is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."
President Biden either does not understand the law or, and I think more likely, is a lazy thinker using the compelling imagery of a bad analogy even though the argument was never the law and was rejected by the Supreme Court as an argument more than fifty years ago. Authoritarians want to censor and they do not brook free speech.
For a national leader to indulge in lazy rhetoric on a topic about which the public is divided and passionate is no sign of leadership. It is wantonly dangerous. I'd much prefer a politician straddling the fence with both ears to the ground.
I can't help but think of the Ray Bradbury quote in the afterword to the 1979 edition of Fahrenheit 451.
There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.
Yesterday I quoted a passage from Lucretius in De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things). Always dangerous dangerous to wander in Lucretian waters, you get sucked in.
Sic rerum summa novatur
semper, et inter se mortales mutua vivunt.
augescunt aliae gentes, aliae minuuntur,
inque brevi spatio mutantur saecla animantum
et quasi cursores vitae lampada tradunt.
Thus the sum of things is ever being renewed, and mortal creatures live dependent one upon another. Some species increase, others diminish, and in a short space the generations of living creatures are changed and, like runners, pass on the torch of life.
Book II, line 75 (tr. Rouse)
One of my favorite poems is Vitai Lampada by Henry Newbolt which references that old Roman formula, "They pass on the torch of life."
Vitai Lampada
by Sir Henry Newbolt (1862-1938)
There's a breathless hush in the Close to-night --
At Antalya we turned inland towards Istanbul, and that evening found ourselves in the little town of Kütahya, celebrated then as now for its pottery. We strolled around before dinner and bought a set of dinner plates; they might do rather well, we thought, in the London house that we should have to start looking for when we returned. The only problem was that we had no money to pay for them. We therefore asked the proprietor to pack up the plates, explaining that we would go to the bank first thing in the morning, cash some traveler’s checks and be back at 9 am to collect our purchases.
We woke at first light to sounds of considerable hubbub. There was a lot of excited shouting beneath our hotel window, with martial music being played at full volume on the loudspeakers which for some reason lined the street. Mystified, we got dressed and headed off to the bank—only to find on the doorstep two soldiers with submachine guns blocking our way. Since I spoke not a word of Turkish, I had no means of discovering what all the fuss was about; but then, by an astonishing stroke of luck, two girls who were obviously employees of the bank arrived, chatting between themselves in a language that I at once recognized as Serbian. (After a recent agreement between Turkey and Yugoslavia, a considerable number of ethnic Turks from Bosnia had returned to their original homeland a year or two before.) After three years of disuse my own Serbian was rapidly rusting, but I managed to ask them what had happened. It seemed that there had been a military coup against the government; the Prime Minister, Adnan Menderes, was under arrest and was at that very moment being held in the local castle, which we could see on a hilltop only a mile or two away.
[snip]
There was still, however, the matter of those dinner plates. I explained the situation to the Bosnian girls, who rather to my surprise told the soldiers to let us into the bank and cashed my traveler’s check without hesitation. We went to the plate shop, collected our purchases, and soon afterwards were on our way. Alas, our problems were far from over. Between Kütahya and Istanbul there must have been twenty military checkpoints. Foreign diplomats were rare on the roads of central Anatolia, and by definition suspect. True, we had our laissez-passer from the Turkish Ambassador in Beirut; but he was almost certain to be a Menderes appointee, and his signature in present circumstances might well do more harm than good. I produced it anyway, and though some checkpoints were more cooperative than others—on several occasions we were held for up to an hour while the soldiery made anxious telephone calls—we reached Istanbul without serious mishap.
A very revealing tweet thread. Nicholas Christakis starts out:
I admire @joerogan. His conversational style & his reach are phenomenal. But I think his advice that young people not get vaccinated misses the mark. Young people are at low risk of death no matter what. COVID19 increases their risk by ~30%. Why not avoid this with a safe shot?
COVID19 increases their risk by ~30%. Really? That sounds dreadful but what does it really mean. What is their risk of death from Covid-19?
From WHO January 2021 -
For people younger than 70 years old, the infection fatality rate of COVID-19 across 40 locations with available data ranged from 0.00% to 0.31% (median 0.05%); the corrected values were similar." Meta study published in WHO Bulletin
Christakis is saying that risk of death from Covid-19 for those below age 70 is 0.05%. A thirty percent in risk takes you from 0.05% to 0.065%.
A 30% increase in risk sounds terrible. An increase chance of death of 0.015%? Not so much.
A keep in mind that I think Rogan specified young healthy people whereas the 0.05% is for all people below 70 regardless of health. Risk of death from Covid-19 for young healthy people is 0.01%. A thirty percent increase would lift that to 0.013%.
Nobody is wrong in this thread. I accept without investigating that Christakis is correct that no vaccination raise the risk of death by 30% is irresponsible given how low that risk already is.
To normalize this a bit, the vehicle fatality rate for driving by night is 300% greater than for driving by day. Not 30%, 300%. And night time deaths are material at 49%. People do consider of alternatives of driving by day and by night but usually there isn't much consideration, particularly for shorter journeys which are by far the majority of vehicle deaths.
Christakis is right with regard to the numbers and Rogan is right with regard to the practical implications. Too many of our mainstream media are in the mode of communication like Christakis and not enough are in the mode of communicating like Rogan.
Both are valuable insights but both need to be understood in order to have credibility.
Explanation - For most rich Americans, much of their wealth is highly contingent on the regulatory state. The regulatory state is controlled by the political state. Hence to investment in following politics.
Those ancients sure addressed a lot of modern life without knowing it. From De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) by Lucretius.
Nam veluti pueri trepidant atque omnia caecis in tenebris metuunt, sic nos in luce timemus interdum, nilo quae sunt metuenda magis quam quae pueri in tenebris pavitant finguntque futura. hunc igitur terrorem animi tenebrasque necessest non radii solis neque lucida tela diei discutiant sed naturae species ratioque.
For as children tremble and fear everything in the blind darkness, so we in the light sometimes fear what is no more to be feared than the things that children in the dark hold in terror and imagine will come true. This terror, therefore, and darkness of mind must be dispelled not by the rays of the sun and glittering shafts of daylight, but by the aspect and law of nature.
Book II, lines 55–61 (tr. Rouse)
Strangely apt for someone writing 2,100 years ago. If this is not an excellent description of the fear mongering of our mainstream media and the panic porn of our health institutions, I don't know what is.
And the solution? The aspect and law of nature (empiricism, logic, reason). In other words, follow the science. The fear mongerers and panic porn interests wave their hands and shout about "Follow the Science" but these are just magical incantations for them. They would not know science if you knocked them up-side the head with a twelve page report on a study conducted on 23 non-randomly selected participants, with no control group and no pre-registration of methodology. That is what passes for science with them because it throws them an occasional crumb to bolster their theology.
A crumb which dissolves away at the first splash of empiricism, logic, and reason.
I had never been to Iran either, and decided that the return journey would give me a splendid opportunity to fulfill a long-held ambition by stopping off for twenty-four hours and for a quick trip to Isfahan. Alas, when I returned to Tehran a week later I found that the local airline was on strike. It was a bitter blow; but as I was retiring disconsolately to bed in the hotel my telephone rang. It was the head—I think he may have been the owner—of the airline, whom I had met at dinner on our outward journey. “You told me,” he said, “that you had made plans to go to Isfahan tomorrow. I simply can’t allow this ridiculous strike to affect them. Be at the airport at eight o’clock tomorrow morning. Heaven knows what it’ll be, but we’ll fix up something.”
I of course had even less of an idea of what he would arrange. A mail plane, perhaps, or even an army one; but certainly not what I found waiting for me—a minuscule two-seater, to be piloted by my benefactor’s sixteen-year-old grandson. Never having flown in anything other than a large airliner, I felt panic welling up inside me; but in the circumstances there was obviously nothing to be done. I clambered in behind one of the twin joysticks—taking great care not to touch it—and looked around as a tousled and rather spotty youth got in beside me. There were, I distinctly remember, no seat belts. I also remember that if I looked directly downwards I could see right through the ill-fitting floorboards to the concrete runway below.
Five minutes later we were airborne and climbing steadily. The altimeter was immediately in front of me, indicating 7,000 feet, 8,000, 9,000. . . . There was no pressurization and very little heating. At 10,000 I said to the boy “Do we have to go very much higher?” He spoke, I have to admit, quite good English. “Well,” he said, “the mountains are about 12,000 feet.” I shut up, till half an hour later a line of huge and extremely jagged snowcapped peaks loomed up ahead. By this time the altimeter showed 11,500 and I changed my tune. “Shouldn’t we be going a little higher?” I asked. “The plane won’t do it,” he replied, “but don’t worry, we can easily fly between them.”
Somehow we did, and reached Isfahan physically—though not in my case emotionally—intact. The city when I finally saw it came up to my highest expectations, but I found it hard to give proper attention to the monuments; my thoughts were only of the return journey, which would, I knew, take place entirely in the dark. This time it was the boy who, soon after we had taken off, broke the silence.
“It’s funny,” he said, “Isfahan seems to have run out of fuel. I couldn’t find any anywhere.”
“You mean,” I said, “that we haven’t got enough to get back?”
“Oh no,” he said—I thought rather doubtfully. “We should be able to manage all right.”
I looked at the fuel gauge, which showed almost exactly half full; it was obviously going to be a close thing. A few controls away along the all-black instrument panel, I noticed a single scarlet knob, above which were written the words mixture: pull for weak, push for rich. To my horror, he pulled it out, at which the engine coughed and spluttered until he pushed it most of the way back in again—a process which continued regularly every few minutes until we finally bumped down in Tehran. I grasped the lad warmly by the hand and congratulated him on his skill. He was obviously pleased. “Do you know,” he said, “I’ve never flown as far as that before.”
Thomas Sowell is a gifted non-fiction author with a wonderful breadth of knowledge to make striking juxtapositions of data. As in the instance from Conquests and Cultures by Thomas Sowell.
The dire poverty of the early nineteenth century Irish may be indicated by their average life expectancy of 19 years—compared to 36 years for contemporary American slaves—and the fact that slaves in the United States typically lived in houses a little larger than the unventilated huts of the Irish and slept on mattresses, while the Irish slept in piles of straw. Slaves also ate a wider variety of foods, including low grades of meat, while an Irishman, subsisting on potatoes and occasionally fish, might not see meat from one year to the next. Bad as these "normal" conditions were among the Irish masses in the early nineteenth century, worse conditions followed in the 1840s, when potato blight destroyed the crop that provided their basic nutrition.
Sowell is not arguing against the moral outrage warranted by chattel slavery, merely emphasizing that there are many forms of lost freedom and there is always a material context to be considered. The moral case against chattel slavery is as robust as ever. But 19 year life expectancies for Irish and 36 years for American slaves in the 1840s? That is astonishing.
Somehow turning this Irish peasant/Chattel slave anomaly over in my mind eventually led to a question in my mind. American democracy has never, by design, been pure. The Founders were extremely attuned towards the history of direct democracy becoming majoritarian mobs.
Beyond the Federal system and the three part divided government serving as checks and balances, there were all sorts of restrictions on who could vote from the very beginning. Even though those restrictions were less onerous than virtually every other nation in the world at the time, it still shocks the modern conscience. Restrictions such as being literate, or owning land, or paying taxes, etc.
My question was, by what date could the majority of White Americans vote? Given that women could not vote until the 19th Amendment which was only passed in 1920, it seems likely that 1920 was the earliest data by which a majority of whites were enfranchised.
Women were allowed to vote in several states during the Revolutionary era but by 1807, no state allowed women to vote. In the 1870s some thinly populated western states began to extend suffrage to all women but in terms of all whites, that was a tiny number.
In 1776, Catholics, Quakers and Jews were not allowed to vote. Up until 1965 poll tax tests were still used to deny the vote. In 1966 The Supreme Court handed down a ruling outlawing the use of the poll-tax as a condition for voting.
My guess is that, even with some states still having property and tax restrictions, 1920 was the first election in which voting rights were extended to the majority of white Americans.
For African-Americans it came slightly later. While they had the right to vote by 1870, it still excluded women. When did the majority of African-American have the right to vote? Again, in 1920 with the 19th Amendment.
For blacks, the majority might not have been reached until 1966 with the Supreme Court's rejection of limits such as poll taxes became the law of the land.
For all of American history from 1607 up until 1920, the majority of Americans were unable to vote by law. By 1966 most of the state restrictions (land ownership, literacy, poll tax, etc.) were also illegal.
In a narrow window of time, 1920-1966 all Americans of all races were legally entitled to vote. Before 1920, by law there was no racial group in which the majority of adults were allowed to vote.
This is no argument against the excess burdens imposed on African-Americans between 1870 and 1966.
All it is is a recognition that we rarely take the reality of the past into account. It is nearly as shocking to me that the majority of whites were not allowed to vote until 1920 as it is that the Irish had a life expectancy nearly half that of American slaves in the 1840s.
A study published in @NatureEcoEvo finds no evidence of interbreeding between modern humans and the ancient humans known from fossil records in Island Southeast Asia, but does report further DNA evidence of our mysterious ancient cousins, the Denisovans. https://t.co/z5YWDbczsHpic.twitter.com/7aPfgjX70J
Lowry is reading the Washington Postdatabase of police involved killings which WP created after the Ferguson, MO shooting of Michael Brown in 2014. It was at that time that journalists discovered there were some significant gaps in national crime reporting and they filled it by creating this WP database that registers every known police involved killing in each year. It has been an invaluable resource even though it has undermined the narrative the Washington Post wishes to be true.
Every time a Washington Post editorial makes some claim of systemic racism in police killings, you can go straight to the database only to discover that the claim is not true. Kind of an ironic dynamic that the same paper both makes spurious claims and publishes the data which debunks those spurious claim.
Circa 2016 or 2017, I did just as Lowry has done and looked at all the killings in a year. Yes, racial groups are killed in proportion to which they attack the police. There is no apparent racism. Outcomes are driven by suspect's behaviors and choices, regardless of race. Cases of inappropriate police respionse exist, but they are mercifully rare.
On April 18, two remarkably similar incidents played out in different parts of the country.
In Burnsville, Minn., police got a report that a man, 30-year-old Bradley Olsen, had been involved in a carjacking. They pursued the vehicle Olsen was driving, he fired at them, and they returned fire, hitting and killing him.
In Fort Worth on the same day, police also responded to reports of a man trying to steal cars. The armed man fled on foot, and an officer told him to drop his weapon. As the officer pursued, 31-year-old Ryan Williams pointed his gun at the cop and fired a shot. The officer returned fire and killed him.
The difference between these two incidents was that Bradley Olsen was white, and Ryan Williams was black. Otherwise, the cases are largely indistinguishable — how they started, how they played out, and, emphatically, how they ended.
This is the overall sense that one gets from the Washington Post’s famous database of police-involved shootings. Reading through it, there is no stark racial difference that jumps out, rather a dreary sameness. The fact patterns that get people shot by the cops, whether they are white, black, or Hispanic, are largely the same.
There are the most extreme cases, when suspects engage in gun battles with cops. But pointing a gun, including a fake gun, at an officer also is likely to end badly. So is approaching a cop with a knife or even a metal pipe and refusing, despite repeated orders, to put it down. Resisting arrest is a common theme and, quite often, the people killed by the police were obviously mentally disturbed.
The Washington Post database suggests we have a violence problem in America and certainly a mental-health problem, but not — at least not on the face of it — a race problem.
Lowry then looks at all the individual cases of the past month, seeking some pattern of race. There isn't any. What he does find is:
One of the starkest disparities in police-involved shootings concerns how much attention is devoted to cases depending on the race of the person shot. Of course, police sometimes get it wrong in how they handle cases involving white people, too, but there is no activist and media apparatus devoted to finding and blowing up such cases, in part because it would run counter to the narrative of systemically racist police preying on black people.
Police officers are not shooting people by race but by behaviors and actions but the media is reporting by race and creating a lie by omitting the whole data set and focus on rare outliers.
What are the common elements behind the 1,000 of police involved killings per year?
Do not resist arrest.
Do not point guns at police.
If you encounter the police, distance yourself from any replica guns near you.
Do not approach police with any other weapon (knife, pipe, baseball bat, etc.),
Obey lawful orders.
If you are mentally ill, prepare in advance to have a way to communicate that in situation beyond your control.
The latter is the most tragic, the least useful advice, and the least amenable to policy solution. Mentally disturbed people acting out are a danger to themselves, the public and to the police but the visible distinction between someone behaving as a result of mental illness versus either drug fueled behavior or simple aggressive behavior is vastly difficult to distinguish, especially under split second decision-making cases, which the majority of these are.
All of which invokes the obligatory Chris Rock PSA - How not to get your ass kicked by the police! It is his list of eight non-data based but eminently practical vernacular (language alert) recommendations on behaving with the police.
"After controlling for nationality, age, education level, relationship status, and sexual orientation, men with facial hair scored significantly higher on hostile sexism than clean shaven men" https://t.co/WBQIxQ47RDpic.twitter.com/bKc5eql8e2
Another regular guest, both at Ain Anoub and in Beirut, was Freya Stark. Whenever she came we would give a little dinner party for her. People would arrive in a state of wild excitement at the thought of meeting this most intrepid of travelers, winner of the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society while still in her twenties, who had crossed vast tracts of unknown territory in the Middle East and Central Asia, mapping much of it for the first time. They would expect a tall, spare, weather-beaten woman, her hands heavily calloused after years of pitching tents and tightening the girths of camels, and would be gratifyingly astonished to see this short, dumpy figure with an extraordinary coiffure like a whirlpool, dressed stylishly if a shade overimaginatively and dripping with jewelry, her little stubby fingers heavy with huge rings. Knowing her as I did, I doubt whether she had ever pitched a tent or harnessed a camel in her life. As her books make clear, she always traveled en princesse, attended by a small regiment of guides and dragomen. When they arrived at a suitable camping site she would immediately retire to a comfortable spot nearby and start writing her diary or one of her exquisite letters, returning only when her tent was ready, her dinner awaiting her, her bed prepared.
Thinking in terms of left or right, conservative or liberal, is not an accurate way to understand the current cultural moment. A far more accurate lens is cognitive liberty: those who demand you think a certain way are on one side while those who do not are on the other.
80,000 fake pitch emails were sent to 28,000 venture capitalists and business angels. Female entrepreneurs received an 8% higher rate of interested replies than men pitching identical projects. https://t.co/qGXPATJpiA
The ingrained tradition of all Beirutis, of whatever class or station in life, was to take to the hills in the summer to escape the heat. “Estivating,” it was called—as opposed to hibernating. Smart Lebanese would express horror if you confessed—as we had happily done in 1957 and 1958—that you were remaining in town. “Comment?” they would cry aghast, “Comment, vous n’estivez pas à la montagne?”38 In the summer of 1959, however, we followed their example. The American University of Beirut was lucky enough to have as its Professor of English Literature a memorably wonderful Englishman called Christopher Scaife, who had spent most of his life in the Arab world, first in Egypt and more recently in Lebanon. Christopher had a house—known, after a former English owner, as Dar Worsley—near a village called Ain Anoub; he was returning to England for a couple of months and asked us to look after it for him. Anne was once again expecting, and was keen on having as quiet a life as possible, so we agreed with delight.
It was a sort of idyll: a rambling old building, dating probably from the middle of the nineteenth century, set on a wooded hillside at some 1,500 feet, with a breathtaking view over the sea. Life there was simple in the extreme—no electricity, only rudimentary running water, hard iron bedsteads, a single loo in the garden—but it was cool and beautiful, and—particularly after the previous summer—magically peaceful. There was a resident staff of two, who brought in wonderful hissing oil lamps as the light began to fail, and—best of all—Christopher’s superb library. It filled two whole rooms, the books stacked in dozens of freestanding metal bookcases. All English literature was there, ancient and modern.
I would drive down into the city at six in the morning, have a quick swim and be at the office at seven. We would then work uninterruptedly till two, when the Embassy closed for the day. Back up the mountain, and after a late lunch followed by a short siesta we would be ready for whatever Beirut social life had in store for us. Better still were the evenings where we could stay at home, sitting on the terrace in the warm, still night, reading.
A #Roman tile from Norton (Britain), with the clear impression of a child's footprint - from the size, about a 3 year old. Footprints on Roman tiles, whether animal or human, never cease to fascinate... #RomanArchaeology#RomanBritain
"Nondominant boys are rarely excluded from play but are made to feel the inferiority of their status positions in no uncertain terms. And since hierarchies fluctuate, every boy gets his chance to be victimized and must learn to take it." https://t.co/hjQVHMmPxfpic.twitter.com/9pZLJlFG7L
Daily TSA cleared U.S. air travelers haven't been under one million in two weeks, and surged to almost 1.5m passengers yesterday. We're at year-ago levels. Americans are on the move. pic.twitter.com/egKUiFTYsY
Our new boss, Sir Moore Crosthwaite, was a joy. A shamelessly camp bachelor, he was formidably intelligent, with exquisite French and a wicked sense of humor. The Lebanese, though finding his name impossible to pronounce, immediately took him to their hearts, particularly after the first large and lavish dinner party he attended. It was in a huge marble palace in the quartier Sursock—the smartest district in Beirut—and its principal reception room was furnished at its center with a small ornamental pool, of which the surface was covered in rose petals. As Moore left the buffet table, carrying in each hand a plate piled high with Arabic delicacies, he walked straight in. A moment later there he was in his dinner jacket, sitting on the edge of the pool with his feet in the water, the two plates still in his hands, not one crumb having fallen off either of them to the floor. The company was spellbound. “Ah, vous avez vu Sir Moore, comme il a gardé son sang-froid et n’a rien laissé tomber? Mais vraiment, quel style. . . .”
("Did you see Sir Moore, how he kept his sang-froid and didn’t drop anything? There’s style for you. . . .")
"The more morally committed a ruling elite is, the more oppressive they are likely to be. Communists were oppressive because they wanted to remake society according to their ideals, whereas the kings and queens of old mainly just wanted to live in luxury" https://t.co/hky2RmbD7Dpic.twitter.com/j65IquiD6j
Hiding the fact that there was hardly any evidence supporting the charges against Derek Chauvin.
Hiding the fact that George Floyd was already in mortal distress at the beginning of the encounter owing to overdoses of several drugs.
Adulation over Governor Cuomo's policies in New York despite the early and commanding evidence that the state had one of the highest death rates per million in the country.
The FBI converting the 2017 assassination attempt by a Democrat against the Republican Congressional leadership to a "suicide by cop" attempt. It was not so characterized at the time. Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence labeled this attack as a domestic violent extremism event. Claimed in November 16, 2017. The FBI continues to characterize this as "suicide by cop" rather than a clear instance of domestic violent terrorism. An Outrage from the FBI.
US investigators corroborate some aspects of the Russia dossier. This was claimed by CNN despite the CIA and FBI having already dismissed the dossier as a compilation of rumors and unsubstantiated allegations. (February 10, 2017)
From The voter suppression lie by Ilya Shapiro. Shapiro is a mainstream legal scholar somewhat on the libertarian scheme of things.
The long piece is a comprehensive and deeply empirical debunking of the lies advanced by the Democratic Party and the mainstream media about Georgia SB 202 which improved both security and access of voting in Georgia after the lessons learned of the Covid-19 disruptions of 2020. It is astonishing how blatant lies, immediately verifiable with easily accessed public information, have been advanced by the DNC and the MSM as if people were unable and uninterested in checking on the truth.
All the details are in Shapiro's piece. It is well worth a read to get a sense of the magnitude of raw political/ideological propaganda is now being produced by traditional media sources to explicitly shape public opinion for the benefit of one party.
It is also alarming to see how major corporations are not just going along with the lie but are joining in to exact punishments against those being lied about. Shapiro is particularly effective at demonstrating that the new Georgia law is both more open to voting and better at securing the integrity of elections than the laws of most Democratic states. Indeed, the more Democrat dominated the state, the more restrictive are their voting laws.
Shapiro also points out the ultimate inconvenient fact. Georgia is one of only two states where black registration is higher than white registration rates. So much for Jim Crow versus Jim Eagle.
The shock goes beyond the blatant and destructive lying. For the President to simply lie blatantly, obviously, and repeatedly calls in to question every statement that the leader of our nation makes. The willingness to tell straight lies with no concern is deeply undermining of our trust-based system of governance.
The deep moral and epistemic corruption being paraded by Democratic leadership and the mainstream media is captured in this excerpt but the whole article is well worth reading.
Attempts by progressive groups and Democratic politicians to tie SB 202 to the era of segregation and systemic racial disenfranchisement are thus remarkably dishonest. Even the bizarre attack on the provision purportedly limiting the distribution of water to voters waiting in line is all wet. Many states have similar anti-electioneering (or anti-vote-buying) rules, which, as colorfully detailed by Dan McLaughlin in National Review, make it illegal to send “people in National Rifle Association t-shirts and MAGA hats to hand out free Koch-brothers-financed, Federalist Society-branded pizza to voters.” To again pick on the Empire State, New York explicitly prohibits giving voters “meat, drink, tobacco, refreshment or provision” unless the sustenance is worth less than a dollar and the person providing it isn’t identified. To be perfectly clear, under the new Georgia law, poll workers can still provide water to voters, and anyone can donate food and drink for election workers to set out for those waiting in line.
As for voter ID, SB 202 simply adds a requirement that voters provide the number of their driver’s license or (free) state identification card to apply for a ballot, the same as California, New Jersey, and Virginia, and one of those (or the last four digits of a Social Security number) when returning it. Surely, applying a numerical voter-verification requirement to absentee or mailed ballots is better than the inexact science (to say the least) of signature-matching. Colorado, now a solidly blue state that votes entirely by mail, rejected 29,000 ballots last fall (about 1 in 112) because the mailed signatures didn’t match those on file. That doesn’t count the 11,000 who were allowed to “cure” the issue by texting in a picture of a — gasp — photo ID. Illustrating the point further, the Tampa Bay Times just came out with an amusing article about how Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s signature has changed over the years, apparently leading to his ballot being tossed in a 2016 primary.
Voter ID more generally is hugely popular, including among Democrats ( 56% in a recent Associated Press poll) and African Americans ( 69% in a recent Rasmussen poll), despite in-person voter fraud being exceedingly rare. And majorities of all racial groups — 64% of whites, 59% of blacks, and 58% of other minorities — reject the claim that voter ID laws discriminate against certain voters. Indeed, many democratic countries require voter ID of some form, including Canada, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, and Sweden. As do most states with professional baseball teams, not to mention airlines and many of the other corporations now virtue-signaling about Georgia.
To top it off, the bipartisan 2005 Commission on Federal Election Reform, led by Jimmy Carter and James Baker, recommended voter ID as one of many common-sense reforms to promote election integrity. As the Supreme Court explained in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board (2008), a 6-3 decision written by the liberal Justice John Paul Stevens, such requirements are constitutional so long as the state doesn’t unduly burden the ability to get an ID. And anyway, a recent National Bureau of Economic Research study found that these provisions have “no negative effect on registration or turnout,” either overall or for any race, gender, or age group.
Fascinating research on the genetic underpinnings of psychiatric disorders: The same genes that predispose people to one disorder also predispose them to others (left), and certain genes increase the risk of all the major psychiatric disorders (right). https://t.co/s14BF0cY6Tpic.twitter.com/0Q0CZgASCL
The incident was over, apart from one thing: I had somehow to get in touch with my mother before she read of the incident—its gravity almost certainly grossly exaggerated—in the papers. She was, I knew, in Athens, and at nine o’clock that morning I called the Hotel Grande Bretagne. International telephoning half a century ago was not what it is today; it took me ages to get through at all, and when I did the line was atrocious. As it happened, however, she was in the entrance hall, a few yards from the telephone operator. When she came on the line I—terrified lest we should be cut off—immediately yelled: “Don’t worry, I’m all right!” but she couldn’t hear. I repeated, still louder. “What?” she screamed back. Then I made my big mistake. “I’ve been shot,” I bellowed, “but I’m . . .” That was the only bit she heard. “You’ve “been shot?” And then to the telephonist at the hotel: “Mademoiselle, mademoiselle, aidez-moi! Mon fils a été fusillé!” The line went dead. A telegram had to do the rest.
A family man, a management consultant, a book seller and an avid reader. Committed to helping children become avid readers in turn. The great chain of reading always needs renewing.
Posts
