Utopia, you are standing in it!

ChildLine : Coming Out Stories

In the third of my posts on the NSPCC, child protection charity, I looked at Coming Out Stories, involving three females and one male. Callum is a gay male. One of the females identifies as assexual, one bisexual and , despite watching this, and transcribing it, I still don’t know what the final girl identifies as. 😳. This is a video about coming out and , as far as I can tell, Maja didn’t actually come out as anything! What was noticeable was, out of the three females, not one came out as Lesbian.

Here is a link to the youtube https://youtu.be/wzw6rGDMqX0

Here is a transcript: ChildLine Coming Out stories Transcription

First question is directed at Calum. He is given, by far, the most air time in this piece. He was aware of his sexuality at a young age and began talking…

Freedom for Faith have posted this submission on the provisions of a Private Member’s Bill (sponsored by the Hon Mark Latham) being considered in the NSW Parliament at the moment. The Bill would plug a gap in NSW discrimination law by making religious belief or activity a prohibited ground of discrimination in NSW. The Bill is one that ought to receive serious consideration from the Parliament, and the submission (prepared for Freedom for Faith by Dr Alex Deagon, Senior Lecturer in Law at the Queensland University of Technology) should be very helpful in that process.

Mark Kishlansky (1948 – 2015) was an American historian of seventeenth-century British politics. He was the Frank Baird, Jr. Professor of History at Harvard University, editor of the Journal of British Studies from 1984 to 1991, and editor-in-chief of History Compass from 2003 to 2009.

Kishlansky wrote half a dozen or so books and lots of articles about Stuart Britain and so was invited to write Volume Six of the Penguin History of England covering that period, under the general editorship of historian David Cannadine.

I think of the history of Britain in the 17th century as consisting of four parts:

1. The first two Stuarts (Kings James I & Charles I) 1603 – 1642
2. The Civil Wars and Protectorate (Oliver Cromwell) 1642 – 1660
3. The Restoration (Kings Charles II & James II) 1660 – 1688
4. The Glorious Revolution and Whig monarchs (William & Mary, then Queen Anne) 1688 – 1714

Australia has seen two recent initiatives by local Parliaments aimed at what are often called “conversion therapy” practices. No-one supports coercive electro-shock or other oppressive practices imposed on someone without their consent, to change their sexual preferences or identity. But the problem with the recent legislative proposals is that the laws do not target these practices alone (as to which it is hard to find any evidence of them occurring in Australia in recent years), but seem to reach further and to prevent religious groups sharing the teaching of their faith.

This video from Dan Hannan crams 10,000 years of human history into 5 minutes. We learn about the “stationary bandit” of government and find out how our ancestors endured pervasive oppression and misery.

But there’s a happy ending to the story. It’s called capitalism.

There are many useful insights in this video.

We learn why it was important to replace arbitrary government with the “rule of law” so that property rights could be protected and so that people wanting to buy and sell no longer had to get permission from the state.

And once capitalism was unleashed beginning a few hundred years ago, living standards dramatically improved (these videos by Don Boudreaux and Deirdre McCloskey have lots of evidence).

Hannan makes the all-important point that capitalism is the opposite of exploitation. It enriches people, but also liberates them.

And, as indicated by one of my…

The endless appeal of media-driven myths rests largely in their supposed affirmation that journalists can be powerful actors whose work and words can have great and decisive effects on war, politics, and public policy.

Cronkite in Vietnam

This thread runs through all prominent media myths, from William Randolph Hearst’s presumptive vow to “furnish the war” with Spain at the end of the 19th century to the dominant narrative of the Watergate scandal, that exposés by two Washington Post reportersbrought down Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency.

The thread also defines the presumptive “Cronkite Moment” of 1968, when CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite declared on air that the U.S. military was “mired in stalemate” in the Vietnam War.

Cronkite’s assessment, which came after he visited what then was South Vietnam in the wake of the communist-led Tet offensive, was unremarkable for the times. Even so…

There has been extraordinary progress made in many facets of medical science and treatment, with the obvious front runner being cardiac issues. Nowhere is such progress better demonstrated than in the life insurance industry with its actuarial downgrading of cardiac risk over the last thirty years.

Not so well known, perhaps, is the art of pain management.

Some of our more alert readers will know Adolf underwent surgery on his left shoulder nearly three months ago to reattach a snapped tendon. The surgeon told me while such surgery is not major compared with many other types, this particular case was at the top of it’s class for being ‘major.’

So there I was, slung in a sling for six weeks, unable to drive.

For the whole six weeks l was required to take Panadol, 24 hours per day, every day, continuing up to today and for God knows how much…

In a ‘don’t say we told you so moment’, wind and solar obsessed California has just suffered another run of weather induced mass blackouts. Like clockwork, wind power output collapsed just as the summer heat and demand for electricity rose – leaving a million or more Californians sweltering in the dark.

Anyone wondering what an all wind and sun powered future might look like need look no further than the debacle that is California. Oh, and for those who think this might be novel or unique, you can always trawl our archives on Australia’s blackout capital, the equally wind and solar obsessed South Australia: Déjà Vu (All Over Again): Yet Another Wind Power Output Collapse Plunges 200,000 South Australian Homes into the Dark Ages

Here’s a couple of primers on what happens when brazen ideology trumps sound engineering.

Green California Has the Nation’s Worst Power Grid
Washington Examiner
Steve Goreham
18…

The scare du jour is about Greenland Ice Sheet (GIS) and how it will melt out and flood us all.  It’s declared that GIS has passed its tipping point, and we are doomed.  Typical is the Phys.org hysteria: Sea level rise quickens as Greenland ice sheet sheds record amount:  “Greenland’s massive ice sheet saw a record net loss of 532 billion tonnes last year, raising red flags about accelerating sea level rise, according to new findings.”

Panic is warranted only if you treat this as proof of an alarmist narrative and ignore the facts and context in which natural variation occurs. For starters, consider the last four years of GIS fluctuations reported by DMI and summarized in the eight graphs above.  Note the noisy blue lines showing how the surface mass balance (SMB) changes its daily weight by 8 or 10 gigatonnes (Gt) around the baseline mean from 1981…

There is a lively debate among economists about the way in which UK statisticians are estimating the impact of the pandemic on the output of the public sector. This is a relatively arcane topic and the mainstream media can be forgiven for not yet covering it. But it is important, not least because other countries do things differently.

If everyone used the same method, the reported fall in UK GDP in the first half of the year would actually be similar to that in France and Italy, rather than the outlier that the headlines suggest. On the other hand, the UK method, which is more accurate, will also show an even stronger recovery in the third quarter and beyond.

These issues have also led to some confusion about an alternative measure of inflation known as the implied GDP deflator, prompting the economist Shaun Richards to ask “Has nobody else…

(The 1968 Democratic Convention demonstration on the streets of Chicago)

The publication of MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell’s new book, PLAYING WITH FIRE: THE 1968 ELECTION AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN POLITICS comes at a propitious moment in American political history.  According to O’Donnell 1968 is the watershed year that set our current politics in motion – a partisan conflict were by ideology and party affiliation has become more important than the needs of the American people.  O’Donnell argues that before 1968 the terms conservative democrat and liberal republican existed, today they are pretty much extinct.  By examining 1968 we can discern the origin of this political schism and conjecture on how it affects the United States domestically and in the realm of foreign policy.  The comparison between our current politics and 1968 is fascinating as Donald Trump seems to have adopted the populist message of Alabama governor George C. Wallace…

The Heartland Institute’s Andy Singer explains why Golden State residents are dealing with rolling blackouts. As an aside, Governor Gavin Newsom, promised in May he would take a pay cut after slashing California state employee salaries. To this day, not surprisingly, he has yet to do so.

(1) A commenter alerted me to this video by Mark Felton about the time Hitler (y”sh) came close (sadly not close enough) to dying in an airplane accident.

Briefly, on June 4, 1942, he flew from the Wolf’s Lair in Rastenburg to Finland on a state visit to his ally malgré-soi, Field Marshal Gustav Mannerheim. As usual, two identical Focke-Wulf FW-200 Condors took off. Upon takeoff, pilot Hans Baur noticed the brake on the left undercarriage had jammed. Then upon landing, he was faced with a much-too-short landing strip. He braked vigorously to ensure he would not skate off the runway: this caused the failing left brake to overheat and the brake fluid to catch fire.

Could the world have been spared three more years of war and butchery, were it not for an alert ground crew member who noticed the fire and moved quickly to extinguish it? Felton’s…

In 2019, YouTube removed Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 film “Triumph of the Will” from its platform because it was considered “hate speech,” and if any film is ever considered hate speech, this would be the one, for it documents a famous rally for Hitler in prewar Germany and glorifies the Führer, showing a lot of his speech.  YouTube’s grounds for removal were that its guidelines mandated removal of any videos “that promote or glorify Nazi ideology, which is inherently discriminatory.”

I watched it several years back on YouTube, but we can’t any more, though you can find it, with critical commentary, on the platform if you look hard enough. But it can be seen in full on Daily Motion, at the preceding link, which carries only the brief notice, “The infamous propaganda film of the 1934 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, Germany.”

And infamous it is—it’s propaganda in the service…