Utopia, you are standing in it!

We explore the consequences of ethnic partitioning, a neglected aspect of the Scramble for Africa, and uncover the following. First, apart from the land mass and water bodies, split and non-split groups are similar across several dimensions. Second, the incidence, severity, and duration of political violence are all higher for partitioned homelands which also experience frequent military interventions from neighboring countries. Third, split groups are often entangled in a vicious circle of government-led discrimination and ethnic wars. Fourth, respondents from survey data identifying with split ethnicities are economically disadvantaged. The evidence highlights the detrimental repercussions of the colonial border design.

This is from Stelios Michalopoulos and Elias Papaioannou, in the American Economic Review.

Is there a way of out this quagmire for Africa? The status quo, with its multilateral institutions, doesn’t seem to be working (perhaps because multilateral institutions have been grafted on to the old imperial structures

Inconvenient facts like the wind industry’s rampant Eagle slaughter troubles the narrative and requires the mainstream press to do backflips to maintain a positive spin.

Remember, this is an ‘inevitable’ transition to an all wind and sun powered future. So, the slicing and dicing of millions of birds and bats, the destruction of pristine wilderness and whole rural communities is just collateral damage, right?

Over the last few posts, STT has been focused on former Australian Greens leader, Bob Brown, who has managed to ignite a debate centred on just how useless wind power is, and how much chaos and unnecessary carnage it causes. All because Dr Bob is railing against a few wind turbines set to be plonked in his backyard, notwithstanding that he was always ready to spear them into yours.

Although readers, viewers and listeners of Australia’s National Broadcaster, the ABC and the lefty Nine Group (now…

Tasmania’s rugged North is one of Australia’s natural wonders, but not for much longer if Chinese wind developers have their way.

Tasmania’s rare and endangered Wedge Tailed Eagle is already under threat, being slice and diced with impunity by its existing wind farms on the North-West and North-East coasts. Now another monster wind farm is set to extend the carnage across the central highlands.

Epuron might be the nominated developer, but chances are it will flog its project once it gets development approval to Beijing-based Xinjiang Goldwind Science & Technology Co, which will almost certainly provide the Chinese made turbines. Epuron has done the same in a number of other places elsewhere.

Alan Jones, gobsmacked by the hundreds of $millions in subsidies that will be pocketed by its Chinese owner over the life of its wind farm, takes a look at the kind of carnage that’s threatened.

Taxpayers will…

This is the third instalment of a series of blogs about how the privilege in parliamentary publication eventually came to be defined in the Parliamentary Papers Act 1840. Part I can be read at Privilege, Libel and the long road to Stockdale v. Hansard, Part I: from Strode’s Case to Article IX; Part II is at Parliamentary Privilege and Libel, Part II: from Wilkes to 1835. This instalment deals with what happened after the Reform Act of 1832.

The publication resolution of 1835

The 1835 decision of the House of Commons that it would routinely publish the reports and returns that were formally presented to it would have a huge impact on the issue of parliamentary privilege. It was of a piece with other gestures of openness on the part of the post-Reform Parliament, most notably the decision to publish division lists, dealt with in this blog by…

The Duke of Northumberland faced a number of key tasks to consolidate his power after Edward VI’s death. Most importantly, he had to isolate and, ideally, capture Mary Tudor to prevent her from gathering support. As soon as Mary was sure of King Edward’s demise, she left her residence at Hunsdon and set out to East Anglia, where she began to rally her supporters. Northumberland set out from London with troops on 14 July to capture Mary.

The Privy Council switched their allegiance and proclaimed Mary queen in London, on July 19. The historical consensus assumes that this was in recognition of overwhelming support of the population for Mary. However, there is no clear evidence for that outside Norfolk and Suffolk, where Northumberland had put down Kett’s Rebellion; hence, where Princess Mary sought refuge.

John Dudley, 1st Duke of Northumberland

Rather, it seems that Henry FitzAlan, 19th Earl of Arundel—whom…

The New York Times Magazine has a very long article on Robin DiAngelo, her white fragility hypothesis (and her best-selling book about it), and her methods of training people in government, colleges, and businesses to be anti-racist and promote diversity in the workplace. As the article notes, she’s made a ton of money off her hypothesis, but I don’t begrudge her that. After all, the Kardashians, who are completely useless, make much more. Rather, I’ll focus on the efficacy of her methods and whether her very message is consistent. If you read this site yesterday, you’ll have seen a post about John McWhorter’s take on DiAngelo’s book White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism, a take that was not only highly critical, but accused her methods of fostering a bigotry of low expectations towards African-Americans.

The NYT piece, which is pretty positive, raises…

Experimental E-plane [image credit: Siemens]
If only batteries could lose some of their heavy weight during flight, matching the reductions achieved by burning fuel, he might be onto something. But as they can’t, this looks like more pie in the sky.
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Exclusive: Acting Liberal Democrat leader calls for green short haul flights to be UK’s next “moon landing mission”, reports i-news.

Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey is calling for all domestic flights to be zero carbon by 2030, arguing the target must become the UK’s new “moon landing mission”.

Commercial planes run mainly on fossil fuels, and engineers are struggling to design a zero carbon passenger jet to replace them.

New ‘Green’ Deal Democrats, headed by AOC’s Squad are determined to destroy the USA from the inside. Presidential hopeful, Sleepy Joe Biden appears equally determined to help them.

The Democrats have been doing the bidding of America’s cabal of crony capitalists who designed the wind and solar scam for years; characters who’ve made obscene profits from massive taxpayer subsidies to renewable energy and who are obviously very keen for more of the same.

Back in April, the Democrats went on the offensive in an effort to help America’s renewable energy rent seekers snaffle $billions from Trump’s $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus and failed. AOC and her Squad are still at it.

Paul Driessen takes a look at what might happen in the US in the event that these lunatics ever get anywhere near the controls.

Report renewable energy risks, too
Watts Up With That?
Paul Driessen
9 July 2020

Joe…

When we study history, we tend to focus on the lives of the elite and the royalty because their lives are well documented. However, there was a large majority of the population who tends to be forgotten in the annals of the past. They are the lower classes who were the backbone of society for centuries, the people who we would call peasants. Now, if we know so much about the higher echelons of society, we must ask ourselves what was life like for those who had almost nothing in life. How did they work? When they did speak out about injustices through revolutions, how were they received? How did they worship? How were they educated? How did they relax after long days of back-breaking labor? Where did they live? These questions and more are answered in Terry Deary’s latest book, “The Peasants’ Revolting Lives”.

I would like to thank…

John McWhorter is a professor of comparative literature at Columbia University (he specializes in Creole languages), is black, and appears, politically, to be a Liberal/Centrist.  That, at least, should give him enough credibility so that one couldn’t from the outset totally dismiss his piece at The American Interest called “Atonement as Activism.”

It’s a two-barreled indictment, first of activist, writer, and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates, about whom I can’t say much as I haven’t read him, and, second, about the self-flagellation of white people in the face of the indictments that Coates apparently levels at America: we’re a land of endemic, structural racism where blacks are due reparations and improvements in civil rights have been merely cosmetic.

All I can say is this: reparations is a hard problem, but I think something must be done to repair the damage of slavery and racism. That “something”, in my…

Knowing a bit about Robin DiAngelo‘s book White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism, having heard some of her lectures online, and also having read John McWhorter and listened to his exchanges with Glenn Loury, I was pretty sure that McWhorter’s review of DiAngelo’s book wouldn’t be full of encomiums. And indeed, it’s a pan.

Yes, I admit I haven’t read the book, and when I write about reviews like this one I’m always accused of not passing my own judgment on the book, but that’s like saying that you can’t criticize thumbscrews until you’ve had your digits crushed. At any rate, I’ll just present McWhorter’s take. I may read the book some time, but there are so many other books out there in the queue, and I’ve listened to several online lectures in which DiAngelo presents her thesis. (I’ve put one…

(April 9, 2018, Donald Trump and John Bolton)

In all candor I debated whether to purchase and read John Bolton’s new memoir THE ROOM WHERE IT HAPPENED: A WHITE HOUSE MEMOIR.  Apart from stealing the title from a song from the Broadway show “Hamilton” I believe that Bolton’s approach is about maximizing his book royalties rather serving democracy, something he claims he has done throughout his years in government service.  By eschewing an appearance before the House Impeachment hearings for his own self-serving interests is rather hypocritical and Bolton showed his true colors.  In the past whether arguing for an invasion of Iraq or other foreign adventures one at least saw a man whose beliefs were clear, in the present instance I wonder except for the fact that his reputation for never finding a war he didn’t like remains.  After reading Bolton’s somewhat self-serving memoir one gets the feeling…

If you think computer-assisted and computer-display modern cars are complicated (I do; I have a low-tech 2000 Honda), then you’re going to be blown away by this new 14-minute video about now the McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle jet fighter is controlled.  Col. Themely, who has flown these things in extenso, tells us what all the buttons are displays are for, though some of the displays aren’t activated because they’re classified. The amount of redundancy and safety features is impressive. Though the plane has been around since 1967, with continual upgrades, it remains a marvel of human ingenuity. And remember, every bit of this plane was made out of material wrested from the Earth, and designed by a mess of neurons in our heads.

Now guess what all this costs? After you’ve watched the video, click below the fold to find out, but guess first.  Oh, and the top speech is…

Rick first alerted me to the end of the popular rationalist blog Slate State Codex. Then it was all over my internet. I have never been a huge fan of the rationalist community, mostly because they don’t do history very well, but this is a big deal.

It has also produced some great conversation on both sides of the American cultural divide. Gideon Lewis-Kraus wrote an excellent meta-piece on the whole affair. Lewis-Kraus uses “Silicon Valley” as shorthand for the intellectual right. This is more correct than wrong, even though the region votes Democrat, because Silicon Valley is more of a mindset than a geographic place.

Lewis-Kraus’s Silicon Valley is a new, decentralized informational ecology. He contrasts Silicon Valley with the old media: big corporations trying to maintain a stranglehold on “the narrative.” (Lewis-Kraus readily admits he’s part of the old media.) For Lewis-Kraus, Silicon Valley is trying…