Utopia, you are standing in it!

As presidential election results in Afghanistan are being counted one must ask the question; how much better off is Afghanistan today, as compared to the period before the American invasion following 9/11?  Further one must ask; what is the future outlook for Afghanistan as the United States and its NATO allies are about to withdraw by the end of the year?  Carlotta Gall, a New York Times reporter who has worked in Afghanistan and Pakistan for more than ten years attempts to answer these questions and many others in her new book, THE WRONG ENEMY, AMERICA IN AFGHANISTAN 2001-2014.  A number of  books have been written about America’s role in Afghanistan and its relationship with Pakistan the best of which are Steven Coll’s GHOST WARS, Ahmed Rashid’s DESCENT INTO CHAOS, and Barnet R. Rubin’s AFGHANISTAN FROM THE COLD WAR THROUGH THE WAR ON TERROR, but what sets Gall’s apart is…

By Anton Lang ~

This Post details the daily wind power generation data for the AEMO coverage area in Australia. For the background information, refer to the Introductory Post at this link.

Each image is shown here at a smaller size to fit on the page alongside the data for that day. If you click on each image, it will open on a new page and at a larger size so you can better see the detail.

Note also that on some days, there will be a scale change for the main wind power image, and that even though images may look similar in shape for the power generation black line on the graph when compared to other days, that scale (the total power shown on the left hand vertical axis) has been changed to show the graph at a larger size to better fit the image for that…

I picked up the Dominion-Post newspaper from the front step this morning to find this blaring back at me.

The second page was entirely green, with a little Kiwibank logo and the twee marketing  line “Kiwis backing Kiwis”.  (I guess advertising must have been more expensive in the Herald, where it is “just” wrapped round the sports section).

Rarely had I ever been more glad that I’d never been tempted to shift my banking business to the state-owned Kiwibank.  The crude nationalism on display today was at possibly an even more inane level than the last such NZ-owned bank’s advertising campaign I wrote about

That one was on display at the heart of New Zealand’s “globalist-central” (if there were such a place), just over the road from the New Zealand Initiative, and a few hundred metres from places like MFAT, MBIE and The Treasury.   If it had any merit…

People are getting remorseful about everything tied their personal ecological footprint. They are told the meat on their plate is choking mother nature, their car represents capitalism’s suffocation of the planet and that they will have to give up the idea of flying for a holiday or to visit their family abroad. A year ago, we were consumers; now we’re disgraceful polluters.

It’s painful and every day we hear from gurus and virtue signalling campaigners how ashamed we should be for having consumed. The imminent extinction of all humanity is urgently guilting us into some public sacrifice to save the planet: cathartic climate cleansing … atonement with a selfie-stick.

That is until the Risk-Monger suggested on social media to the Extinction Rebellion catastrophe peddlers that we should also then give up our pets (they eat a lot of meat). He even launched the #PetFree2020 hashtag (it failed to take off)…

Nathaniel Comfort, author of the risible Nature essay at hand (click on screenshot below), is a professor in the history of medicine at Johns Hopkins University. We’ve met him three times before on this site; he seems to be a postmodernist who dislikes genes, New Atheism, and Richard Dawkins.  Now he’s written about. . . . well, it’s hard to discern. If you read the essay (and I both pity you if you do and challenge you to see its point), you’ll see it’s laced with criticisms of Enlightenment values, white males, scientism, and the oppression of the disabled. Oh, and it lauds postmodernism, especially its “other ways of knowing”.

One of Comfort’s main points, at least as I discern it, is that science has somehow deeply changed how humanity has perceived itself. Not so much in the Darwinian way, in which we now see ourselves as part of the…

Ringhals nuclear power site, Sweden [image credit: Vattenfall]
Or, theoretically at least, an equivalent amount of power from other so-called ‘green’ sources, requiring vastly greater amounts of non-renewable mined materials than are currently available – assuming they even exist on such large scales. Not to mention all the other practical difficulties of such dodgy ideas.

What makes achieving Net Zero by 2050 impossible is a failure to accurately understand the scale of the challenge and the absence of policy proposals that match that scale, says Roger Pielke Jr. @ Forbes (via The GWPF).

More than a decade ago, Gwyn Prins and Steve Rayner characterized climate policy as an “auction of promises” in which politicians “vied to outbid each other with proposed emissions targets that were simply not achievable.”

For instance, among Democrats competing for the presidency in 2020, several, including Joe Biden, have committed to achieving net-zero carbon dioxide emissions by…

Moana Jackson, described as a “Te Tiriti specialist” in a recent Stuff report, dismissed Tuia 250 as a load of humbug.

To celebrate the dual heritage of navigation across the Pacific, he contended, “then it wouldn’t be Tuia 250, it would be Tuia 2000 or something.”

More egregious, to “commemorate” Captain James Cook’s arrival in this country seems “weird” to Jackson:

“When it comes to explorers, you usually make a big deal of whoever did something first.

“Neil Armstrong is acknowledged as the first astronaut to land on the Moon. There’s no real celebration of the 12th astronaut to land on the Moon. And Cook wasn’t even the 12th navigator to sail across the Pacific.

“So I’m not sure what the baseline was for commemorating him – except that he has become an important part of the misremembering of colonising history.”