Utopia, you are standing in it!

Jerry Ravetz writes at Nature Stop the science training that demands ‘don’t ask’.Jerry Ravetz is an associate fellow at the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, University of Oxford, UK.Excerpts In italics with my bolds and images.

It’s time to trust students to handle doubt and diversity in science.

As a child, I realized that my parents spoke in Yiddish when they didn’t want me to know what they were talking about, so I became aware that some knowledge was intended only for grown-ups — don’t ask. In college, I was taught an elegant theory of chemical combination based on excess electrons going into holes in the orbital shell of a neighbouring atom. But what about diatomic compounds like oxygen gas? Don’t ask; students aren’t ready to know. In physics, I learnt that Newton’s second law of motion is not an empirical, approximate relation such as Boyle’s…

(Some questions at the end about comparative context. Help, please!)

This Wednesday night, Benny Gantz’s period as designated formateur expires. His odds of successfully forming a government look bleak. Nothing has changed to make it any easier than when I last wrote on the topic of government-formation options. And at least one thing has changed to make it harder. It is important to understand that a third election (April 2019, Sept. 2019, and potentially March 2020) is the default if no agreement is reached. There is actually a 21-day period after Gantz’s mandate expires before the election becomes automatic, but there’s scant reason to believe the next 21 days would result in an agreement. (During this 21-day period, it requires 61 Knesset members’ signatures to nominate a PM. Fat chance.)

The change that makes forming a government harder than it was in April or even immediately after the September election…

The manufacturers of turbines and solar panels are dropping like flies, as subsidies are rolled back across Europe.

So-called ‘green’ jobs are a case of easy come, easy go. The wind and solar ‘industries’ that gave birth to those jobs simply can’t survive without massive and endless subsidies, which means their days are numbered.

With the axe being taken to subsidies across the globe, their ultimate demise is a matter of when, not if.

The wind back in subsidies across Europe has all but destroyed the wind industry: in Germany this year a trifling 35 onshore wind turbines have been erected, so far.

Twelve countries in the European Union (EU) failed to install “a single wind turbine” last year.

Danish turbine maker, Vestas is on the brink and was recently forced to axe 600 of its groovy ‘green’ jobs. Its rival Siemens Gamesa, has also been forced…

So the plan was only virtue signalling to try and impress gullible voters, not an actual belief that the climate needs saving any time soon. Does the UK really want inadequate, unreliable and expensive electricity in perpetuity?

Labour has dropped a radical plan to end the UK’s contributions to climate change by 2030 and will stick to a target of achieving it “well before 2050”, reports The Independent via Yahoo News.

Activists passed a motion at the party’s conference in September to dramatically speed up the date for net zero carbon emissions – pushing for inclusion in the general election manifesto.

(President John F. Kennedy and Arthur M. Schlesinger)

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary a “gadfly” is “a person who stimulates or annoys other people especially by persistent criticism.”  According to Richard Aldous, in his new biography, SCHLESINGER: THE IMPERIAL HISTORIAN, the definition fits Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.’s role as Special Assistant to the President during the Kennedy administration.  Aldous’ work is the first full-length biography of Schlesinger and he successfully grapples with a number of questions as his narrative unfolds.  First, was Schlesinger a great and important historian, a model of how academics and public service can mix?  Second,  was he a popularizer and court historian held captive to the establishment that nurtured his career?  After reading Aldous’ monograph there is no conclusive answer and elements of each question make up Schlesinger’s academic career at Harvard, as well as a speech writer and advisor to President Kennedy.  However…

As long-time readers will be aware, during Operation Protective Edge in 2014 the BBC failed to independently verify casualty figures and civilian-combatant casualty ratios provided by the Hamas-run health ministry in the Gaza Strip. Instead, its coverage during and since that conflict was based on data obtained from partial sources which it promoted to audiences without fact-checking.

Since then BBC journalists appear to have ceased trying to independently verify information provided by a terrorist organisation and instead adopt a qualifying ‘he said-she said’ approach which includes describing all Gaza Strip casualties as “Palestinians”, regardless of whether or not they belonged to terror groups.

Here are some examples from the first two days of BBC reporting on the recent events in Israel and the Gaza Strip. [emphasis in bold added]

November 12^th 2019, BBC News website, ‘Israel kills top Palestinian Islamic Jihad militant in Gaza’:

“Israeli aircraft also…

On 25^th July 1554 Queen Mary I married Philip of Spain, the son of her cousin, the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. Philip was the heir apparent to many countries across Europe and the New World so was an appealing match, as part of the marriage negotiations 37 year old Mary was sena portrait of her new husband to be.

The marriage proposal was unpopular in England and led to many of Mary’s advisors urging her to marry an Englishman. A rebellion also broke out led by Thomas Wyatt the younger led a small army from Kent in an attempt to place Elizabeth on the throne. The biggest fear that many of the rebels held was that whoever Mary married would instantly become King of England and assume all the powers of the monarchy. This led to Mary introducing Queen Mary’s Marriage Act.

Under the terms of the Marriage…

Mary I (February 18, 1516 – November 17, 1558), also known as Mary Tudor, was the queen of England and Ireland from July 1553 until her death. She is best known for her aggressive attempt to reverse the English Reformation, which had begun during the reign of her father, Henry VIII. The executions that marked her pursuit of the restoration of Roman Catholicism in England and Ireland led to her denunciation as “Bloody Mary” by her Protestant opponents.

Mary was the only child of Henry VIII by his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, to survive to adulthood. Her younger half-brother Edward VI (son of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour) succeeded their father in 1547 at the age of nine. When Edward became mortally ill in 1553, he attempted to remove Mary from the line of succession because he supposed, correctly, that she would reverse the Protestant reforms that had begun during…

By Matthew Wang, November 15, 2019, The Chronicle

Animal rights organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals ranked Duke among the worst schools in the country for animal testing, but Duke professors and students argued that the University meets ethical standards for research.

PETA’s new “Failed Tests” feature rates colleges and universities as “bad,” “worse” or “worst” in animal testing. Duke is in the “worst” category, along with dozens of other universities, including prestigious research institutions like Princeton, Yale, Stanford and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Michael Schoenfeld, vice president for public affairs and government relations, wrote in an email to The Chronicle that Duke has “a rigorous process in place to ensure that all animal-related research adheres to the highest standards set by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the National Institutes of Health and [Association for Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care]…