Category: Lies and Untruths

Depressing Statistic

Lies and Untruths, Men & Women

As Longtime Readers all know, I look on most “studies” nowadays with the utmost skepticism, being as they generally employ shoddy data collection techniques, poor sampling and / or stupid analytic conclusions.

All that said, I found this one, from this study, to be at least credible:

Most relationships start with terrible or awkward sex.

Well, duh. That’s true of pretty much most human interaction,because you’re on unfamiliar territory and you need to get things straightened out before you can make it work properly.

Within the report, however, was a factoid which I found downright depressing:

69% of Americans admit that they get feelings of excitement right before sex with a new partner.

Now the last time I had sex with a new partner was during the Clinton presidency, so my memory may be failing me. But FFS: what other feelings can one have before first-time sex, if not excitement? Dread? Nausea? Fear? Disgust? And to make it worse: if 69% of folks get excited before a first-time bonk, that means that 31% don’t get excited, which seems incredible. I can understand pre-bonk anxiety, of course — which over half of people admit to — but one can be anxious about something yet still be excited about it. But 31 percent?

As I suggested above, this may just be shitty data, in which case we can carry on with our lives. But if the data can be trusted, then we as a society are in deep shit when something so basic, so natural, and (speaking from memory again) so much fun is not exciting.

Fucking Leftist Bullshit

Lies and Untruths, Two-Minute Hate

Maybe I’ve just been reading too much stuff like this, this, this and this recently, but I have to tell you, I’m getting totally sick and fucking tired of all this snowflake-ism, fascism masquerading as anti-fascism, threats against conservatives, Twatter storms when someone dares voice a viewpoint counter to the Orthodoxy, children screaming about how their parents have fucked up democracy (and being treated seriously by their ideological allies in the Press instead of being laughed out of the room), and all the rest of the politically-correct, safe-space-seeking, thumb-sucking kindergarten antics which passes for serious behavior on the Left.

Fucking hell: I enjoy a good show as much as anyone, but when Leftists are pilloried by other Leftists for being not Left enough — when the first Leftists stand to the left of Joseph Stalin to begin with — I start to get a sinking feeling about all this. Some people are treating this as a spectator sport: “Go ahead! Let’s all get the popcorn while the Left devours itself!” Well, it may be oh-so amusing, but what happens if this bunch of loony Commies gets their hands on the levers of power?

Does anyone remember when Hillary Bitch Clinton bragged that when she became President, she was going to allow not one or two, but twenty thousand Muslim Syrian refugees into the United States? Does anyone else see that this bit of American Merkelism could only have one purpose, that purpose being the undermining of American society? And that was Hillary Clinton, FFS: the most conservative member of the freak show that calls itself the Democrat Party nowadays. What if ultra-Socialist Bernie Sanders or one of those other Marxists became POTUS? Does anyone think that this would end well?

We’re all going tsk-tsk as we watch Venezuela descend into chaos, or South Africa descend into the usual African slaughterfest, and we comfort ourselves that oh no, none of that could happen here. Here’s my take on this:

Oh yes it fucking could.

I used to think that whoever was elected POTUS didn’t really matter because the Establishment would provide some kind of corrective stability. Sure, we elected a silly Lefty like Jimmy Carter or a fake conservative Democrat like Bill Clinton, but that didn’t really matter because the Republic survived their silliness. But then a serious Marxist (Barack Obama) got elected because golly gosh, it was time we had a Black President (even though he was really half White), an intellectual (even though he was an appalling student with crap college grades) who could then inflict Leftist bullshit like ObamaCare and subversive initiatives like the “Dear Colleague” missive sent to college administrators. Couple that with a vacillating, cowardly foreign policy, a feral politicization of the federal bureaucracy (Lois Lerner’s IRS, Eric Holder’s Justice Department, and the EPA to name just three), a serious attempt to undermine the electoral process using fake information and the FBI — and we have, for the first time, a really quick and effective transformation of the United States into a socialist police state.

And here’s the really good news: Obama was just the beginning. The next Democrat president is going to make him look like an amateur socialist: a member of the 1930s Fabian Society, as opposed to Joseph Stalin.

This, by the way, is the reason I’m really irritated by the NeverTrumpers: their childish little tantrums about Trump’s uncouth manner, his “undignified” behavior (e.g. his use of Twitter) and the “chaos” of his Administration don’t do anything but help make the Leftists’ screams that “Trump Is Hitler!” ring true.

But if the NeverTrumpers irritate me, the pillars of the American Left (academia, the Press, the Democrats and so on) have a different effect. Where before I looked on them with scorn and some amusement — FFS, do they actually believe that bullshit they’re spouting? — I now look on them as I would a rabid dog or a black mamba: they really do believe that crap, and they are that fucking dangerous.

One of Obama’s more telling pronouncements (as opposed to his bald-faced lies) was “Punch back twice as hard.” Well, that’s what I’m going to do in future. I’m not going to let some asshole Leftist get away with behavior that as few as twenty years ago would have been unthinkable to the Left itself. If they attempt to suppress my speech because it’s “hateful” or “hurtful” or “threatening” or any one of their little masquerades which all mean “Shut Up!”, I’m just going to ratchet up the venom quotient.

If they think that I’m “hateful” now, just wait: I haven’t yet begun to hate.

I didn’t think I was ever going to have to resort to violence to protect myself, my right to free speech and all my other Constitutional freedoms, but then came the calls for gun confiscation, Black Lives Matter and Antifa (to name just three), so I’d better get in some preparation.

So now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the range. While I still can.

Hall Of Shame

Bad News, Lies and Untruths

So PJMedia is an “objectionable” website, huh?

Wait till you go to Britishland. Here are a couple of websites I discovered were blocked, while I was Over There (in bold type):

I’m amused by the fact that weapons are lumped in with hate (or, for that matter, gore — as though Collectors Firearms have blood dripping from their antique bayonets or swords, FFS). It just shows how frightened these Brits are of… well, of everything. (Imagine being afraid of hatred.)

Amazingly, my website was not blocked under those auspices, because I surely feature all four of them on a regular basis* — a Good Thing they didn’t block me, or else I’d have gone over to Sky Broadband offices and shown them what “hate”, “gore” and “violence” really are. As for “weapons”:

Fuck off and die, Sky Broadband, you bunch of pussywhipped, nanny-hugging hoplophobe sissies. (Now that’s hate.)

I mean, if we can’t shoot ’em, can we at least flog them a little?

*I don’t do porn on these pages, but after seeing this timorous nonsense, I’m sorely tempted…

Fudging The Numbers

Lies and Untruths, Numbers & Statistics

Oops. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been caught with its dirty little fingers in the fudge drawer… again.

NOAA has been cooking the books. Yet again – presumably for reasons more to do with ideology than meteorology – NOAA has adjusted past temperatures to look colder than they were and recent temperatures to look warmer than they were.
We’re not talking fractions of a degree, here. The adjustments amount to a whopping 3.1 degrees F. This takes us well beyond the regions of error margins or innocent mistakes and deep into the realm of fiction and political propaganda.

This all started when some smart guy looked at the raw data covering the recent polar vortex storms in the Northeastern United States, and found the disparity as noted above. The data had been “smoothed” (weasel statistician word meaning “altered”) and guess in which direction? Why, to support the Glueball Wormening narrative, of course.

And by the way: you know how the Arctic ice cap is at its lowest level in history? Ummm not so.

And you know how it never snows in Rome? Also not so. And Naples?

And you know how The Independent said that British children will grow up never having seen snow? Not this generation, anyway.

Enjoy the read.

Just To Mess With Ya

Lies and Untruths, Numbers & Statistics

Here’s an interesting math situation, wherein I prove that 2=1:

1.) Suppose you have quantities A and B, and suppose they are equal. That is,
A = B

2.) Multiply both sides by A:
A^2 = AB

3.) Now subtract B^2 from both sides:
A^2-B^2 = AB-B^2

4.) Factor both sides:
(A+B)(A-B) = B(A-B)

5.) Divide both sides by the common factor (A-B):
A+B = B

6.) Now, remembering that A=B, we have
B+B=B, or 2B=B

7.) Divide both sides by B:
2=1

And now, children, you will understand how Congress creates the national budget.

/Lewis Carroll

 

Not Science

Lies and Untruths, Numbers & Statistics

An Initial Association Test (IAT) purports to signal whether the testee (I nearly wrote something else) displays an inherent bias against something or someone. It’s called “science” (mostly by the charlatans who dreamt it up) but it isn’t, as the redoubtable Heather MacDonald writes in City Journal:

There is hardly an aspect of IAT doctrine that is not now under methodological challenge.
Any social-psychological instrument must pass two tests to be considered accurate: reliability and validity. A psychological instrument is reliable if the same test subject, taking the test at different times, achieves roughly the same score each time. But IAT bias scores have a lower rate of consistency than is deemed acceptable for use in the real world—a subject could be rated with a high degree of implicit bias on one taking of the IAT and a low or moderate degree the next time around. A recent estimate puts the reliability of the race IAT at half of what is considered usable. No evidence exists, in other words, that the IAT reliably measures anything stable in the test-taker.

And it gets better:

But the fiercest disputes concern the IAT’s validity. A psychological instrument is deemed “valid” if it actually measures what it claims to be measuring—in this case, implicit bias and, by extension, discriminatory behavior. If the IAT were valid, a high implicit-bias score would predict discriminatory behavior, as Greenwald and Banaji asserted from the start. It turns out, however, that IAT scores have almost no connection to what ludicrously counts as “discriminatory behavior” in IAT research—trivial nuances of body language during a mock interview in a college psychology laboratory, say, or a hypothetical choice to donate to children in Colombian, rather than South African, slums. Oceans of ink have been spilled debating the statistical strength of the correlation between IAT scores and lab-induced “discriminatory behavior” on the part of college students paid to take the test. The actual content of those “discriminatory behaviors” gets mentioned only in passing, if at all, and no one notes how remote those behaviors are from the discrimination that we should be worried about.

In other words, the stats don’t add up, and the subject of the test (racial bias) cannot be established beyond cooking the numbers and faulty projection.

Sound like global warming theory.

If you read the whole piece — it’s long, like all City Journal articles — what will strike you the most (as it did me) was not the bullshit of the IAT, but the degree to which the IAT has become embedded in government and the corporate world.

This is yet another reason why I could never find employment in today’s business world: not only would I refuse to take the test, but I’d also pour scorn on the whole process, loudly. Exit Kim, on Day One at Global MegaCorp, Inc. And I wouldn’t even get a chance to be fired for complimenting some harpy on her outfit, or for carrying my 1911 into the office.

But I digress.

Once again, as with global warming “science”, this whole IAT thing smacks of people having a theory (people are prejudiced / the Earth is over-heating because of SUVs), then creating the pseudo-science underpinning to support and prove the theory. So it’s complete bullshit, just like Glueball Wormening. (Of course, the appearance of “Harvard” in the credentials of one of the IAT’s developers should have been a warning to everyone.)

I should also remind everyone that Heather MacDonald is a statistician, not just a journalist. Hers is the scientific method; what those other two tools are doing is selling snake oil.