History

Wow – UK coal use has fallen to the lowest level in 250 years

Amazingly, the 8m tonnes used in 2019 was similar to levels last seen in 1769

By wild coincidence, 1769 is the year James Watt got the first patent for his steam engine pic.twitter.com/zu9xLSS6Vp

— Simon Evans (@DrSimEvans) August 3, 2020

History

The only military coup that ever took place in Australia was in 1808 over a rum dispute. pic.twitter.com/r6Xd8icJ5A

— Weird History (@weird_hist) August 3, 2020

The Road to Grassington, 1971 by Richard Eurich

The Road to Grassington, 1971 by Richard Eurich

Click to enlarge.

An insight

Freedom of association implies freedom of exclusion. For each person with whom one chooses to associate, they choose to exclude hundreds, thousands, even millions of others. We’re quite happy with the association, but we’ve become squeamish about the exclusion.

— Bo Winegard (@EPoe187) August 2, 2020

If you don't know the facts, rely on personal prejudice and imagination

 The Old Grey Lady is neighing again.  Which is a more polite way of saying, they are once more barking at the moon.  

In a long form creative writing assignment similar to the 1619 project and in contrast to actually investing in real reporting, Helene Cooper has managed to produce this threadbare, omission committing, context ignoring and reality denying pseudo babble.  

I love the ratioing the Times is receiving in their tweet and the comments in the thread are gold.

Proud and fierce in their identity, the Marines have a singular race problem that critics say is rooted in decades of resistance to change. A handful of white men rule over 185,000 white, African-American, Hispanic and Asian men and women. https://t.co/C3YvLQMr41

— NYT Politics (@nytpolitics) September 1, 2020

Click for the thread.

At the time of posting, there are about 50 hearts and 1,100 comments.  Not the mother of all ratios, but certainly a daughter.

As I posted earlier, one of Thomas Sowell's three questions for refuting social justice claptrap is to ask "Compared to what?"

Helene Cooper, being a journalist and therefore constitutionally incapable of either factual reporting or numeracy, does not answer the question.  She can't even do percentages.  She reports:

Out of 82 Marine generals overall today, there are six African-American brigadier generals and one African-American major general.

Doing the math, 7/82 is 8.5% of all Marine Generals are African-American.

Compared to what other professions with necessarily stringent standards?  

8% of all white collar professionals at any level are African-American. 

6% of surgeons are African American.

6% of university professors.

5% of all medical doctors. 

3% of all engineers.

3% of airline pilots. 

2% of law partners.

0.3% of accounting partners.

OK.  Rather than being a racist institution, it appears, consistent with its reputation for color blindness, that the Marines are, when compared to competitive professions where standards are high and failure deeply consequential, at least 35% more successful at advancing African-American leaders. 

What about Helene Coopers own field of journalism where the standards are notoriously low and the consequences of failure tends to be more failure?

Journalism - Only about 6% of all journalists are African American.  Among leadership, it is less than 4%. 

Cooper has written a long form article critical of the Marines, making claims of racism with very little evidence and without ever mentioning that the Marines do a dramatically better job of racial representation than her own profession or any other high-standards profession.  In fact, the Marines are more than twice as effective as the field of journalism.  

To be fair to Cooper, in a fashion that she is not with the Marines, there is racism among individuals in America.  It can be found.  But it tends to be rare and fleeting.  

What Cooper is struggling with is that people aren’t blank slates to be molded.  Different cultures have different degrees of effectiveness.  Individuals are diversely competent.  In any major enterprise, there will be departures from proportionality based on all sorts of attributes (handedness, height, race, ethnicity, religion, gender, marital status, hair color, weight, age, class, etc.)  

Some of these departures from strict proportionality may be due to prejudice of one form or another.  But, despite the fondness and prevalence of the belief in critical theory circles, racial prejudice is nowhere near the most prevalent form of prejudice (class, educational attainment, and age being far more common).  

Even when there is no prejudice involved, some variances in proportionality will be due to historical path dependence.  Some will be due to direct causal mechanisms (time available based on marital and family status; personality traits rewarded within particular cultures or religions; personal attributes such as work ethic, or relative experience, etc.).  

Disentangling all these elements - degree of manifested prejudice, real differences in capability, necessary institutional requirements, etc. requires granular data on a massive scale.  We usually do not have the data quality or process knowledge to second-guess the thousand incremental outcomes which make up a career progression.

We can get rid of the most obvious instances of prejudice (racial or otherwise) but we cannot get rid of variance in outcomes.  Attributing all variances simply to racial prejudice is massively ignorant and bigoted.  And that is what Cooper is doing.  She doesn't understand the Marine Corps and she does not appear to have a strong grasp on numeracy so what she produces is an article reflecting her own ideological prejudices and assumptions.  

Were she obviously smart, wise or accomplished, she might be worth reading to try and understand what she sees that the normal reader does not.  Absent those conditions, she is just another run-of-the-mill producer of cognitive pollution.

Data Talks

How much of the resistance to statistical reality (e.g., only 14 police shooting deaths involving unarmed blacks in all of 2019) when it comes to opinions about BLM can be blamed on female empathy and the inexperience and idealism of youth?

(Graph by Audacious Epigone.) pic.twitter.com/MnVVnFnEjD

— A New Radical Centrism (@a_centrism) August 2, 2020

The Living Beauty by W.B. Yeats

The Living Beauty

by W.B. Yeats

I'll say and maybe dream I have drawn content—

Seeing that time has frozen up the blood,

The wick of youth being burned and the oil spent—

From beauty that is cast out of a mould

In bronze, or that in dazzling marble appears,

Appears, but when we have gone is gone again,

Being more indifferent to our solitude

Than 'twere an apparition. O heart, we are old,

The living beauty is for younger men,

We cannot pay its tribute of wild tears.

I see wonderful things

She was deployed 2 years ago, and her dog at first doesn't recognize her, watch her reaction later

pic.twitter.com/PtWQApRTn8

— Positivity+ (@Positiv69439132) August 2, 2020

The old Soviet Union lives on in the strangest of places

From My run-in with the New York Times by Andrew Sullivan.  

It’s never a good sign when you’re watching a scene of street terror in yet another gut-churning YouTube video and you find yourself thinking: ‘Hang on a minute, that’s around the corner from my apartment!’ But there’s a now infamous video from last week where a mob of enraged millennials with their fists pumped in the air surrounded a lone young woman sitting outside a Washington restaurant where I often eat. Like a scene from the Cultural Revolution, the crowd demanded she shout certain slogans and raise her clenched fist in solidarity — or be damned as a racist. Most of her fellow diners took the path of least resistance. She wouldn’t. The chants grew louder: ‘White silence is violence!’ They started screaming in her face. She wouldn’t cave. Wokeness, in case you hadn’t noticed, has entered a more intense phase. Not so long ago, you were canceled for something you did or said or wrote. Now you’re canceled just for saying absolutely nothing at all.

I had a much milder experience of this during the past week when the New York Times decided to run a profile of me. The hook was that I was forced to leave New York magazine last month because, according to the NYT, I had not publicly recanted editing an issue of the New Republic published…in 1994. The issue was a symposium on The Bell Curve, a book by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein that explored the connection between IQ, class, social mobility and race. My crime was to arrange a symposium around an extract, with 13 often stinging critiques published alongside it. The fact I had not recanted that decision did not, mind you, prevent TIME, the Atlantic, Newsweek, the NYT and New York magazine from publishing me in the following years. But suddenly, a decision I made a quarter of a century ago required my being canceled. The NYT reporter generously gave me a chance to apologize and recant, and when I replied that I thought the role of genetics in intelligence among different human populations was still an open question, he had his headline: ‘I won’t stop reading Andrew Sullivan, but I can’t defend him.’ In other words, the media reporter in America’s paper of record said he could not defend a writer because I refused to say something I don’t believe. He said this while arguing that I was ‘one of the most influential journalists of the last three decades’. To be fair to him, he would have had no future at the NYT if he had not called me an indefensible racist. His silence on that would have been as unacceptable to his woke bosses as my refusal to recant. But this is where we now are. A reporter is in fear of being canceled if he doesn’t cancel someone else. This is America returning to its roots. As in Salem. 

The conversion of the Left in America back to a totalitarian, repressive, coercive Soviet ethos is alarming.  In the 1950s-1980s we slowly evolved our concern about the Soviet Union from a largely military fear to a combined concern about economic prowess, military prowess, and cultural corrosion.  

The economic prowess turned out to be a massive failure of intelligence - the USSR and its client states were economic failures whom we consistently overestimated.  And over time, absent the productivity of the foundational economy, their military prowess also declined despite our overestimations.  They were certainly dangerous.  Just not as dangerous as we thought.

It was the third concern, cultural corrosion, that has actually been the most successful consequence of the brief existence of the USSR.  The Gramscian infusion of postmodernism, critical theory, and social justice theory into the news and entertainment media, into academia (K-12 and universities) and into the Administrative State do now present by far the most effective threat to our nation.  It is not the mushroom cloud of an atom bomb which is the most pertinent emblem of our danger, it is the the black bloc attire of distributed, anarchic, fanatical Antifa members (along with similar movements) and their institutional and government supporters.  

Agents of destructive violence encouraged across the nation by select politicians, academia, news and entertainment media, and by the regulatory Administrative State who indict innocent citizens and exercisers of their Bill of Rights and who simultaneously release known criminals with outstanding warrants.   Who punish the police and who encourage the rioters. 

Who demand struggle sessions.  Who demand professions of group guilt.  Who reject due process and science and freedom.  Who de-platform, cancel, and write out of history those who are not compliant.  Who demand submission from public diners.  Who pronounce and denounce rather than discover and collaborate.  Shameful.

Sullivan's experience of a journalistic commissar brings back memories of all those old Soviet habits.

Everyone needs to stand up and turn back this tide of totalitarianism.  All of us together.

Offbeat Humor

This could only happen in 2020... pic.twitter.com/TGSPUjy0Kn

— Sid's Free Speech Zone 📣 (@KhullarSidharth) August 2, 2020