Utopia, you are standing in it!

I think it’s great that Joe Biden chose Kamala Harris to be his running mate, which also positions her to be the Democratic Presidential candidate in (likely) 2024 or (if Biden is still healthy) 2028.  It’s time we had a woman on the ticket, and if she’s a racially mixed woman, so much the better. For Harris is not only a woman of color (half Jamaican black, half Indian), but one who’s well qualified for office—smart, eloquent, pugnacious when she has to be, and with a proven track record. (Some will, of course, take issue with her accomplishments.) But I have no beef with those who put her ancestry above her accomplishments, for she remains accomplished and qualified, and to me that’s the most important criterion. If she makes a group proud because of her ancestry, what’s the problem with that?

So I have no beef with those who see…

They say “hard cases make bad law“. What little case law there is about single sex spaces and transgender people’s access to them falls into that category.

Croft v Royal Mail was an employment case which considered the issue of toilets and changing rooms. It went to the Employment Appeal Tribunal and then to the Court of Appeal in 2003. The outcome is not popular with anyone, since it does not give a clear answer either way.

It says that

But it it also suggests that employers can not solve the issue by simply offeringa unisex alternative. The Court of Appeal said that at some point a male person should be considered transitioned enough to gain access to women’s facilities, even if they had not…

When one attends a public function in Australia one is likely to endure a nauseating ‘welcome to country’ or ‘acknowledgement of country’ before the real business begins.

A typical example might start off like this:-

‘Our meeting/conference/workshop is being held on the lands of the [Traditional Owner’s name] people and I wish to acknowledge them as Traditional Owners.

I would also like to pay my respects to their Elders, past and present, and Aboriginal Elders of other communities who may be here today.’

These little speeches are meant to remind everyone that Aboriginals at some time or other occupied the particular piece of land on which the public function is being held. There is a implication that, in fact, these Aboriginals still own it. They are also meant to remind Australians that any property they own was stolen from Aboriginals. Readers will know of the movement to have Australia Day…

Photosynthesis: nature requires carbon dioxide
Truth-starved climate propaganda and its backers get a good going-over from the ever-robust Professor.

H/T Climate Change Dispatch
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As a result of an activist campaign, the Australian Press Council took exception to my article in The Australian on November 22, 2019, says Ian Plimer @ Spectator AU.

They claimed that my statement that there “are no carbon emissions. If there were, we could not see because most carbon is black. Such terms are deliberately misleading, as are many claims” was false.

Journalists in the Press Council should know basic English and the difference between an element (carbon) and a compound (carbon dioxide).

This is elementary schoolkid’s science. For the Press Council to claim that this is factually incorrect shows breathtaking ignorance.

Imagine that the government could simply print whatever amount of money it needed to guarantee everyone a decent income, fantastic public services, and a secure job if they wanted one – with enough left over to save the planet too. That, for many, is the promise of a new economic paradigm known as “Modern Monetary Theory” (MMT).

If you’re already thinking that this sounds too good to be true, you are not alone. Many economists – myself included – think that MMT is a frustrating muddle.

To be fair, MMT has a respectable academic pedigree, helpfully summarised here, which some trace all the way back to Keynes himself. It has several prominent advocates, notably Professor Stephanie Kelton, author of The Deficit Myth and an advisor to the US Democrats.

MMT also appears to offer a credible alternative to conventional thinking on the importance of balancing the government’s books. The…

It takes audacity to suggest that the wholesale environmental destruction wreaked by the wind and solar industries is all for the good of planet.

Michael Moore’s Planet of the Humans managed to lift the lid on green hypocrisy, focusing on the raft of inconvenient truths behind the greatest economic and environmental fraud of all time.

Such as the fact that those ‘planet saving’ solar panels that give virtue signallers such a warm inner glow are really ‘coal’ panels, where the core ingredient is made from strip-mined quartz, which is converted to silica using coal-fired furnaces. Inconvenient for those claiming renewable energy piety, but true enough.

Mark P Mills treads the same path with his investigation into hypocritical claims that renewable energy is all about saving the planet when, in reality, wind and solar are simply devouring it.

Mines, Minerals, and “Green” Energy: A Reality Check
Manhattan Institute
Mark P Mills

UPDATE: Greg Mayer noted that Jonathan Weiner reviewed the new Haldane bio in the New York Times, also favorably. The link is below, and here’s one quote from Weiner’s review:

“A Dominant Character” is the best Haldane biography yet. With science so politicized in this country and abroad, the book could be an allegory for every scientist who wants to take a stand. “In the past few years,” Subramanian writes, “as we’ve witnessed deliberate assaults on fact and truth and as we’ve realized the failures of the calm weight of scientific evidence to influence government policy, the need for scientists to find their voice has grown even more urgent.” Haldane’s political principles were “unbending and forthright,” as Subramanian says, and his science illuminated all of life. In both these ways, for all his failings, he was “deeply attractive during a time of shifting, murky moralities.”

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J. B…

The New York Times reports the latest instance of unhinged deplatforming (click on screenshot):

Adolph Reed, Jr., a black antiracist and Marxist who has taught at four universities (now emeritus at Penn) was scheduled to give a talk in May to New York chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).  Unfortunately for him, it was on one of his areas of expertise: the conflict between emphasizing race versus emphasizing class in striving for social justice.  His topic: how the Left has, in his view, unproductively concentrated on the disproportionate effect of the coronavirus on blacks, which he sees as unnecessarily dividing those blacks from  those whites who both belong to the real underclass: the poor. He sees this kind of identity politics as needlessly fracturing people who should be working together to assure equity. (To show how Left Reed is, he’s criticized both Obama and Clinton, the former…

After reading Eric Schlosser’s COMMAND AND CONTROL: NUCLEAR WEAPONS, THE DAMASCUS INCIDENT, AND THE ILLUSION OF SAFETY, I felt a sense of wonderment that mankind has survived the Cold War and the nuclear age in general.  Schlosser, who earned a Pulitzer Prize in 2013 for his work, has written a forceful indictment of American nuclear policy and a realistic assessment of what has gone wrong with the American nuclear program; including strategy, safety, and the lack of transparency and honesty that a democratic system of government is entitled.  The book presents a general history of the development of nuclear weapons dating back to World War II through the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.  In reviewing the history of the nuclear age Schlosser narrates and analyzes the different approaches of each administration from Harry Truman through the first President Bush.  In telling his story Schlosser intersperses alternate chapters dealing…

Koichi Kamoshida/Getty Images

On August 6, 2020, the world commemorated the dropping of a “10,000 pound uranium bomb” on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.  The weapon referred to as the atomic bomb unleashed the nuclear age and brought about the threat to human civilization.  According to journalist John Hersey the use of the bomb has kept the world safe from its use again because of the memories of the devastation unleashed on Hiroshima.

At the outset, the American government was open about the use of the weapon as President Harry Truman stated it was by far the largest bomb ever used in the history of warfare.  As time went on Washington began to clamp down on information circulating as to the effects of the bomb on the city’s landscape and its people.  Between 100-280,000 people may have died by…

Toyota’s Prius model
They say solid-state batteries – unlike lithium-ion ones – can’t catch fire, but on the other hand the electrolyte needs to be warmed up. Years of technical challenges still lie ahead, it seems.
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A team of researchers from Kyoto University and Toyota Motor is making solid progress developing next-generation battery technology that has the potential to cram far more energy into a small, lightweight package than today’s standard lithium-ion, or li-ion, batteries, says Nikkei Asian Review.

The new fluoride-ion battery the researchers are working on, which would hold about seven times as much energy per unit of weight as conventional li-ion batteries, could allow electric vehicles to run 1,000 km on a single charge.

The team has developed a prototype rechargeable battery based on fluoride, the anion — the negatively charged ion — of elemental fluorine.

Two things I remember being taught about Francis Drake at school are he was the first British man to sail around the world, and that he nonchalantly played a game of bowls as the Spanish Armada sailed up the British Channel in 1588.

It’s true that Drake recreated the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan’s circumnavigation – although unlike Magellan, he survived being attacked by hostile islanders, and lived to tell the tale.

As for his game of bowls, there was a bowling green at his manor house, but the story first appeared thirty-seven years after the Armada. From what we know of the tide and weather on that day, Drake’s casual behaviour may well have been justified, but I believe it’s all part of the myth around Drake’s life, which he had good reason to encourage.

I’d been planning an Elizabethan series for some time, as my aim is to tell…