Utopia, you are standing in it!

Napoleon III (Charles-Louis Napoléon Bonaparte; April 20, 1808 – January 9, 1873), the nephew of Napoleon I, was the first president of France, from 1848 to 1852, and the last French monarch, from 1852 to 1870. First elected president of the French Second Republic in 1848, he seized power by force in 1851, when he could not constitutionally be re-elected, and became the emperor of the French. He founded the Second French Empire and was its only emperor until the defeat of the French Army and his capture by Prussia and its allies in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. He worked to modernize the French economy, rebuilt the center of Paris, expanded the French overseas empire, and engaged in the Crimean War and the Second Italian War of Independence.

The Battle of Sedan was a total disaster for the French—the army surrendered to the Prussians and Napoleon himself was made a…

Good Reasons for Bad Feelings by Randy Nesse examines emotions and mental illness from an evolutionary psychology perspective. I was really excited about reading this book because Nesse’s Why We Get Sick had a huge impact on me when I read it as an undergrad, encouraging me to think of the intersection between health psychology and evolutionary psychology. Here is a good primer on Darwinian Medicine from around that time.

Last month I had this discussion on free will versus determinism with Gena Gorlin, a clinical psychologist who expressed a great deal of skepticism about an evolutionary approach to clinical psychology and mental health in our conversation. I was reminded that, in the therapeutic community, an evolutionary perspective is often considered wrongheaded, counterproductive and offensive to human dignity.

Good Reasons for Bad Feelings is essential reading for anyone interested in how an evolutionary perspective improves our thinking about mental health…

Because King Charles II died in February 1685 without a son and heir – without, in fact, any legitimate children from his marriage to Catherine of Braganza – the throne passed automatically to his brother, James Duke of York, who ascended the throne as King James II.

James was a professed Roman Catholic and a zealous reformer. He wished to lift the multiple legal restrictions which had been placed on his fellow Catholics and, as a balancing gesture, to lift legal constraints on the Puritans and non-conforming Protestant sects. However, within three short years he managed to alienate almost every party and profession in the country, and especially the powerful Whig politicians.

The crisis came to a head over two big issues. First James made the error of trying seven Anglican bishops for seditious libel. To be precise, in April 1688, encouraged by the Quaker leader William Penn with whom…

The very title of this VICE Motherboard piece (click on screenshot below) is part of a multifaceted attempt to smear Steve Pinker, calling him a “free speech crusader” who nevertheless has blocked people on Twitter who connected his name with Epstein.

And the smear continues in the first paragraph, implying that somehow this blocking is abrogating people’s free speech:

Harvard professor and author Steven Pinker, who previously railed against “cancel culture,” is blocking anyone on Twitter who mentions his connections to Jeffrey Epstein, the financier who was charged with organizing a child sex trafficking ring before being found dead in his jail cell shortly after his arrest last year.

Note the double mention already of “free speech” and opposition to “cancel culture,” all of which is meant to imply that Pinker is somehow hypocritical in blocking people on his Twitter feed. But that is ludicrous. Favoring free speech does not…

What better way to kill off or have a few more humans suffer for the planet? The sad part is, XR has done this before. Some XR’ers even took time to do a plastic bag dance. How thoughtful!

PHOTO CREDIT: By DAVID HOLT – https://www.flickr.com/photos/zongo/31078299267/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74629914

Thanks to Quillette, you’ll be able to watch a free lecture by John McWhorter in a bit more than three weeks. The reason I’m announcing this early is that you have to reserve a spot, which is free for the talk and the afterparty (if you want to attend the virtual salon and ask McWhorter questions, it’ll cost you 200 Australian dollars). The dates and times vary because Australia is on the other side of the International Date Line. In the US, McWhorter’s talk will start at 7 p.m. on Friday, September 25, as noted below.

More info from the email I got:

While acknowledging that some aspects of modern social justice movements are vital and necessary, John McWhorter has likened some progressive activism to a new expression of ancient religious impulse – with its own versions of Original Sin, rituals, dogma, and even excommunication—often in the form of “cancel culture.”

As an associate professor…

They don’t build rock musicians—or songs—like these any more.  Here’s a cast of all-stars, featuring McCartney and Clapton, doing two songs at the Concert for George (Harrison), held in 2002 at the Royal Albert Hall.

The first is the Beatles song “Something“, written by Harrison. McCartney starts it on the ukulele before the electric guitars and drums (four sets, with Ringo on one) kick in. Note that the song, according to Harrison, was likely written for his first wife Pattie Boyd, who divorced him and married Eric Clapton (the song “Layla” is about her). Multiple ironies, but a great song and a great performance.

One of Harrison’s best songs, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” Three of the four original people on the released recording: McCartney, Starr, and Clapton (uncredited on the album), are there again, while Harrison’s son Dhani (who looks freakishly like his…

Lady Antonia Fraser published her life of Charles II in 1979. 14 years later she published this big hardback version which is basically a large-format coffee-table book with the text drastically cut back in order to make room for hundreds of beautiful and fascinating full-colour illustrations.

As I have detailed the political events leading up to the civil wars in other blog posts, this review will focus on snippets and insights into Charles’s private life, seeing the events of this turbulent time from his personal perspective.

Birth Charles was born on 29 May 1630, one year into his father’s Personal Rule i.e. determination to rule without troublesome parliaments.

Heredity Charles had a swarthy complexion. He was nicknamed the Black Boy and this is the origin of hundreds of pubs of the same name across England. Through his father Charles I, Charles was one quarter Scots, one quarter Danish (his…

The California State Water Resources Board is going to leave some natural gas plants open in an effort to provide power for state residents. However, the political class will only see this as a minor setback and the real problems will start when Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant is shut down in five years.

California extends lives of aging gas plants as state seeks to prevent blackouts

by Abby Smith, Energy and Environment Reporter, Washington Examiner

California will keep four natural gas plants online for another few years instead of shutting them down, in an effort to guarantee the lights stay on as the state rapidly adds more renewable energy.

The decision, made unanimously Tuesday by members of the State Water Resources Control Board, comes just weeks after California grid operators imposed rolling blackouts on residents during peak electricity load amid a severe heat wave.

Republican politicians, including President…

Our daily check with the Beehive website draw a blank.  Nothing has been announced there since the PM announced the offender responsible for the Christchurch terror attack on 15 March 2019 has been designated as a terrorist entity.

But elsewhere in our monitoring of the political scene we found the Māori Party is hot and bothered about goings-on in the education domain .  The item was headlined Racism In Education, Second Pandemic In Aotearoa

The Māori Party candidate for Te Tai Tonga, Tākuta Ferris, and Waiariki candidate, Rawiri Waititi, said in the statement they “believe institutional racism within the education system is holding this nation back”.

Ferris raged that:

“This week has highlighted the second pandemic taking hold of this nation, the pandemic of racism in Aotearoa – but particularly in the Aotearoa education system.”  

Oh dear. What shameful acts have given risen to this?

Recently, the CDC released data on COVID comorbidities, including data showing that 6% of COVID-19 deaths only listed COVID on the death certificate, while the remaining 94% of COVID deaths also listed other conditions. Many have jumped on this as proof that COVID is far less deadly than previously claimed and are arguing that most reported COVID deaths are actually just people who died of some other condition while happening to have COVID. In particular, I keep seeing an analogy of someone who has COVID getting hit by a car, then the death being attributed to COVID. This is a very bad analogy (and faulty argument in general) that horribly mischaracterizes these data. So, I want to briefly explain what is actually going on.

First, you need to realize that when a patient dies, doctors list all of the factors that contributed to the death. This often includes multiple conditions…

by Greg Mayer

[Update: I’ve been informed by Sam Harris that Murray and Herrnstein did not make the quantitative genetics error I attributed to them: they did not suppose that in traits with high heritability mean differences between populations indicate genetic differences between populations. I wasn’t sure they did (not having read the book), hence my noncommittal “or at least their public proponents” caveat. I am happy to be corrected on this point. It makes the demonization of Sullivan even more perplexing.]

Sort of. We may read him, but we must find him “abhorrent”. Or at least so proclaims Ben Smith of the New York Times in “I’m Still Reading Andrew Sullivan. But I Can’t Defend Him.” The headline condemns Sullivan, in Smith’s voice no less, but then opens with Smith visiting Sullivan, apparently late at night, at Sullivan’s vacation home on Cape Cod. The whole piece…