Utopia, you are standing in it!

The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) brings this critique of the big beasts of social media to our attention. Fake impartiality and bullying tactics get exposed again.
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Silicon Valley Goliaths, using the technology and market forces at their disposal, have shut out of the marketplace Davids opposed to their preferred opinions on climate change, says Clarice Feldman @ The Pipeline.

In his 2007 book, An Army of Davids, Glenn Reynolds, the founder of Instapundit, wrote optimistically that an army of ordinary people (“Davids”) could use technology and the market to beat the Goliaths of “Big Media, Big Government and other Goliaths.”

Thirteen years later, big media is on the ropes but the Silicon Valley Goliaths, using the technology and market forces at their disposal, have shut out of the marketplace Davids opposed to their preferred opinions.

Mike Moore’s Planet of the Humans has incensed renewable energy rent seekers, climate cultists and the mainstream media, alike. Its narrative – that subsidised renewable energy is just a playground for crony capitalists and the greatest economic and environmental fraud of all time – doesn’t sit well with the tribe who would have us believe we’re all on the brink of an ‘inevitable transition’ to running on nothing but sunshine and breezes.

However, if you haven’t already taken the opportunity to see it, trying to do so is like a perpetual game of hide and seek.

STT first covered it here: Blood & Gore: Mike Moore’s ‘Planet of The Humans’ Unmasks The Power & Money Behind Renewables Scam

The film had its debut on YouTube about six weeks ago, and while available on that platform clocked up over 8 million views.

Thereafter – As JoNova details below – those with skin…

Museum of American Finance runs a superb publication named Financial History. It is published three times an year.

The recent issue (Spring 2020) focuses on what else but pandemics. It has an article by Maura Ferguson and Sarah Poole titled Dirty Water. The article tracks a long winding history of epidemics in NY with JP Morgan Chase Bank.

The story narrates the history of this firm named Manhattan Company which was established to clean water of NY City.

During the pre-war years, the Japanese Navy had painstakingly prepared its fleet for one particular strategy: a “decisive battle” to be held in its home waters, after the US fleet had been whittled down by aircraft and submarines during its long transit from Pearl Harbor into Japanese waters. The fleet was designed for this task, where fuel endurance and habitability and (in some cases) ships’ stability was sacrificed for speed and firepower. Logistics ships, tenders, repair ships, and developed forward support bases were unneeded in this strategy. Bases were to receive only minimal development, enough to support long-range reconnaissance and bombing aircraft and a sacrificial garrison. They were only speed bumps in the path of the American fleet and likely to be lost to the Americans’ advance. Fleet auxiliaries were not needed, because the most intense combat was expected to occur near the Japanese homeland in one cataclysmic decisive battle.

The hoarymedia myth about Richard Nixon’s “secret plan” to end the war in Vietnam is circulating anew, and being presented as if genuine.

The tale was invoked yesterday in a Washington Postessay that argued societal rifts and recent civil disorders in contemporary America don’t match those of 1968. “America is polarized today — but not like in 1968,” the essay said. “Today’s polarization is tidy by comparison.”

Maybe. But it’s not a far-fetched assessment. The essay stumbles, though, in claiming without attribution or qualification that Nixon’s “secret plan” was a “tantalizing” pledge that figured significantly in his run for the White House 52 years ago.

The Post presented the claim in this convoluted manner:

Won without a ‘secret plan’

“Besides law and order, he touted a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam. Later, we learned that the plan was secret because it didn’t…

Recent reconstructions and computer simulations reveal the operating principles of the most powerful weapon of its time.

by Paul E. Chevedden, Les Eigenbrod, Vernard Foley and Werner Soedel

Centuries before the development of effective cannons, huge artillery pieces were demolishing castle walls with projectiles the weight of an upright piano. The trebuchet, invented in China between the fifth and third centuries B.C.E., reached the Mediterranean by the sixth century C.E. It displaced other forms of artillery and held its own until well after the coming of gunpowder. The trebuchet was instrumental in the rapid expansion of both the Islamic and the Mongol empires. It also played a part in the transmission of the Black Death, the epidemic of plague that swept Eurasia and North Africa during the 14th century. Along the way it seems to have influenced both the development of clockwork and theoretical analyses of motion.

The trebuchet succeeded…

One giant white elephant deserves another…

When Crescent Dunes, the world’s biggest solar-thermal power plant went bankrupt, US taxpayers were left to pick up the tab, with their liability running into hundreds of $millions.

South Australians (victims of their government’s obsession with chaotically intermittent wind and solar) can count themselves lucky that they didn’t end up with a carbon copy of the Crescent Dunes debacle.

Back in August 2017, STT reported on efforts by the Weatherill Labor government to build a solar-thermal plant at Port Augusta with the ‘help’ of the characters behind Crescent Dunes. It was designed with a trivial 150 MW (notional) capacity, but came with an absolutely staggering $1.2bn pricetag: South Australia: Sublime One Day, Ridiculous the Next – Premier Set to Squander $1.2bn on Solar-Thermal Boondoggle

Fortunately for South Australians that big, shiny white elephant never did get off the ground and Jay Weatherill’s Labor government…

In 2019, the Irish Supreme Court decided two cases concerning speech in parliament. The same seven judges sat in each case. The seven agreed in each case: Frank Clarke, the chief justice, wrote a single judgment for the Court each time.

The applicant won in the first case, decided in late February. The Supreme Court granted a declaration of unlawfulness sought by Angela Kerins against a parliamentary committee on foot of that committee’s unfair interrogation of her on matters relating to her leadership of a publicly-funded charity. In ruling as it did, the Supreme Court overturned a Divisional High Court ruling that Kerins’ claims were non-justiciable. The Divisional Court had interpreted the Article 15 provisions in light of the early modern English laws to which they owe their provenance. “For upwards of four centuries,” Kelly P said, “it has been recognised in common law jurisdictions throughout the world that the…

Yesterday’s column focused on how police unions protect the bad apples who misbehave and therefore cause some people to resent law enforcement, especially in the minority community.

Curtailing the role of those unions would be an important step to create better bonds between the police and the citizenry.

Today’s column will explain the need to repeal or substantially curtail the doctrine of “qualified immunity,” which was created by courts to protect cops who trample on people’s rights.

It’s not a complete answer, just as fixing the union problem isn’t a complete answer. But getting rid of the doctrine at least will give citizens the opportunity to bring lawsuits when cops disregard their civil liberties. This tweet is a good summary for those who don’t have time to dig into the topic.

But hopefully you do have time to investigate this issue.

Here are excerpts from four articles about problems with…

(1) Sweden’s Sonderweg (“special road”, idiomatically, “going its own way”) is the subject of heated debate pro and con.

At first sight, per capita mortality is an order of magnitude higher than in adjacent countries with similar ethnic profile, climate, and sociology. (Sweden does, however, have a higher percentage of 1st-generation immigrants than Norway, Denmark, and Finland — see below.)

At second sight, however, it turned out that Swedish morbidity and especially mortality is disproportionately concentrated in two populations: elderly in care homes (over 70%) and 1st-generation immigrants. Mortality among native Swedes from young to independent elderly, is actually not that elevated compared to the neighbors. 

On the gripping hand, while the Swedes may have avoided the economic ruination of a full lockdown and may be closer to herd immunity now should a second wave arrive, there are costs to this epidemic for everyone (the travel…

WESTERN OUTSKIRTS OF SAIGON

“WHAT IS THIS?” Nguyen Sinh Tuan said, raising his Leica M3 camera and focusing on Nguyen Duc Cui as he sat on the ground, massaging the leather of the brown oxford shoes that he had carried in his pack since the day he had made the blood-bound promise to his dying friend.

“I thought you had no film,” Cui said, smiling as Tuan released the shutter.

“I had no more film for photographs of darkness,” the photographer said. “They wanted pictures of that battle, and all that my lens could see was blackness and streaks of light. I had no film for that. However, I do have this roll of film to photograph today, Liberation Day!”

“It has not yet ended,” Cui said. “We still have ARVN entrenched here at Hoc Mon.”

“In a few hours,” Tuan said and snapped another photograph, “their President Minh will…