The false flags failed

So the Pentagon is taking credit for preventing Iran from following through on its nonexistent plans to attack the United States:

Washington’s peace-oriented threats towards Iran have paid off – at least according to Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan, who says that the Islamic Republic had to “put on hold” its violent plans thanks to US efforts.

While Iran has repeatedly denied allegations that they are responsible for recent tensions and said that they prefer diplomacy to threats, Shanahan on Tuesday was certain that Tehran’s dangerous behavior had only been curbed by the US’s proactive measures.

These peace-keeping gestures presumably include sending a navy strike group to Iran’s border, ratcheting up crippling sanctions and President Donald Trump’s amiable threat to end the country altogether.

Meanwhile, another 10,000 or so hostile foreigners invaded the southern border today. The Pentagon did nothing at all about that and had no comment about either the invasion or its inactivity.

The four horsemen of bad science

A scientist addresses the irreproducibility problem presently plaguing what passes for professional “science”:

I think that, in two decades, we will look back on the past 60 years — particularly in biomedical science — and marvel at how much time and money has been wasted on flawed research. How can that be? We know how to formulate and test hypotheses in controlled experiments. We can account for unwanted variation with statistical techniques. We appreciate the need to replicate observations.

Yet many researchers persist in working in a way almost guaranteed not to deliver meaningful results. They ride with what I refer to as the four horsemen of the reproducibility apocalypse: publication bias, low statistical power, P-value hacking and HARKing (hypothesizing after results are known). My generation and the one before us have done little to rein these in.

In 1975, psychologist Anthony Greenwald noted that science is prejudiced against null hypotheses; we even refer to sound work supporting such conclusions as ‘failed experiments’. This prejudice leads to publication bias: researchers are less likely to write up studies that show no effect, and journal editors are less likely to accept them. Consequently, no one can learn from them, and researchers waste time and resources on repeating experiments, redundantly.

It’s fascinating to see how science has not only demonstrated itself to be utterly useless as a device to adjudicate ethics, morals, or philosophy, but has actually corrupted itself in attempting to replace Christian ethics and moral philosophy.

The answer to post-Christian globalism

And to the Culture of Death is Christian nationalism:

While European nations languish with rapidly declining birthrates, Hungary stands out with rising marriage rates, falling abortions, and its highest birthrate in 20 years, Breitbart reports. Marriage is up by 43 percent since 2010, while divorce has dropped by 22.5 percent in the same period. This demographic turnaround has not been an accident, but the fruit of deliberate programs to promote marriage and the family while defending Hungary’s cultural identity and Christian roots.

“After we won the election in 2010 with a two-thirds majority, we decided to build a family-friendly country and to strengthen families raising children”, said Hungary’s Minister for the Family, Catalan Novak.

Standing firm in its position despite fierce opposition from the socialist left, the Orbán government enacted legislation resulting in “a comprehensive family-support system, a family-friendly tax system, a housing program, 800,000 new jobs, and many opportunities to create a balance between life and work”, Ms. Novak stated.

“We are living in times when fewer and fewer children are being born throughout Europe. People in the West are responding to this with immigration”, Prime Minister Orbán said at the State of the Nation address in Budapest in February.

Be fruitful and multiply or be replaced. Those are the choices. Choose wisely.

Darkstream: the Game of Thrones finale

My take on the finale of A Game of Thrones relied somewhat upon this article on Scientific American explaining the way in which the shift from George Martin’s sociological storytelling to Hollywood’s psychological storytelling all but ruined the HBO show, but allowed for a moderately satisfying end to the saga nevertheless.

It’s easy to miss this fundamental narrative lane change and blame the series’ downturn on plain old bad writing by Benioff and Weiss—partly because they are genuinely bad at it. They didn’t just switch the explanatory dynamics of the story, they did a terrible job in the new lane as well.

One could, for example, easily focus on the abundance of plot holes. The dragons, for example seem to switch between comic-book indestructible to vulnerable from one episode to another. And it was hard to keep a straight face when Jaime Lannister ended up on a tiny cove along a vast, vast shoreline at the exact moment the villain Euron Greyjoy swam to that very point from his sinking ship to confront him. How convenient!

Similarly, character arcs meticulously drawn over many seasons seem to have been abandoned on a whim, turning the players into caricatures instead of personalities. Brienne of Tarth seems to exist for no reason, for example; Tyrion Lannister is all of a sudden turned into a murderous snitch while also losing all his intellectual gifts (he hasn’t made a single correct decision the entire season). And who knows what on earth is up with Bran Stark, except that he seems to be kept on as some sort of extra Stark?

But all that is surface stuff. Even if the new season had managed to minimize plot holes and avoid clunky coincidences and a clumsy Arya ex machina as a storytelling device, they couldn’t persist in the narrative lane of the past seasons. For Benioff and Weiss, trying to continue what Game of Thrones had set out to do, tell a compelling sociological story, would be like trying to eat melting ice cream with a fork. Hollywood mostly knows how to tell psychological, individualized stories. They do not have the right tools for sociological stories, nor do they even seem to understand the job.

This is why it’s going to be challenging to make A Throne of Bones properly. But we’ll find a way to do it, and the success of A Game of Thrones is why we’ll have the opportunity.

Then they came for Thomas Jefferson

And Andrew Jackson:

Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg fully supports erasing the names of Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson from titles of prestigious annual political dinners around the country, due to their slave-owning history.

The Indiana politician shared his view on The Hugh Hewitt Show Friday after the radio host asked if Jefferson-Jackson dinners be renamed everywhere because both were holders of slaves.

‘Yeah, we’re doing that in Indiana. I think it’s the right thing to do,’ Buttigieg said ahead of his June 15 appearance at the event that is now named the Blue Commonwealth Dinner in his state…. He said scrubbing the names of the 1801-1809 President Jefferson and 1829-1837 7th President Jackson from event titles was not an attempt to erase history.

However he regards the move as a way to not only acknowledge the damage of the enslavement of people but to make it clear racism still thrives in America.

‘The real reason I think there is a lot of pressure on this is the relationship between the past and present that we’re finding in a million different ways that racism isn’t some curiosity out of the past that we’re embarrassed about but moved on from,’ he said. ‘It’s alive. It’s well. It’s hurting people and it’s one of the main reasons to be in politics today is to try to change or reverse the harms that went along with that.’

It is always Year Zero for the antichrists, whether they call themselves montagnards, liberals, socialists, progressives, or SJWs. And yet, the Fox News crowd loves this guy:

Pete Buttigieg received a standing ovation from the crowd at the end of his Fox News town hall in Claremont, New Hampshire Sunday night.

What an astonishing surprise

Nearly one-third of immigrant children are unrelated to their “parents”:

DNA tests of migrant children arrested at the US-Mexico border with their families have revealed the minors were not related to the adults accompanying them, the US media have reported. In a pilot program conducted by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) DNA tests were being taken of immigrants who are suspected of arriving at America’s southern border with children who were not theirs.

“There’s been some concern about, ‘Are they stepfathers or adopted fathers?’” an official involved in the system’s temporary rollout told Washington Examiner. “Those were not the case. In these cases, they are misrepresented as family members.”

It’s going to be tough on all the sanctimonious conservative virtue-signalers once they understand that they have been actively championing sex trafficking on a scale the world has never seen before. And so much for the “keeping families together” argument against repatriation.

No one knows anything

Especially the so-called experts:

The idea for the most important study ever conducted of expert predictions was sparked in 1984, at a meeting of a National Research Council committee on American-Soviet relations. The psychologist and political scientist Philip E. Tetlock was 30 years old, by far the most junior committee member. He listened intently as other members discussed Soviet intentions and American policies. Renowned experts delivered authoritative predictions, and Tetlock was struck by how many perfectly contradicted one another and were impervious to counterarguments.

Tetlock decided to put expert political and economic predictions to the test. With the Cold War in full swing, he collected forecasts from 284 highly educated experts who averaged more than 12 years of experience in their specialties. To ensure that the predictions were concrete, experts had to give specific probabilities of future events. Tetlock had to collect enough predictions that he could separate lucky and unlucky streaks from true skill. The project lasted 20 years, and comprised 82,361 probability estimates about the future.

The result: The experts were, by and large, horrific forecasters. Their areas of specialty, years of experience, and (for some) access to classified information made no difference. They were bad at short-term forecasting and bad at long-term forecasting. They were bad at forecasting in every domain. When experts declared that future events were impossible or nearly impossible, 15 percent of them occurred nonetheless. When they declared events to be a sure thing, more than one-quarter of them failed to transpire. As the Danish proverb warns, “It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.”

As it happens, I’ve occasionally taken part in the project as one of the forecasters, although I haven’t even logged in to the system for years. The one time I was moderately active, my team was in second place, although that was largely thanks to one guy who was easily the best in our group. If I recall correctly, I was better than the average forecaster, but not in the top ten percent. I still get emails from time to time asking me about the prospects for a Russian attack on Estonia before September and so forth, but I lost interest in it pretty quickly.

Anyhow, the article is right. Everyone is wrong about the future and most people are actually much more reliable as negative predictors, which I interpret as meaning that events proceed in a non-linear manner that is contrary to normal human expectations. That’s my best guess as to why the future is so hard for everyone to predict, or even anticipate.

Rule by immigrant

Tucker Carlson correctly identifies the fundamental failure of the US immigration system that was created by the confluence of immigration and excessive democracy:

For the left, whether the country benefits is not the point. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar––herself a symbol of America’s failed immigration system if there ever was one, someone who hates this country coming here at public expense––spent yesterday demanding the abolition of ICE, the decriminalization of illegal immigration itself, and an end to all deportation programs. She demands open borders, the unlimited arrival of anyone who wants to come to America, whether they have anything to contribute or not, and by the way you get to pay for it.

Tom Wolfe saw this coming at the turn of the century. I doubt it escaped his attention that the disastrous 1965 Naturalization Act that destroyed the USA was championed by immigrants and the children of immigrants.

Did anybody high or low look for a Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi to create a new tribute on the order of the Statue of Liberty for the nation that in the twentieth century, even more so than in the nineteenth, opened her arms to people from all over the globe—to Vietnamese, Thais, Cambodians, Laotians, Hmong, Ethiopians, Albanians, Senegalese, Guyanese, Eritreans, Cubans, as well as everybody else—and made sure they enjoyed full civil rights, including the means to take political power in a city the size of Miami if they could muster the votes?

And as soon as American immigration restrictions were relaxed in the 1960s, people of every land, every color, every religion, people from Africa, Asia, South America, and the Caribbean, began pouring into the United States.
– Tom Wolfe, Hooking Up

The Syrian false flag

Don’t believe any of the new stories about Iranian “attacks” that are now beginning to appear as the neocons continue banging their idiot war drums. All of these purported justifications for military action in the Middle East and the Gulf are fraudulent and they have been for decades. It has now been reported that the “poison gas attacks” supposedly conducted by Syrian government forces were no more real than Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction”.

A huge international news story broke last week, but I doubt you will hear about it anywhere else. It seems very likely that the decision we, France and the USA made in April 2018 to bomb Syria was based on a mistake as big as the fictional weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003.

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the international body which examines alleged incidents of the use of poison gas, has just confirmed to me that a devastating leaked document from its Dutch HQ is genuine.

The document, written by one of the OPCW’s most experienced investigators, shows that it is highly unlikely that gas canisters found at the scene of an alleged poison gas attack in Douma, Syria, were actually dropped from helicopters – as has been widely believed and claimed. The claim is crucial to the case for bombing Syria. A copy of the leaked document can be found on my blog on Mail Online.

Yet the OPCW’s official report on the event made no mention of any such doubts. What is going on? The OPCW is a valuable organisation, containing many fine people, with a noble purpose, but has it been placed under pressure, or even hijacked, by political forces which seek a justification for military intervention in Syria?

Given that a decision between war or peace, affecting the whole planet, could one day hang on its judgments, I think the world is entitled to an inquiry into what is happening behind its closed doors.

The treason committed by the FBI isn’t the only treason that has been committed in the last twenty years. There are a whole host of warmongers in Washington DC whose lies are directly responsible for tens of thousands of American dead and wounded. And the inevitable false flags directed at Iran are the one thing that have real potential to derail the 2020 Trumpslide, but only if President Trump is foolish enough to fall for them:

Asked this week if the U.S. was going to war with Iran, Trump said simply: “I hope not.” Aware of the potential backlash from within his party, the president is trying to play down the possibility of hostilities. He held the door open for negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program and malign activities in the region amid reports that he was pushing back against his more hawkish advisers’ preference for a military solution.

Prominent Trump supporters offered a pointed warning on Friday about the prospect of a new war, which they view as a direct violation of his “America First” pledge.

“It would be a disaster for him and for the country getting into another military engagement in the Middle East,” said Corey Stewart, who led Trump’s 2016 campaign in Virginia. “It does concern me that the president has (national security adviser John) Bolton and a lot of these neocons advising him. That’s clearly not what he ran on and what most Americans want.”

No more war in the Middle East. It is neither America’s concern nor America’s business. If the New Palestinians want war with Iran, then they can go and fight it themselves. It would certainly be entertaining to see Ben Shapiro, Bill Kristol, and Max Boot go up against the Revolutionary Guard.