Utopia, you are standing in it!

I’ve reported before on what happened during the recent troubles in Seattle (see here, for instance) , in which a six-block area of the downtown (renamed “CHAZ” or “CHOP”) was taken over by protestors and was abandoned by police, who wouldn’t respond to calls from within the area. Mayor Jenny Durtkan, too, refused to do anything, and even had concrete barriers and portable toilets brought in to reinforce the occupation. Roving groups of armed citizens policed the area, especially at night.

Eventually, the site was cleared by police after several shootings occurred, but things still aren’t back to normal: businesses are either shuttered or aren’t doing much trade, and a group of local businesses is suing the city for abandoning the district, leading to “enormous property damage and lost revenue.”

That revenue is estimated at about $200 million.

I still can’t completely fathom why the city didn’t stop this…

Some time ago PM Trudeau floated the idea that pandemic shutdowns can’t be lifted until a vaccine is available.  More recently, the lack of a vaccine is touted in the US as a reason for keeping schools closed and travel restrictions in place.  What is this obsession with a vaccine as the savior whose healing powers we must await while hiding in isolation?  As a previous post reprinted below explains, it is again a case of generals fighting a past war rather than the current one.

But let’s also be attentive to a bait and switch involving shifty use of words.  A vaccine by definition works by training our immune system to recognize and resist a targeted pathogen.  And it’s a long road to perfecting an agent which achieves that without doing harm to some or many individuals.  Meanwhile Bill Gates is promoting something termed a “vaccine” which intends to…

In Chapter 3, Reich talks about the discovery of the Denisovans, a sister archaic group to the Neanderthals that lived in eastern Asia. It all started out with a pinky bone found in a cave in southern Siberia. The DNA in the little bone was very well preserved – they got better info from that one bone than all previous Neanderthal DNA work. It’s an odd situation – we now know a lot about Denisovan genetics, but we don’t have a skeleton and have no idea what they looked like.

The Denisovans were closer to the Neanderthals than they were to AMH, but not by much. Apparently modern humans split with the common ancestors of Denisovans and Neanderthals about 700,000 years ago, while Neanderthals and Denisovans separated not much later. Almost a trichotomy. Something similar happened when AMH spread into Eurasia: quite early, maybe 50,000 years ago, we split into…

No ‘green’ dream – built with coal, powered by coal.

In their sillier moments, wind and solar advocates claim that we’ll all soon be driving electric vehicles, lovingly recharged with sunshine and breezes.

In Australia, those seemingly virtuous souls with EVs are really being propelled by coal, because 85% of the electricity passing through its Eastern grid comes from coal-fired plants. It’s an irony, to be sure.

While there’s nothing wrong in theory about all-Electric Vehicles, if they really were a sensible substitute for petrol or diesel-powered vehicles, they’d already be jumping off the shelves. Except, for some strange reason, they aren’t.

Of course, taxpayer funded subsidies to the manufacturers (and in some cases to the owners) of EVs are the only reason you’ll find them on the road, at all.

But, for those still eager to parade their purported moral virtue, before signing up for a new Tesla, here’s…

Shetland peat bog [image credit: Shetland Times]
There’s over £1 billion at stake here, as construction is about to start and a subsea cable project costing more than £600m has been approved, if the project goes ahead. It would be the UK’s largest onshore wind farm in terms of annual electricity output.
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OVER 20 people from across the isles have signed a petition expressing concern that Shetland Islands Council’s (SIC) recognition of a global climate emergency has not taken into account current evidence on the carbon value of peatland, reports Shetland News.

The petitioners say that since the original approval was given to the Viking Energy wind farm from the Scottish Government in 2012 “much of the science has fundamentally changed and we now indisputably recognise peatland as a store of carbon equal to or greater than that of rainforest”.

The petition seeks that the…

The title of the YouTube clip is from the little sign that this lone man held up during a protest in London. Behold Western Civilisation in 2017.

You absolutely need to watch this exercise in mob mentality: and it’s only a little longer than Two Minutes of Hate.

You can read the background to this event from an article the guy wrote himself on Medium.com. He’s an artist and the “Anti-Fascist” protests were around an art gallery, as described in this report from the Hackney Gazette.

And of course since then things have only got worse.

• The recent firing of a New York Times editor, James Bennet, at the behest of his staff. They were angered by him allowing a Republican Senator, Tom Cotton, to write an OpEd advocating sending in Federal troops to deal with the riots.

• The departure of Bari Weiss from the NYT

The greenblob marches on, regardless of the real climate. Message to BP boss: water vapour is by far the major so-called greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide is a minor sidekick. Ergo you are merely playing games.
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The chief executive of BP says he understands why people view the industry as “bad” and that fossil fuels are becoming the subject of social challenge, reports Aol.

Bernard Looney, who took on the role at the oil and gas giant in February, said the industry had “a challenge… with trust” but BP was determined to be a net zero carbon company by 2050.

When I posted this video on Twitter, showing two Italian girls who were huge fans of Roger Federer, and also played “quarantine tennis” between rooftops before they met him, I got pushback that it was a fake video: a commercial proposition for advertising Barilla pasta (Federer does promote the company). But I still think this is genuine: the girls have no idea that they’re going to meet Federer. I doubt that the company would have made the whole thing up as a bit of acting.  And even if it’s semi-commercial, it’s still heartwarming.

Here’s the YouTube description:

During the lockdown, Carola and Vittoria, two teenagers from Finale Ligure, in Italy, found a creative way to play a ‘socially distanced’ tennis match: each standing on her own roof. Roger Federer and Barilla saw their video and decided to surprise the girls right in their home in Finale Ligure. Here, Roger Federer…

This is a reblog of the post at Sebastian Rushworth M.D. Health and medical information grounded in science.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Ok, I want to preface this article by stating that it is entirely anecdotal and based on my experience working as a doctor in the emergency room of one of the big hospitals in Stockholm, Sweden, and of living as a citizen in Sweden. As many people know, Sweden is perhaps the country that has taken the most relaxed attitude of any towards the covid pandemic. Unlike other countries, Sweden never went in to complete lockdown. Non-essential businesses have remained open, people have continued to go to cafés and restaurants, children have remained in school, and very few people have bothered with face masks in public.

Covid hit Stockholm like a storm in mid-March. One day I was seeing people with appendicitis and kidney…

Steve Elers, a Massey (maori) academic writes brilliantly.

What’s important about his comments is that although represented as a maverick, they give a voice to the sane silent majority.

Here’s a recent Steve piece published in the Manawatu Guardian.

Louis-Philippe I (October 6, 1773 – August 26, 1850) was King of the French from 1830 to 1848 and the last king of France.

Louis-Philippe was born in the Palais Royal, the residence of the Orléans family in Paris, to Louis Philippe II, Duke of Chartres (Duke of Orléans, upon the death of his father Louis Philippe I), and Louise Marie Adélaïde de Bourbon. As a member of the reigning House of Bourbon, he was a Prince of the Blood, which entitled him the use of the style “Serene Highness”. His mother was an extremely wealthy heiress who was descended from Louis XIV of France through a legitimized line.

Louis Philippe was the eldest of three sons and a daughter, Antoine-Philippe, Duke of Montpensier, Françoise d’Orléans (died shortly after her birth) Adélaïde d’Orléans, and Louis-Charles, Count of Beaujolais a family that was to have erratic fortunes from the beginning of…

Well, we have another cancellation by the Woke Left.

A new book by Edward Ball came out on August 4 (click screenshot below) about the author’s investigation of an ancestor who was a member of the Ku Klux Klan right after the Civil War. Highly praised, it apparently paints a sad and devastating picture of how white supremacy had a resurgence in New Orleans after the Civil War, when blacks gained equal rights in Louisiana.

Here’s a precise and some of the praise for the book on its Amazon site (click on screenshot above; their emphasis):

One of The New York Times‘ thirteen books to watch for in August | One of The Washington Post‘s ten books to read in August | A Literary Hub best book of the summer| One of Kirkus Reviews’ sixteen best books to read in August

Life of a Klansman tells the story…

A month ago, I answered a question about reconciling the absence of libertarian societies with the supposed superiority of libertarian principles.

I gave an uncharacteristically optimistic response, arguing that the world in many ways has become more free thanks to libertarian policies (or, to be more accurate, a decline in statism).

This led to several follow-up questions, mostly premised on the notion that I must be smoking crack to think government has become less of a burden. My defense would be that the world is more free than it was 40 years ago, but probably less free than it was 10 years ago, so it depends on your benchmark. And I definitely agree that the world is trending toward less freedom (with these charts being a very sobering example).

But the question that caught my eye, and makes for a good follow-up, comes from a reader in Missouri: “Why…