Jerry Kirkpatrick's Blog, page 7

Epistemology of the Models—Climate, Economic, and Epidemiological

How do we know the future? Since we are not omniscient, we can’t know it with certainty. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) SciJinks tells us that five-day weather forecasts are about 90 percent accurate, forecasts for seven days decrease to 80 percent, and for ten days 50 percent.We do nevertheless predict the future all the time. We predict what our spouses, children, and

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How Free Speech Dies: Follow the Government Intervention—Beyond Section 230

In a previous post I quoted George Orwell on the non-governmental silencing of dissent during World War II England:Hardly anyone will print an attack on Stalin, but it is quite safe to attack Churchill. . . . Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness.Wall Street Journal writer Mary Anastasia O’Grady, in a column titled “How Free Speech

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The Danger of Emergency Powers: A History Lesson

Emergency powers, as we have learned in the past six months, are dangerous. Any little tyrant in our local mayoral or gubernatorial office can suspend individual rights at the drop of a hat—or virus—in the name of the emergency.In 1933 Adolf Hitler became dictator of Germany through “emergency powers.” Let’s briefly review how that happened.In 1932 in a round of parliamentary voting, the Nazi

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The Clouded Lenses of a Certain Political Derangement Syndrome

Columnist Roger Simon makes this comment about the psychology of today’s leftist sympathizers who excuse the burning of America.So they blame Trump—someone who occasionally does act like a father—for their own failures. And even though those failures have been going on for months.It’s hard to believe they do this with a straight face, but they do.Simon is talking about a certain psychological

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Intellectual Cowardice and Pre-Censorship as the Expressway to Dictatorship

Ayn Rand identified the four characteristics of dictatorship: “one-party rule—executions without trial or with a mock trial, for political offenses—the nationalization or expropriation of private property—and censorship.”*
The United States today is not there—yet. But it has elements of all four characteristics and speculation in some quarters says that a November election loss of our current

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Systemic White Guilt and Its Groveling, Gutless Conformity

White guilt is an attempt by today’s Progressives to regain the sense of moral authority they once had during the desegregation protests of the 1960s.
This is the gist of Shelby Steele’s psychologically insightful 2006 book White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era.
The guilt, writes Steele, is a secular version of original sin—cloaked variously

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Goebbelsian Propaganda and the Rawlsian Reductio to the Rathole—In Our Current Case, Criminals and Terrorists

In a previous post, I argued that our current culture has become “Goebbelsian,” meaning that a torrent of hyperbole, BS, half-truths, and outright lies, best described as smears, has become the norm in communication. It is a way of life for much of our press and many politicians.Joseph Goebbels was Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda. His strategy was to tell a big lie, then say it loud and a lot,

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Sovietization of Federal Law—Part Two

In 2013 I posted “The Sovietization of Federal Law,” featuring a book by Boston criminal defense attorney Harvey Silverglate: Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent. I cited the foreword by Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz who quoted Joseph Stalin’s head of secret police, Levrenti Beria, saying “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.”This in essence is the theme of

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“Rules Are Rules”—the Deep State and Left Are Responsible for Many Coronavirus Deaths

To be sure, many coronavirus deaths in 2020 are due to comorbidities of the elderly in the 80-plus age range. But the failure to test early and abundantly and to rapidly develop and deploy treatments for the virus, not to mention vaccines, falls on the “rules are rules” mentality and seemingly limitless red tape and foot-dragging of the government’s bureaucracy and politicians.Then, the

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Federal Prosecutor Misconduct—Goodbye Rule of Law, Hello Rule of Men and Women

The 2014 book Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice by appellate lawyer Sidney Powell is at once a thriller and a detailed presentation of the intricacies—and horrors—of appellate law in the United States today.The thriller part is the manner in which it is written, with suspense and purposeful progression to the resolution of a climax. It is therefore a page turner