Utopia, you are standing in it!

Here’s a segment from this week’s “Real Time” show in which Bill Maher addresses the epidemic of obesity among Americans. While he, like me, is against “fat shaming”—telling obese people that they need to lose weight (that’s their doctors’ job), we both object to the recent movement to de-stigmatize obesity by pretending that it’s not harmful. Of course it is: it’s associated, as Maher says, with nearly every health issue you can imagine. Yet with the rise of the “body acceptance movement,” we constantly see claims that you can be “healthy at every size“.

But that’s not true. On average, you’re less healthy if you’re obese. In a 2010 National Institutes of Health study, researchers found a decrease in longevity with every ranked step up on the body mass index (BMI).  And overweight people know this. As Grania used to tell me, “You don’t have to tell people…

The inevitable backlash against wind power started in Germany and it’s spreading, fast. The fact that chaotically intermittent wind power can’t be delivered as and when power consumers need it means the wanton destruction of pristine wilderness, bucolic landscapes, rural communities, and millions of birds and bats (including plenty of species on the brink of extinction) is pretty hard to justify.

Even the most delusional eco-zealots are struggling. And, apparently, cognitive dissonance has lost its ability to overcome their niggling internal doubts.

In Australia, Dr Bob Brown, former leader of the Australian Greens, was one of the first to break ranks when a few of these things were threatened for the remote North-West of his home State, Tasmania: Hyper-Hypocrites: Greens Love Wind Power – In Your Backyard – But Never In Theirs

In Germany, real environmentalists are mounting a well-oiled revolt against the destruction of forests – the natural habitat of…

Bari Weiss is a New York Times columnist who, like me, is a Trump-hating Leftist who criticizes the Left. The result, of course, is that she’s been demonized by the Left, and by many writers at her own paper. Her generally pro-Israel views don’t help, either.  Weiss’s new book, How to Fight Anti-Semitism will be out September 10. In this 75-minute discussion with political journalist Michael Barbaro, Weiss not only discusses her book, but anti-Semitism in general.

Among the topics Weiss covers are why Jews should oppose Trump and the Republican party, why BDS (and “anti-Zionism”) is anti-Semitic, why Jews are considered “white” and Palestinians are not, why anti-Jewish hate crimes don’t make the news, how and why anti-Semitism manifests itself on the Left, and why the UN repeatedly condemns Israel a gazillion times more often than it condemns far worse regimes. She’ll let you know why she says, “Anyone…

Today we have an All Video Edition of Caturday felids. The first shows the best five Cat Moments from the BBC Earth series. It’s 15 minutes long, but well worth watching for the impatient.  The segments:

1. Baby tiger is introduced to the water. (It’s my dream to hug one of these beauties.)
2. A leopard mom protects her cubs from wild d*gs
3. A tiger kills a wild boar. The board struggles and squeals, but to no avail. (Trigger warning: Nature red in tooth and claw.)
4. After two years of rearing in captivity, a jaguar is released into the wild. This is how I feel when my ducks fledge and fly away for the year.
5. A pride of lions take down a buffalo—a dangerous pursuit. It looks like the lions win, but the buffalo miraculously survives and chases the lions away.

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What do you think would happen if a man faked…

This is a hard problem for Democrats. They want open borders, at least until we get through the next census count. If they can add enough illegals to get counted in the census in all the sanctuary cities and states, they can add more representatives in the House of Representatives which is organized on the basis of population. The Senate is organized on the basis that each state will have two Senators, no matter what the population, so that all states are represented equally.

Unfortunately for the Democrats, Conservatives believe that immigrants should enter the United States legally. Apply at the U.S. Consulate in their own country, or apply for asylum at the border. Democrats like to believe that letting immigrants just cross the border wherever is because “America is a nation of immigrants”— actually it’s a nation of citizens, and if you want to become a citizen, do it…

This “long read” at the Guardian, written by Nesrine Malik (click on screenshot), could easily have been a short read, as much of it is a personalized rant about the online abuse Malike suffered, and a series of misguided claims that a). there is no ‘free speech crisis’, b.) that those advocating free speech and pretending there’s a crisis are really looking for a cover so they can spout racism and Islamophobia, and c.) that we need to “reclaim” free speech by, among other things, banning or disinviting more speakers. In the course of her argument, though, Malik completely mischaracterizes what most reasonable people mean by free speech.

We’ve met Malik twice before, in both cases when she argued that free speech was really a cover to vent Islamophobia (see here and here, with the last piece discussing her ideas about banning “hate speech”).  Since she was born…