Category: Social media

Michael Yeadon: “SAGE is hugely mistaken”

SAGE being the committee of “experts” who are currently ill-advising the British Government.

Concerning the policy that this advice is now unleashing upon us, Michael Yeadon tweets:

Please spread far & wide.
I’m more certain than ever SAGE is hugely mistaken.
The PCR test has replaced the virus itself as the threat sweeping the country. Completely unreliable.
The number of people dying of respiratory illness Sep-Oct is LOWER than same period last 5y.

And there’s a brief video of Yeadon saying this, that’s more than worth the minute of your time that it will take you to watch.

If you have more time for this guy, and I have a lot of time for him, have a listen also to this interview with Delingpole. Early on, Yeadon asks people to look also at his piece for Lockdown Sceptics about What SAGE Has Got Wrong.

This interview includes, right at its start (in fact before it really starts at all), an amusing way-off-topic anecdote about the WW2 Avro Lancaster factory in Yorkshire, which was at a place called Yeadon.

Farage is up to something!

Sounds to me like Nigel Farage is about to step back into British politics, big time, as the man who will lead Britain out of Lockdown:

Because of his role in contriving Brexit, Farage is already the most consequential British politician alive. If he did this, that would become doubly true.

What people forget, many because they simply choose to, is that Farage is very good at arguing, as the above clip illustrates. Also, he knows how not to be silenced. At present, very depressingly, about a quarter of Britain, maybe even less, thinks Lockdown should end. Farage could double that percentage very quickly, and make Lockdown unsustainable.

If I’m right, this is the best British news there’s been since Lockdown began.

LATER: JH-B‘s all over this, as is Ivor Cummins. Cummins, like me, has become increasingly desperate and bad-tempered in recent weeks. This will surely cheer him up also.

Yes, this is definitely happening.

The greatest show on earth (but not always nice)

So, what creatures does SteveStuWill have for us today?

Mother bird refuses to abandon her eggs. || The amazing diversity of caterpillars. || Sarcasm alert: Nature is so delightful. || Some baby owls sleep face down. || Like humans, wild chimpanzees focus on fewer yet more meaningful friendships as they grow older – that’s me. || Things aren’t always what they seem – butterfly faking it. || This bizarre-looking creature is a long-wattled umbrellabird. || A hognose snake faking its own death. || Who hurt the little sea toad? || A great-backed gull swallowing a rabbit whole. || Cat’s tongue under a microscope. || Scary octopus. || Baby gorilla. || Feline civil disobedience.

Or, to sum it up, Evolution Is the Greatest Show on Earth.

LATER: This. Eat your heart out Peter Bonetti. Not one of SS-W’s, but worthy of being added to them.

LATER STILL: Albino squirrel, demonstrating white supremacy by the looks of it.

Dan Hannan on why Twitter is so left wing

Yes, here’s what Hannan … er, tweets about Twitter’s lefty bias:

Why is Twitter so much more Left-wing that the population at large? Here’s a theory: it lends itself to angry, self-righteous and emotive statements. Conservative arguments are generally too nuanced to fit into 280 characters.

But not that argument, it would seem.

I note with interest that Samizdata supremo Perry de Havilland found this tweet to be of interest too.

I have heard it said that Trump and Trumpists have done very well with Facebook, and that this is a source of deep embarrassment to the people who run Facebook. But Trump has done famously well with Twitter too. He is the master of the short, sharp verbal missile hurled at his enemies in a way that again and again seems to enrage them.

Trump is very self-righteous and sometimes very emotive, but seldom angry. He knows that being angry is a sign of weakness, that you’re out of control. Angry is what the people on the receiving end of his tweets more commonly feel.

Time for me to stop this. It’s is getting far too nuanced.

One final point, though. I think that the social media, Twitter especially, have done a great job of showing how very nasty and destructive so many lefties are. They used to be thought of as people who meant well, but were a bit dim – aka “idealistic” – about how the real world worked. Now, they are more and more regarded as evil, as people who simply hate the real world and want it smashed to pieces.

LATER: This Thomas Sowell book, which I read a long time ago and must take another look at, seems pertinent to the above.

Kappa Alpha Theta supplies an unbecoming BMNB QotD

Quoted in this report, the following unbecoming opinion from Candace Owens:

Black Lives Matter is an organization of white men, using the faces of dead Black people to raise millions of dollars toward electing White Democrats into positions of power.

It is the most flagrantly racist organization in America.

Streisand strikes again, assisted by Glenn Reynolds.

Katherine Lauer should find herself a different sorority.

Canaletto – and now

Came across this picture of St Paul’s by Canaletto, with boats, done in the 1740s:

I tried to find a bigger version. I failed, but did encounter this, from the Daily Express of June 4th 2012:

WITH its spectacular pomp and ceremony, yesterday’s river pageant evoked the alluring images in Canaletto’s painting The Thames on Lord Mayor’s Day which depicted a royal flotilla against a backdrop of the City and St Paul’s Cathedral more than 250 years ago.

That “backdrop” is not what it was. St Paul’s is still St Paul’s, but what’s in front of it has taken rather a turn for the worse.

I’ve surely photoed photos of that scene, although not with that many boats. I recall getting interested in the Faraday Building, the one with the green roof in the photo above, which was the first big architectural violation of that St Paul’s view.

In the Canaletto, notice all the spires there, of other places of worship, most of them also designed by Wren.

Is this duck the same weight as Amey Coney Barrett?

This duck has been in the news recently:

The Babylon Bee did a piece just over a week ago about how Senator Hirono, also to be seen in the fake-photo above, brought a duck with her to the Congressional Hearing concerning whether Amey Coney Barrett should be allowed to become a Supreme Court judge. If the duck weighs the same as ACB, then she’s a witch!

Facebook disapproved of this mockery of their preferred political team, saying it incited violence, taking it down and taking various economic measures against the Bee, while telling the Bee to say nothing about having been thus admonished. But the Bee’s Seth Dillon took public exception. Twitter also got in on this attempted censorship.

The Babylon Bee is wise not to base its business model on never publicly disagreeing with Facebook and Twitter and the rest of the Woke Social Media Platforms. By not depending on them and by never begging them for permission to do its business, but rather by mocking these social media all they like whenever these platforms try to screw with them, the Babylon Bee has turned the wokist workforce of these social media entities into a Streisand effect salesforce for the Bee and its various jokes and fancies.

Quack.

Joe Rogan talks with Daryl Davis about how Davis converted lots of white racists

Just finished watching/listening to this Joe Rogan talk with Daryl Davis, about how Davis has been converting white racists into upstanding American citizens. Davis says he doesn’t himself convert anybody. They convert themselves. In this respect he is like those teachers who say “I’m not a teacher – I just get them to learn for themselves.” Those teachers are teachers, and Davis is a converter. He talks with white racists, and then, hey presto they convert themselves. Some, not all of them course.

Two hours and forty minutes very well spent. Never heard of Daryl Davis until today (thank you Twitter). Used to be a full time musician. Got into the racism conversion business when a KKK guy complimented him on his piano playing, at one of his gigs. “Never heard a black guy pay piano like Jerry Lee Lewis.” But Lewis got his piano style from earlier black pianists, just like I did, said Davis. “No.” Yes. And thanks to Davis being a personable and curious guy, they just kept on talking. “Why do you hate me, when you don’t even know me?” That was his starting question to all these characters.

Daryl Davis wrote a memoir about how he did all this converting of white racists, and while listening to him talk, I of course whistled this book up on Amazon. Apparently, I can buy myself a copy of Klandestine Relationships: A Black Man’s Odyssey in the Klu Klux Klan for the giveaway price of (as I now write (subject to change)), £397.50, in hardback. But the good news is that Davis is now working on a revised edition, with more stories along similar lines that happened since he first wrote this book two decades ago. So if, like me, you now want a copy, but if, not like me, you think you’ll have to pay nearly four hundred quid for a copy or go permanently without, well, be patient and stay tuned.

BMNB SQotD: Richard Fernandez on the current visibility of elite indecency

Richard Fernandez on Twitter:

What is often described as the decline in public decency may just be a rise in the exposure of elite indecency.

Both this posting and my previous one allude to the phenomenon of negative temporal parochialism, whish is the habit of thinking that there is something uniquely bad about the times we ourselves happen to be living in. Yes, it’s now rather bad. But study history and you’ll soon discover other times just as bad, and many that were far worse.

This idea is a closer cousin than it realises of the notion that our own time is uniquely good.

Masked players of wind instruments

Seen on Twitter:

I’m sure that historians could easily think of many times in history that were just as stupid as ours, but yes, that is pretty stupid.