Still "Forbidden" for afd.de I see. Will there be an alternative for the alternative? (I see you've retried today — hazard posting our comments at the same time of day)

Adam's story was grim listening and, as he pointed out a couple of times, being a physiotherapist, he was more knowledgeable than most on bodily processes. How many people meekly acquiesced, went away and died?

Ties in with the Official Visitors thing I mentioned a couple of days ago. Dad saw a lady who was raving in an isolation room, but he also saw the signs of liver failure. Her "mental" illness was a result of a serious infection and she needed antibiotics not antipsychotics.

The BBC policy isn't much of a surprise. The biggest scandal of it for some of the insiders might be that whoever wrote it used "derisory" where "derisive" would have been more appropriate. Tut, tut. As you say, it would be fun to see the interview guidelines for attitude on climate (keywords: 97%, deniers, conspiracy theorists, exonerated, e-mails were hacked, etc.).

A recent EconTalk didn't strike me as particularly interesting — that sometimes great consequences hinge on trivial actions; how can we know which actions matter a priori — but it did mention a paper that sounded interesting.

The paper itself is a bit over-academic in its wording, but the results are amusing.

The plan was to perform one social science experiment, then send the raw results to 73 separate research teams to analyse and draw conclusions. The end result was that about half the analyses said "inconclusive", about a quarter said "conclusive *yes*" and the remaining quarter said "conclusive *no*". Beautiful!

The study is ironically "meta", in that it tries to analyse the analyses, identifying various key decisions in creating the statisical model(s) for the results and putting those decisions into their own statistical model. Variations in those key decisions didn't go anywhere near explaining the variations in conclusions. One of the more lucid sentences in the paper pretty much summed it up:

Our conclusion is that we have tapped into a hidden universe of idiosyncratic researcher variability.

As usual it comes back to Rutherford and if you need statistics to see your results, you should have designed a better experiment.

And yes, this was from "social science", but which fields are immune from this idiosyncratic researcher syndrome? Maths, for sure, I would think, and fair chunks of physics. At the other end of the scale would be medicine, pharma, climate.

tomo,
afd.de is unavailable here too with a 403. The "nginx" agent *might* use this error when it perceives a denial of service attack. Bit unsubtle for the spooks (or is that exactly what they'd *want* us to think?).

No great excitements in my weekend listening, but John Campbell's interview with Adam is pretty harrowing (90 minutes). The vaccine injury is the smaller part of the problem. The way the "caring" NHS has treated him is scandalous: we don't want to hear, we refuse to think, here: have some anti-depressants for your serious heart problems. I remember reading about French nationals doctor shopping across the Channel; looks like you're doubly safe from that now: Brexit + who would dream of wanting NHS treatment?

Seems like there are larger icebergs than the Post Office.

tomo,
Just outrageous that the Post Office expected its employees/contractors to stand guarantor in the face of armed robbery. It would be fitting for people to do time over that one, but I don't suppose it was in breach of criminal law, and who could you pin it down to? Better chance of locking up the person who sacked the forensic accountant.

Not sure Steyn's doing a great job on his own behalf, but Simberg's lawyer seems pretty surgical in her attacks. Hearing that this isn't costing Mann a cent — none of it has — I wonder why there aren't a dozen such actions in train. I suspect his funders told him *no more*. Will such an instruction come to light?

We did get high into the 30s yesterday. Then a "southerly buster" came along in the mid-afternoon and temperatures dropped rapidly. At least we've had a few warm days this summer. Big step up from the previous three.

tomo,
The industry ombudsman might even have more clout than the government one, like the asymmetry in the UK PO system, where all the theft was in the privately run agencies; the government ones being the essence of probity.

...they know it'll choke / constipate the process

Yes, classic blob behaviour. When there's far too much work to get through you also get to pick and choose: let the problematic ones sit while you get on with the trivia. Our bursting-at-the-seams statute books mean police can be selective in their enforcement too.

Thanks for the Juan Brown link. I had meant to keep up-to-date with it but it had slipped my mind. Daftest thing in that video was that "door opening" involved exactly the same amount of disassembly as "door removal", but only the latter called for inspection afterwards.

The competing quality assurance systems doesn't seem much of a worry: everything should be in one or the other. That is until you hear of the absurd arrangement where the contractor's product was so poor that they stationed a bunch of their people within Boeing to fix their stuff-ups. And now you have two different quality systems competing to look after the one component. Great opportunities for finger-pointing when things fail.

Love the flooded bridge. Climate must be really off the rails in London!

Mailman,
I had noticed a rise in mentions of the two-state "solution", but view that sort of thing as just more "blah" from the talking heads. What I'd dearly like to hear is what "admirable" rationale Hamas had for the "hostage taking mission" (turning a diplomatic blind eye to their other barbarities). (1) we'll invade Israel and take a bunch of hostages. (2) We'll put out demands for: what exactly. I don't think "two-state solution" fills the blank at all; Hamas is well known that it wants a one-state solution, and that state isn't called Israel. We've already seen that "release of prisoners from Israel" fitted the space. I don't think they had much beyond that. It was mainly terrorism with that as a fringe benefit.

That doesn't fit the talking heads's "narrative" though. They're very wedded to portraying the terrorists as poor oppressed victims, so they stay mum about the hostages and witter on about two-state solutions that would never solve anything.

Here's something more uplifting: John Anderson interviews Andrew Browning. Admirable fellow doing admirable work as a missionary doctor in Africa. Besides the uplifting anecdotes, he makes a few observations which (I note) explain our advanced world's insatiable appetite for health spending:

You can do a lot with a basic health care service that's quite cheap to run, and then you have to spend millions to increment your improvements by a decreasing amount.

His figures were that in Aus. it's a minimum of $1m per bed, while in Tanzania (IIRC) it was less than $2m for a 50-bed hospital. He also talks about keeping hospitals small because above about 50 beds the bureaucracy grows unmanageable.

For the last three nights the weather forecast here has been of the coming heatwave: Wednesday, Thursday, Friday were all to be scorchers. Wednesday and Thursday have been and gone and the temperatures were *below* average for this time of year. Heatwaves aren't what they used to be. Today looks like it's going to make it well into the thirties. Hope so.