Utopia, you are standing in it!

Introduction

In 2009, a Christian mother of five, Aasiya Noreen (AKA Asia Bibi), was arrested and charged with blasphemy under S. 295C of Pakistan’s Penal Code.[1] In 2010, Aasiya was sentenced to death for “insulting the Prophet”.[2] Aasiya’s case has garnered international attention,[3] and owing not only to the unconvincing case against her[4] but also the assassinations of two politicians associated with her case – Punjab governor Salman Taseer and Christian minorities minister Shabhaz Bhatti –[5] Pakistan’s anti-blasphemy law (hereon ‘blasphemy law’) has been placed under an increasingly intense spotlight.[6] In 1986, Pakistan’s blasphemy law, which is a legislative colonial relic of pre-partitioned India,[7] was amended under the military governance of General Zia-ul Haq to include the death penalty.[8] In 1991, the Federal Shariat Court of Pakistan struck down the option for life imprisonment, prescribing death and a heavy fine as obligatory punishments under S 295 C,[9] which reads:

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Australia’s obsession with intermittent wind and solar is delivering a power supply you’d expect to find in the darkest corners of the Third World.

Yet again, peak power demand in summer has renewable energy zealots berating consumers for having the temerity to turn on air-conditioners, dishwashers and appliances.

Yet again, the same zealots waffle on about “smart grids” and “mega-batteries” being the solution to wind and solar power’s insoluble intermittency.

Yet again, the delusional assert that Australia’s “ageing” coal-fired power plants are at fault because they’re “unreliable” and that it’s “dangerous” to depend on them.

STT has dealt with that kind of nonsense a couple of times recently:

Ever-Dependable: Coal-Fired Power Keeps On Keeping On During Australia’s Bushfire Battle

Deranged & Delusional: Victorian Government Claims Wind & Solar More Reliable Than Fossil Fuels

What was mildly amusing about the story from The Australian below was not just the fact that STT has…

Update: January 31, 2020

This is an update to a post Simple Science 2: World of Climate Change with two new slides and a revised sequence. Context below is from the previous with the new content.

Raymond of RiC-Communications  studio commented on a recent post and made an offer to share here some graphics on CO2 for improving public awareness.  He has produced 12 interesting slides which are presented in the post Here’s Looking at You, CO2.  This post presents the three initial charts he has so far created on a second theme The World of Climate Change.  I find them straightforward and useful, and appreciate his excellent work on this. Project title is link to RiC-Communications. (For some reason I had problems getting my Opera browser to load the revised links, but Edge worked fine.

This project is The World of Climate Change

Infographics can be helpful, in…

The strategy of American courts in their desire to continue allowing religious incursion into the government—be it “In God We Trust” on our money or religious symbols on public land—has been to pretend that religious symbols and mottos morph into nonreligious, historical and secular icons over time. This is patently bogus, an offense to anybody with two neurons to rub together.

And so, in an important decision about the First Amendment, the U.S. Supreme court ruled today that a giant cross on public land in Maryland, commemorating war dead, was constitutional. And the vote of the Roberts court, though opinions were fractured, was 7-2 (only Ginsburg and Sotomayor dissented; where was Kagan?). Read the Washington Post‘s take by clicking on the screenshot below. The full range of opinions can be found in a pdf here.

As usual, the pretense is that the cross is no longer a wholly…

Today is Brexit Day. As of 6:00 P.M. EST (Midnight in Brussels), the United Kingdom no longer will be a member of the European Union.

This is definitely good news in the long run since the U.K. will now be somewhat insulated from inevitable economic crises caused by the European’s Union’s dirigiste economic model and grim demographic outlook.

Whether it’s also good news in the short run depends mostly on decisions in London, such as whether Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his Tory government expand economic freedom (which should be the case, but there are worrisome signs that the spending burden will increase).

But Washington and Brussels also will play a role since the U.K. wants to sign free-trade agreements. This could be a problem since the E.U. will be tempted to behave in a spiteful manner and Trump and his trade team are protectionists.

But…

by Alberto Zaragoza Comendador

The IPCC’s First Assessment Report (FAR) made forecasts or projections of future concentrations of carbon dioxide that turned out to be too high.

Nassim Taleb has published an attack on intelligence research that is getting a lot of attention and so I thought I would respond to it.

As summarized in this useful chart from Strenze (2015), meta-analyses of hundreds of studies have demonstrated that IQ is predictive of life success across many domains.

This is the basic validating fact when it comes to IQ: the use of IQ tests can help us predict things we want to predict and to explain things we want to explain.

Does IQ Linearly Predict Success?

Some people wonder if IQ’s relationship with success weakens above a certain threshold such that it is better described by a curvilinear trend rather than a simple linear one. Taleb brings this up and displays this graph:

This graph does show a decrement in IQ’s predictive validity as we move up the IQ scale. But there is still a positive…

Next Thursday we have a public holiday to “celebrate” 180 years since the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi.  Unlike the USA which every July 4 celebrates the Declaration of Independence without reservation, Kiwis have mixed feelings about the meaning of our national day.

Some Maori believe they still haven’t got justice.  Many non-Maori feel threatened by Maori claims for what is seen as “extra rights”.  They are not prepared to say what they think because they fear being demonised like the Hobson Pledge group, which quite rightly is concerned about undermining the integrity of our democratic fabric.

This is a pity because it was a remarkable event – a powerful colonial power elects to negotiate a treaty with the chiefs of the indigenous population, instead of simply declaring it a colony and establishing direct rule.   This contrasts with Australia where the indigenous Aboriginals were treated as virtually irrelevant.