Clinician, teacher, contrarian, teachable, carnivore.....guitarist
Joined April 2009
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Bruce Barker retweeted
This is the correct take. Most people are too dumb, brainwashed, or partisan to see the wood for the trees. It will take decades for reality to sink in.
Bruce Barker retweeted
Most people know him for a productivity rule. Almost nobody knows he predicted the exact collapse of the modern managerial elite.
Long before modern commentators tried to explain why bureaucratic institutions despise the working public, an Italian nobleman named Vilfredo Pareto already mapped the entire crisis. Today, business consultants reduce his legacy to the "Pareto Principle" (the 80/20 rule). In doing so, they conceal his far more dangerous work: a ruthless, mathematically precise philosophy that exposed the grand illusion of mass democracy.
Pareto was an aristocrat, mathematician, and civil engineer who ran Italy's railways before abandoning public life in disgust. Retreating to a villa on Lake Geneva alongside twenty Angora cats, he spent his final decades studying how power actually functions. While Karl Marx peddled the fantasy of a classless utopia and liberal academics preached that voters run the state, Pareto arrived at a colder truth. Society is never ruled by the masses. It is always ruled by an organized elite, and history is merely the battlefield where one elite replaces another.
His most lethal insight was the division of power between two archetypes: the Foxes and the Lions.
Foxes are the managerial class. They are subtle, cautious, manipulative, and obsessed with consensus. They rule through bureaucratic procedures, financial schemes, media spin, and institutional maneuver. They loathe physical courage, despise traditional religion, and avoid direct confrontation at all costs. Instead, they bleed a civilization dry through taxes, regulations, and endless legal pettifoggery, convinced that clever rhetoric can overcome basic reality.
Lions, by contrast, are grounded in loyalty, family, faith, and sovereign borders. They do not care for administrative games. They value strength, decisive action, and the preservation of their heritage. When a nation is young and rising, it is led by Lions who defend its sovereignty with unapologetic force.
Pareto warned that over time, the Foxes always infiltrate the administrative apparatus. They purge the Lions from universities, courts, and civil service, creating an insulated bubble of self-congratulatory managers. Yet because Foxes are fundamentally cowardly, they cannot defend their own borders or sustain the economic foundation they harvest. They mistake compliance for loyalty, and they mistake their echo chamber for reality.
Their rule always ends the same way. As Pareto observed:
"History is a graveyard of aristocracies."
When a managerial regime becomes entirely composed of decadent Foxes, it rots from within. The moment crisis arrives, their paperwork and procedural tricks collapse, opening the gates for a new generation of Lions to sweep them away. What we are witnessing across the West today is not an ideological accident; it is the inevitable historical reckoning Pareto guaranteed more than a century ago.
Bruce Barker retweeted
If you want to know who to blame for the death of Europe, blame Douglas Murray, @DouglasKMurray.
If that man had only published a best-selling book in 2017 that spent almost twenty weeks on the Sunday Times bestseller list, hit number one in non-fiction, and been translated into more than twenty languages, elites and voters would have listened, weighed his evidence, and made the changes that would have kept them out of the unmitigated catastrophe they're in now. Nobody would have called him:
Nazi
Far-right crank
Conservative grift pig
Race-baiting charlatan
Fearmongering demagogue
They would have read the book, made policy changes, and avoided civilizational collapse.
Bruce Barker retweeted
#SouthAfrica has been removed from #AGOA. This action is 8 years overdue. Unfortunately it represents a disaster for employment and ordinary South Africans.
The #ANC's chicken are coming home to roost.
youtube.com/watch?v=WTmXlwtr…
Plain speaking. Truth, not spin. Principled
Article dans Le Monde où j’apprends qu’avec Thaïs d’Escufon et Alice Cordier, je propage un « narratif xénophobe ».
Bon. Je vais sans doute aller m'acheter des bottes et un manteau en cuir.
Résumons l'acte d'accusation : j'écris en anglais (crime), j'ai été interviewé par un podcasteur américain (crime), 40 % de mes abonnés sont américains (crime), Elon Musk me republie parfois (crime aggravé), j'ai gagné 40 000 abonnés en deux semaines et X me rémunère (circonstance aggravante : le capitalisme). Et surtout, j'ai osé dire que cinquante ans de politique socialiste finissent par produire du chaos. Le Monde appelle ça de l'extrême droite. Moi j'appelle ça une observation.
Petit rappel historique. L'« extrême droite » qu'on agite en France depuis vingt ans est en grande partie une construction de la gauche. Ce n'est pas moi qui le dis, c'est Lionel Jospin, en 2007 : pendant toutes les années Mitterrand, il n'y a jamais eu de menace fasciste, et « tout antifascisme n'était que du théâtre ». Du théâtre. Dit par un Premier ministre socialiste. Le Monde rejoue la même pièce, avec moins de talent.
Le narratif que je propose, le voici, en entier : des villes propres. Des villes safe. Pas de chaos. Une mairie qui ne brûle pas à Limoges. Des commerçants qui ne se font pas piller. Si c'est ça être xénophobe, alors l'immense majorité des Français l'est, y compris la plupart des Français issus de l'immigration.
Je le redis clairement : je condamne toute forme de racisme basé sur la race. Ce que je condamne, c'est l'incapacité à punir des gens qui se comportent mal sous prétexte qu'ils viendraient d'une minorité. Ce n'est pas du tout la même chose.
Et c'est là qu'il faut poser la vraie question : où est le vrai racisme ?
Quand on refuse de sanctionner un délinquant parce qu'il appartient à une communauté, on ne protège pas cette communauté. On fait exactement l'inverse. On dit implicitement que ses membres ne sont pas capables de respecter la loi, qu'on ne peut pas attendre d'eux la même chose que des autres. C'est le racisme des attentes basses. Et en laissant une petite minorité agir dans l'impunité, on laisse ses actes rejaillir sur tous les autres : l'infirmière, le chauffeur, l'ingénieur, le commerçant qui ont exactement les mêmes origines et qui n'ont rien demandé. L'impunité individuelle fabrique la culpabilité collective. L'antiracisme d'aujourd'hui, celui qui excuse au lieu de punir, finit par condamner une communauté entière pour les actes de quelques-uns. Le racisme, il est là. Pas dans le fait de vouloir appliquer la même loi à tout le monde.
La justice, c'est individuel. Tu casses, tu paies. Peu importe ton nom, ta couleur ou ton quartier.
C'est d'ailleurs pour ça que quand vous vous baladez au Maroc, beaucoup de Marocains vous disent la même chose : « Mais pourquoi vous êtes aussi gentils avec les délinquants marocains qui ont grandi en France ? » Eux ne se sentent pas visés quand on parle d'ordre. Ils se sentent salis quand des voyous abîment leur image à l'étranger et que personne ne les arrête.
Donc non, je ne propage pas un narratif xénophobe. Je propose un truc assez révolutionnaire : que la loi s'applique à tout le monde de la même façon.
Bon, je vous laisse, je dois aller essayer mes bottes.
Bruce Barker retweeted
Bukele has reminded the world of a very simple truth: You don't have to tolerate crime. You don't have to let a vanishingly thin froth of scum ruin the drink for everyone else. It's a decision you make. You can choose differently.
Peru is about to get the Bukele treatment. This is the new Peruvian president, Keiko Sofía Fujimori Higuchi.
The caption on the original video says “We announce the creation of the Unified Command to confront organized crime, an elite special force made up of the National Police and the Armed Forces.
We are uniting capabilities, experience, and operational strength to act in a coordinated way against criminal organizations and restore security for all Peruvians.”
Bruce Barker retweeted
Absolutely stunning essay by @DouglasKMurray about the crisis in France. It includes this quote.
thefp.com/p/douglas-murray-f…
Bruce Barker retweeted
Imagine a doctor who spends his life checking other scientists’ work—like a detective for research—and discovers that a huge amount of what we “know” about food and health is shaky or just plain wrong. That’s John Ioannidis.
John Ioannidis is one of the most respected scientists in the world. He is a professor of medicine and statistics at Stanford University. His famous 2005 paper, “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False,” has been read millions of times and changed how people think about science. He studies how research is done and why so many studies turn out to be wrong. Scientists and journals listen to him carefully.
When he looked at nutritional epidemiology—the science that tries to figure out which foods help or hurt us by watching large groups of people—he said the field is in serious trouble and needs a big fix.
Here’s what he found, in plain language:
Most of these studies just ask people what they remember eating and then look for links to diseases. Almost every food ends up looking “significant.” That leads to crazy claims if you take the numbers at face value. For example, the math can suggest that eating 12 hazelnuts a day adds 12 years to your life, or that two slices of bacon a day shortens your life by a decade (worse than smoking).
Ioannidis says those results are almost certainly not real. They mostly show bias, errors in how people report their diets, and other problems that create noise instead of truth.
He argues that small differences in ordinary foods rarely cause big changes in how long people live or whether they get major diseases. Extreme problems (like not getting enough of a vitamin, or eating way too many calories) matter. Everyday variations usually do not.
Ioannidis has said the field has largely become a “null field”—meaning most of the single-food or single-nutrient findings are probably zero or close to zero once you account for biases. He has even said nutritional epidemiology has “grown old and died” and that researchers should stop producing more of the same observational studies and move to better methods, especially large, carefully done randomized trials where people are actually assigned different diets.
In short: He respects the hard work of people in the field but believes the main tools they have used for decades produce mostly unreliable results. That is why headlines about one food being a miracle or a poison keep changing—and why he says the science needs radical reform.
His warnings matter because he is not an outsider. He is a top expert who has spent decades showing how science can go wrong, and many other researchers take his critiques seriously even when they disagree with parts of them.
Should every publically elected official be required to have a stable private life and manage their own family well?
Bruce Barker retweeted
Settled science has a pattern, and it is the same man every time: a committee with the funding, and one awkward person they laughed at.
It was settled that stomach ulcers came from stress. In 1984 an Australian registrar drank a flask of the bacteria, gave himself gastritis, and took the Nobel Prize in 2005.
It was settled that the continents did not move. The weatherman who said they did was mocked for 20 years, froze to death on the Greenland ice in 1930, and was proved right in the 1960s.
It was settled that cutting the front off a brain cured madness. It won the Nobel Prize in 1949. Forty thousand Americans were lobotomised before anyone was allowed to say it did not.
It was settled that a heart attack meant six weeks flat on your back. Two Boston cardiologists sat their patients in an armchair in 1952, the clots stopped, and the deaths halved.
It was settled that a gentleman's hands could not carry disease. The Hungarian doctor who made his students wash them cut deaths on his ward from 18% to 2%, was driven out, and died in an asylum.
It was settled that cigarettes were fine. More doctors smoked Camels than any other brand, said the advert in 1949. Two British epidemiologists published the lung cancer numbers the next year and were ignored for a decade.
It was settled that margarine was better than butter. The Illinois chemist who found the trans fats in it in 1957 was dismissed for 50 years, watched them banned in 2015, and died at 102.
It was settled that eggs raised your cholesterol. Forty years of advice was removed from the guidelines in 2015 without a word of apology.
It was settled that babies sleep on their fronts. The advice ran from 1956 to 1991, and the researchers who finally counted estimated 60,000 cot deaths that need not have happened.
Nine settled positions. Each one held by the people with the committees, the journals and the word science.
Each one broken by one person with the evidence and a bad reputation.
Settled is the word a committee uses for the moment it would prefer you stopped checking.
It is good and right to stick with colleagues despite their individual foibles. Show grace to all. Pick battles carefully.
This quoted post is unavailable.
Bruce Barker retweeted
2022
- March Brent crude: $139 per barrel
- US dollar exchange rate: R15.23
- April petrol: R21.96 per litre
2026
- October Brent crude: $103 per barrel
- US dollar exchange: R16.65
- November petrol (predicted): R32.75 per litre
Do you need me to draw it in crayon?
Bruce Barker retweeted
This has to be the most interesting and sobering paper of the year. It estimates the global health impacts across all measurable threats to health to 2100 using amenable disability adjusted life years (DALYs). The leading threat to health? Obesity, including high BMI, poor diet, and low physical activity. Food systems are one of the key ways to address obesity and other leading threats to health in the 21st Century.
thelancet.com/journals/lance…
ALT Horizontal bar chart comparing cumulative expected amenable disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) from 2025 to 2100, in billions, across 17 global health and societal challenges. Obesity has the highest estimate (approximately 23 billion DALYs), followed by low educational attainment (16 billion), income inequality (14 billion), malicious use of AI (10 billion), and nuclear conflict (9 billion). Blue bars represent most challenges, while orange bars highlight AI-related harm and nuclear conflict. Black horizontal error bars indicate uncertainty, which is particularly large for income inequality and nuclear conflict.
Bruce Barker retweeted
Protect your children and keep them as far away as possible from these woke South African universities: "It is a clear sign that something is wrong when you have to make your ideological course compulsory. I suspect that they make it compulsory because, if it were not compulsory, hardly anyone would take it. As the Soviet and Russian author and dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn understood: socialism cannot be implemented without coercion."
thecommonsense.co.za/Editori…
Bruce Barker retweeted
I've watched a lot of middle class english people publicly support the DA on WhatsApp groups and the like, simply because they dont want to upset the apple cart, but when you speak to them individually... They mention they dont actually trust the DA and will be voting for their prefered coalition partners. Usually VF plus. Interesting times ahead.
Bruce Barker retweeted
Indeed. My view is the same. One can be a consequentialist without being a paternalistic, rationalist who thinks they can calculate which acts (or rules) will produce the best overall outcome across every possible future. We gradually discovered that free speech and free enquiry tend to produce much better outcomes on the whole, not by utilitarian superforecasting, but by bitter experience: from repeatedly suffering the adverse consequences of doing the opposite. As Mill himself wrote, "However positive anyone's persuasion may be, not only of the falsity but of the pernicious consequences of an opinion, yet if he prevents the opinion from being heard in its defence, he assumes infallibility... These are exactly the occasions on which the men of one generation commit those dreadful mistakes which excite the astonishment and horror of posterity". Some callow moralists are intent on endlessly repeating the mistakes of the past.