Utopia, you are standing in it!

Where the wind industry’s propaganda machine has spent the best part of 20 years trying to reinvent the facts, giving perceived substance to myth and fantasy – what American comedian Stephen Colbert defines as “truthiness”, assertions emanating ‘from the gut’ which are made because they just ‘feel right’ – STT has spent its entire existence setting those facts straight and lifting the lid on a raft of others that the wind industry works overtime to avoid.

The big problem for wind power is, and will always be, the W-I-N-D.

Sailors know it. Kite flyers know it. But, for some strange reason, the wind cult simply cannot come to grips with it.

Australia’s Eastern States, with the exception of Queensland, have thrown billions in subsidies at the construction of a couple of thousand of these things; the embattled economic backwater, South Australia led the charge – and earned the (now infamous)…

A May 13th article at The Telegraph, “Meet the Palestinian family who have tended the graves of our war dead for 60 years”, by correspondent Tom Rowley, focuses on a Gazan who works as a gardener for Commonwealth Graves Commission tending to a First and Second World War cemetery in the strip.  

Ten paragraphs down, the Telegraph provides the following context on the location of the cemetery.

In the middle of the cramped concrete prison that is Gaza (with few exceptions, no one has been allowed in or out since Hamas came to power in 2007)…

This is extraordinarily misleading. In addition to the false suggestion that there’s a “concrete” wall surrounding Gaza, the claim that “with few exceptions, no one has been allowed in or out since…2007” is absurd, as data from UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the occupied Palestinian territory…

By Darren Smith, Weekend Contributor

A 2,000 acre organic farm in central Oregon is facing what could be a be an existential threat to its operations after county weed control authorities sent notice mandating that the farm use chemical herbicides, such as Roundup, to eradicate weed growth.

The mandate would bring to an end nearly 18 years of organic farming, placing a significant loss of organic food to the public.

Azure Farms is a certified organic farm located in Moro, Sherman County, Oregon. The farm produces almost all the organic wheat, field peas, barley, Einkorn, and beef for Azure Standard.

Sherman County could issue a court order on May 22, 2017 to quarantine Azure Farms and possibly to spray the entire farm with poisonous herbicides contaminating them with Milestone, Escort, and Roundup.

Such a unilateral action on the behalf of the few individuals representing county government could set a precedent…

Here’s the headline from an article in the Spectator, dated May 13: “Wind turbines are neither clean nor green and they provide zero global energy” with the subhead “We urgently need to stop the ecological posturing and invest in gas and nuclear.” The post is from Matt Ridley.

The Global Wind Energy Council recently released its latest report, excitedly boasting that ‘the proliferation of wind energy into the global power market continues at a furious pace, after it was revealed that more than 54 gigawatts of clean renewable wind power was installed across the global market last year’.

You may have got the impression from announcements like that, and from the obligatory pictures of wind turbines in any BBC story or airport advert about energy, that wind power is making a big contribution to world energy today. You would be wrong. Its contribution is still, after decades —…

This weekend’s FT had an article titled “Mars and Venus – how women invest” bringing up, yet again, whether men’s supposed risk-seeking behavior and women’s supposed risk-averse behavior is reason that men are so much more successful in the business world and basically the whole world in general. This question has been discussed in media and academic literature before, but it’s especially appropriate on the release of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, where she argues that we just need to “lean in” a little more and not back away from risk and potential accomplishment. The FT reviews some surveys that show women feel less prepared to make financial decisions compared to men and that women are less likely to “enjoy the sport of investing.” The FT also discusses risky types of investing where men overwhelmingly dominate, even more than in the finance sector in general. Apparently…