Utopia, you are standing in it!

No matter where the wind industry plies its subsidy-soaked trade, rural folk soon turn hostile. The German wind industry is at a standstill, not only because subsidies have been wound down, but also as a result of furious rural residents – fed up with being driven nuts in their homes, or being driven out of them, altogether by incessant low-frequency noise and infrasound – blocking projects and taking developers to court.

As we’ve reported recently, Hawaiians are on the war path, too.

The protesters number in their hundreds, and their perfectly understandable fury has been met with heavy-handed policing, with over 160 Hawaiians being cuffed and carted away. Here’s a report from NZ’s Maori News on a battle for Hawaii’s heart and soul.

“Bad night” in Hawaii as arrests rise to 161
Te Ao Maori News
Mare Haimona-Riki
16 November 2019

More than 25 people were arrested in…

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…