by Ross McKitrick

Challenging the claim that a large set of climate model runs published since 1970’s are consistent with observations for the right reasons.

Jan 26, 2020

Zuby, the self-styled “Jordan Peterson of rap”, is this week’s guest on “So What You’re Saying Is…”.

The weight-lifting hip hop artist became an unlikely feminist icon for demonstrating that athletes who are genetically male should not be competing alongside women. In 2019 he was filmed smashing the British women’s deadlift record, in which the weights are raised from the ground to thigh level, while he said he was “identifying as a woman”.

The video went viral on the Internet. The Oxford University graduate beat the UK women’s bench press record too, joking that his work was “strong, stunning and brave”.

The Painful Truth About Affirmative Action

Introduction

“The Painful Truth About Affirmative Action” is an editorial published by Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr. in magazine The Atlantic. Sander is a law professor and economist at the University of California- Los Angeles and has published several works studying the effects of racial preferences. Taylor is a contributing editor for National Journal and teaches news media and law at Stanford Law School. The content of the editorial is a criticism of affirmative action in college admissions and how it is inherently unfair and ineffective.

Summary

To begin the persuasive piece, the authors introduce the audience to a concept called “mismatch”. As they defined and explained, mismatch is a problem wherein students get admitted to incredibly selective universities where they would not have been accepted to had it not been for affirmative action, and thus do not perform or fit in as…

In January 1629, Charles opened the second session of the English Parliament, which had been prorogued in June 1628, with a moderate speech on the tonnage and poundage issue. Members of the House of Commons began to voice opposition to Charles’s policies in light of the case of John Rolle, a Member of Parliament whose goods had been confiscated for failing to pay tonnage and poundage. Many MPs viewed the imposition of the tax as a breach of the Petition of Right.

When Charles ordered a parliamentary adjournment on March 2, 1629 members held the Speaker, Sir John Finch, down in his chair so that the ending of the session could be delayed long enough for resolutions against Catholicism, Arminianism and tonnage and poundage to be read out and acclaimed by the chamber. The provocation was too much for Charles, who dissolved Parliament on March 10, 1629 and had nine…

Ahead of tonight’sParliaments, Politics and People seminarat the Institute of Historical Research, we hear from Anna Harrington, a PhD candidate at the University of Leicester. She spoke at our previous session on 25 February about her research into the campaigning of William Wilberforce following the abolition of the slave trade in 1807…

William Wilberforce (1759-1833) is remembered as the MP who championed the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. He retired from the House of Commons in 1825, after forty-five years as an MP (1780-1825). My PhD thesis, which is a reassessment of Wilberforce’s abolitionist activity throughout his career, argues that in many ways the years after the abolition of the slave trade reflect what Wilberforce had done within that first campaign.

Wilberforce was as active an abolitionist in the second half of his career as he was…

Posted to Energy March 05, 2020 by Curt Levey writes at InsideSources Climate Change Lawsuits Collapsing Like Dominoes.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Climate change activists went to court in California recently trying to halt a long losing streak in their quest to punish energy companies for aiding and abetting the world’s consumption of fossil fuels.

A handful of California cities — big consumers of fossil fuels themselves — asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to reverse the predictable dismissal of their public nuisance lawsuit seeking to pin the entire blame for global warming on five energy producers: BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell.

The cities hope to soak the companies for billions of dollars of damages, which they claim they’ll use to build sea walls, better sewer systems and the like in anticipation of rising seas and extreme weather that…

The blank look on Jane Fonda’s face revealed that, 50 years on, her activism has aged more than she had. When a BBC Newsnight reporter asked where Fonda got the numbers indicating an existential climate collapse threatening humanity, she replied authoritatively: “From the science!”. When challenged on this, her fumbling revealed how her advisers had assumed that no one was going to question her on that and on whether she had, indeed, read “the science”.

2019 was the year of Celebrity Science – where the cameras focused on stars making a token gesture to some mystical doctrines to be revered rather than read; where virtue signalling meets fear of missing out; and where decades of research could not withstand a mindless celebrity tweet. Anti-vaxx stars walk down red carpets, gurus tout naturopath remedies or celebrities get themselves arrested to help stop the extinction of humanity or collapse of entire ecosystems…

This week former Home Secretary Amber Rudd, who was in charge of the Home Office at the time of the Windrush scandal in 2018, was disinvited by the UNWomen Oxford Society after originally inviting Rudd to speak for International Women’s Day. According to The Guardian, Oxford’s African Caribbean Society claim that they didn’t call for Rudd to be cancelled nor did they plan to boycott the talk, after suggestions were made by the UNWomen Oxford Society. Nevertheless, this story has added fuel to the perception that there is a free speech ‘crisis’ at British universities today and resulted in numerous calls for places like Oxford University to remain a bastion of free speech.

These calls are misleading because there is a long history of students attempting to prevent controversial figures from speaking at Oxford, through the formal use of a ‘no platform’ policy, or by picketing, or disrupting the…

I was chatting to someone yesterday about what was behind the undisciplined, highly political, way in which Reserve Bank Governor Adrian Orr has taken to the job.  My interlocutor reckoned Orr might have his eye on a high place on Labour’s 2023 list (“doing a Brash”).  I was a bit sceptical –  he’d be about 60 and Jacinda Ardern about 43 –  but then I guess this is the era where a youngish (only 72) Trump could be facing off against either Bernie Sanders (77) or Joe Biden (76).   I still doubt Orr has a conscious personal party political goal in mind –  and if he did, it would be highly inappropriate for him to be serving as Governor –  and suspect it is mostly about revelling in being a big fish in a small pond, the opportunity to strut his personal ideological commitments using a statutorily provided (and…