Utopia, you are standing in it!

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…

UPDATE: From Block Club Chicago (click on screenshot):

An excerpt:

The action continued into Sunday with yoga, breakfast and organizing workshops. Students will remain there “indefinitely until we hear publicly” from Lee, CareNotCops organizers said in a tweet.

In a statement Monday, organizers said they would remain on the block until Lee agrees to meet their demands.

They’re going to be waiting a LONG time. . . . .

________________

For some time now, I’ve been anxious about my University becoming more and more woke. That’s clearly happening to the student population, and there are signs it’s affecting some of the administration as well. This would break my heart, but I think the tide is unstoppable. I only hope that the highest administrators—the President and the Provost—will hold the line.

The latest instantiation of student wokeness, as reported by the Chicago Tribune (click on screenshot below) is a…

The study talks about the need for more ‘grid flexibility’, but as one union leader put it: “The political aspiration is for a low carbon future but politicians have no credible way of delivering it”. Despite the ‘cheaper’ claim, it turns out that ‘the costs of managing the grid skyrocketed to a record high’, which looks ominous given existing energy policies.
– – –
Lockdown measures taken to combat Covid-19 in March led to a much greener and cheaper electricity system in Britain in the weeks that followed, but at the same time the increased reliance on renewables made managing the grid far more challenging, offering a glimpse of the UK’s future power requirements as the economy transitions towards net zero emissions.

That is the conclusion of independent research released today by Imperial College London and energy firm Drax, which saw experts assess the tumultuous impact of the coronavirus crisis…

• Introduction
• Timeline of the Restoration
  • 1659
  • 1660
• The reign of Charles II, the 1660s
  • Convention Parliament
  • The Clarendon Code
  • The Corporation Act
  • The Act of Uniformity
  • The Conventicle Act
  • The Five-Mile Act
• Timeline of the 1660s
• The reign of Charles II, the 1670s
• The reign of Charles II, the Popish Plot and after
  • Whigs and Tories
• Death of Charles II

Introduction to the restoration of Charles II

When Oliver Cromwell died on 3 September 1658 there was no immediate sense that the Commonwealth would collapse and the king be restored. Rule passed smoothly to Oliver’s son, Richard – but things quickly started to unravel.

Cromwell’s rule had never reconciled the ever-increasing number of conflicting constituencies or parties or groups within not only England, but the other kingdoms of Scotland and Ireland. His rule rested ultimately on his control of the army, and the loyalty to him of (most) of the…

Renewable energy rent seekers are fuming because Australia’s power grid can’t take any more of their chaotically generated wind and solar power.

The massive daily spikes and collapses in wind and solar power output have made the grid manager’s life a living hell: Hopeless Joke: Australia’s Wind Industry Keeps On Failing to Deliver the Goods

As a result, AEMO has introduced new rules about grid access for intermittent wind and solar and, much to the horror of the wind and solar industries, is actually enforcing them.

Dozens of proposed wind farms and large-scale solar projects have been shelved, simply because they can’t be guaranteed of ever being able to deliver a single watt into the grid.

Their grid troubles also coincide with the fact that the Federal government’s principal RE subsidy scam – the Large-Scale Renewable Energy Target – tops out this year at its ultimate annual target of 33,000 GWh…