- “Protester jailed after chanting at police” – A 67 year-old man has been jailed for 20 months after chanting “You’re not English any more” at police officers during a demonstration in London, reports the BBC
- “London imam claims ‘Zionists’ were behind far-Right riots” – An imam at a London mosque, led by an extremist preacher, has claimed that Zionists were behind the recent riots, says the Times.
- “The police can’t be impartial while discriminating against white men” – Police chiefs must reject the divisive identity politics that has torn our nation apart, writes Rory Geoghegan in the Telegraph.
- “England’s prison crisis grows after influx of rioters into jails” –The prisons crisis has deepened, as the number of available places for adult male offenders has dipped below 300 for the first time, reports the Mail.
- “Nearly 2,000 prisoners to be released on single day” – About 2,000 prisoners are to be released early on a single day next month in an attempt to tackle the jail overcrowding crisis, says the Telegraph.
- “This rush to define Islamophobia will harm free speech” – Any definition of Islamophobia must have genuine legal value that protects individuals and is free from the invidious blanket term “Muslimness”, writes Fiyaz Mughal in the Times.
- “Tory members back Cleverly but Tugendhat is public’s favourite” – James Cleverly leads the pack among Tory members in the first major poll since all six candidates declared (a poll commissioned by Cleverly), but Tom Tugendhat wins the public’s vote, reports the Mail.
- “Boris Johnson memoir will be unleashed in heat of Tory leadership battle” – Boris Johnson’s eagerly awaited memoir, Unleashed, will be released just weeks before Tory party members vote on their next leader, reveals the Times.
- “More than half of Brits believe U.K. is heading in the wrong direction” – According to a new poll, Keir Starmer’s favourability rating has dropped to zero and more than half of Britons believe the country is heading in the wrong direction, reports the Mail.
- “Labour’s misogyny review won’t help women” – Censorship will not solve society’s woman problem – citizens will, says Ella Whelan in the Telegraph.
- “Labour’s pound shop populists are now heading for a humiliating fall” – The real calamity is not that the new Government is socialist, but that it hasn’t got a clue what it’s doing, says Sherelle Jacobs in the Telegraph.
- “Britain’s pothole-ridden roads so bad ‘they are damaging the economy’” – Factory bosses say that the appalling state of the country’s infrastructure is adding to manufacturing costs, according to the Telegraph.
- “Post Office scandal: understanding computer evidence in cases” – Speaking to the British Computer Society, Dr. Sam De Silva explores what part the legal assumption that “the computer is always right” could have played in the Horizon scandal.
- “Mike Lynch’s co-defendant in fraud trial dies after being hit by a car” – Mike Lynch’s former colleague and co-defendant in his U.S. fraud trial has died after being hit by a car, just days before the billionaire tech tycoon vanished off the coast of Sicily when his superyacht was caught in a freak whirlwind, reports the Mail.
- “Starmer backs working from home as ‘culture of presenteeism’ is bad for productivity” – Keir Starmer has backed more working from home after No.10 warned that a “culture of presenteeism” is bad for productivity, says the Telegraph.
- “Public fears GPs would encourage assisted dying to ease NHS pressures, poll finds” – A new survey reveals that more than four in 10 members of the public fear legalising assisted suicide could lead doctors to encourage patients to end their lives to ease pressure on the NHS, reports the Telegraph.
- “MPox/monkeypox: summer 2024 update” – On Substack, Dr. Robert W. Malone separates the hard facts from the self-interested noise surrounding monkeypox.
- “Merck MMR case ruling: ‘You can defraud the American people when government agencies go along with it’” – A recent Appeals Court ruling has huge negative implications for whistleblowers, says Steve Kirsch on his Substack.
- “COVID-19 vaccines cause far more myocarditis than infection, overall risks greatly outweigh theoretical benefits” – On the Courageous Discourse Substack, Dr. Peter A. McCullough discusses new analysis that challenges the prevailing narrative that SARS-CoV-2 infection poses a higher risk of heart damage than being vaccinated against it.
- “More evidence that the Covid shots did not reduce mortality” – On Substack, Steve Kirsch counters the Lancet’s claim of 20 million lives saved by Covid vaccines with two public data sources that indicate the vaccines carried only downside risk.
- “Far more flu tests were given in 2019-2020” – The absence of a death spike despite rising flu or Covid symptoms before Covid was officially recognised suggests the virus was likely not very deadly at all, writes Bill Rice Jr. on his Substack.
- “Rachel Zegler derails Snow White trailer with another woke comment” – According to the Mail, Snow White remake star Rachel Zegler has sparked further outrage while promoting the long-delayed Disney film, saying, “And always remember, free Palestine.”
- “IS attacks erase Christian cultural heritage for Assyrians and Iraqis” – Premier Christian News marks the 10th anniversary of the Islamic State’s genocide, which saw thousands from Iraq’s marginalised communities, including Christians, slaughtered in Mosul.
- “Der Spiegel sets out to ‘identify evil’ and asks which of our Right-populist politicians might be ‘secret Hitlers’” – On Substack, Eugyppius savages Der Spiegel’s recent cover story, ‘The Secret Hitlers’, dismissing its claim that modern leaders like Trump and Orbán are comparable to fascists.
- “Energy bills to surge by £150 as Reeves prepares to scrap winter fuel payments” – Energy bills are forecast to rise by nearly £150 later this year in a move that will pile further pressure on millions of pensioners set to lose their winter fuel payments, says the Express.
- “LTNs could be forced on Bath with no say for residents” – The installation of low traffic neighbourhoods could proceed in Bath, despite a petition signed by 250 locals opposing them, reports the Telegraph.
- “Price gouging is a nonsense narrative” – On the Bad Cattitude Substack, El Gato Malo explains why price controls never work.
- “The funniest joke of the Edinburgh Fringe” – According to the Guardian, U&Dave announced the winner of its Funniest Joke of the Fringe award, with Mark Simmons taking the prize for his one-liner: “I was going to sail around the globe in the world’s smallest ship, but I bottled it.”
- “LBC presenter is sick of the far-Right scum…” – On X, Andrew Lawrence channels his inner James O’Brien with a cheeky spoof of the LBC host railing against anyone vaguely patriotic and critical of mass immigration.
— Andrew Lawrence (@andrewlawrence) August 19, 2024
LBC presenter is sick of the far right scum… pic.twitter.com/tih0TFGsQf
If you have any tips for inclusion in the round-up, email us here.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Here’s a claim that I’d love to be true:
100% of those who instill fear, panic and despondency have declined over the last minute.
In the meantime: Hope, Strength and Tenacity to those who think and judge for themselves!
—“we have a last chance to act.” Oh goody! Where do I sign up?
If only I had quid for every time I’ve read that or similar, I’d be rich as Croesus.
That’s not going to be your last chance for getting quid whenever someone announces a last chance to … !!!
Don’t forget how the climate data was fiddled to show warming where before there had been none:
https://realclimatescience.com/alterations-to-the-us-temperature-record/
The page from the New York Times in 1989 is worth keeping in mind. No warming trend for a hundred years. Since revised to show a warming trend. I’m not sure whether it is politics or religion but it sure isn’t science to keep fiddling the data to get the result they want.
It’s cobblers! I’ve heard all this since cofo in the 70s. There’s just as much if not more life now than then, you don’t get rid of life that easily
I remember when I was a kid, occasionally I really did see men walking about the town wearing sandwich boards proclaiming that “The End Of The World Is Nigh“. Yes, I really am that old.
Thanks to the breakthroughs of science, we’ve come a very long way since then.
Now, international NGO’s, funded by unimaginably rich megalomaniacs, can make the same nutty proclamation all around the world using electronic media.
.
The rule of thumb is simply: Whenever someone presents averages of some data which is not different measurements of the same thing (NB: measurements is important here), he’s trying to pull a fast one because averaging is a mathematical algorithm supposed to remove noise, ie, randomly distributed errors, from a set of measurement of the same quantity as each individual measurement is composed of a value part and an error part whose exact values are unknown. That’s solidly undergraduate math.
In this particular case, averaging means that outliers in the original, raw data set end up being evenly distributed over it. For an example, assume there are four species A, B and C and D. A had a 0.1% increase, B a 5% increase, C a 25% decline and D a 2% increase This means the average change will be -5.6%, composed of 1/4 of 0.1 (0.025), 1/4 of 5 (1.25), 1/4 of -25 (-6.25) and 1/4 of 2 (0.5). On average, species declined by 5.6% is a gross misrepresentation of the actual data.
I keep being amazed how shoddily constructed all of this is. One would expect people with that much money and manpower could do a lot better. This leads to two hypothesises about why they cannot:
Something I should have added to the example: The individual contributions of A, B, C and D to the average are: A 0.31%, B 15.58%, C 77.88% and C 6.23%. More than 3/4 of the average come from the change of a single species.
This article is so wrong I stumped up the £5 to comment.
1) The WWF/ZSL do not claim that 69% of Vertebrates Have Declined Over Last 50 Years (whatever that means). Chris was presumably confused by the phrase: “average 69% decline in the relative abundance” in the Executive Summary of the Living Planet report. It is admittedly tricky to know exactly what this means. But the LPI website is clearer.
Here under “common misconceptions about the LPI”:
“The LPI statistic does not mean that 69 per cent of species or populations are declining”
“The LPI statistic does not mean that 69% populations or individual animals have been lost”
The LPI is shows the average rate of change in animal population sizes – something quite different.
2) The Canadian scientists make a good point about the problems in using a geometric mean to represent overall rate of species decline. But Chris left out an important quote:
“Excluding only the 2.4% most-strongly declining populations (354 out of 14,700 populations) reversed the estimate of global vertebrate trends from a loss of more than 50% to a slightly positive growth (Fig. 2). Similarly, excluding 2.4% of the most-strongly increasing populations strengthened the mean decline to 71%.”
They are not claiming there is no problem with biodiversity decline – only suggesting a method that is not so sensitive to extremes. They concluded that decline tends to be concentrated in a relatively few species and areas but this doesn’t mean it is not a serious problem.
“Although the global BHM model reveals considerably more nuance than a geometric mean index, analysing across systems still masked important patterns. When systems were analysed separately…., primary population clusters were strongly declining (θ1 < −0.015) with high certainty (95% credible intervals not overlapping zero) in three systems, all of which occurred in the Indo-Pacific realm (freshwater mammals, freshwater birds and terrestrial birds) ….. This suggests that this region has the highest risk of system-wide declines and should be a conservation priority. By contrast, the primary cluster was increasing with high certainty in seven systems, six of which were in temperate regions. In addition, seven additional systems had strongly declining primary population clusters but with less certainty (95% credible intervals overlapped zero), four of which were amphibian or reptile groups.”
The Finnish scientists were just pointing out that the LPI is no good for measuring abundance – but as it was never intended to do that, it is kind of irrelevant.
The LPI is shows the average rate of change in animal population sizes – something quite different.
As explained in another comment: This is a bullshit metric supposed to give the impression of an strong, overall decline which doesn’t exist.
But Chris left out an important quote:
“Excluding only the 2.4% most-strongly declining populations (354 out of 14,700 populations) reversed the estimate of global vertebrate trends from a loss of more than 50% to a slightly positive growth (Fig. 2). Similarly, excluding 2.4% of the most-strongly increasing populations strengthened the mean decline to 71%.”
That’s from a different part of the text and the quote attached to the graph is correct. Further, really taking everything into account, the outcome is
Here we show, however, that this estimate is driven by less than 3% of vertebrate populations; if these extremely declining populations are excluded, the global trend switches to an increase.
[…]
16 systems contain clusters of extreme decline (comprising around 1% of populations; these
extreme declines occur disproportionately in larger animals) and 7 contain extreme
increases (around 0.4% of populations). The remaining 98.6% of populations across
all systems showed no mean global trend.
—–
That’s from the abstract. Another nice quote from the Discussion section of this paper:
Shifting the message from ubiquitous catastrophe to foci of concern,
also touches on human psychology. Continual negative and guilt-ridden
messaging can cause despair, denial and inaction. If everything is
declining everywhere, despite the expansion of conservation measures
in recent decades, it would be easy to lose hope. Our results identify
not only regions that need urgent action to ameliorate widespread
biodiversity declines, but also many systems that appear to be gener-
ally stable or improving, and thus provide a reason to hope that our
actions can make a difference.
That’s absolutely not the kind of serious problem of the WWF and it calls for targetted, perfectly traditional conservation measures, not global lifestyle changes.
It’s all irrelevant, life will do what it wants!
You can see the Board of Directors of the WWF here.
https://www.worldwildlife.org/about/leadership
There’s a lot of money in all those financial institutions so many of them work for. Is it any surprise they pursue the WEF agenda?
Incidentally, it’s only officially called the World Wildlife Fund in the US and Canada. In the rest of the world it renames itself the World Wide Fund, thus allowing it to use funds for other purposes. It’s also been accused several times of ‘greenwashing’, cosying up to big multi-nationals in exchange for donations, human rights abuses, and the use of paramilitaries.
It’s also worth noting that for very many years its patrons, directing the use of funds to protect rare species, then went off hunting those same wild species. Using donor money to keep their exclusive ‘sport’ going?
.
It is good to be sensitive and open to the damage that we do as a species but given the agendas that prevail and owe their existence to pure ruling class survival tendencies we do well to be sceptical. If you weren’t born under a Christmas tree. Don’t talk to me about environmental espoiliation when you haven’t given a monkeys about anything until now.
When I studied Physics and Biology at A-Level 35 years ago, and Physics at University thereafter, I must have missed the sections of the scientific method that told me to first determine what I wanted my research to conclude, then disregard any results that showed anything otherwise. Oh, and the step that told me to simply fabricate (adjust) supporting results if I need to. I think I’m owed a Ph. D. from someone …
Me too! And this approach would have meant getting the PhD after about 9 months or so’s study!