Category: Uncategorized

The skinsuits come off

The Hollywood Lawyer who has been playing a Fake Republican for over a decade has finally left the GOP. Of course, (((Jennifer Rubin))) is also a Fake American, so it probably won’t be long before she leaves the USA as well. Good riddance on both accounts.

Hours after Paul Ryan announced his retirement last week, President Donald Trump tweeted a photo of the House speaker and the rest of the GOP congressional leadership at dinner together at the White House. All did the traditional Trump-style smiling thumbs-up—a big show of unity to rebut anxiety about the party collapsing.

What Jennifer Rubin saw while looking at that photo: a Republican Party that “has become the caricature the left always said it was—the party of old white men. And that has become more so in the age of Donald Trump, when he is actively courting and stoking white resentment.”

Trump’s use of identity politics, Rubin told me in an interview for the latest episode of POLITICO’s Off Message podcast, “is a dead end for the party. It’s a dead end because it’s immoral and anti-American to base an entire political movement on one racial group, and it’s a dead end because that’s not America and what America is becoming.”

For Rubin, author of the Washington Post’s “Right Turn” blog, it’s been a fast trip from conservative apostle to apostate.

Rubin was hired in late 2010 to be a forceful conservative presence, the counterpart on the right to the Post’s liberal blogger, Greg Sargent. But since Trump’s election, she’s been one of the president’s most strident critics, attacking him multiple times a day as an “arrogant fool” and “flat-out racist.” In the process, she’s becoming a leading voice for a group of conservative intellectuals who don’t fit comfortably in either political party.

Conservatives are so dumb that they actually looked to a Hollywood lawyer from Berkeley as one of their opinion leaders because she told them she was one of them. Talk about controlled opposition! I wonder how long will it be before the Littlest Chickenhawk removes his Republican skinsuit in favor of this Fake Right party?

The Fake Right is collapsing

And yet, the Alt-Right remains inevitable. Now that it is of no further use to them, the media is finally killing off its cartoon parody of the Right. But the Right is not, and never was, based on races or states, but rather, on nations. The material distinction between nationalism and imperialism is the easiest way to distinguish between true Right and Fake Right. Meanwhile, the genuine nationalists are growing steadily in popularity and influence, and taking over entire nations:

Eight months after a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia ended in the death of a counterprotester, the loose collection of disaffected young white men known as the alt-right is in disarray.

The problems have been mounting: lawsuits and arrests, fundraising difficulties, tepid recruitment, widespread infighting, fierce counterprotests and banishment on social media platforms. Taken together, they’ve exhausted even some of the staunchest members.

One of the movement’s biggest groups, the Traditionalist Worker Party, dissolved in March. Andrew Anglin, founder of the Daily Stormer, the largest alt-right website, has gone into hiding, chased by a harassment lawsuit. And Richard Spencer, the alt-right’s most public figure, cancelled a college speaking tour and was abandoned by his attorney last month.

“Things have become a lot harder, and we paid a price for what happened in Charlottesville. . . . The question is whether there is going to be a third act,” said Spencer, who coined the name of the movement, which rose to prominence during the 2016 presidential campaign, advocates a whites-only ethno-state, and has posted racist, anti-Semitic and misogynistic memes across the internet.

This is why it is vital for nationalists to adhere religiously to the philosophical truth rather than to various dogmas and ideologies. Any departure from the truth and the media will adroitly exploit that gap and use it to discredit and disqualify you. Speak the clear and unvarnished truth and they will fear to even mention your name because there is little they can do to effectively spin what you are saying into something that it observably is not. They really, really, really do not want to permit any discussion of which narrative is closer to the observable truth, because that calls their own veracity and legitimacy into question.

Reject the Fake Right. Reject the neoconservatives. Reject the cuckservatives. Reject the conservatives. They are all fakes. They are all frauds. None of them are able to speak the truth reliably, and that is why the media is always able to successfully exploit the vulnerabilities exposed by their dishonesty.

UPDATE: Yes, in the unlikely event you still take any of them seriously, reject the libertarians, the communists, and while we’re at it, the Whigs.

The Storm approaches

It is safe to assume that the arrest of this Trudeau associate and the arrest of Smallville actress Alison Mack are not unrelated.

A former London lawyer who left the legal world more than 30 years ago to become an expert in international humanitarian work with street children has been arrested in Nepal on suspicion of sex crimes against children.

Reports out of Kathmandu say Peter Dalglish, the 60-year-old founder of Street Kids International, was taken into custody last weekend on suspicion of pedophilia.

Dalglish, who has worked with the United Nations on child poverty issues, was arrested at a home about 50 kilometres north of Kathmandu on April 8. Two girls aged 12 and 14 were also found in the home. Authorites said they suspect there may be other children involved.

Dalglish, a graduate of California’s Stanford University, has been operating the Himalayan Community Foundation for two years, helping to educate and support children.

He has been working in Nepal for decades after being drawn to humanitarian work in 1984 during the Ethiopian famine. His journeys made him a leading expert on street kids, child labour and child soldiers — and a subject of admiration in his hometown, London.

In 2002, he became the United Nations adviser on child labour in Nepal while working for a non-government organization called NGO Terre des Hommes. He was also involved with programs to send millions of laptop computers to children in Third World countries.

Remember, we’ve been told that this thing is much bigger, and the evil is far more widespread, than the average individual is going to be able to easily credit. That, I suspect, is why we’ve been seeing these arrests taking place on a regular basis, without too much media attention. But if you’ve noticed, the names, and the names to whom the arrested individuals are connected, just keep getting bigger and more recognizable.

Peter Dalglish appointed to the Order of Canada
January 5, 2017

His Excellency the Right Honourable David Johnston, Governor General of Canada, announced 100 new appointments to the Order of Canada just before the start of the new year.

Peter Dalglish (LLB’83, LLD’08) is among the 75 new Members of the Order (C.M.) to receive one of Canada’s highest honours. Residing in London, Ont., Dalglish was appointed “for his efforts to alleviate child poverty worldwide, notably by establishing and leading Street Kids International.”

A festive evening and a false alarm

This season has been a difficult one for me so far. Four games (including two friendlies), two starts, no goals. I had a horrible game last week, which was of some concern to me because it’s the first time I felt as if I was playing like a fragile old man afraid to go in and win a contested ball. One thing I’ve noticed with age is that it’s harder to play in cold weather and that one tends to become more contact-avoidant for fear of injury. Then again, the last time we played our most recent opponent, one of our defenders snapped the leg of an attacker like a twig with a late tackle, so it could be argued that this is more late-onset wisdom than cowardice. It also doesn’t help that I’m now playing at 180 instead of 190, which helps with the speed and endurance, but puts you at a distinct disadvantage when going shoulder-to-shoulder with a 200-pound defender.

Anyhow, I had a distressingly bad game last week. Even when I am overmatched in terms of speed or fitness I can usually keep at least the defensive half of my wing under control, but the left defender and I were completely out of sync and allowed two crosses that led to goals, at least one of which should have never happened. We both stood there, waiting for the other to close on the guy with the ball, and gave him the opening he needed to cross it. In fairness, I probably shouldn’t have been playing at that point, as I’d already taken myself out of the game earlier after receiving a hard knee to the thigh that left me limping for three days afterward. But still, I had told the captain I was okay to go back in, so that was entirely on me.

The problem was that the bruise slowed me down just enough to inhibit me from trying to move the ball forward myself, and we had changed our stopper from an attack-minded player to a defensive-minded one, so when I received the ball on the wing, I looked to pass it in to the middle right away rather than pushing it up myself. This would normally have been all right, but with our new stopper, instead of advancing the ball he invariably passed it back to one of the other defenders. More than once, I ended up with the ball again, which meant our attacks were going precisely nowhere.

It was probably one of the worst games I’ve ever played, and my on-field plus-minus was uncharacteristically negative at net -1, but fortunately we were playing a weak team so we ended up winning 5-3 anyhow. The problem was that our next game was against the second-best team in the league, and one which we have always had to be on our game in order to beat. And, of course, at my age, there is always the looming possibility that one simply can’t play anymore.

At practice, I played hard for more than two hours despite the bruised thigh, finished fourth in the team penalty kick competition, and that served to get my mindset back to normal, more or less. However, on game night I knew we were in trouble when two of our three best players showed up but did not suit up due to injury, and was even more alarmed when the captain started me at attacker despite last week’s debacle. I like playing up front, but not when both our starting wings are more inclined to push forward and assist the attack than getting back to help out the defense. Sure enough, despite controlling the ball for most of the first 10 minutes, we went down 1-0 on their first serious attack coming from the wing. We produced little in the way of chances, except for a header on a corner that just missed and one cross that I put just inches too deep in front of our other striker. At halftime were down 2-0 on a beautiful free kick that struck the underside of the far corner and banked in. It wasn’t even one of their best players taking it either; these guys are really good. Not even Buffon at his best could have saved that one.

I was out for a while, and we went down another goal, but they were starting to wear down a bit, and I went back in on the left wing, which helped us start putting pressure on both wings. I burned the defender on the side once, but my pull-back pass into the box was too fast for our captain to put in the net, although he scored a beautiful goal on the following post-corner chaos. The ball came low and hard, bounced off my shins on the far side, and ricocheted off a defender. As they pushed forward on the clearance, our captain retrieved it, turned, and shot high just as the goalie was moving up, catching him completely off-guard. 3-1.

We kept attacking, but that was all we managed and that’s how it ended. It was a good game, all in all, and they deserved to win. We get along with them well despite last season’s unfortunate incident, and there were two or three amusing “here, it’s your ball – no, really, it’s your ball” situations after someone went down and both sides called for a halt in play. It was a festive evening, as Ender’s team was playing on our other field and won their game 5-2. It was fun to introduce him afterwards to one of the former pros who plays for the team that beat us, as Ender has a lot of respect for the retired pros and internationals, and they are always pleased to be recognized by the younger generation of players.

So, false alarm on the age front. The former pro and I were talking about the challenges our years pose, as we are of an age, and he figures we can both play until at least 55. My original goal was to make it to 50, but I am happy to revise that in view of his professional opinion.

“Cuck!” they cucked, cuckingly

David French urges conservatives to refrain from going on the offensive against a left-wing professor. It would be unseemly, don’t you know.

No, Conservatives Shouldn’t Try to Punish Radical Professors for Offensive Speech

We’re reaching a disturbing point in American discourse where increasingly both sides of the national debate (it’s not the Left that’s driving the firestorm against Jarrar) are looking for ways to justify and rationalize censorship and suppression of offensive views. If the censorship comes through a public employer or government entity, then the Twitterati transforms into a squad of hapless law students, hunting through the results of hasty Google searches to find just the right exceptions to the relevant First Amendment jurisprudence — exceptions that allow for the infamous phrase, “I believe in free speech, but . . .”

If the suppression comes through private employers, then it’s easier to justify. From the left — “Sure, The Atlantic can fire a conservative.” From the right — “Get those damn football players off their knees.” Both sides eagerly obliterate the culture of free speech in the quest to cleanse the marketplace of ideas we don’t like.

But culture drives law, and law drives culture. Every time that we refuse to tolerate offensive expression, we incentivize the culture of crocodile tears. We motivate government officials to expand state power over speech until the silencing exceptions swallow the free-speech rule. California’s recent efforts to compel crisis-pregnancy centers to advertise for free or low-cost abortions represents what happens when the people, to borrow my friend Greg Lukianoff’s excellent phrase, “unlearn liberty.” Periodic conservative efforts to expel radical professors from the academy demonstrate the pernicious effects of a “fight fire with fire” mentality. In both cases, a culture of coercion triumphs and liberty loses.

Here’s an alternative: Leave the trolls alone. Let the radicals rant. Then, rebut the bad speech with better speech, or — sometimes better yet — rebut it with silence. Does anyone really care what Randa Jarrar thinks of Barbara Bush? Or is she now mainly useful as a foil, as clickbait, as the latest pawn in the culture war? I think we know the answer.

If you truly hate the offensive speech in question — if you truly believe it’s hurtful — why share it far and wide? Why amplify the offensive voice? Arguably, the worst rebuke for a troll, the worst punishment for the self-promoting radical, is indifference. I have my own standard for engaging bad ideas — First, I wait. I ask myself: Are these ideas gaining traction? Do they threaten to make a material difference in the marketplace of ideas? If the answer is yes, then I engage. If the answer is no, I let the offensive speech die a natural death.

But killing an idea through censorship? That’s not what free people do.

Actually, it’s what people who are not free, but would like to be free, have to do. It’s called “reprisal”. It’s remarkable how these cuckservative idiots are still relying on the same tactics that have uniformly failed for the last 50 years. Why, it’s almost as if they want to fail….

Rod Dreher, of course, agrees that nothing should be done. The most important thing when the Left attacks is to not respond, not in kind, and not in any way. Because as long as you keep your eyes shut and pretend it isn’t happening, it will eventually stop.

My job here at TAC involves opinion writing. I have been paid for most of my career to state my opinion. Yet no employer of mine — no newspaper, no magazine — would keep me on if I tweeted something as vile as what Jarrar tweeted. It would be devastating to the institutional reputation of these newspapers and magazines. TAC would lose donors left and right, and would take a real hit in terms of its credibility. Any magazine or publication would. I would never abuse the privilege I have. With that privilege comes responsibility.

So, today, I am much less sympathetic to Randa Jarrar than I was when she first spouted off. I still lean towards not firing her. But boy, is she ever a poster child for left-wing academic privilege and arrogance. If the university president fires her for pranking the crisis hotline, I won’t be sorry.

That will show her! Now, I can’t help but wonder, do these two gentlemen of principle and champions of free speech also counsel indifference to the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction movement?

Re-opening the closed door

How immigrants and their allies conspired to end the national origins system that made America great in the 20th century.

The demographic consequences of ending the open door cannot be known with certainty, since no one can be sure what immigration would have been in the absence of restriction. Demographer Leon Bouvier has estimated that, assuming no restriction and pre-war levels of one million a year for the rest of the century, the American population would have reached 400 million by the year 2000. This would have meant 120 million more American high-consumption lifestyles piled upon the roughly 280 million reported in the census of 2000, making far worse the dismal figures on species extinction, wetland loss, soil erosion, and the accumulation of climate-changing and health-impairing pollutants that are being tallied up as the new century unfolds.

The chief goals of the national origins system, shrinking the incoming numbers and tilting the sources of the immigration stream back toward northern Europe, were less decisively achieved. Numbers entering legally but outside the quotas (“non-quota immigrants,” mostly relatives of those recently arrived and Europeans entering through Latin American and Caribbean countries) surprised policymakers by matching and in time exceeding those governed by quotas. Yet with overall numbers so low, ethnic composition did not agitate the public.

International economic maladies, war, and the new American system of restriction had thus combined to reduce immigration numbers to levels more in line with the long course of American history, and to some observers seemed to have ended the role of immigration as a major force in American life. Apparently the nation would henceforth grow and develop, as Thomas Jefferson had preferred, from natural increase and the cultural assets of its people.

The curbing of the Great Wave created a forty-year breathing space of relatively low immigration, with effects favorable to assimilation. The pressures toward joining the American mainstream did not have to contend with continual massive replenishment of foreigners.

The new immigration system was widely popular, and the immigration committees of Congress quickly became backwaters of minor tinkering or inactivity. The 1930s arrived with vast and chronic unemployment, and the American people wanted nothing from immigration. War in Europe would bring unprecedented refugee issues, but dealing with these — or avoiding them — did not require any rethinking of the basic system for deciding on the few thousand people who would be given immigration papers.

But American immigration policy in the postwar years attracted a small but growing body of opponents. The political core of a coalition pressing for a new, more “liberalized” policy regime was composed of ethnic lobbyists (“professional immigrant-handlers,” Rep. Francis Walter called them) claiming to speak for nationalities migrating prior to the National Origins Act of 1924, the most effective being Jews from central and eastern Europe who were deeply concerned with the rise of fascism and anti-semitism on the continent and eternally interested in haven. Unable by themselves to interest many politicians or the media in the settled issue of America’s immigration law, these groups hoped for new circumstances in which restrictions could be discredited and the old regime of open doors restored. The arrival of the Civil Rights Movement thrust (racial) “discrimination” into the center of national self-examination. The enemy everywhere at the bottom of virtually every national blemish seemed to be Discrimination, the historic, now intolerable subordinating classification of groups on the basis of inherited characteristics. The nation’s national origins-grounded immigration laws could not escape an assault by these reformist passions, and critics of the national origins system found the liberal wing of the Democratic Party receptive to their demand that immigration reform should be a part of the civil rights agenda.

Who would lead, and formulate what alternatives? Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy cautiously stepped out on the issue in the 1950s, sensing that a liberalization stance would gather vital ethnic voting blocs for his long-planned run for the presidency. His work on a refugee bill caught the attention of officials of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, who convinced Kennedy to become an author of a pamphlet on immigration, with the help of an ADL supplied historian, Arthur Mann, and Kennedy’s staff. The result was A Nation of Immigrants, a 1958 bouquet of praise for the contributions of immigrants and a call for an end to the racist, morally embarrassing national origins system. The little book was initially ignored, but its arguments would dominate the emerging debate. The ADL, part of a Jewish coalition whose agenda included opening wider the American gates so that increasing U.S. ethnic heterogeneity would reduce the chances of a populist mass movement embracing anti-semitism, had made a golden alliance. John F. Kennedy was no crusader on immigration (or anything else), but he was an activist young President by 1961, comfortable with immigration reform as part of his agenda, elected on a party platform that pledged elimination of the national origins system.

What comes next? The USA is again on course to reach 400 million imperial subjects sometime between 2043 and 2051, depending upon which UN report you credit. Its population is unlikely to ever reach that size, of course, but it should be apparent that the forty-year breathing space created by the national origins system is the primary reason the empire has not collapsed already.

Barring a mass repatriation program for all post-1965 immigrants and their descendants, which appears extremely unlikely at the moment, the political breakup should begin by the early 2030s. Every empire is destroyed by immigration of one sort or another in the end, but it is the cultural decadence and lack of confidence that permits such immigration to take place that is the true cause of the collapse.

Had American politicians possessed the wisdom to arrest and deport the seditious ethnic lobbyists who agitated for ending the national origins system, the collapse of the empire would not be rapidly approaching. Now the necessary surgery is even more difficult and considerably less politically palatable. So, we can safely conclude that it will not be performed.

SJWs in SF: Sad Puppy version

Sarah Hoyt laments the ejecting of John Ringo from something called ConCarolinas:

It’s been known for years – as long as I’ve been published in SF/F – that conservatives get invited to be guests of honor at conventions far less often than leftists in SF/F and infinitely less than red-diaper-babies in SF/F, but ConCarolinas seemed like a weird place for a conflagration of snowflakism.

I went over to John Ringo’s page and read about it.  As far as I could tell, a bunch of people on Twitter had been badgering both the con-committee and the other (very leftist) guest about inviting someone who was… what the heck was he?  I don’t know.

In the beginning, the accusation against him was that he was “Puppy Adjacent.”

For those of you wanting to follow this at home, the score card is this: Five years ago, my friend Larry Correia started a movement called Sad Puppies, which was a half joking attempt to get books not of solid leftist bent (not even right wing, just not preachy left) nominated for the Hugo, which used to be one of the most prestigious fan awards in science fiction.

When Larry tired of the game after two years, my friend Brad Torgersen took it over…

It was supposed to be me, but a cancer diagnosis and emergency surgery stopped it.

Brad ran it creditably, suggesting fan-favorites who had never got nominated (over the last decade, the Hugos have become a log-rolling club of leftists.) He got people who’d never before nominated to nominate, increasing the number of people involved by three fold.  And we got practically everyone on our suggestions list on the ballot.  (Ours because I was involved both in planning and defending the guys, as was my friend Kate Paulk and my friend Amanda S. Green.)

Imagine our surprise when we found out that:

  1. We’d promulgated an immutable slate, that had to be voted for in order. We must have managed that by cleverly telling people to read and vote for those they liked, or add others, or whatever, just get involved.
  2. We were against the participation of women, people of color, and people of different gender identification and orientation in science fiction and fantasy. (How we were supposed to divine all that except perhaps women, is beyond me.  And even there, there are gender neutral names.)  The fact that three of us, in the “inner council” were women made no difference.  Since we’re not leftists, we’re obviously not “real women.” Oh, by the way, we also nominated women, people of color, and I think at least one gay person for the Hugo.  That most of those recused themselves had nothing to do with us, and was a function of the attacks by the left, who threatened to destroy careers of those who stayed on the ballot, or promised them they would get nominated by them next.  (On the eve of never, I’ll wager.)
  3. We’d done this to oppress people by being gatekeepers. Note our coalition was one best selling author (Larry Correia), a promising beginner (Brad Torgersen), a midlist author (me), and two indie authors (Kate Paulk and Amanda S. Green).  None of us had or had ever had gatekeeping powers.  In fact, the people who called calumnies against us to Entertainment Weekly (who later retracted) and other national publications were gatekeepers, since everything points to their working for TOR.

Anyway, that was the conflagration called Sad Puppies.  After our nominees were treated horribly at the 2015 Hugos, after leftists bought memberships by the dozen for the express purpose of voting “no award” over people they proudly admitted they’d never read, we thought there was no point.  My friend Kate Paulk, probably the most conciliatory woman in the world, ran it the next year and did everything the left said they wanted done.  They still attacked her.  I and Amanda claimed the right of succession, but never took it, because it was obvious the Hugos were dead, their reputation destroyed and only academics seeking tenure could be interested in them.  The only reason we claimed them was to prevent a few deluded people from trying to ride a movement they had nothing to do with to fame.

So.  This is now three years later.  There have been no Sad Puppies for two years.  And by the way, John Ringo’s extent of involvement in this was to be our friend and to joke about giving Larry and Brad the Don Quixote award.

But he was “puppy adjacent” and the deranged game of post office on the left adduced to him all the things they said we were.  You know the drill: racisss sexisss homophobic.  (They really need to come up with a more sibilant word for that.)

I find this rather fascinating for what it omits. The Baen cum Sad Puppies crowd is in an uncomfortable position not terribly different from that of Never Trump and the cuckservatives. They are accustomed to being the sole opposition to the SJWs in science fiction, and viewing themselves as the proper and respectable opposition, so they really don’t know what to do about the Rabid Puppies or the considerably less accommodating opposition that is now represented by Castalia House, Arkhaven, and Dark Legion. Nor do they understand how various trends favor the growth of our influence, in part at their expense.

So, they push a narrative to the public in which we don’t exist, even though without us, Sad Puppies would have remained what it was prior to our involvement, a minor bump in the road that didn’t even require any suppression outside of the usual routine. This is not to say that what they did was not admirable, and indeed, their construction of the Dragon Awards will likely prove to be more significant in the long run than our demolition of the Hugo Awards. I merely observe that their efforts would have been insufficient in our absence.

But unlike the SJW narrative, the Sad Puppy narrative does not harm us at all. I am content to let them push it in peace; after all, they are not the enemy. Right now, we are marshaling our forces and preparing to engage in offensives on multiple fronts, some of which are known and others which will prove to be unexpected.

Understand that many people are going to become exhausted. Others are going to fall away for one reason or another. Friends will become allies, and allies will become neutrals. All of that is fine. None of that gives us any cause for concern nor should any such transitions be discouraged or criticized. The core remains stronger than ever, and our focus and our efforts remains relentlessly targeted at the enemy.

Let the others trail in our wake at their own pace. As long as they refrain from either attacking us or getting in our way, they are not part of the problem. They are trying to be part of the solution, even if they go about it in different and suboptimal ways.

Speaking of the SJW narrative, the crazy never ends.

I liked The Hobbit. A lot. But while Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books are influential as exercises in world building, as novels they are barely readable. It never seemed to me that Tolkien cared about his story as much as he cared about rendering, in minute detail, the world he built. Why not instead read Ursula K. Le Guin’s magnificent (and as beautifully rendered) stories and novels surrounding Earthsea? Le Guin captures the world of Earthsea through a powerful, dark, gorgeous kind of storytelling that is irresistible. Perhaps Le Guin’s work—along with an entire universe of fantasy fiction—wouldn’t have been possible without Tolkien’s influence behind it, but in its time, Le Guin’s books are more influential and make for better reading.
—”21 Books You Don’t Have to Read”, GQ

Only on Planet SJW are Ursula Le Guin’s tedious and tedentious books deemed more influential and better reading than Tolkien’s.

The 11 percent metric

Modern science is actually less reliable than flipping a coin. The Wall Street Journal reports on scientific efforts to address the reproducibility crisis:

Half the results published in peer-reviewed scientific journals are probably wrong. John Ioannidis, now a professor of medicine at Stanford, made headlines with that claim in 2005. Since then, researchers have confirmed his skepticism by trying—and often failing—to reproduce many influential journal articles. Slowly, scientists are internalizing the lessons of this irreproducibility crisis. But what about government, which has been making policy for generations without confirming that the science behind it is valid?

The biggest newsmakers in the crisis have involved psychology. Consider three findings: Striking a “power pose” can improve a person’s hormone balance and increase tolerance for risk. Invoking a negative stereotype, such as by telling black test-takers that an exam measures intelligence, can measurably degrade performance. Playing a sorting game that involves quickly pairing faces (black or white) with bad and good words (“happy” or “death”) can reveal “implicit bias” and predict discrimination.

All three of these results received massive media attention, but independent researchers haven’t been able to reproduce any of them properly. It seems as if there’s no end of “scientific truths” that just aren’t so. For a 2015 article in Science, independent researchers tried to replicate 100 prominent psychology studies and succeeded with only 39{9777635cfa82a0aab621d7111c7b7154d6356e0eedfaecd5a3ca30be59699a9a} of them.

Further from the spotlight is a lot of equally flawed research that is often more consequential. In 2012 the biotechnology firm Amgen tried to reproduce 53 “landmark” studies in hematology and oncology. The company could only replicate six. Are doctors basing serious decisions about medical treatment on the rest? Consider the financial costs, too. A 2015 study estimated that American researchers spend $28 billion a year on irreproducible preclinical research.

The chief cause of irreproducibility may be that scientists, whether wittingly or not, are fishing fake statistical significance out of noisy data. If a researcher looks long enough, he can turn any fluke correlation into a seemingly positive result. But other factors compound the problem: Scientists can make arbitrary decisions about research techniques, even changing procedures partway through an experiment. They are susceptible to groupthink and aren’t as skeptical of results that fit their biases. Negative results typically go into the file drawer. Exciting new findings are a route to tenure and fame, and there’s little reward for replication studies.

It’s always ironic how the IFLS crowd isn’t even remotely up to speed on current science while simultaneously pointing and shrieking about how everyone with substantive and valid criticism of scientistry simply “doesn’t understand science”. You can see this in the comments of the most recent Voxiversity on Christianity and Western Civilization. Richard Dawkins has repeatedly argued that eyewitness testimony should not be used in the courtroom because it is insufficiently reliable, but by his own metric, the expert testimony of a scientist should barred from the courtroom as well because science is considerably less statistically reliable.

As for the idea that science can even theoretically serve as a basis for moral guidance, the grand windmill at which Sam Harris has been jousting in futility for the last 10 years, that has become even more obviously ridiculous than even his most brutal critics believed at the start. One would do nearly four times better to simply flip a coin; indeed, statistically speaking, one’s optimal strategy is to listen to what scientists advise, then do precisely the opposite.

Of course, in retrospect, this should have always been obvious. Look at the average scientist. Do you think following his advice on women or doing the precise opposite is more likely to lead to a desirable outcome? Do you trust his philosophy on fitness, or on any other aspect of life? These are individuals whose entire perspectives on life, the universe, and everything are constructed on an illusion of a nonexistent solidity.

And the great irony is that scientistry now stands condemned by its beloved scientodific metric. The New Atheists reasoned that religious faith must be false on the basis of presuming the eyewitness testimony and documentary evidence to the contrary being false, but now we actually know, we do not merely reason, that it is faith in science that is false due to irreproducibility.

The nonexistent principles of Never Trump

Kurt Schlichter tears into the pious frauds who, despite their proclamations of high principle, have proven to be every bit as unprincipled as we always figured they were:

Where are your principles in the face of the gross injustices of the last few days? A federal judge who was nearly appointed Bill Clinton’s attorney general and who officiated at Soros’s wedding ordered Hannity’s information disclosed, but that was cool with you. After all, Sean Hannity is so…oh well, I never!

Principles that depend on who is asserting them aren’t principles. They are poses.

If you actually adhered to them, your principles would have you shrieking, not cheering. A bunch of Hillary-donating feds should not be allowed to randomly pillage through privileged materials looking for a crime. No, the crime-fraud exception does not mean that the feds can just take all your stuff, read through it, and decide if some happens to fall into that narrow exception and leak the rest. But hey, why let some principles get in the way of a good laugh at the expense of one of those Trump people?

Gosh, it’s almost like your talk of principles was just…talk.

Schlichter is correct. There are no Never Trump principles. As a matter of fact, there are no conservative principles, because conservatism is not, and has never been, a coherent ideology. It is, ultimately, a reactive, defensive pose.

That’s the strategic problem with conservatism. It literally can’t win. It can’t go on the offense, because it has no objectives. And Never Trump is conservatism with cancer.

UPDATE: They were always frauds from the start.

Former presidential candidate Evan McMullin owes his former campaign staff members tens of thousands of dollars and most believe he has no intention of ever paying them, a former campaign worker tells The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Right before McMullin’s failed bid for president in 2016 as the conservative alternative to President Donald Trump, the campaign was inundated with debt. The disastrous fiscal situation was a combination of frivolous spending by McMullin and his campaign manager Joel Searby, according to the former staffer.

McMullin received news weeks before Election Day 2016 about how dire the campaign’s finances were, and he had “no remorse” and said “I have qualms about this thing ending badly in debt,” the former staffer claimed. McMullin’s cavalier attitude towards the campaign’s spending struck many as a surprise, particularly because he billed himself as a fiscal conservative, he added.

It is simply delicious to think of all the harrumphing bow-ties shedding furious tears over the way they were stiffed by their fine, principled fiscally conservative candidate who was only running out of his deep sense of outraged honor.

A win-win

More jobs for the working class supporters, fewer jobs for the chattering class enemy:

The Tampa Bay Times announced that it would cut about 50 jobs after new tariffs imposed by the Trump administration dramatically increased the cost of newsprint. A spokeswoman for the Times confirmed the layoffs to the Tampa Bay Business Journal, saying they are directly in response to the tariffs imposed on newsprint imported from Canada. The Times spokeswoman declined to say how many of the layoffs would be within the paper’s newsroom, but said that the “cuts are taking place throughout the organization.”

That’s how you do it. The God-Emperor would do well to aggressively seek more of these heads my people win, tails yours lose actions.