August 4, 2026

August 3, 2026

OPEN THREAD: Monday, Monday.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Fauci’s follies — time to toss the ‘science is settled’ groupthink.

Fauci’s continuous four-decade tenure, unprecedented for an NIH institute director, gave him deep institutional knowledge, relationships across government, and high public visibility.

After so long in office, he had connections everywhere — and he used them with relish.

People who crossed him were unlikely to get funded; people who pleased him had a much better shot.

No wonder he saw himself as the embodiment of science itself.

But science isn’t something that people are; it’s something people do.. It’s a system in which hypotheses are tested, supported or falsified, and developed further.

And allowing one person, with all his human biases and weaknesses, to hold so much power over science for so long can only do that system harm.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

Posted at 7:45 pm by Glenn Reynolds

JASON GUMP: Cambridge professor made impossible claim he was on Seven Up.

Now footage of a talk Prof [Jason] Arday gave in October 2022 has re-emerged, revealing his claim that he appeared as a child on Seven Up.

He told the University of Bath’s Race Equality Taskforce: “I was part of a programme, actually, which – it doesn’t really exist any more – but it was called Seven Up at the time.

“And Seven Up is basically when they follow you over the duration of your life, so they follow you at [ages] 7, 14, 21. I was pulled out of the project when I was 14.”

During the same talk, he also claimed: “I had just turned 18 when I learnt to read and write.”

Seven Up was the first episode in a decades-long TV series created by Granada Productions for ITV.

The series follows 14 people’s lives at seven-year intervals, beginning when they were seven years of age. The final instalment is expected to be broadcast later this year.

The inaugural episode was broadcast in 1964, meaning its subjects were born in 1957. Subsequent programmes have been titled 21 Up, 28 Up and so on as the participants have grown older.

The BBC also commissioned a spin-off series titled Up: Millennium Generation. This began in 2000, also featuring a group of seven-year-olds. At the time, Prof Arday would have been 15.

A BBC spokesman confirmed that Prof Arday was not involved with the Up: Millennium Generation films.

Like Forrest Gump, or his prototype, Woody Allen’s earlier Leonard Zelig character, Arday has made claims of being seemingly everywhere, apparently not considering that he’d eventually be caught, or that he’d be too entrenched in academia for anything to happen to him if he was. And he may be right — over to you, Cambridge: Cambridge Can — but Evidently Won’t — Catch Jason Arday.

UPDATE:

A source close to Mr. Driscoll adds that in 2011 at the Freakanomics blog, Fred Shapiro wrote:

The Yale Book of Quotations traces the proverb “It takes a village to raise a child” back to 1989. Subsequent to the publication of the YBQ, I found that Toni Morrison was quoted in Essence, July 1981: “I don’t think one parent can raise a child. I don’t think two parents can raise a child. You really need the whole village.” The forthcoming Yale Book of Modern Proverbs notes: “The saying is often referred to as an ‘African’ or a ‘West African’ proverb; however, no prototype from Africa has been discovered — though several sayings from that continent do urge cooperation in child rearing and other enterprises.”

Regarding Hillary Clinton’s 1995 book popularizing the quote, a source close to the late P.J. O’Rourke famously wrote that the title is “an ancient African proverb which seems to have its origins in the ancient African kingdom of Hallmarkcardia.”

Posted at 6:20 pm by Ed Driscoll

WHAT CLIMATE CRISIS?

Posted at 4:07 pm by Stephen Green

MY NEPHEW HAS AN AR-15 IN .458 SOCOM. IT’S IMPRESSIVE. Ammo: .458 SOCOM.

Posted at 4:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

YOU DON’T SAY: Dr. Ashish Jha on COVID-19: ‘It probably was a lab leak.’ “Former Biden White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator, Dr. Ashish Jha, tells Dana Bash, ‘When I went into the White House, my view was this was almost surely a natural outbreak, maybe a lab leak. Based on information I learned and based on information I’ve seen, I have come to conclude that it is more likely to have been a lab leak.'”

Posted at 3:48 pm by Stephen Green

I LIKE THE CUT OF HIS JIB: Javier Milei Just Proposed a Great Idea. Every Government Should Follow His Lead. “Essentially, if the Argentine national government runs a fiscal deficit for several months in a row, the Congress receives a warning that it has a matter of weeks to fix it. If it doesn’t hit the deadline, the ‘shackle’ activates automatically, and the political class will be the ones impacted.”

Posted at 3:17 pm by Stephen Green