Smelling A Rat

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

By now, if you’re not looking suspicioustly at all the “scientific” experiments of the twentieth century that proved that communism was scientific and the left’s ideas about humans were right, you are a beautiful soul, full of trust and the milk of human kindness.

Also you should seek help for that massive concussion and the attendant mental confusion.

Look, in the nineteenth century, science as defined mostly by engineering brought an amazing improvement on the general quality of life, etc. (And if you’re going to weeb about the “dark Satanic mills” I really am going to demand you get a brain scan. At this point if you’re not in doubt about that stuff, concussion really is likely.) Yes, there were critiques, mostly of it being inhumane, mostly from the deposed elites that lost out to the improvements, or from power-starved people. (BIRM. Here I should point out most of the “romantic” and socialist complaints about industrial progress were an aristocratic opinion. Most Americans don’t know that. And yet it was true.)

And then in the twentieth the people who hated industrial progress or improvement in human life that was bringing out true equality of odds and meritocracy fought back with “science.”

Suddenly a bunch of studies “proved” that humans, in general were horrible and that we’d extinguish ourselves, destroy the world, etc. unless taken in hand by our betters. Our betters in that case and by that time were largely defined by the people doing these “studies” and they promised to usher in an era of complete justice, utter equality, and of course safety under their absolute enlightened rule. In other words, our betters in this case were largely communists by any other name.

So — How do you know the Earth is overpopulated? I mean, other than UN statistics? (And if you believe the UN on ANYTHING I really, really, really must demand that you get a catscan for that massive concussion.)

Do you really believe that somewhere, in an African country known for tribal strife, someone is going out and hand-counting everyone? That most people are born in the hospital? That accurate vital statistics are kept? Do you believe any of this for a random third world country? (The only ones where population is “increasing”.) Do you truly, as someone or other put it (I really can’t remember who) Arab countries send someone into the desert to not only count every Bedouin, but also to make sure they’re not counted more than once?

My sweet Summer child, we, the mighty United States of America, arguably (or undoubtedly) the most organized, best equipped country in this sorry sobbing world can’t tell how many people live here. Heck, we can’t tell how many people live in any given city.

This is because people largely lie. They lie enthusiastically, happily and often randomly. Which is a good thing as it prevents the hungry for power from getting a handle on us. The appropriate answer to “What are you doing?” from a stranger is “None of your business.”

In the US the sources of confusion are people who receive government help per capita “inventing” more children (Often by physically borrowing the neighbors) to get the “more help.”

Globally, I suggest, it’s much the same.

So, we don’t know how many people there are in the world.

More importantly, we don’t know how many people are too many. The more we plunge into the statements of Paul Ehrlich the more we realize their deciding a-priori and then making up stuff to “prove’ we have a population bomb going came from an emotion response to “lots of people” + “poverty”. In Ehrlich’s case, the benighted masses in some Indian cities. The fact that we can have the same population density and absolutely no bad effects in prosperous Western towns just baffles them.

I was shocked when P. J. O’Rourke pointed out that at NYC population densities, we could have the entire population of the world in a US state, and leave the rest of the Earth pristine. (BTW bad idea to make those analogies near the left. They take it as an instruction. It’s an image, not a serious proposition for cultural and other reasons. So the WEF can take its fifteen minute cities and its open borders, fold them all in corners and stick them where the sun don’t shine.)

And yet, everyone knows that overpopulation is terrible and means the end of humanity. (And that it must be combated by an all-powerful government, of course.) And really we must all stop reproducing before we destroy the world.

Also, overpopulation will render us extinct, anyway, or at least cause such behaviors that will destroy civilization.

AND THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT: Humans can’t help themselves and will keep reproducing till they become extinct.

How do we know? Well it’s scientific. It’s from Calhoun’s 1960s Mouse Utopia experiment, of course!

And …. and you should really follow that link.

Turns out like most such studies the mouse utopia is not only irreproducible, it might never have been managed, even once.

Mouse Utopia is almost completely unpublished. Despite working on it and similar experiments with NIMH funding for decades (he “continued to work on his research results until his death on September 7, 1995”), Calhoun appears to have published almost nothing substantive about his research, limited to a handful of short summary articles or passing references. (Calhoun’s 1963 book The Ecology and Sociology of the Norway Rat describes only his “quarter-acre” experiments which ended in June 1949, before the NIH experiments on overcrowding.) The major citation for his Mouse Utopia experiments is the aforementioned 1962 Scientific American article (published 33 years before his death), which consists of 9 pages of popular writing, of which about half is generic illustrations of mice (rather than data-based figures or plots or tables). Calhoun 1963, “The Social Use of Space” touches briefly on behavioral sinks & mortality in some of the earlier experiments. Calhoun 1971, “Space and the Strategy of Life” presents a brief display of data from “Universe 14” and “Universe 15” but goes into more detail about 25 unspecified universes done to followup the Kessler 1966 thesis and mentions that they are following Universe 25, still waiting for it to actually collapse.7 The article Calhoun1 973, “Death Squared: The Explosive Growth and Demise of a Mouse Population”⁠, begins with an extended analogy to the Book of Revelation, and presents some limited information on Universe 25, which has only halved in population at this point.

His 1970 article, for example, is just a redaction of the 1962 one, and despite apparently consulting Calhoun’s manuscripts at the NLM, Ramsden & Adams 2009 shed little light on Calhoun’s research or cite much beyond the 1962 article. (Considering how little he published, it’s surprising that NIMH funded Calhoun until 1983, leading to what describe as a “forced retirement” in 1986—apparently Calhoun was unable to get funding anywhere else. One wonders why NIMH dropped Calhoun, and why he was unable to get further funding given how high-profile and important his results are.)

This causes considerable confusion in reading since it’s unclear what papers refer to what. The 1962 article describes high infant mortality (infanticide is common in rodents) but not collapse in unidentified ‘universes’, which are not the famous Universe 25, which was started later; Calhoun 1971 had not yet seen a collapse in Universe 25; Marsden 1972 describes a population in slight decline and extrapolates out to possible collapse in a single unspecified universe; while Calhoun 1973 article shows a graph of a universe’s population definitely decreasing and apparently doomed by sterility & aging, which is identified as Universe 25. Are these all the same population, and if not, how many different ‘series’ or ‘universes’ are being described? How many exhibited the ‘senescence’ phase, much less population collapse? (Indeed, how many were done in total?)

So, at the basis of the certainty there are too many humans and that human overpopulation is a terrible thing; at the heart of things like Extinction Rebellion, the push for unfettered abortion; the certainty that women’s higher purpose is NEVER to be wives and mothers? At the heart of all of it is a giant lie perpetrated for self-aggrandizement by a man who couldn’t even prove that over-population is bad FOR MICE who are kept in a completely controlled environment and messed with over and over and over again.

I told a friend last night that if anything the Mouse Utopia proved that having someone mess with your society to try to make it fail was a bad idea. His answer was “And it could only work because mice don’t have the second amendment.”

Of course, neither does most of the world. We do. But it is of limited use if we believe the lies and let them get into our head.

Which is how we’ve come to the verge of a demographic collapse, if I’m reading economic and other signals right.

It’s time to stop believing the well-propagandized liars. And to reclaim our humanity.

It’s time to reproduce and create more humans. Not only because this is what humans were designed to do, and there’s an inescapable rightness in generation succeeding generation, no. But because we are humans and the measure of everything for us is human. The striped tri winged butterfly might be very pretty, but if you wouldn’t sacrifice all of them for a single human, you really should have that concussion looked into.

It’s time to start valuing more humans, not fewer. Because without humans, humanity quite literally has no meaning and no future.

So, How is the According To Hoyt Annual fundraiser going?

Frankly not well. After a promising and actually amazing first day, it’s been limping along, largely ignored. Honestly, I think this is because I’m not doing enough of a song and dance about it.

HOWEVER I must plead (alms for the writer) that this change because OTHERWISE I’m going to get pushed into doing a winter one again. And frankly? I don’t wanna.

It’s bad enough this will go on till 7/18.

Anyway, so some dancing:


This is the reason for doing a fundraiser. THIS IS NOT AN EMERGENCY. Don’t hurt yourself.

If you read this blog a few times a week and feel like donating, I’m tremendously grateful.

The Give Send Go is still active. Lately I’ve gotten more disenchanted with them, though. Not only have they hosted fundraisers for the kid who stabbed the track star through the heart, but there was some appearance of encouraging racialist bs. True or not? Don’t know. Haven’t looked that closely. Still, that and the fact they calculate how much of the raised money you actually get in some weird way makes them less than shiny.

So, what else is there? Well, there is paypal. Yes, I removed the button from the side (though I’ll return it) because they were threatening to fine people for badthink. Whether that was entirely organic or part of the Autopen administration it’s open to debate. They were being very enthusiastic about forcing everything from social media to everything else including debanking. At any rate, I think it is safe to use a paypal link for the next four years. Give or take. (Look none of these services are pure. We use what we can and seems safe at the time.)
So, here’s the paypal link.

While on that, yes, the address in Las Vegas is still available:

Sarah A. Hoyt

Goldport Press

304 S Jones Blvd #6771

Las Vegas, NV  89107

(Note this is a drop box. Please don’t send perishables that will be damaged by heat. If you want to send something out of the ordinary, contact me first. I’ll figure out another place to send it where things won’t be damaged and I can retrieve it. And if you want to give me something perishable or bulky, it might be best to catch me at a con. (Younger DIL says I have do do more cons. Sigh.)

Please, please, please do not send Indy a multi-tool. I realize this is probably futile pleading, but he’s enough trouble as it is. No, seriously. If you want me to have time to write, don’t send Indy a multitool.

And that’s it for now. A heartfelt thank you to anyone who contributes, thinks about contributing or (“merely”) leaves a nice review on one of my books.

You are all appreciated, and I hope you know it.

106 thoughts on “Smelling A Rat”

  1. Quatloos sent via the pal of paying.

    And on 2A for other mammals, the recent minefield laying on the NFA tax stuff is very encouraging. Not constraining efforts to banging away in frontal assaults (which are good too), but setting traps like eliminating the tax part and then proceeding to “well if it’s not a tax…”

    Quite encouraging.

    Liked by 1 person

  2. See John Brunner’s book title Stand on Zanzibar. Though it struck me on my last rereading that Brunner portrays a future where (a) there are strict eugenics laws that prevent many people from having children and (b) many people have no children of their own and seek shared time with other people’s children but (c) there is also widespread resentment and even violence toward people who have “too many” children, yet (d) all of this is because of overpopulation and behavioral stress which (e) is still a problem despite (a-c) above. So apparently Brunner couldn’t imagine when he wrote that book that antinatalist policies could actually work. . . .

    Liked by 1 person

  3. In related “news”, some joker put together an AI clip of Trump signing an executive order mandating that all vasectomies be reversed.

    It’s gone viral, and the Left is losing whatever substitutes for their minds.

    Liked by 1 person

  4. “If you love a dam made by beavers, but hate a dam made by humans, then you hate mankind.”

    (Sort of based on a Robert A. Heinlein saying.)

    Liked by 1 person

    1. From Robert A. Heinlein’s “Notebooks Of Lazarus Long”.

      There are hidden contradictions in the minds of people who “love Nature” while deploring the ”artificialities” with which “Man has spoiled ‘Nature.’”

      The obvious contradiction lies in their choice of words, which imply that Man and his artifacts are not part of nature but beavers and their dams are. But the 
      contradictions go deeper than this prima-facie absurdity. In declaring his love for a beaver dam (erected by beavers for beavers’ purposes) and his hatred for dams erected by men (for the purpose of men) the “Naturist” reveals his hatred for his own race; i.e., his own self hatred.

      In the case of “Naturists” such self hatred is understandable; they are such a sorry lot. But hatred is too strong an emotion to feel toward them; pity and contempt are the most they rate.

      As for me, willy-nilly I am a man, not a beaver, and H. sapiens is the only race I have or can have. Fortunately for me, I like being part of a race made up of men and women; it strikes me as a fine arrangement and perfectly “natural.”

      End Quote

      Yes, I just had to look it up. 😉

      Liked by 3 people

  5. “It’s time to reproduce and create more humans.”

    You have perfect timing for this post.

    Today, my youngest son and his lovely wife are in the hospital, as she is about to give birth to our first grandchild.

    To say that I am over the moon would be a grave understatement.

    I am thrilled/excited/ecstatic. (And worried half out of my mind.)

    The world is going to be a much better place for having this little one in it.

    Liked by 3 people

  6. And on the Institute of Irreproducible Results ever expanding membership rolls, it is amazing to me that these frauds lasted so long without challenge. When dug into, their data either does not actually exist, or bears all the signals of being fabricated from whole cloth. Yet the conclusions stood for decades.

    Makes you kinda think the scientific method is very distant indeed from scientific publishing.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. The results probably stood because

      1.) Certain people in positions of power found them convenient

      2.) “Everyone” knew about them, so they had achieved narrative status

      3.) The mouse “experiment” was a big, bulky thing, and likely would have cost a lot of money, which could be better spent on something we don’t already “know” the answer to.

      4.) The scientific journals would likely see it as suicide to print a counter-narrative paper if someone actually had attempted to publish a “could not replicate the results” paper.

      5.) Fewer back channels – like today’s internet – to discuss possible problems with accepted narratives.

      #5 is a critical part of being able to chip away at an accepted narrative.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. 6) No grants, no science. Nobody would write a grant to study something that, per #1 and #4, everybody knew and no matter what, probably nobody would publish. And supposedly you can only get a PhD for “original contribution to human knowledge”, and questioning the giants of a field probably does not float many boats on the thesis review committee, so it would be up to the tenured to reexamine things, and why would they risk their reputation?

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        1. Even though the ‘giant’ is actually a midget on stilts concealed by a long lab coat.

          It’s politics. It’s all politics. There is no science any more. Today’s ‘scientists’ are mere indentured laborers, their efforts and results dictated by government bureaucrats. Science has been fully perverted by politics.

          Liked by 3 people

              1. So what to do about the replication crisis? First off, we minimize potential harm.

                Federal law (start with an XO) should prohibit federal rulemaking based upon any research that has not been independently validated. It will be harder to require validation for legislation – critters will critter – but once validation is the standard it will be easier for opponents of feel good legislation to call out any bogus studies used as justification.

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                1. Any grant recipient whose experiment cannot be verified from more than three projects shall be ineligible to receive federal funding for any future project they are part of.

                  Liked by 1 person

    2. I just heard that ‘Trump’ (Congress, actually. The President does not control appropriations) cut NASA’s budget. NASA ‘has been forced to slash their science and mission budget by 50%’. Waaaaaah!

      What do you want to bet they don’t sack a single bureaucrat? Space exploration and the advancement of human knowledge count for nothing against their little office empires.

      Liked by 2 people

  7. And on the population un-bomb, my biggest worry is all of the societal struts and girders, like Social Security, that are premised on the inevitable increase in population will show larger and larger cracks now that the rate of the rate is going so bad.

    There are kids, just not so many, and they will bear the boomers support on those fewer heavily-student-loan-burdened shoulders, which is a recipe for some very ugly self-interest-driven decisions a few years down the road.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. “self-interest-driven decisions a few years down the road.“

      –

      Meh. Don’t get me wrong. I won’t voluntarily give up SS. OTOH who here, under say 80, actually expected SS to be still available for them? Be honest. We sure did not. Thus the 401(k), IRA, and ROTH, contributions. Heck we didn’t expect pensions to be left in the financial bucket. Most my jobs didn’t. (Only two of the major companies had pensions. One I “vested”, barely. The other one didn’t. The one that I do get, that company has now gone to forced 401(k) with company contribution but employee can add to. VS what I had: Company contribution pension + 401(k) with company matching first 3%.)

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  8. I was going to attempt to figure out if I could explain what may have been happening through attachment theory, when I realized, that data set is such a mess that it is going to take a ton of effort, and is not even necessary. The core predictions are directly testable at home with the people you deal with daily.

    And none of the Mouse Utopia predictions are necessary to explain a lot of what is going on either. If people have all agency stripped from them, they cease to function.

    Further, human contact is necessary for human operation, and the Internet does not fill the biological part of that. We haven’t solved that problem yet.

    Liked by 1 person

  9. I can’t tell you how many people are too many for the world. I can give you a rough figure of the maximum number of people this planet is capable of sustaining based on a simple comparison of total daily water consumption per person in the western world with total volume of rainfall. We Americans probably use the most water per person, Kalahari Bushmen probably use about the least, so the numbers are likely to fall somewhere in between. And that’s based on the absurd assumption that we could capture 100% of all rainfall for the entire globe. HA! That, of course, doesn’t leave any water left over for the rest of the living things on the planet.

    So, you have to factor in all the maximum food production, all the shelter and clothing requirements, all the garbage disposal requirements, all the heating and cooling and sundry energy requirements; many of which are mutually exclusive.

    But that’s maximum use of the planetary surface merely for the purpose of maximum human population. That doesn’t leave anything left over for other purposes. No art. No conservation of animal or plant life not required for human sustenance. No space flight to get all of our eggs out of the single basket we’re currently in. No human recreation. That’s not a world even the worst of the Marxists want, and certainly not a desired nightmare that USAins would see it as.

    If you want to see a really overpopulated community, you don’t have to look any further than your nearest leftist stronghold. More’s the pity.

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    1. Even the water is not an absolute limit. We could desalinate sea water with nuclear power.

      Apparently that is politically verboten, though. California, a state in desperate need of more water, has (had) 2 nuclear power plants right on the coast. They never made any attempt to use the waste heat to make fresh water, just dumped it all into the ocean and then screeched about how it was ruining the environment! by promoting increased growth of seaweed and fish around the discharge pipes.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. Humans create resources.

        If needed, we will mine asteroids and comets. Antarctica is just sitting there.

        Like

  10. ceci nest pas une comment

    Sorry this is a test , I can’t see comments other than on the fundraiser posts (And WP seems to think this is on the “Smeling a Rat” post. Moderator(s) feel free to deal with this post as you see fit.

    Tregonsee (L2) Signing out for now.

    Liked by 1 person

  11. On the chance this gets through and is visible–

    WORD PRESS IS BEING DUMB AGAIN, some folks can’t see comment box, some folks can’t see other folk’s comments, some folks can’t see THEIR comments but everyone else can, who knows what else.

    Sarah and the Support Staff [opening next week for Gratuitous Umlaut] know, and have no idea what is going on because it’s not consistent.

    Liked by 1 person

      1. I always thought that the appropriate answer to “What are you doing?” from a stranger was, “I’m attaching this dewlap to a frammistan, so I can get some torsion on its spring.”

        Word Accompless is merely a tool to ensure that this is generated more easily.

        Liked by 1 person

  12. Hah! It seems to me that all the HUGE experiments that prove how evil humans are (Zimbardo, Milken, Calhoun) are utterly unscientific and prove nothing about human nature. The only reason they have impact is that they tell a story, a story that someone wants to use to prove a selfish point.

    Funny how when I run into somebody who likes to scream, “There are too many people!” at the top of their lungs, they never respond positively when I agree, saying, “We really should decrease the population as you say,” then I hand them a knife and say, “You first.”

    Liked by 1 person

      1. There are several reports Bongino and Bondi had a fight over the Epstein files. He wants to release more but can’t (one reason given is it’s evidence in Maxwell’s trial). And he’s PO’ed over the empty binders blunder. My personal take is Bondi’s “binders to the influencers” shtick says she’s not qualified for the job. Either she had the bad judgement to do it before she had the data, or she listened to somebody with bad judgment (or wanted her to screw the pooch).

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Saw an article where Dershowitz was saying he’s actually seen the list, but claims he won’t name names because it’s not actually a list of people who committed crimes, but merely were associated with Epstein, flew on his plane, or stayed at his island. Frankly, I think he got warned to keep his mouth shut for the dual reasons of not prejudicing any developing cases (such as Maxwell’s), and for his own, personal, health.

          I’d love to see the charges filed, and cases tried against the ones they can provide evidence for; afterwards, release the entire list. But at this point, there’s only slightly greater chance of that than there will be of an in-depth investigation into the 2020 election fraud. The limit approaches zero.

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          1. Saw an article where Dershowitz was saying he’s actually seen the list, but claims he won’t name names because it’s not actually a list of people who committed crimes, but merely were associated with Epstein, flew on his plane, or stayed at his island.

            So, what folks who are familiar with child abuse rings have been predicting from the start.

            -.-

            Being on the list wouldn’t prove much beyond that Epstein wanted you on the list, either as a conspirator– or as a shield.

            That said, the folks that are in the associated documents are unlikely to be lily pure elsewhere, and while being on the list is terrible evidence, it’s a very good red flag.

            I want to know how many of them have already been arrested, charged, and sentenced. Probably won’t happen for some time, though.

            Liked by 1 person

          2. Yep. THAT is the problem. We know for a fact there is a list that includes everyone he gave rides on the plane to. And most of those are innocent.
            Also, do YOU trust any list that was in the hands of the Bidenites all this time?

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      2. OK I realize how absolutely insane this sounds but the night before the Epstein non-reveal I had a dream I largely don’t remember where I heard a voice telling me something like “If all of Epstein’s evil came to light there would be nuclear exchange WW3. Thats why they won’t do it.” I’m not saying I believe this whole-heartedly, but I did wake up chilled, and felt very chilled reading the news the next day.

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      1. Weirdly, I just yesterday performed an exercise in nostalgia along those lines.

        Dated a girl in HS, long before I met the girl I married.

        Wondered if she might be on the web someplace; no, not really. Found her dad’s obit, and got her later name, but she’s (prudently, I believe) pretty much invisible. Seems still to be in New England.

        Vague indications she had a pretty normal life, kid(s) and grandchildren. I’m glad, in a slightly teary way.

        Liked by 1 person

      1. I thought of that, too, but Mamdani isn’t eligible for the vice presidency, not being native born. And besides, both he and Ocasio Cortez are from New York. . . .

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Ah, but there’s no law saying such a ticket can’t RUN for the election. Only that he can’t actually hold the office. I’d almost want to see them run, win, and then be disqualified after spending a couple times what Kamala wasted this past election.

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        1. Well, TBH, I think that was originally a picture of Geronimo, who was in southwest Indian garb worn by the Apache’s iirc. Not the best photo shopped a photo shopped pic I’ve seen, but not bad.

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  14. Sadly finances are tight and can’t donate this time around.

    Re the population bomb nonsense and the other leftist pseudoscience (i.e. religious dogma masquerading as science), no matter the “problem”, i.e. coming ice age, coming “hothouse Earth”, population boom, population bust, etc., the “solution” is ALWAYS totalitarian socialism. ALWAYS. It’s as if the pseudoscience exists to alarm people into the accepting serfdom and a small cadre of “experts”, i.e. oligarchs, controlling their lives……oh wait.

    Liked by 1 person

  15. I don’t have a problem with other people reproducing, I just don’t want to do it myself. Never have, never did, respectively.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. We get our largest income chunk the 3rd Wednesday of the month, which means “it varies” (been being deposited on the Friday before recently, but being paranoid, I do not risk it). I just trigger payments to be the day after we get paid. Which, for this contribution, sends the check out via snail mail to the PO drop box. I use Quicken type app to track so I know how much I can spare. Just information on an option your banking may have.

      Liked by 1 person

  17. Wasn’t it Douglas Adams who stipulated that laboratory mice where the ones controlling humans by there results?

    Liked by 1 person

  19. The scientific method is a method to develop models of the particular phenomena that give accurate predictions in specified circumstances. It works well in physics, chemistry, engineering, etc., because they involve relatively simple and mostly deterministic systems.
    When you throw human beings into the role of test subjects, the number of variables quickly spirals out of control. And the phenomena are mostly not deterministic.
    A hallmark of bullshience is the claim of models that essentially encompass all circumstances and are deterministic for human behavior.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Yes.

      I’ve probably been reading more mathematics than is healthy for me, because I keep on trying to make such an argument as a series of proofs.

      i) reduced order, at the best (1)
      ii) we necessarily use behavior in the past to form our theories which we use for forecasting

      iii) the stuff we do in engineering and physics to go from the past to the future may well fail to hold for human behavior (2)

      Fundamentally, human behavior of large groups is a little squishy for even a soft sort of proof to have much persuasive validity. We can show things about models, but humans can willfully deviate from a lot of models. In non-ergoditic and nonlinear ways.

      human behavior is hard. Animal behavior and biology are still challenging, but not quite as intractable as human behavior. Engineering has some pretty sucky areas, but even those may be easy mode to biology or to animal behavior.

      And, enough experience with modeling and simulation in engineering tends to reveal a bit that such things are not anywhere near as straight forward or as cut and dry as the journalists, or as the secondary teachers I had implied. I personally think that if we cannot do a perfect fidelity sim of a physical thing, that it is probably entirely absurd to posit that these large and aggregate behavior models are calculable or perfect.

      (1) Okay, some room for quibbling
      (2) The fundamental problem with arguing against forecast is how well the forecasts can work when the changes average out, or when your subjects are cooperating because you are not hurting them very badly

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  20. Oh, it gets better. The rare time I see a wokist not parroting the 60 year-old Population Bomb agitprop and actually acknowledges population decline, their solution is . . . mass migration.

    So, wait, who’s left to populate the countries that send everyone to the West? SHUT UP FASCIST!!!

    Liked by 1 person

        2. I’m not to going to vacation on Venus. I’m not a moron. (And yes I got the reference.)

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  21. A bit of “snailmail” is on the way. I forgot about the fundraiser and had another reason to send such, but didn’t get the address again until this started. ‘taint much, but it’s something I couldn’t leave be.

    Liked by 1 person

  22. When I realized that the population numbers had to be BS was when I learned that China, which has had a 1-child policy since before I was born, and which has far more males born than females, meaning the population is going to decrease even faster than the 1-child policy would do naturally, has, by the official numbers, increased its population every year. The only exception was that it briefly appeared that 2020, after COVID hit hard, that the population had gone down slightly—before the Chinese officials complained, and the census takers discovered that, no, they made a mistake, and the population had actually increased.

    I’m pretty sure that the estimates of the Chinese population go something like this:

    Official: How many people are in your village?

    Village Elder: How many does Mr. Xi want there to be?

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Yes. And the official’s boss probably rounded up a little, “For people who weren’t home when you visited.”

      And then, after a generation and a half, the Chinese government is saying, “Well, growth isn’t as fast as we’d like, so have more. How about three? Three sound good?” And they are surprised when their people can’t afford to have more than one, if that many. (And “surprised” when foreign women are forced into marriages in villages where there is a shortage of girls.)

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Saw something where they did the math on the reported annual birth rates in China and they could not make the reported counts come out of those rates.

        There’s a fair argument by the mainland Chinese folks I know that if you start from a more realistic smaller number after the intentional famines and great-leap and cultural revolution impacts of the Mao period (every single person I have talked to who was there during the Cultural Revolution had direct family members disappear), then add in how migration from China has been all outward en masse for fifty years (they tell me they never, ever, met any foreign migrants to the Middle Kingdom), and then the One Child Policy impacts, and then with the reporting bias as noted, where the rural villages where everyone of working age left to go work at FoxConn has absolutely no incentive to not report the numbers as if all those youngsters stayed home instead, and you’ll get something a lot closer to the population numbers that the “Lei’s Real Talk” YT channel gets, as here:

        Liked by 1 person

  23. Don’t get me started on Ehrlich.

    I mean, with some time for perspective, I suspect my parents would have found other justifications for their horrible parenting if he’d never existed. But Ehrlich was their go-to.

    …Along with space travel, I want not just GMOs, but GMOs investigating this in specific.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Mixe_corn

    (That and cold-tolerant cacao trees. People don’t like how plantations produce cocoa in Africa? Let’s grow it at home!)

    Liked by 1 person

    1. I thought it’d be a really good post-civilization hack to have a coffee plantation.

      Sadly, seems like very little of the USA is suitable.

      Liked by 1 person

  24. One of my current “favorite” scientific issues is beta amyloids in Alzheimer’s Disease.

    Beta amyloids were the key to beating the disease! All research money had to be put into figuring out how to deal with beta amyloids and how to treat them! Once we had that treatment, everything would be perfect!

    …except, the more we keep looking at it, beta amyloids seem to be the end part of the actual disease chain-the “ash,” as it were, not the fuel or the fire itself.

    But the HOLY AND SACRED NARRATIVE is simply put-the cause of the disease is beta amyloids and anything that keeps us from researching those is wasted effort. Researchers have been trying to get grants to investigate other possible causes and get rejected because they aren’t doing research into beta amyloids.

    (And let’s not talk about Herr Fauci and his belief that we didn’t have to engage in classic public health measures against HIV, because we’d have a vaccine any day now…)

    Liked by 1 person

  25. Pingback: Instapundit » Blog Archive » IT’S ALMOST LIKE ALL THE “STUDIES” THAT FORM THE BASIS OF THE LEFTIST WORLD VIEW ARE WRONG, INCOMPLE

  26. In China, apparently about a quarter of men carry around multiple fake IDs. And lots of rural people buy fake city birth certificates for their kids born in rural areas, because that keeps them from having to be trapped in rural areas or from going to rural high schools.

    I am really starting to think that China is low on people. Everything I find out, tends to show that.

    Liked by 1 person

      1. That’s the funniest way I have seen that put, ever. And those who knot their knickers over the use of color-words to describe melanin (red-man, blacks°, negroes/negroid) don’t generally have “vermilion” in their linguistic crayon box.

        ° as opposed to the AP-diktated “Blacks” which appears to only apply to activised race-communists of negroid descent.

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    2. My mom, not the same way, but … she paid someone to say we lived in her house so I didn’t have to go to a rural high school. Which is what made it possible for me to enter college with no particular help of the kind rich people got (Tutors, private schools, etc.) She put me in the toughest, reputed most strict school she could find.

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