tomo,
While it would rate as foreign interference, I suspect the funding originates in the USA, and runs afoul of other laws too. Not very likely to be prosecuted though. Lady Justice has had the blindfold replaced with blinkers: only sees what she's pointed at.

Speaking of which, India's Supreme Court has adopted a new Lady Justice statue. No blindfold, no sword. Interesting, the spin put on it in several articles (including that one). We should probably adopt the same changes. It's not that they're improvements, but it is a more accurate depiction of how the legal system behaves. It's the point in Animal Farm where the sheep change to bleating "Four legs good, two legs *better*".

As to the French Revolution, I've been worried about modern parallels for some time. This time la Terreur may be less civilised. Orwell didn't get to the bit where the other animals started guillotining the pigs — a bit gory for a fable.

Linked at Jo Nova's, Bentley is building new 1930 Speed Sixes. Bit expensive, but you'd fairly get the sensation of speed at 115 mph!

Mailman,
A little parable...

A friend of my dad's (I'll call him Jim) had a knee replaced. Unfortunately, things weren't ideal in the theatre and he came out with an infected joint: swollen and painful. The surgeon acknowledged this, and offered to re-do the operation. Jim was suffering quite a bit of pain and felt that he deserved some compensation as well as the re-do, but the surgeon didn't agree. A lawyer was consulted.

"Yes, that's a serious problem. We can certainly get some compensation from the surgeon" was the advice. Things dragged out. Jim was hobbling pretty badly, but the lawyers pointed out how well this would boost his case in the negotiations. Eventually (couple of years later) a substantial compensation sum was agreed.

Not surprisingly, the lawyers got to pocket about half the sum. Then Jim found that, because he'd received compensation, it was up to *him* to pay for his new operation: no Medicare (NHS equiv), no health insurance. That took most of his cut of the payout. And he was warned the re-do wasn't going to be great, because things had deterioriated while he'd suffered on with the first replacement. His fitness had fallen away too.

Jim regretted not accepting the surgeon's first offer, realised that the lawyers had been the only beneficiaries of his supposed compensation.

Parasites who pretend to be on your side crop up time and again on the bigger stage. Palestine, of course, and Northern Ireland, and the Australian Aborigines all have made some people *very* wealthy, while purporting to serve the worthy cause, all the while doing what they can to perpetuate the problem.

As you say, better to do as the Kurds are doing: make the most of what you have to work with, and forget about fancied grievances.

Robbo,

Look at what the Kurds have achieved in Northern Iraq vs what Hamas has achieved in Gaza.

The differences between the two are light and day, and lets not forget that the Kurds have managed to create a functioning State that works to improve the lives of its people in spite of facing very real challenges and enemies that actually do not care about who it kills AND its done all that with a fraction of the money and support Palestinians have enjoyed for nearly 7 decades.

Hamas has been in control of Gaza for nearly 2 decades and in that time it has invested considerable time, effort and money in to killing Jews. Instead of creating institutions to improve the lives of Gaza's, as the Kurds have done in Northern Iraq, they have fritted away BILLIONS on their national past time of killing Jews.

And they are actively encouraged, aided and abetted by the international community who should be damn right ashamed of what they have helped to create.

But you know, when you look at everything through the prism of racism its all ok because the Jews are white and the Gazans are people of colour (never mind the fact Jews are the original first nation people of the region while Palestinians are merely descendants of slave owning occupying imperial colonists who arrived with the spread of islam in to the area).

tomo,
Statins are efficacious enough at lowering cholesterol readings, but the benefits in health and longevity aren't evident. And the amounts of money involved don't make for unbiased research.

About ten years ago I had an e-discussion on statins with my nephew. He was about to graduate in medicine, and there had been a recent furore about an anti-statins item in a TV science show. I asked him for evidence of how good statins were and he sent me this paper (as a pdf).

Hmmm. That's the right paper, but layout is completely different, which may have served to obscure things somewhat.

Looking at the table "Analysis 1.6, Number of Fatal CVD Events" on p49, just look at the placebo group mortality figures as a proportion in the larger studies:

  MEGA 18/3966 .0045
  JUPITER 30/8901 .0034
  WOSCOPS 297/3293 .0901

So the placebo participants in WOSCOPS are ~30x more likely to die than those in JUPITER. Just how do you combine studies with such hugely different participants? I don't know, but they've decided to weight WOSCOPS at 83.6%, even though JUPITER is the largest study.

Then you look at the RR confidence intervals in the rightmost column and see that the confidence intervals for the largest two, MEGA and JUPITER, include the possibility that the statins actually *increased* the risk of mortality. WOSCOPS is the *only* large study where the confidence interval is entirely on the "good" side.

That they weight the smallest of the large studies *so* heavily, and it just happens to paint the rosiest picture of benefits of statins, looks mighty tendentious to me.

October 7 anniversary has Brendan O'Neill being interviewed on his own show, for a change. In the talk he mentioned his being interviewed by Joe Rogan a while back. I tracked that one down and listened to it too.

The first was perfectly listenable, though a little sycophantic. The Rogan interview was very long, with two thirds preaching to the choir (wokeness, trans, etc.), then both of them dug in disagreeing about Israel's actions since the Hamas atrocities. All politely done, but neither seemed to gain an inch.

My leanings were with O'Neill. I've heard a few back-and-forths on Israel's actions in Gaza. The two sides are basically: Hamas started it, and Israel must end it; and No, Israel started it, and everything stems from 1948. The latter makes little sense to me. After 76 years of this bitter repression, the best strategy is to invade Israel, butcher, rape, terrorise and take hostages from amongst the civilians?

Strikes me that doesn't make for justice. Far more likely it was calculated deliberately to *infuriate* the Israelis. Has Hamas's strategy all along been for Israel's reprisals to be "disproportionate" (etc.), and to drive a wedge between Israel and the USA? I'd like to have heard that line of reasoning put to Rogan. And to the Palestinian people. Yes, the immediate cause of their suffering is Israel, but the deeper architect is living quite comfortably in Qatar.

Mentioned in Jo Nova comments was that the Daily Mail has apologised to a couple of "statin denier" doctors. Would be nice to see the tide ebb on statins. Also linked was a substack article on cholesterol which I found agreeable.

The parent substack seems a bit on the fringe. E.g. complaining about the Totalitarian Health Laws Proposed For Northern Ireland. As discussed here during the COVID capers, public health *needs* draconian powers, not much point getting worked up about them. It's the abuse (or incompetent use) of those powers that should have serious consequences.

John Anderson's conversation with (retired) General Cross was pretty listenable, but no particular eye-openers. Comments to the video complain about the ads. I don't see them with my setup; probably not worth persevering if they're that bad.

ABC Radio's recent Law Report did have some worthwhile insights. He's interviewing a strongly unionist lawyer, working for an activist law firm — hardly an endearing intro. — and I wasn't all that sympathetic to some of his examples, but I warmed to him on one point in particular: that so-called codes of practice, DEI policies, etc., are more than moral posturing; they can be quite handy for corporations as a pretext for getting rid of inconvenient staff (no need for dismissal procedures if there's a Twitter storm, or whatever). As he put it:

...we don't want to position corporations as the moral abiter of — pretty much anything ...

Still don't agree with him on lots of things, but I liked his stance on freedom of speech. It was a good interview.

Listened to Brendan O'Neill's interview with Ruy Teixeira on the state of play in the US election. Nicely cynical. Surprised me that he said he'd probably be voting for Harris, but that it wasn't much more than a coin-toss. What he didn't mention (hadn't previously occurred to me either) was that the coin toss choice makes itself: Heads-Harris, Tails-Trump.

Not quite as apt as when Australia's federal election was between Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten: MT (he certainly was) and BS (he certainly did).