Utopia, you are standing in it!

I want to write about a politician who made himself the central political figure in his lifetime. He had charisma, the popular touch, and his ambition knew no bounds; he even had a splendid mane of sometimes unruly hair. He was the darling of his party, who knew exactly how to tickle exactly the right place on the membership’s funny bone. He was the chancer’s chancer, playing fast and loose throughout his career with fact, policy, law, the public finances and his personal life. More than once his career, rocked by scandal, seemed over, but he bounced back.

And he became prime minister.

Nothing ever stuck. Back in September 1985, whilst leader of the opposition, whilst sailing to his privately owned island off the coast of Co Kerry, his private yacht came close to the rocks and he had to be saved by the local lifeboat crew. Later, standing the…

Giant industrial wind turbines have an economic lifespan around 15 years, after which the chances are that they’ll be left to rust in some idiot’s back paddock.

Decommissioning these things properly at a sizeable wind farm would run into the hundreds of millions. Then there’s the toxic waste.

Already, thousands of 45-70m blades are being ground up and mixed with concrete used in the bases of other turbines erected later or simply dumped in landfill. Which should worry locals: the plastics in the blades are highly toxic, and contain Bisphenol A, which is so dangerous to health that the European Union and Canada have banned it.

Following that theme, Tony Thomas takes us on a tour of our wonderful wind powered future.

Inherit the Wind
Quadrant Online
Tony Thomas
7 November 2019

It’s good to know that wind turbine blades are a bird’s best friend, or something like…

A Guardian article (“Lawyer criticises secretive Israeli case against Gaza aid worker”, Nov. 28), by their Jerusalem correspondent Oliver Holmes, included the following claim:

However, there are no Palestinian “political prisoners” (a term widely understood as referring to people “imprisoned for their political beliefs”) in Israeli prisons.  And, in fact, the source cited in that sentence, the anti-Israel NGO B’tselem, doesn’t cite any “political prisoners” in their list of prisoners.

Amnesty International, in their 2017/18 annual report, does list one Palestinian, Ahmed Qatamesh, as a “prisoner of conscience”, but this doesn’t appear to be true, as reports at the time noted that he was arrested because he was a “senior member” of the terror group Popular Front for the Liberation…

SNOWFALL Will Become “A Very Rare And Exciting Event…” | Climatism

SNOWFALL will become “A very rare and exciting event…
Children just aren’t going to know what snow is.”
Dr David Viner – Senior scientist, climatic research unit CRU (2000)

“Winters with strong frosts and lots of snow
like we had 20 years ago will no longer exist at our latitudes.”
– Professor Mojib Latif (2000)

“Good bye winter. Never again snow?” – Spiegel (2000)

“Milder winter temperatures will decrease heavy snowstorms” – IPCC (2001)

“End of Snow?” – NYTimes (2014)

***

Hat Tip@twawki2

ONE of the more memorable instances of global warming climate change fear-mongering, gone awry, is that of the bold prediction made by Dr David Viner, of the UK’s Climate Research Unit (CRU), in an interview with The Independent’s Charles Onians.

THE now infamous dud-prediction became The Independent’s most cited (now deleted) article in its history…

The issue of whether prisoners should have the right to vote (and, if so, which prisoners) has long troubled a number of democracies. The current position in the United Kingdom is that no prisoner serving a custodial sentence after conviction can vote, albeit that the Scottish and Welsh Assemblies currently are taking steps to allow some prisoners to do so in devolved elections (see Neil Johnston, “Prisoners’ voting rights: developments since May 2015”, Commons Briefing papers CBP-7461, Sept. 30, 2019). New Zealand currently mirrors the UK in barring all sentenced prisoners from voting.

However, New Zealand’s Minister of Justice recently announced that the law will be amended before the next general election in late 2020 to enfranchise prisoners serving sentences of less than three years. This change follows sustained criticism of the complete ban on prisoner voting, including a formal judicial declaration that it is inconsistent with the right…

It doesn’t take much for journalists to conjure the heroic-journalist myth of Watergate. The trope has such narrative power that it’s easy to invoke, if usually too good to check.

Perhaps an inevitable by-product of the recent bombshell-free and wholly unrevealing impeachment hearings conducted by the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee were news media references to the Watergate scandal and the myth that the Washington Post’s reporting brought down Richard Nixon’s presidency in 1974.

Not the Post’s doing: Nixon quits

That’s the heroic-journalist trope of Watergate. It centers around the work of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Post’s lead reporters on the scandal, and it was invoked blithely.

Last week, for example, the Guardian of London referred to the Post as “the paper that owned the [Watergate] story and ultimately brought down the presidency of Richard Nixon.”

As the House committee’s hearings were about to go public, David

(American Ambassador to Libya Christopher Steven)

The past two weeks the American people witnessed the professionalism and commitment to American national security on the part of diplomatic personnel before the House Intelligence Committee.  Career diplomats like acting Ambassador to the Ukraine, William B. Taylor, Jr., Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent, Fiona Hill, a former official at the U.S. National Security Council specializing in Russian and European affairs, and Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch who was fired as ambassador to the Ukraine by President Trump, along with a number of others displayed their honesty and integrity as they were confronted by conspiracy theories and lies developed to defend administration attempts to coerce and bribe Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to encourage him to launch investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.  The preciseness of their presentations left no doubt as to their credibility and points to the importance…

“… No, nor any of my folk. If I have to lie, steal, cheat, or kill, as God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.”

Gone With the Wind

1913-1919

Steven Pinker wrote an important book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, arguing that along a number of dimensions and on a number of time scales, human societies have been getting less violent over time. I think he’s probably right, but there’s an obvious problem to be wrestled with, the battle deaths in the First and Second World Wars and further associated deaths from starvation, disease and other mass killing. Here’s a figure from his book:

Pinker argues that there’s a lot of random variation around the long-term trend to reduced violence. The frequency distribution of sizes of wars (measured by war deaths) looks like random noise following a power law (like the frequency distributions of the magnitudes…

We know there will be an election on 12 December, but the outcome, in terms of parliamentary seats and who will form the next government, remains uncertain. Robert Hazell and Harrison Shaylor answer some of the key questions about what happens if the election creates another hung parliament.

With an increasingly volatile electorate, and uncertain forecasts in the polls, it is possible the 2019 election will result in another hung parliament. Although bookmakers currently have a Conservative majority as comfortably the most likely election result, and the Conservatives are currently polling around 11 points ahead of Labour, a hung parliament is by no means out of the question. It would be the third hung parliament in four general elections. This explains what lessons can be learned from our previous experience of hung parliaments at Westminster and around the world. It addresses questions such as how a new government is formed…

The wind industry is built on lies and runs on subsidies. But, in a rare turn of events, an effort to cover up the cost of those subsidies has come unstuck, in grand style.

Initially, Andrew Cuomo’s cronies put forward a lowball figure for the cost of subsidies to wind power in New York State, which drew attention from the Empire Center’s Ken Girardin.

In a blog post, Girardin sought to get behind those figures (based on rubbery accounting) and calculate precisely what Cuomo’s wind power obsession is likely to cost New Yorkers over the long haul.

Cuomo’s propaganda squad launched a missive against Ken Girardin, claiming that he’d misled his readers.

Turns out that Girardin’s estimates were, if anything, light on; in fact, the ultimate cost of subsidies to wind power in New York State are greater than Girardin’s estimates and magnitudes greater than Cuomo’s understated figures.

State blows…

What Are Lost Continents, and Why Are We Discovering So Many? Is published at The Conversation by By Simon Williams, Joanne Whittaker & Maria Seton.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

For most people, continents are Earth’s seven main large landmasses.

But geoscientists have a different take on this. They look at the type of rock a feature is made of, rather than how much of its surface is above sea level.

In the past few years, we’ve seen an increase in the discovery of lost continents. Most of these have been plateaus or mountains made of continental crust hidden from our view, below sea level.

One example is Zealandia, the world’s eighth continent that extends underwater from New Zealand.
Several smaller lost continents, called microcontinents, have also recently been discovered submerged in the eastern and western Indian Ocean.

But why, with so much geographical knowledge…

The role of the BBC’s Middle East editor is to provide “analysis that might make a complex story more comprehensive or comprehensible for the audience, without the constraints of acting as a daily news correspondent”.

Hence, when Jeremy Bowen appeared on two BBC radio stations on November 19^th to provide answers to questions concerning “the legal status of […] settlements” following a statement made the previous day by the US Secretary of State, BBC licence fee payers no doubt expected to hear accurate, impartial and comprehensive information which would enhance their understanding of that undoubtedly “complex story”. 

The November 19^th edition of the BBC Radio 4 programme ‘PM’ included an item (from 22:40 here) introduced by presenter Evan Davis as follows: [emphasis in italics in the original, emphasis in bold added]

Davis: “Last night the US made a dramatic shift in its position on Israeli…

1) Third quarter loss of US $1.3 billion.

2) License to operate in London cancelled. (14,000 recorded incidents of unlicensed drivers).

3) Further share-price decline, now under US $30.

4) Uber’s CEO announces he will take the focus off price (Uber’s strong point) and concentrate on company profitability.

As I’ve repeatedly written, Uber, an in-demand service, can only work as a drivers’ co-operative. Its massive flotation was a time-proven signal of a share-market boom about to end. The other is when take-overs take off, they’re currently at record levels.