CONGRATULATION’s Jay Weatherill !

YOUR mad global warming policies and ruinously juvenile obsession with green power have rewarded South Australia with the World’s most expensive power prices, helping to destroy your economy and hurt the poor.

Bravo.

German minister: we’ll burn coal till the 2040s

AFTER spending upwards of a trillion Euros of taxpayers money on the disastrous Energiewende program, all but destroying Germany’s industrial heartland and causing widespread energy poverty to consumers and businesses alike, ideologically green-agressive Germany is giving up on its mad rush into unreliable ‘energy’ – wind and solar – undergoing the biggest coal-fired power expansion in her history…

Following the cancellation of 758 wind projects in Ontario, its government has further delighted locals with the decision to revoke approval for the (almost complete) Nations Rise project, at North Stormont, near Ottawa.

This time the decision announced by Jeff Yurek, Ontario’s Minister of Environment, Conservation and Parks, was not one based purely on the flawed economics of the project, as in the other 758 cases.

This time, the government pulled the plug in order to prevent the inevitable annihilation of Hoary, Big and Little Brown bats; the Little Brown bat is identified as one of Ontario’s ‘Species at Risk’.

We’ll hand over to – an obviously delighted – Sherri Lange.

A GREAT DAY FOR BATS WORLD WIDE

This is a completely brilliant move. The developers can never argue about the efficacy and ESSENTIAL power of saving nature’s quiet little eco warriors, Bats. They are in serious decline world wide.

Reader Dom sent me a Bertrand Russell quote from what appears to be a very short essay, “Am I An Atheist Or An Agnostic?” (1947)

As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one prove that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think that I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because, when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods.

None of us would seriously consider the possibility that all the gods of Homer really exist, and yet…

I hope that the reader is as awestruck as I am (p.37)

I first read this book 25 years ago and in the intervening years I had forgotten how naive, silly and embarrassingly earnest Dawkins can be.

The blind watchmaker

The basic premise is easily summarised. In a theological work published in 1802 – Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity – the English theologian William Paley said that if you were out for a walk and stumbled over a stone, you wouldn’t think anything of it, it is so obviously part of the natural world and you unthinkingly accept it as a product of impersonal geological forces.

But if you were out for a walk and stumbled over a watch, particularly if it was an 18th-century, ornately fashioned pocketwatch, you would immediately deduce that something so wonderfully crafted, with so many carefully calibrated…

Subsidies and special deals for favoured firms/industries seem to have been becoming increasingly common in New Zealand.  There is Tiwai Point, the Sky City convention centre, the forestry industry, the export education industry and probably others I’ve forgotten.   There are the R&D tax credits the Prime Minister touts at every turn –  the only substantive item in her (very short) list of things the government is doing to reverse the atrocious productivity performance.

And then there is the film industry, into which many hundreds of millions of dollars have been poured over the last couple of decades.  There is an industry there, but one which official advice to the government makes clear has no prospect of viability without heavy subsidies.  That should be a good test as to whether there is any robust case for the subsidy.  Barring something like national defence considerations, any industry that has no credible…

The silence from traditional conservation groups against the wind industry’s rampant bird slaughter is deafening.

Once upon a time, hirsute, hair-shirted and sandal wearing tree huggers would die in a ditch to prevent harm to any of God’s other creatures. That was, of course, before industrial wind power hove into view. Groups like the Sierra Club and the UK’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds are all ‘fire and brimstone’ wherever ‘big business’ threatens our avian fauna. Except, that is, if the ‘big business’ in question is heavily subsidised, and chaotically intermittent wind power. It’s all about “saving the planet”, you see…

So, it’s a rare and beautiful thing when a couple of conservation groups get on the front foot.

In order to prevent the inevitable slaughter of millions of birds across the Great Lakes, the American Bird Conservancy (ABC) and the Black Swamp Bird Observatory (BSBO) have launched…

After their unlawful antics costing taxpayers millions of pounds and disrupting thousands of people trying to go about their daily lives, anti-terrorism police included XR in a booklet they send to statutary partners.

Biologist Nathan Lents, whose abbreviated c.v. is given below, has been featured on this site before, both as a critic of creationism (good), but also as a defender of the Adam-and-Eve apologetics pushed by his religious friend Josh Swamidass (bad). But chalk up another two marks on Lents’s “good” side.  First, he’s written a book (click on screenshot below) that lays out all the suboptimal features of the human body—features whose imperfection gives evidence for evolution. I’m getting the book for teaching purposes, and here’s the Amazon summary:

Dating back to Darwin himself, the “argument from poor design” holds that examples of suboptimal structure/function demonstrate that nature does not have a designer. Perhaps surprisingly, human beings have more than our share of quirks and glitches. Besides speaking to our shared ancestry, these evolutionary “seams” reveal interesting things about our past. This offers a unique accounting of our evolutionary legacy…