tomo: thanks for flagging up Calum Douglas' talk on Beatrice Shilling. She was brave as well as being a gifted engineer: lapping Brooklands at over 100 mph on a motorcycle was not for the faint-hearted!
I'm always interested in anything he produces since reading his book which you brought to my attention.
I've just checked his website but there's no mention of it so I guess it will appear in due course.

tomo,
Boris is surely on the upper tail of the narcissism distribution, but that goes with the territory. I could confidently rate our former PMs Rudd and Turnbull as having egos that would dwarf Johnson's. And the same trio would hold similar spots on the incompetency distribution.

On the ONS, hitherto they seem to have been above board, but this ~400 parameter expected deaths model looks like a hole below the waterline to me. The attitude that wants to hid the results is likely to want to hide the data too.

That vaccines paper is a nice example of obfuscation through explanation. In the spirit of Rutherford, you hardly need *any* exposition. Show Figure 2, and invite the reader to interpret it for himself. About the only other thing needed is a reminder that the figures are observational, so the groups with 0, 1, .., 4 doses may differ in significant ways other than number of doses.

That last point makes it pretty dodgy to draw conclusions like the one you quoted (3.8x risk), but the clear dose-response relationship (i.e. the way the graphs fan out) would be pretty strong evidence that the vaccines are harmful.

This, on the poor record of lockdowns, was linked in a comment at Jo Nova's. Nothing all that surprising in the article, but one of the comments surprised me:

Every time I see Spiked, or the DT, or w*nkers like Piers Morgan, or any of that previously lockdown-loving ... ilk

Wasn't aware that Spiked had previously held a pro-lockdown position. I've listened to all the Brendan O'Neill Show podcasts. Good number anti-lockdown, and I don't think any were pro. Haven't been so assiduous with written articles.

Anyhow, not leaping to their defence; just a bit surprised.

My contempt for "Boris" grows as every day passes - I'd not really appreciated that "Boris" isn't on his birth certificate and it's a nickname akin to P.G. Wodehouse character. The departure of Dominic Cummins and the ensuing shambles showed that "Boris" is in it all for "Boris". It turns out he is an empty shell which needs someone else's arm up it’s backside to operate it and his latest partner seems to have assumed much that role assisted by the war whores in the establishment.

I hope Tucker actually gets to interview him ...

On the ONS stats - it really does look like an exercise in obfuscation - in the spirit of "the science" I wonder if the raw data is trivially accessible (I've not searched) . I'm reminded of the CO2 spectrometer satellite OCO-2 where they messed with public data access and produced some absurd animated data presentations - all, it would seem - to protect GISS-NASA's totally broken CO2 GCM...

tomo,
Well, it did draw me in. Listened to it all, and Carlson explained his principles better under interview than in his customary monologues. Three hours (/1.75) passed well enough. He's pretty hyper, and could do without the squealy-girl giggles, but it hung together.

Particularly liked his ridiculing of the rationale: wading through turds in the city is a price we have to pay for freedom. Unless I missed it, the seemingly natural next question wasn't asked: What would you do about it?. I don't have an answer, but I have a feeling Carlson would answer along law and order/enforcement lines.

My feeling is that this wouldn't get us very far. It goes against Moulton's talk on Law and Manners. Is there any law more unenforceable than "thou shalt not crap on the footpath"? You have to hope people would rather choose not to.

Of course Moulton's talk was warning about manners departing if you let the law move in; he didn't say what to do to get manners fired up in the first place. Could there be an optimistic glimmer that today's cancel culture might morph into a scheme of obedience to the unenforcible. It seems to have a few of the elements.

tomo,
Ah, I see you've posted while I've been typing, and covered just the same point. Well, I'll leave that part as-is.

Just to expand on yesterday's:

... lumps and bumps from overfitting ...

The first term in the model says there are *19* age groups. Presumably that's something like 0-4, 5-9, 10-14 ... 85-89, 90+. That sounds pretty ridiculous to me; I'm sure we've all known "old" people in their 40s and "young" people in their 70s. A few bands would make sense (infant, child, youth, prime, elderly), but 19 will probably obscure important trends by spreading smallish numbers of deaths across multiple bands.

And then you look at the rest of the model, or particularly the last sigma term and find the model has 398 derived coefficients. Not quite up with Ferguson's epidemic modelling, but headed his way.

Thanks for the link to that interview. Not sure I'll listen to it all, but maybe it'll draw me in. Close run betwen Vlad and Boris on sleaze, but Boris would get the nod on superciliousness.