Author Archive: Stephen Green
October 27, 2023
NO CHANGE, PLEASE, WE’RE BRITISH: Debunking the Conspiracy Theory Keeping Britain’s Socialized Healthcare System Alive.
Even though it’s self-evident the emperor has no clothes, the NHS is treated like a sacred cow. This begs the question: why are people so loyal to a system that is clearly failing them?
There is a prevalent conspiracy theory that the NHS is being intentionally underfunded by the Conservative Government so that the resulting poor outcomes will provide justification for them to privatize it and transform it into the American model of healthcare. This theory is pushed by the establishment: from senior members of the British Medical Association, journalists, and Members of Parliament.
This theory achieves two things. One, it shifts blame for poor outcomes away from the NHS as a system itself and toward the politicians in power. Two, it frames the debate with the assumption that privatization is a bad thing, causing any meaningful reform to be met with fear mongering.
This narrative has caused a massive issue for opponents of the NHS as there are multiple levels of misleading rhetoric. The fact of the matter is that the Conservatives are not privatizing or underfunding the NHS. Furthermore, whether it be a fully privatized system or even the mixed system as seen in other European countries, free-market reform would significantly help patients and doctors.
But socialism is never about outcomes; it’s about control.
MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Toyota Chair Speaks the Charged Truth About EVs.
October 26, 2023
PAULA BOLYARD: Truth. “The Left will tell you that everyone has his/her/zher own truth. Thanks to postmodernism, we’re supposed to believe that objective truth is a myth—a relic of a bygone era.”
NEVER BEND THE KNEE: Shut Up, the TED Talk People Explained.
In April, Mr. Hughes was invited to give a TED talk about colorblindness—the topic of his forthcoming book. The talk’s theme, as he explained recently in a podcast interview with Glenn Loury, was that colorblindness shouldn’t be a “dirty word,” which it has become on the political left. The concept “was at the core of the antislavery movement, the core of the civil-rights movement, and was later abandoned,” Mr. Hughes said. “We should reinvestigate the wisdom of it as a principle. The idea of colorblindness is that no one ever gets penalized for their racial identity. And there’s a logic to that for governing a racially diverse society in the long run.”
That’s common sense. But we live in an age when common sense is not only uncommon, it’s controversial. It’s controversial to argue that children fare better in two-parent families. It’s controversial to argue that someone who swam on the boys team last year shouldn’t be allowed to swim on the girls team this year. It’s controversial to condemn unequivocally Hamas’s massacre of unarmed Israeli civilians on Oct. 7. And yes, it’s controversial to argue that race-neutral policies are preferable to polices that promote racial favoritism.
The day after Mr. Hughes’s talk, he received a call from Mr. Anderson, who said that black employees at TED were upset by his remarks. Mr. Anderson asked Mr. Hughes to meet with them. Mr. Hughes agreed, but the employees backed out without an explanation. Two weeks later, Mr. Hughes received an email from Mr. Anderson explaining that he was under pressure to not post the talk online. The email cited an unnamed social-scientist friend of Mr. Anderson, who said Mr. Hughes’s argument for colorblind public policies was “directly contradicted by an extensive body of rigorous research.”
Mr. Hughes was confused. “I’m thinking,” he told Mr. Loury, “are they preparing the grounds to censor my talk using fact-checking as a pretense?” The talk had passed TED’s own fact-checking process: “Every word of a TED talk is fact-checked before it gets spoken. And you don’t deviate from the script at all. And I didn’t.”
TED finally posted the talk but “sandbagged” it so that “the lack of standard promotion by TED has Coleman’s talk at about 10% of the views of all the other talks surrounding his on their site.”
Shameful behavior on TED’s part but the real question is what they’ll bend the knee to next time and the time after that.
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Can Even Nancy Pelosi Save the Nancy Pelosi Federal Building? “Other than the vagrants, the drug dealers, the risk of physical violence, the double standards, and the comically hapless climate control, the Speaker Nancy Pelosi Federal Building is a lovely place to work.”
SAD: Russia’s Invasion Has Thrown Its Space Scientists Out of Orbit. “Russia’s attack on Ukraine is fueled by a decidedly anti-Western ideology. But in contrast, Russia’s space scientists had been building international ties, entering into partnership projects, and seeking to expand collaboration with Western countries over the previous three decades. For many scientists, Feb. 24, 2022, came as a shock and caused many international studies to be paused indefinitely or terminated altogether.”
COLONIZATION, STRAIGHT UP: Qatar’s War for Young American Minds.
Right now, senior leaders of Hamas, the perpetrators of the worst atrocity against Jews since the Holocaust, are huddled in Qatar. They’ve been there for years. But American foreign policy has turned a blind eye. Why? One reason might be that for the last 25 years, this small, energy-rich state has pumped billions into America to purchase influence and good favor.
The Qataris have spent their lavish fortune at American law firms, on lobbying contracts with former senior officials, and on junkets and partnerships with big media companies. The biggest recipients of Qatari largesse, though, have been major universities and think tanks.
The numbers are staggering. According to a 2022 study from the National Association of Scholars, Qatar today is the largest foreign donor to American universities. The study found that between 2001 and 2021, the petrostate donated a whopping $4.7 billion to U.S. colleges. The largest recipients are some of America’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning. These schools have partnered with the regime to build campuses in Doha’s “education city,” a special district of the capital that hosts satellite colleges for American universities.
Plus: “One of Qatar’s soft power aims is to advance the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist movement that spawned Hamas and the ruling party in Turkey.”
It’s time to decolonize American higher education.
KEVIN DOWNEY JR: Four Astounding Facts You Need to Know About Your Government NOW. “Normally I would suggest that you send an article like this to your lavender-haired, Transtifa, non-binary sibling-in-law and try to open zhim’s eyes. Not today. That would be a waste of your time and effort. Zhe is part of the problem and intends to remain one. You need to send this to every ‘normie neighbor’ or friend who thinks the nation is fine and that ‘globalist codswallop’ you talk about falls into the ‘it can’t happen here in America’ file.”
DECLINE IS A CHOICE: Europe could face a ‘century of humiliation’ warns CEO of Nvidia rival, who says startups fare better in America.
European technology startups would have more success if they upped stakes for the States—at least, that’s according to British chip designer Graphcore’s chief executive, Nigel Toon.
“We’d probably have it easier if we moved to the U.S.,” he said in an onstage interview at the Bloomberg Technology Summit in London on Tuesday.
Why? Because, according to Toon, there is just more investment and support for computing technology across the pond.
Toon even went as far as to say that the U.K. and Europe could enter a “century of humiliation” if they fail to invest enough in new technology.
Pointing to China’s mediocre growth during the industrial revolution, he added: “We risk, as the U.K. and Europe, being left behind in this technology war.”
Most European innovations in recent years seem to consist of EU regulations meant to suck funds and fines out of foreign tech firms.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Trump Is Not Going Quietly Into That Perversion of Justice Night. “At present, destroying Donald Trump’s life is Priority #1 for the American Left. It’s a tall order, since Trump has resources and fortitude. If they do manage to get him out of the way, it’s open season on the rest of us.”
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: FBI Received ‘Criminal Information’ From 40+ Confidential Sources On The Biden Family. “Grassley said that an FBI task force inside the Washington Field Office shut down ‘reporting and information from those sources by falsely discrediting the information as foreign disinformation,’ the report said. The result was that a lot of the information that was given to officials went nowhere.”
THIS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL THE PAIN DEALT BACK FAR EXCEEDS THE PAIN DEALT OUT: Iran Continues to Use Its Proxies to Attack Americans With Impunity.
SURPRISING NO ONE OUTSIDE THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION: Hamas Fighters Trained in Iran Before Oct. 7 Attacks.
Roughly 500 militants from Hamas and an allied group, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, participated in the exercises in September, which were led by officers of the Quds Force, the foreign-operations arm of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the people said.
Senior Palestinian officials and Iranian Brig. Gen. Esmail Qaani, the head of Quds Force, also attended, they said.
…
Israel and the U.S. have sought to highlight Iran’s role in supporting Hamas and other groups hostile to Israel, including the Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah, which has been engaging in sporadic exchanges of fire with Israeli troops on Israel’s northern border.But, with the specter of a wider war looming, the U.S. has said it has no evidence that Iran was directly involved in planning or approving the Oct. 7 attack.
The Wall Street Journal, citing senior Hamas and Hezbollah officials, has reported that the Quds Force helped plan the attack and agreed that it could go ahead at a meeting in Beirut on Oct. 2 with leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah. An adviser to the Syrian government and a European official gave the same account of Iran’s involvement.
But: “Several U.S. officials said Washington has ‘compelling’ intelligence indicating that Iranian leaders were surprised by the Hamas assault.”
It could be that the intel is correct and Hamas is lying to draw Israel (and perhaps the US) into fighting Iran directly, we have just another massive intel failure, or our officials are lying.
ATHENA THORNE: The Systemic Anti-Semitism of the Left. “The truth is that the left is integrally anti-Semitic. As they’ve marched through our institutions, they’ve brought their anti-Jewish and anti-Israel sentiment with them, weaving it throughout the establishment of which they are now firmly in control.”
October 25, 2023
ASHLEY MCCULLY: Viral Restaurant List Is the Rosetta Stone of Gen Z Dating. “The real problem with this list, though, does not lie in Gen Z’s unwillingness or inability to understand the purpose of dating but in the female’s mind that she is entitled to luxury in exchange for the privilege of being in her company for two hours.”
ELECTRIC VEHICLE BLUES: Honda and General Motors SCRAP $5 billion plan to develop more affordable electric vehicles – after Ford boss warned eco cars had become a ‘political football.’
The manufacturers agreed in April 2022 that they would combine powers to slash the battery costs on eco cars and develop vehicles below GM’s $30,000 Chevrolet Equinox. The partnership was intended to compete with Elon Musk’s Tesla which has aggressively cut prices this year.
But today Honda CEO Toshiro Mibe confirmed the project had been cancelled, citing cost and logistical challenges.
He told Bloomberg: ‘After studying for a year, we decided that this would be difficult as a business, so at the moment we are ending development of an affordable EV.
‘GM and Honda will search for a solution separately. The project itself has been cancelled.’
Honda confirmed the news did not change its ambition to only sell electric vehicles by 2040.
Perhaps… but how many?
VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR WEEKLY INSANITY WRAP [VIP]: No Justice Is Possible for the Killers of Retired Cop Andreas Probst. “Is there any human punishment fit for the joyriding killers of Andreas Probst? That’s the lead crazy on today’s Insanity Wrap, an entire week’s worth of the best bad news.”
So much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.
YOU WON’T NEED MORE THAN ONE GUESS: Guess Who Funded the Pro-Palestinian ‘Insurrectionists’ on Capitol Hill.
HMM: China Is Facing Housing Market Disaster.
According to data, China’s property sector is the single largest asset class in the world, as Adem Tumerkan, editor at Speculators Anonymous, told Newsweek. “It’s estimated to be worth over $60 trillion—far more than China’s bond and equity markets combined,” he said.
“When I was still at UBS a few years ago, we used to call it the most important sector in the world,” economist George Magnus, once chief economist of UBS and now an associate at the China Centre at the University of Oxford in the U.K., told Newsweek. “Most people kind of accept that even allowing for a bit of double counting and dubious inclusions, it’s probably about a quarter of [China’s] GDP.”
This is a huge slice of GDP when compared with other large economies. Not only this sector is massively important for China, but it’s also closely tied to the personal finances and savings of Chinese households, as “Chinese people don’t really invest in equities or financial assets,” Magnus said, and the property sector has become “a form of saving for the urban middle class.”
About 70 percent of household wealth in China is tied to the real estate sector, “a massive amount,” according to Tumerkan. “It really emphasizes how dangerous falling home prices can be on household balance sheets and confidence,” he said.
But while prices fall…: China is estimated to have nearly 25% of the entire US building stock under construction right now.
China needs to deleverage from real estate but they keep doubling down, instead.