Utopia, you are standing in it!

Credit: NASA
Looks like game over for the Planet Nine idea. Unavoidable observational biases may be at least partly to blame.
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Planet Nine is a theoretical, undiscovered giant planet in the mysterious far reaches of our solar system, says The Conversation (via Phys.org)

The presence of Planet Nine has been hypothesized to explain everything from the tilt of the sun’s spin axis to the apparent clustering in the orbits of small, icy asteroids beyond Neptune.

But does Planet Nine actually exist?

(0) Israel today celebrated its first day with zero new cases.

(1) Via Instapundit, SSRN (Social Science Research Network, a preprint server similar to arXiv.org, medrxiv.org, biorxiv.org and chemrxiv,org) has a article in press about the Swedish COVID19 epidemic. 

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3609493

Their per capita death rate is an order of magnitude larger than neighboring Scandinavian countries. It is tempting to attribute all this to Sweden’s Sonderweg (“road alone”) — but this article makes a case that at least part results from factors unrelated to Sweden’s decision not to go on lockdown.

Not only is half of Sweden’s mortality concentrated in just the capital city Stockholm, but over 70% of Sweden’s mortality is in nursing homes. As the article explains, in Sweden the elderly tend to stay at home for as long as possible, assisted by home helpers assigned by the public healthcare system. (Independent assisted living facilities do exist, apparently mostly…

Producing hydrogen gas using chaotically intermittent wind and solar is only the latest hoax being peddled by renewable energy rent seekers and other crony capitalists.

The majority of hydrogen available on the market (around 95%) is produced from fossil fuels by steam reforming or partial oxidation of methane and coal gasification with only a tiny fraction produced by way of biomass gasification or the electrolysis of water or solar thermochemistry.

Steam-methane reforming, the current leading technology for producing hydrogen in large quantities, extracts hydrogen from methane, usually in the form of natural gas; the process releases carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide into the atmosphere. Which, of course, doesn’t wash with the climate cult.

Another method of creating hydrogen is electrolysis, which involves chewing up enormous volumes electricity that gets passed through a volume of water to separate the hydrogen and oxygen atoms. The big plus attached to this method is…

At Strong Language we love creative swearing. But sometimes being creative means avoiding swearwords. When John Boorman and his team were filming Deliverance in rural southeast US, they faced difficulties not only in handling the unforgiving location but also in making certain scenes suitable for eventual TV broadcasting.

One scene in particular proved a challenge: Jon Voight and Ned Beatty’s brutal encounter with two sadistic locals in the woods. According to Boorman, the film’s producers suggested that he shoot the scene two different ways, so that there’d be a version suitable for TV. This meant, among other things, toning down the language in the working script.

People in general are overconfident, excessively optimistic and think of themselves as superior to others.

How can I say such a thing?

Ask anyone with a license to rate their driving abilities, and most people will tell you that they are above average. However, this is not just an isolated case of cocky drivers. The same effect is found when asking people to assess their own intelligence, evaluate their attractiveness, or reflect on how kind they are.

A survey of American school students, which received over 1 million responses, found that no less than 70% rated themselves as above average leaders. Conversely, only 2% of these students humbly stated that they are actually below average.

This all begs the question: why do we think more highly of ourselves than who we really are?

To explain the prevalence of overconfidence, psychologists have historically pointed to the mental health…

Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia reports that, at the urging of students and by a big majority of faculty, it has instituted a general education requirement that “focuses specifically on the histories and experiences of people of color.” This will be a required course for all students, though there may be different courses in different departments that meet the requirements approved the College Senate (the resolution to create this course was passed by 73% of voting faculty). You can read about this in the article below, from Emory’s independent student newspaper (click on screenshot):

The Wheel notes that there were predecessor courses in the 1990s about diversity, though I suspect from the description of those in the proposal that these were far less political, focusing mostly on the different groups that made up America: not only blacks, but Native Americans, Jews, Italians, Asians, Irish, Germans, and so on. (This is…

Earlier this month, Neil Ferguson was awarded membership in the Bureaucrat Hall of Fame after he and his mistress were caught violating lockdown rules that Ferguson – in his role as a supposed public health expert – demanded for the entire United Kingdom.

This was a stunning display of hypocrisy, perhaps even to the extent that Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren might be shocked.

But I want to focus on a different point, which is the degree to which the coronavirus has exposed the fault line between those who are subsidized by government and those who pay for government.

In her Wall Street Journalcolumn, Peggy Noonan opines about how the “protected” don’t have to worry about the consequences of economic shutdowns.

There is a class divide between those who are hard-line on lockdowns and those who are pushing back. We see the professionals on one side—those James Burnham…

The Zircon Affair

The Zircon affair concerned a BBC programme made in 1986 by the investigative journalist Duncan Campbell. It covered a secret defence project, an intelligence-gathering satellite named Zircon, and particularly the failure to submit it to parliamentary scrutiny. The BBC, under pressure from the government and its governors, decided not to screen it. After the decision was announced in January 1987, Campbell looked for other ways of publishing his scoop. On 21 January, the government obtained an interim injunction to prevent him. A group of MPs, organised by Robin Cook, planned a showing of Campbell’s film within the precincts of the House of Commons (in room W1, just off Westminster Hall, at 11am on Thursday 22 January) – presumably on the assumption that the injunction had no effect within the Palace of Westminster. The government appealed to the Speaker to allow a motion to be debated in…

(1) A reader drew my attention to a COVID19 outbreak in Nobles County, Minnesota — again linked to a meatpacking plant (JBS, in this case). According to a May 12 report from MPR (Minnesota Public Radio), https://www.mprnews.org/story/2020/05/12/latest-on-covid19-in-mn

In southwestern Minnesota’s Nobles County, where an outbreak hit Worthington’s massive JBS pork plant, about 1 in 17 people have tested positive for COVID-19. In mid-April, there were just a handful of cases. On Tuesday, there were 1,291 confirmed cases. The numbers were still increasing, although at a slower rate than in previous weeks. [Ed.: My source adds: now 1,414 positive cases out of a county population of 21,378, about 6.6% or one in fifteen. So far, there have only been 2 deaths.]

The JBS plant shut on April 20 but has partially reopened with expanded hygiene and health monitoring measures.

Similar problems have been reported in Stearns County, where COVID-19 cases tied to…

May 25, 1660 – King Charles II lands at Dover at the invitation of the Convention Parliament (England), which marks the end of the Cromwell-proclaimed Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland and begins the Restoration (1660) of the British monarchy.

Charles II (29 May 1630 – 6 February 1685)[c] was king of England, Scotland, and Ireland. He was king of Scotland from 1649 until his deposition in 1651, and king of England, Scotland and Ireland from the 1660 Restoration of the monarchy until his death in 1685.

Charles II was the eldest surviving child of Charles I of England, Scotland and Ireland and Henrietta-Maria de Bourbon of France, the youngest daughter of HenrI IV of France and his second wife, Marie de’ Medici.

After Charles I’s execution at Whitehall on January 30, 1649, at the climax of the English Civil War, the Parliament of Scotland proclaimed Charles II king on…