On this blog/Facebook page, I try very hard to stick to scientific facts and avoid discussing politics. Nevertheless, I am frequently accused of being political, even when I am simply reporting a fact. For example, I often post facts about climate change, such as the fact that 2014, 2015, and 2016 all set new records for the warmest year (on average), and when I do that, I nearly always receive comments accusing me of “liberal propaganda” or “pushing a liberal agenda,” but that’s not how facts work. It is demonstrably true that all of those years were the warmest on record, and politics has absolutely nothing to do with it. In other words, facts are inherently not political. They are simply statements of reality. To be clear, facts can, of course, be used to make political arguments and to try to persuade people of a particular political position, but the…

Australia’s energy policy is a joke, but a plan to send subsidised solar power to Singapore proves lunatics really have taken over the asylum.

The Morrison Federal government has given major project status to a 500KW undersea cable to run from Darwin to Singapore over a distance of at least 3,350 km.

The cost of the cable alone will be staggering. Then, considering the fact that solar panels deliver power around 25% of the time (on average), the cost of any electricity that occasionally makes landfall in Singapore will be positively astronomical.

STT nearly choked on our porridge when we learnt that the notionally conservative Liberal/National Coalition was backing yet another massively subsidised renewable energy white elephant. Michael Darby must have suffered the same near-death experience. Here he is, suitably outraged about an outrageous waste of taxpayers’ money.

Flogging Unreliable Energy By Extension Cord To Singapore Looks Like An Outrageous…

COVID1984 – get TRUMP – November 3rd

“Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely
exercised for the good of its victims
may be the most oppressive.”
– C. S. Lewis

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed
 (and hence clamorous to be led to safety)
 by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins,
all of them imaginary.”
– H.L. Mencken

***

MUST READ analysis, by a concerned citizen (aka voter), of what’s really going on in the Orwellian world of COVID-19 and the politics of statistics.

via Cairns News :

No more recorded influenza cases in Australia

Letter to the Editor

Government lies, damn lies and statistics

Victorian Population – 6,359,000

• COVID tests conducted – 1,633,900
• COVID cases – 11,557
• Positive cases to Victorian population – 0.18%
• Positive Case to Test Conducted Percentage – 0.70%
• COVID Deaths…

Andrew Sullivan’s site is still free, but will shortly go to a fee scheme whereby you can pay $50 a year for full access (I’ve already subscribed). The format is still a weekly tripartite column, but with additions like his famous “The View from My Window” contest, in which readers have to guess exactly where a reader’s photo was taken. There’s also selected feedback from readers, which Andrew answers.

This week’s column (click on screenshot below) has a section on diversity, one on the possibility of a rebuilt Republican Party, and a small “1620 project” piece, in which Sullivan extols the Pilgrims’ arrival in America and, sadly, has gone back to extolling religion as well. I’ll concentrate on the diversity bit, but here’s an excerpt from his “1620 project” piece (the name, of course, is mocking the NYT’s “1619 Project”):

The [Mayflower] Compact was a way to keep the company…

The latest gambit of Woke politics is to trawl back through everyone’s history, and, if you find something unsavory, that person must be canceled. Now sometimes this is okay, as when statues are taken down that honored Confederates, particularly postbellum statues meant to solidify the established system of segregation. (I’d prefer, however, that those statues be left in place with a prominent caveat.)

But when you do that with scientific names, it causes a problem.  Sometimes a “problematic” person is part of a species’ name, either the common name like Audubon’s shearwater (Puffinus lherminieri), or both the common name and the Latin binomial, like these birds: Audubon’s warbler (Setophaga auduboni), Townsend’s warbler (Setophaga townsendi), Hammond’s flycatcher (Empidonax hammondii) , and McCown’s longspur (Rhynchophanes mccownii). These names confer instant communication between birders and other biologists, and the Latin binomials are entrenched…

Even after 30 years and endless subsidies, no country is powering itself exclusively with the wind and solar; no country ever will.

But that doesn’t stop our political betters berating us, should we ever beg the question about the purported logic of throwing endless $trillions at something that’s already proven to be an abject failure.

Whatever your views on climate change (the apparently existential threat formerly known as ‘global warming’), the idea that trying to run modern, civil societies on sunshine and breezes might somehow prevent it is, of course, a complete nonsense.

One environmentalist who called it out, loud and early, was Michael Shellenberger. As a long-time advocate for reliable, affordable and safe nuclear energy, and critic of intermittent renewables – calling wind and solar worse than useless – Michael combines common sense, logic and reason, in an era when those attributes have become scarce commodities.

Shellenberger delivered…

Political/ideological debates have a lot of moving parts, and there are a lot of timely issues to address. Given the marginal impact of anything we do in this sphere (e.g. voting, sharing a blog post on Twitter, or being a solitary voter in a vast sea of the entire 6200 people in this country), it’s only natural that we have to economize on information and argument and that results. We can’t help but deplete the intellectual commons.

What are some low cost ways to improve the quality?

1. Value Intellectual humility.
2. Devalue the sort of behavior that makes things worse.

It bears repeating: value intellectual humility. It’s not easy. I’m as drawn the confident claims as you are. I’ve got a lot of smart people in my bubble and when they boldly declare something, I tend to believe them. But the “I honestly don’t know” posts deserve more attention…

Latest from the Beehive –

It looked (at first blush) like Christchurch would gobble up around half the money earmarked by the government for projects to get us on our bikes.

Julie Anne Genter, Associate Minister of Transport and a Green with a fondness for two-wheeled, pedal-driven transport, today banged out two press statements.

One of these, headed Green light for Te Awa River Ride in $220m nationwide cycleways investment, triggered the Point of Order Trough Monitor.

We quickly established that just a few of those $220 million are actually being invested in the Te Awa Ride.

The second statement was headed Six major ‘shovel-ready’ cycleways funded in Christchurch.

No figure was mentioned in the heading, but big bucks were bandied in the text of the statement.

Genter advised that six major cycle routes will be completed in Christchurch thanks to funding from the Government’s investment in shovel-ready infrastructure…

By Duggan Flanakin ~

The rush to decarbonize every nation in the world in one or maybe two decades reflects the “I want it all NOW!” philosophy imbued through modern education systems. Current and recent former students – and their teachers – demand a perfect world (since they can envision one) and exhibit zero patience (hence the nationwide riots in the U.S.).

Hopefully the mad stampede to destroy the West’s ability to use fossil fuels at all will be sidelined by harsh realities of economics, logistics, and resource availability (including a hoped for reticence to rely on child slave labor to satisfy their blood lust). Yet the United Kingdom, formerly a bastion of sanity, has mandated, as part of its drive toward an all-electric society, the installation of electric vehicle charging stations in every home by 2030 and that all new cars and vans be hydrogen or electric vehicles (and…

August 6, 1945, 8:15:17 seconds, a solitary bomb was released from a single B-29 over Hiroshima…

[Lyrics: Peart; music: Lee, Lifeson]

Imagine a time
When it all began
In the dying days of a war
A weapon that would settle the score
Whoever found it first
Would be sure to do their worst
They always had before…

Imagine a man
Where it all began 
A scientist pacing the floor
In each nation, always eager to explore
To build the best big stick
To turn the winning trick
But this was something more…

[CHORUS:] The Big Bang took and shook the world 
Shot down the Rising Sun 
The end was begun
It would hit everyone 
When the chain reaction was done 
The big shots try to hold it back 
Fools try to wish it away 
The hopeful depend on a world without end 
Whatever the hopeless may say

Imagine…

The dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire occurred de facto on August 6, 1806, when Emperor Franz II abdicated his Imperial title and released all imperial states and officials from their oaths and obligations to the empire. Although the abdication was considered legal, the dissolution of the imperial bonds was not and several states refused to recognise the end of the empire at the time.

Although today is the date the empire was dissolved, in many ways it was a mere formality as the empire had been deteriorating since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 that ended the Thirty Years War. The treaty gave the numerous states within the empire autonomy, ending the empire in all but name. The Swiss Confederation, which had already established quasi-independence in 1499, as well as the Northern Netherlands, also left the Empire at this juncture. The Habsburg Emperors then began to focus on consolidating…