Utopia, you are standing in it!

I rarely write about media bias, but I sometimes come across stories that cry out for correction because of blatant inaccuracies.

• The New York Times asserting that government schools are “starved of funding” when taxpayer subsidies actually have skyrocketed.
• The Washington Post claiming a GOP budget included “large cuts” when spending actually would grow 3.3 percent annually.
• The Economist writing about poverty in the United States, but then citing numbers that have nothing to do with poverty.
• The New York Times asserting that U.S. multinationals pay little tax on foreign-source income, but forgetting to include the taxes paid to foreign governments.
• A Washington Post column blaming problems in France on “austerity” when the nation has the biggest spending burden in Europe.
• The Atlantic reporting about “steady defunding” in Washington when the federal budget has tripled (adjusted for inflation) since 1980.
• A New York Times

Although they live in the ocean like fish, whales are clearly mammals. A reasonably complete series of intermediate fossils have been found for the evolution of whales from terrestrial mammals. A sampling of these transitional species is shown below:

Source: The evolution of whales , https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/evograms_03

Modern whales have no external hind limbs, and have their nostrils or blowholes on top of their heads. Pakicetus (shown in the figure) lived around 52 million years ago. Although it probably spent considerable time submerged in rivers hunting its prey, it was fully terrestrial. It had long, slender legs, and nostrils at the tip of its snout, like most mammals. Dorudon appeared about 12 million years later, and is maybe halfway to modern whales, being fully aquatic, with tiny vestigial hind limbs and nostrils halfway back on its snout. Whales largely similar to modern species appear after another 12 million years or so…

Some unions supported Donald Trump, such as the Pipeliners Local Union 798. Neal Crabtree, a Welding Foreman from Arkansas and a Pipeliners Local Union 798 member, was laid off after President Joe Biden signed an executive order during his first day in office halting construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline citing a climate crisis and not caring one bit about the crisis of people needing to work after the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns.

How do we conduct cost-benefit analysis when different policies might harm some in order to help others? This question has become increasingly important in the Year of COVID.

In particular, it is possible that some interventions to prevent the spread of COVID may save the lives of the vulnerable elderly, but have the unfortunate effect of causing other harms and potentially deaths. For example, increased social isolation could lead to increased suicides among the young (we don’t quite have good data on this yet, but it’s at least a possibility).

If you don’t think any public policies will reduce COVID deaths, then the post isn’t for you. It’s all cost, no benefit!

But for those that do recognize the trade-offs, a common way to do the cost-benefit analysis is to look at “years of life lost” or YLL. This is a common approach on Twitter and blogs, but I’ve seen…

Brits expecting their thousands of wind turbines to deliver the goods this winter have been disappointed, yet again.

While Boris Johnson peddles his delusional plan to run the UK entirely on breezes and bluster, the typical (and wholly expected) collapse in wind power output across Britain this winter provides a taste of things to come.

Wind power acolytes run the line that their groovy ‘green’ product is free. But, Britain’s winter wind power drought, is a reminder that you only get what you pay for.

As the doldrums drove wind power output through the floor, the owners of what remains of Britain’s conventional, dispatchable power generators cashed in. Big-time! With the average wholesale price rocketing from £40 to £4,000 per MWh.

The obscene and endless subsidies siphoned off to wind power outfits – allowing them to undercut everyone else – have driven large volumes of reliable capacity out of the…

Soviet shortages led to the gag about “what has 100 legs and eats cabbage?” 50 Muscovites lining up to buy sausage.

Wind and solar obsessed Germans must feel a little like the USSR’s (unwilling) vegetarians at the moment.

Their endless seas of solar panels are plastered thick with snow and ice and, accordingly, producing two fifths, of five eighths of very little.

And their 30,000 wind turbines have downed tools, too. With bitterly cold, dead calm conditions across the country, wind power output has been reduced to an occasional trickle.

Power rationing is the only thing that’s preventing a total collapse of Germany’s grid; during the first week of January the country narrowly avoided widespread blackouts following the total collapse in wind and solar output.

But, if you relegate engineers to the status of well-meaning idiots, and supplant them with green ideologues with gender studies degrees, get ready for…

The moment Joe and Jill Biden were left awkwardly standing in the cold outside White House on Inauguration Day when doors to their new residence didn’t open because chief usher had been FIRED five hours earlier.

(hattip Daily Mail)

The only way for communities to beat wind power outfits is to get organised and fight, like fury. Knowing the tricks of your opponent’s subsidy-fuelled trade helps, too. Which is the very reason for this site. The first insight to grasp is the wind industry is not there to help you; it’s there to destroy you, your home, your family, your community.

Rural communities are sick and tired of being treated as wind industry roadkill, and that includes the nomadic Sami – who graze and herd reindeer across northern Europe’s frozen tundra, ranging across the north of Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Kola Peninsula.

The fact that chaotically intermittent wind power can’t be delivered as and when power consumers need it means the wanton destruction of pristine wilderness, bucolic landscapes, rural communities, and millions of birds and bats (including plenty of species on the brink of extinction) is pretty hard…

This week, we have seen the departure of a disgraced, self-serving petulant bully who left executive office with one last closing salvo of bitter recrimination and disavowal of personal responsibility for having created a toxic, dysfunctional workplace that showed absurdly high levels of turnover and waves of mass resignations.

And we also witnessed President Trump leaving the White House one last time.

Julie Payette marked her tenure as Governor General of Canada by oscillating between long bouts of lassitude punctuated by periods of immense controversy and heightened media scrutiny. Payette melted down Rideau Hall into a toxic workplace, systematically drove out the most experienced staff, and reduced those who remained to quotidian bouts of tears of frustration.

One of the most dynamic queens in 16th century Europe who spent most of her youth in a country that was not her homeland, but was fighting for the right to rule England. Her name was Mary Queen of Scots, the cousin of Queen Elizabeth I. Many know of her tragic tale, but there was a man who was behind the scenes trying to guide Scotland to a brighter future. He was not married to Mary Queen of Scots, but he was influential in her life and choosing who she might marry and who she would end up divorcing. He was a politician and a religious reformer whose decisions would alter history dramatically. His name was William Maitland and he served as Mary’s secretary. He is always mentioned as a footnote in history, until now. Robert Stedall’s latest biography, “Mary Queen of Scots’ Secretary: William Maitland- Politician, Reformer, and Conspirator”…