Tag: declineandfall

The reproducibility crisis in science, which is the fact that most peer-reviewed studies published in the most-reputable science journals cannot be replicated, is being significantly exacerbated by the fact that the nonreplicable studies are cited far more often than the replicable ones:

Papers in leading psychology, economic and science journals that fail to replicate and therefore are less likely to be true are often the most cited papers in academic research, according to a new study by the University of California San Diego’s Rady School of Management.

Published in Science Advances, the paper explores the ongoing “replication crisis” in which researchers have discovered that many findings in the fields of social sciences and medicine don’t hold up when other researchers try to repeat the experiments.

The paper reveals that findings from studies that cannot be verified when the experiments are repeated have a bigger influence over time. The unreliable research tends to be cited as if the results were true long after the publication failed to replicate.  

“We also know that experts can predict well which papers will be replicated,” write the authors Marta Serra-Garcia, assistant professor of economics and strategy at the Rady School and Uri Gneezy, professor of behavioral economics also at the Rady School. “Given this prediction, we ask ‘why are non-replicable papers accepted for publication in the first place?’”

The link between interesting findings and nonreplicable research also can explain why it is cited at a much higher rate—the authors found that papers that successfully replicate are cited 153 times less than those that failed.

“Interesting or appealing findings are also covered more by media or shared on platforms like Twitter, generating a lot of attention, but that does not make them true,” Gneezy said. 

Serra-Garcia and Gneezy analyzed data from three influential replication projects which tried to systematically replicate the findings in top psychology, economic and general science journals (Nature and Science). In psychology, only 39 percent of the 100 experiments successfully replicated. In economics, 61 percent of the 18 studies replicated as did 62 percent of the 21 studies published in Nature/Science.

With the findings from these three replication projects, the authors used Google Scholar to test whether papers that failed to replicate are cited significantly more often than those that were successfully replicated, both before and after the replication projects were published. The largest gap was in papers published in Nature/Science: non-replicable papers were cited 300 times more than replicable ones.

Apparently my prediction that science would be as reliably false as government press releases may have been an observation, not a prediction. Putting the reproducibility problem together with the non-replicable citation problem indicates that present scientage – the current scientific knowledge base – in Nature/Science is only 0.5 percent reliable.

Granted, that’s half-a-percent more reliable than government press releases, but still reliably wrong. In other words, almost everything that “studies show” has no support from an actual scientific perspective.

I don’t know why President Trump failed to publicly uphold the law and the Constitution when he was confronted with massive election fraud. Given all of the various anomalies we’ve witnessed since January, I don’t even know who is actually calling the shots in the United States. But while I still assert that Donald Trump was the greatest US president since Andrew Jackson, what I do know is that he also doesn’t merit any sympathy whatsoever from his supporters for his current post-presidential persecutions.

New York’s attorney general is now investigating the Trump Organization for criminal offenses, it emerged on Tuesday night.

The office, led by Letitia James, had been investigating the company for civil tax offenses since early 2019. The investigation has now escalated.

‘We have informed the Trump Organization that our investigation into the Organization is no longer purely civil in nature,’ said Fabien Levy, a spokesman for the office. 

‘We are now actively investigating the Trump Organization in a criminal capacity, along with the Manhattan DA.’

First, Trump betrayed – yes, betrayed – his supporters when he completely failed to address, much less crack down upon, the social media companies who were systematically attacking them. As someone who was “suspended” from Twitter six years ago, I’m completely unmoved by conservatives belatedly crying about their own recent suspensions and deplatformings. This could have, and should have, been dealt with by President Trump back in 2016, and his failure to do so was a massive strategic mistake that was obvious at the time.

If you won’t fight for your followers, don’t expect them to fight for you.

Second, it was always obvious to everyone that the witch-hunting that started before President Trump even took office was going to continue the moment that he left office. And no matter what agreements were agreed, only a complete idiot would have placed any confidence in the various parties that make up the Deep State all keeping them.

As I repeatedly pointed out during his presidency, President Trump’s fundamental weakness is that he is a negotiator, not a fighter. Which means, at the end of the day, he’s always going to cave and take the best deal that he thinks he can get. While we don’t know that’s what happened after the events of November 3, 2020, it wouldn’t be even remotely surprising to eventually learn that Trump took the best deal he thought he could get at the time in lieu of crossing the Rubicon.

THE ART OF THE SUCKER, March 2017: 

An ambitious immigration deal with Congress. That sounds familiar, how did that work out in 1986? It’s rather remarkable that an experienced negotiator like Donald Trump doesn’t seem to fully grasp the way in which everything else he does will be rendered entirely moot by giving in on immigration. This would appear to be a crucial nexus, and if handled incorrectly, has the potential to serve as his own “No New Taxes” moment, which you will recall sank a George Bush who had previously been riding very high in the polls and was widely expected to win reelection.

If Trump doesn’t build the wall and maintain a hard line on immigration, he will not win the 2020 election, as he will lose the base that has remained loyal to him throughout. It’s literally the one thing he cannot afford to do, which is why he should immediately fire any adviser, from his daughter on down, who is advising him to throw away his core support in pursuit of a mirage and approval from the Left that will never come.

Never abandon your base. Never abandon your core. If you do not understand this, you are absolutely guaranteed failure.

This really isn’t that hard. 1) Build the Wall. 2) They have to go back.

SO STOP NEGOTIATING, CHAMP, October 2019:

President Trump needs to stop listening to his “aides”. It was incredibly stupid. But it’s ultimately Trump’s fault for caving constantly instead of following through on his threats. This is the problem with a negotiator. They never grasp that sometimes the best deal is no deal.

Giving up a major campaign promise “because Mexico won’t cooperate” is entirely retarded. The US has the largest military in the world. Mexico doesn’t need to cooperate; there are many other ways to keep invaders out than relying on the Mexicans to do it.

 After 60 years of completely failing to defend America’s borders or protect the nation from invasion, a group of retired US military officers is… encouraging everyone to get involved in local and state politics.

More than 120 retired generals, admirals, and military officers signed a letter that warned that the United States is embroiled in an existential fight and called on “all citizens” to get involved in local and state politics.

“We are in a fight for our survival as a Constitutional Republic like no other time since our founding in 1776. The conflict is between supporters of Socialism and Marxism vs. supporters of Constitutional freedom and liberty,” stated the letter (pdf), which was signed by 124 former generals and admirals, released by “Flag Officers 4 America.”

The letter also posited that opposition to proposed bills and laws that would strengthen election initiatives has troublesome implications.

“Election integrity demands insuring there is one legal vote cast and counted per citizen. Legal votes are identified by State Legislature’s approved controls using government IDs, verified signatures, etc. Today, many are calling such commonsense controls ‘racist’ in an attempt to avoid having fair and honest elections,” the letter added.

According to the Flag Officers 4 America website, it is a group of former military leaders who “pledged to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies,” who are “domestic” and “foreign.”

Of note, signatories of the letter include retired Army Brig. Gen. Donald Bolduc—a Senate candidate in New Hampshire, retired Army Lt. Gen. William Boykin, and retired Vice Adm. John Poindexter—who was the deputy national security adviser for President Ronald Reagan.

“China is the greatest external threat to America. Establishing cooperative relations with the Chinese Communist Party emboldens them to continue progress toward world domination, militarily, economically, politically, and technologically. We must impose more sanctions and restrictions to impede their world domination goal and protect America’s interests,” their letter also said.

OK, Boomers. The extent to which this letter completely misses the point and the problems is downright amusing. Civnattery and vooting harder will accomplish precisely nothing.

What a joke. With an officer class like this, no wonder the USA hasn’t been capable of defeating any foe bigger than Panama. 

 A former believer in free speech belatedly comes to realize that it was never anything more than an intellectual weapon designed to destabilize the Christian West by the Promethean intellectuals operating under the perverse banner of the Enlightenment.

The question is not, “Should we be absolutely free to speak?” The question is really, “Who should be the censors, and what should be censored?” We understand this intuitively, but the mantra of free speech propaganda often causes us to miss this.  

There are always blasphemy laws in any culture, even a libertine culture, where it is blasphemy to say, “That is immoral”, or “Maybe you should have self-control,” or, “Do you really need another cookie?”. We Christians and conservatives in the West fell into the trap of believing that neutrality could exist in a nation. That is, we thought a society based on a secular public sphere, allowing a freely expressed marketplace of ideas was possible. But this was always a lie, and this is why such a society didn’t last very long.

Really, those who sought to break the boundaries of what could and could not be said, were just using that as a means of usurping the Christian nature of the West, and taking power for themselves, so they could then enforce their version of blasphemy laws. Have you noticed how todays almost exclusively leftist cultural elite are not even slightly interested in encouraging the free market of ideas any more? They want no part of free speech. Why is this? Their goal of taking power has been achieved. There is no desire for the anti-establishment to let people freely continue to criticize the establishment, once they become the establishment. No, it actually becomes a threat to their systemic control.

This is not my opinion of what has happened, either, elements of society have been agitating for the disestablishment of the church for some time, and they have been utterly successful. Here in Australia, it is not uncommon to see the media go after politicians who are open in their Christian faith, even if their advocated policies are not all that Christian. The eminent historian and Medievalist, J B Bury, told us that progressives viewed free speech as a means of achieving this goal of destabilizing the Christian West.

First tradition had to be undermined, “It is only recently that men have been abandoning the belief that the welfare of a state depends on rigid stability and on the preservation of its traditions and institutions unchanged.” The process of dismantling tradition was encouraged by the effective and continued challenging of Western heritage, by the very elites who were supposed to preserve it. “DURING the last three hundred years reason has been slowly but steadily destroying Christian mythology and exposing the pretensions of supernatural revelation.”

This was not the dispassionate scientific process that it is often presented as being in the movies. Humanity did not just wake up one day in a state of “enlightenment” and determine based on scientific reason that all tradition must be rejected. It was guided in that direction, by ideologues and freedom of expression was the tool used to achieve this end. As Bury says, “…nothing should be left undone to impress upon the young that freedom of thought is an axiom of human progress.” By “human progress” Bury, and many other enlightenment thinkers really mean less Christian. Indeed, this is explicit in Bury’s A History of the Freedom of Thought, for example: “In this sense it might be said that ‘distrust thy father and mother’ is the first commandment with promise.” This is an explicitly anti-biblical command. This brings to mind Richard Dawkins misguided attempt to create a new 10 Commandments in his book The God Delusion, to replace the real ones.

These attempts to create new commandments are always foolish, because if mankind sees very little reason to follow God’s commands, why would he care about some enlightenment professors list?   

It is important to understand that freedom of expression was only ever a tool for the enlightenment anti-Church thought leaders, to replace the authority of the Church, with their own values and Dogma, and authority. Previous generations of enlightenment thinkers argued for, and even genuinely defended the principles of free speech. But once they had completely replaced the authority of scripture and the Church in guiding society, the doors began to close on anti-establishment sentiment, which Bury conceived as possible,

“It is by no means inconceivable that in lands where opinion is now free coercion might be introduced. If a revolutionary social movement prevailed, led by men inspired by faith in formulas (like the men of the French Revolution) and resolved to impose their creed, experience shows that coercion would almost inevitably be resorted to.”

Those who still champion free speech today are well-intentioned, but they are still well behind the curve, because they don’t understand how it is incompatible with Western civilization, or that it was only a phase in the decline to which Western societies can never be reasonably expected to return. Now that the intellectual infection has metastasized into full-blown convergence, either it will be cured or it will kill the infected victim.

When one considers that the primary goals of the Enlightenment were to a) legalize usury and b) legalize blasphemy, it should be readily apparent that there was something deeply evil behind it. This really shouldn’t have been that hard. When someone is offering you the promise of knowledge, you must always look for the snake.

Thanks to the post-WWII mass deportation of the neoclowns from the USSR, Russia is now free and the USA is rapidly being transformed into the USSA. Pessimistic as I am about the prospects for the survival of the USA as a political entity, I didn’t expect this level of social control to be imposed on citizens so soon by the evil imperial elite:

“America First” host Nick Fuentes has been banned by all the usual Big Tech suspects, along with livestream service DLive, Coinbase, “and every payment processor” for his forceful advocacy of populism, an end to mass migration and protection of the nuclear family. He was scheduled to join Loomer, former Delaware GOP Senate candidate Lauren Witzke (banned from Twitter for calling a pedophilia-flirting transgender activist “demonic”), and me in Palm Beach Tuesday at a rally to push for loophole-free legislation holding Silicon Valley accountable for discriminatory deplatforming.

But Fuentes never got off the ground, because two airlines and Joe Biden’s TSA informed him that he didn’t have “clearance” to fly. He has been charged with no crimes and was blocked from exercising his First Amendment rights to free speech and peaceable assembly.

“The United States is now a country that persecutes its own citizens for political dissent. My placement on the no-fly list constitutes a grave escalation by the federal government against American conservatives,” Fuentes told me. It’s “all the more reason why our Republican representatives in state and federal government must get serious and pass strong legislation that protects the civil liberties of the 75 million people that voted for Donald Trump.”

Note that a US citizen who has not even been accused of a crime is being denied the right to travel within the country due to nothing more than the fact that a small number of evil and influential Jews are afraid of the popularity of his opinions. The idea that “it’s a free country” is no longer even remotely applicable to the USA, because the United States is no longer a republic and it is no longer ruled by American Christians. It is now ruled by foreigners and women, which you may recall is defined as a curse by the Bible.

If you fear to even identify the wicked, then you have submitted to them and their father the Devil. And your silence will not protect you. To the contrary, they are absolutely counting on it. They don’t deplatform people like Nick Fuentes out of strength, but rather, out of sheer terror, and for the very same reason they are trying to disarm you.

And the Bank of England. Because does anyone really believe the central banks of the USA and the UK are any less corrupt than Lebanon’s central bank? There is presumably a reason the Fed has vehemently resisted being audited since Ron Paul first started calling for a public audit.

Switzerland’s attorney-general is investigating allegations that Lebanon’s central bank governor and his brother embezzled more than $300m from that institution through transactions to a mysterious offshore company. 

“Since April 2002 at least, it appears the central bank governor, Riad Salame, with help from his brother, Raja Salame, organised embezzlement operations, . . . exceeding $300m to the detriment of the Banque du Liban [BdL],” the Swiss attorney-general’s office wrote in a letter to the Lebanese authorities requesting mutual legal assistance. The letter, sent in November last year, was leaked and is publicly available online on a Lebanese news site. 

A Lebanese official confirmed the authenticity of the letter. The Swiss attorney-general’s office confirmed to the FT a “criminal investigation into suspicions of aggravated money laundering . . . in connection with possible embezzlement to the detriment of the Banque du Liban”, and that it had requested help from Lebanese “competent authorities”. 

Clown world is collapsing. The tide is receding and soon we’ll see who is naked. 

What does it profit a woman to gain the US Supreme Court, but lose her soul?

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett sold a book advance for $2 million, according a Monday report. Barrett’s advance is the largest for a Supreme Court justice since Clarence Thomas and Sandra Day O’Connor wrote books, according to Politico. The book will discuss how judges should not bring their personal feelings and opinions into the courtroom, publishing sources told the outlet.

Big book advances are one of the most reliable guides to personal corruption that exist today, short of being put on the corporate boards of foreign corporations. As a publisher, I can attest to the extreme unlikelihood that Barret’s book will ever come close to earning out its advance, especially not without the bulk buys by her paymasters.

The complete dereliction of duty by the US Supreme Court following the November 2020 elections wasn’t surprising, but it did confirm that the last embers of the Republic that survived the establishment of Empire in 1865 had been extinguished.

UPDATE: Bill Barr and Mike Pence were also gifted book deals. Quite the collection of talented writers, it would seem:

While some veterans of Donald Trump’s administration are having a tough time selling memoirs about their time in power, others with ties to Trump who didn’t embrace his election conspiracy theories have sold book deals.

William Barr, Trump’s former attorney general who resigned two days before Christmas after disagreeing publicly with Trump’s voter fraud conspiracy theories, recently sold a book about his time at the Justice Department, according to three people familiar with the deal. This will be Barr’s first book and he started writing it within the last two months, according to one of the people.

Some Trump figures have made millions selling their books, including former Vice President Mike Pence, who Simon and Schuster bought the rights for two books for reportedly $3 to 4 million. 

Ontario goes full Nazi:

Effective Saturday, April 17, 2021 at 12:01 a.m., police officers and other provincial offences officers will have the authority to require any individual to provide their home address and purpose for not being at their residence. In addition, police officers, special constables and First Nation Constables will have the authority to stop vehicles to inquire about an individual’s reasons for leaving their home. This additional enforcement tool will only be in effect during the Stay-at-Home order and exclusively to enforce the Stay-at-Home order.

It’s just a temporary measure. Short term, for the duration of the emergency. You know, like the income tax. Meanwhile, the Canadian government is actively encouraging people to leave their homes in India and China and move to Canada.

There is no doubt that certain US governors would like to pursue a similar approach, but the obvious success of less-restrictive states like Florida is preventing them from doing so.

UPDATE: It appears the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms has gone missing. This is not a metaphor.

WE ARE SORRY

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The nice thing about Riot Days, as opposed to Snow Days, is that the school administrators can schedule them in advance. Like hurricanes, city riots are now relatively predictable:

Protests and riots have been happening in major cities across the country over the last week in response to the deaths of Daunte Wright and Adam Toledo. Since the news broke of Wright’s death last Sunday, things have been progressively getting worse.

Now the city of Minneapolis is preparing for even more riots next week.

On Friday night, Jack Posobiec said on Twitter that Minneapolis is closing all schools this upcoming Wednesday through Friday. The reason? The anticipation of the Derek Chauvin verdict, the police officer at the forefront of the death of George Floyd.

It seems the school administrators, at least, expect the jury to return with a “not guilty” verdict. 

Curfew in Minneapolis in effect

 7 p.m. April 12 to 6 a.m. April 13

Today, April 12, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey issued Emergency Regulation 2021-2-1, which establishes a city-wide curfew in Minneapolis. The law goes is in effect at 7 p.m. tonight, April 12 and will last until 6 a.m. tomorrow, Tuesday April 13. The curfew comes after Frey declared a local State of Emergency, as is required under the City’s Charter before establishing a curfew. 

Gov. Tim Walz has also issued a curfew 7 p.m. tonight until 6 a.m. tomorrow for Hennepin, Ramsey and Anoka counties

During the curfew, you must not travel on any public street or in any public place.

I have to admit, I find it more than a little hilarious that NORTH OAKS is under curfew for fear of violence in Brooklyn Center and Minneapolis.