Utopia, you are standing in it!

Media Myth Alert today marks its 12th anniversary of calling attention to the publication or posting of prominent but exaggerated tales about media prowess and the presumed power and influence of journalists.

Twelve years offers a fitting occasion to recall some memorable posts — posts that tweaked often-arrogant media outlets such as the Washington Post and PBS, called out media lapses and hypocrisy, and supported the two editions of my myth-busting book, Getting It Wrong.

The lineup that unfolds below is admittedly subjective and represents but a slice of the hundreds of essays posted since the launch of Media Myth Alert on the afternoon of Halloween, 2009. It’s nonetheless a slice that makes for pleasant reminiscence. What follows are headlines and descriptions of five of the posts that for varying reasons have stood out over the years:

■ Why Trump-Russia is hardly Watergate-Nixon (posted March 5, 2017):

All of a sudden coal-fired power is back in vogue and everybody wants a nuclear power plant: what a difference a burst of calm weather can make.

The world’s ‘love’ affair with wind power was never going to last. It was always going to be like unveiling a mystery bride on the wedding night to find a toothless crone, instead of the nubile young thing that was promised to the hopeful groom.

As buyer’s remorse takes hold, it’s time to lift the veil and take a look at just how insane our energy policies have become, thanks to a heady mix of starry-eyed ideology and wishful thinking.

Matthew Sheahan takes a look at Europe’s wind power disaster from an Australian perspective.

Aussie Taxpayers to Subsidise Renewables and Coal to Keep the Lights On
Advance Australia
Matthew Sheahan
10 September 2021

Although millions have fallen for the nonsense that intermittent solar…

The fastest way to get people thinking about electricity, is to deprive them of it. Europe’s power pricing and supply calamity has sharpened thinking and provided a golden opportunity for engineers and free-market economists to wrest back control from ideologues and renewable energy rent-seekers.

Until the Big Calm hit Western Europe last month – causing wind power output to plummet across the continent and the UK – all the talk was about a purportedly ‘inevitable transition’ to an all wind and sun powered future.

Well, things aren’t looking so ‘inevitable’ for wind and solar, after all. Grid managers have been left scrambling for what little gas might be available to fuel open cycle gas turbines; and recently mothballed coal-fired power plants are being desperately pressed back into action, both in Germany, and in the UK.

Only those countries with substantial nuclear power generation capacity seem untroubled. Until recently, the French…

Apparently some activist group on Twitter, called “DCist” recently started running Global Warming Catastrophe stories to support the great COP26 conference in Scotland.

That’s the conference that has seen hundreds of political and bureaucratic worthies spewing thousands of tons of CO2 into Mother Earth’s atmosphere by flying from all over the world to a place where they can discuss how they can stop spewing meagatonnes of CO2 into Mother Earth’s atmosphere.

Here’s one example.

I said many years ago in these debates that people telling me with horror that “The great cities of the world like New York, Washington D.C, San Francisco and LA, will be flooded”, was not only not going to get me onboard the AGW-action train but produce the opposite reaction: “You mean I get to burn fossil fuels AND destroy Leftist enclaves? SIGN ME UP”.

And so…

This thread is even better for responses.

Nobody likes empires but there are some problems for which there are only imperial solutions. (p.11)

Nations sometimes fail, and when they do only outside help – imperial help – can get them back on their feet. (p.106)

A bit of biography

In the 1990s Ignatieff managed to combine being a tenured academic, a journalist making extensive foreign trips, and a TV presenter. Without planning it, Ignatieff fell into a rhythm of publishing every 2 or 3 years short books chronicling the unfolding of the failed states he visited, and the chaos which engulfed some countries after the end of the Cold War.

These short but engaging studies build up into a series of snapshots of the new world disorder unfolding through the 1990s and into the post 9/11 era, mixed with profound meditations on the morality of international affairs and humanitarian intervention:

• Blood and Belonging: Journeys Into the New…

Western Europe’s wind drought has them scrambling for fossil fuels, like their lives depend upon it, and it’s as if they didn’t see it coming! Who would ever have thought that the wind might stop blowing for extended spells?

The almost dystopian panic brings to mind George Miller’s dystopian post-Apocalypse action-thriller, Mad Max 2.

Mel Gibson’s Max Rockatansky – aka the Road Warrior – is an ex-cop, outcast and loner who had been roaming the wastelands for years, until he stumbles upon the desert compound and refuge of a clan of misfits and renegades (the Settlers), defending themselves against a marauding mob of cutthroats, led by the evil Lord Humungus (the Marauders).

Max manages to enter the compound and escape Humungus and his band of vicious thugs, for a time.

Max is already alive to the fact that the compound houses a petrol refinery and also, apparently, holds fuel…