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→ Four in 10 voters think Reform UK is ‘extremist’
Nigel Farage’s bid to make Reform UK respectable has come up against another stumbling block. After standing general election candidates accused of racism and a tussle with Channel 4, new polling reflects the party’s mixed success in winning over mainstream voters. While Reform’s support base remains committed to the Faragist cause, YouGov data shows that the word most associated with the party among the British public is “extremist”, with 39% of voters employing the term.
The same percentage of respondents believe that Reform “should be nowhere near power”, while just under a third describe the party as “dishonest” and more than a quarter judge it to be “unprofessional”. Farage will no doubt be perturbed that a third of Brits consider Reform to be “nasty”. Have the Tories now lost that title?
→ Blue zones exposed as fraud
The secret to living past 100? There isn’t one. The vaunted “blue zones” of the world, in which residents routinely live past 100, are in fact merely rife with pension fraud and clerical errors, according to Nobel Prize-winning research.
Utterly obsessed with this UCL researcher who won an Ig Nobel for showing that “Blue Zones” where people supposedly live well past 100 at unusual rates are actually just full of clerical errors and people committing pension fraud https://t.co/wJZRvF3RVU
— Claire Zagorski, MSc, LP (@clairezagorski) September 19, 2024
Sardinian nonnas aren’t living to 110 as a result of the Mediterranean diet — it’s because their ne’er-do-well grandchildren are scamming the public benefits system for years after their deaths. Ditto, apparently, for Okinawa and Ikaria. Bewilderingly, the general populations of these supposed blue zones experience higher crime rates, lower literacy, and shorter life expectancy than their national average, a telltale sign that something is amiss with the blue-zone myth. Fewer than a fifth of “validated supercentenarians” even have a birth certificate in existing research. We’re going to need a new diet fad.
→ Johns Hopkins publishes diversity data
Another elite college has published its demographic data for the first post-affirmative action admissions cycle. Johns Hopkins University’s incoming freshman class saw the black and Hispanic populations decline by more than half compared to the year prior, returning to 2010 levels. The share of white students decreased — from 39% to 34% — while the proportion of Asian students increased from 32% to 46%.
The drastic changes indicate that the consideration of race was a major factor in JHU’s admissions over the past decade. The school’s president and provost called the recent demographic changes “profoundly disappointing”. The spike in students from low-income backgrounds was apparently little consolation.
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SubscribeThere are 300 people over 105 in Tower Hamlets.
In the socialist utopia desired by a certain kind of egalitarian each and every one of us would be scamming the benefit system.