"When a clown moves into a palace..." [CORRECTION]

 

"When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn't become king. The palace becomes a circus."

~ Turkish proverb [Hat tip Monica B.]

UPDATE: 

CORRECTION:  So it isn't a Turkish proverb. Well, not exactly, anyway. It's an old saying tweaked by British writer Elizabeth Bangs -- and it's a fascinating story of its own, full of political arrests, journalists gone bad, and memes gone wrong. She writes:

“There is a famous saying,” Turkish Journalist Sedef Kabaş declared in a live broadcast on the 14th January 2022, “‘A crowned head will get wiser.’” She continued, “But we see that this isn’t the reality. There is also a saying that is the exact opposite: ‘When cattle go into a palace they don’t become the king, but the palace becomes a barn’.”
    On Friday evening, January 21st, she repeated the saying on Twitter and Instagram, in slightly different form, adding that it was a Circassian proverb (in Turkish: öküz saraya çıkınca kral olmaz, ama saray ahır olur). At 2 a.m. that Saturday morning, she was detained for ‘insulting’ the Turkish President, which is as strong an admission that she’d hit the mark as it’s possible to imagine.
    Two days later, Sunday 23rd January, I sat at my kitchen table and read about the arrest. It struck me immediately that the saying also had resonance in the UK’s political moment. I read several translations, with ox, bull, stable, barn and so on and for a second or two, considered settling on the best I could find. But, something didn’t quite speak to our situation. The old rural analogy using a heavy, slow bull or ox in his barn or stable was not a perfect fit, when transplanted to contemporary British politics. I needed something more biting, more apposite. The proverb was quickly reworked and 8.36 a.m. it became:
    When a clown moves into a palace, he does not become a king. The palace becomes a circus....

You won't believe what happened next! [>>>READ ON]

"To believe in Kings..."

"To believe in Kings you need to believe in Gods. I believe in neither."

~ Eric Idle

 

Statistical tests on the efficacy of prayer

"Adam Rutherford reminded me that it was the now-demonised Francis Galton who did statistical tests on the efficacy of prayer. His most famous is finding out that British Royals, who are prayed for constantly, didn’t live any longer than non-royals at a similar level of well being. Galton did related studies of the success of sea voyages accompanied by prayer versus those with no prayer. Again, no effect. And, more recently, I’ve written about the Templeton-funded study of intercessory prayer that found no effect of such prayer on the rate of recovery from cardiac surgery (in fact, those who were prayed for did marginally but not significantly worse). This constitutes direct evidence against [the] implicit thesis [of the efficacy of prayer]."

~Jerry Coyne, from his post 'Does the ubiquity of prayer prove the existence of God?'

"...to do absolutely nothing in life but complain about one’s victimhood."

"Think about the kind of person who would find Harry & Meghan interesting and enlightening. It must be the kind of person who sees it as the ideal to do absolutely nothing in life but complain about one’s victimhood. It’s literally all these former royalists do. It’s not a side activity. It’s their whole reason for living.
    "They complain. They already have a huge audience because of the very thing they decry daily — the largely unearned wealth and notoriety of the royal family. They hate the very idea of the royal family, and say so regularly. Yet they complain and whine that they’re not getting more money, visibility and power from the same royal family they regularly decry.
    "It strikes me: This is the very essence of the woke mentality — not politically, but deeper: culturally and psychologically. Harry and Meghan stand for all the things that wokesters want: Something for nothing. Not just economically (though money is definitely part of it); but psychologically, in terms of the unearned and unlimited visibility snowflakes everywhere yearn for."

~ Michael Hurd, from his post 'Harry & Meghan: A Couple About NOTHING' [emphasis in the original]