Utopia, you are standing in it!

Mine Your Own Business pulls the mask off of the environmentalist movement. The 2006 documentary thrashes the warm, fuzzy image of environmentalists as well meaning, harmless activists and is the first movie to reveal the true intent of foreigners who lead campaigns to rescue people in remote areas of poor foreign countries from development.

The answers environmentalists give when interviewed are often disturbing, and usually with racist overtones. But, somehow, they are continuously supported and conduct activities that force people to remain in poverty. The makers of Mine Your Own Business ask local people about their lives and what they want for themselves and their future.

An article by the Guardian’s former Mid-East editor Ian Black included the claim that the latest round of violence between Israel and terrorists in Gaza was triggered by the Israeli shooting of Palestinian protesters on Friday.

“The immediate trigger for this round of violence was the now routine shooting of Palestinians on the border with Israel…”

However, as we noted in a May 8th post responding to the claim by Black, every British media outlet we reviewed – including the Guardian’s own Jerusalem correspondent – was clear in their coverage that the mini-war was started by the shooting of an Israeli soldier by an Islamic Jihad terrorist in Gaza.

We contacted the Guardian’s readers’ editor, who upheld our complaint and amended the article accordingly.

It now reads:

“The immediate trigger for this round of violence was the wounding of two Israeli soldiers on the Gaza border…”

The following addendum now appears…

by Dan Hannan | May 10, 2019 12:00 AM – The Washington Examiner

Not long ago, a new variety of orchid was discovered at the Newmarket racecourse in Suffolk, England. The track’s managers were horrified at first. When an endangered plant is found on your land in England, eco-regulators seize control; and this flower was, apparently, the only one of its kind in the world.

But the Jockey Club came up with an ingenious defense. If the orchid truly was unique, it argued, and if it flourished only on ground that had been churned up by horses’ hooves for the better part of 400 years, then surely the correct course was to maintain that unusual habitat.

The inspectors accepted this logic, and the orchid continues to thrive on the turf upon which, in 1672, Charles II became the only reigning monarch to ride a winner.

I thought of Newmarket when…

Macron meets with Zuckerberg to discuss how to oppress free speech. All for our good you understand.

Note, for Ardern sycophants, the report has the tagline France takes lead.

So much for world leader Ms Ardern.

Meanwhile in NZ there a couple of interesting items.

On The Spinoff was this article about Macron’s approach to free speech. The article was by Branko Marcetic, who is an editorial assistant at Jacobin magazine and a freelance journalist who wiles away the hours writing about New Zealand and US politics.

This  took my eye in particular:

Macron invited some of the country’s leading media outlets to the Élysée Palace earlier this year, where he appeared to suggest the French government needed to take a stronger hand in the news business. Expressing his worries about “the state of information and the truth”, he urged the re-establishment of “levels of confidence” and a “hierarchy…

After President Barack Obama killed a fly during a TV interview, some media outlets contacted PETA to get their reaction. It wasn’t like somebody at PETA’s offices saw Obama kill the fly and said “OMFG!!!!”. No, several media companies actually thought that there was a story there and contacted PETA.

You can read PETA’s side of the issue here and here.

I immediately smelled a rat when I read those blogposts from PETA. It’s almost as if somebody – or a group of somebodies – is looking for anything and everything that they can use against Barack Obama and the fly-killing was just convenient. I’m guessing that if they can get PETA and other animal rights groups pissed-off enough at Obama, then they can look forward to Obama facing some kind of backlash from animal rights advocates.

But, seriously, who the fuck is going to march a picket line…

Dominic Lieven’s book about the diplomatic build-up to the Great War – Towards The Flame – was very demanding, every page full of analyses and counter-analyses of complex international situations, which took a good deal of concentration to understand.

By contrast, Catherine Merridale’s book is like a series of articles in a travel supplement, or the book version of a TV script – chatty, opinionated, entertaining, lightweight and, in the end, a bit disappointing.

The story

In April 1917 the German High command laid on a sealed train to transport Lenin and 30 or so communist colleagues to war-weary Russia, in the hope that his subversive activities would weaken the Russian war machine. It was a strategy they’d been trying elsewhere. The Germans were arming independence fighters in Ireland and trying to foment rebellion against British rule in India.

This book sets out to recreate Lenin’s fateful journey, describing the broader context…

This blog post uses the timeline of Byzantine emperors from Wikipedia and then adds details and comments from John Julius Norwich’s book Byzantium: The Early Centuries.

Constantine I ‘the Great’ (324-337)

Son of the Augustus Constantius Chlorus and Helena. Proclaimed Augustus of the western empire upon the death of his father on 25 July 306, he became sole ruler of the western empire after the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312. In 324, he defeated the eastern Augustus Licinius and re-united the empire under his rule, reigning as sole emperor until his death. Constantine completed the administrative and military reforms begun under Diocletian, who had begun ushering in the Dominate period. Actively interested in Christianity, he played a crucial role in its development and the Christianization of the Roman world, through his convocation of the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea. He re-founded the city of Byzantium as ‘New…

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “alas”, derives from this article in Canada’s National Post (click on screenshot):

I’m surprised that they made a joke about global warming rather than religion, though!:

The Government seemed to be in a bind about the cannabis referendum to be held at the general election next year.  The dilemma was about whether the referendum should be binding.

Referencing a leaked cabinet paper, National Party drug reform spokeswoman Paula Bennett threw doubt on how binding the referendum would be. 

National declined to release the paper to protect the source (something of an impediment when it comes to establishing the credibility of claims against political opponents) but said only one of four referendum options due to be discussed by Cabinet yesterday might compel the Government to act on the outcome.

The other three possibilities would not be technically “binding” because the government would not be obliged to act on them.