Utopia, you are standing in it!

I’ve just finished Nadine Strossen‘s 2018 book, HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship, one of 16 volumes in the series “Inalienable Rights,” edited by University of Chicago constitutional law professor Geoffrey Stone.  Click on the screenshot to go to the book’s Amazon site:

Strossen was president of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) from 1991 to 2008—their first woman president. She’s now a professor at New York Law School. She’s always been a civil-rights lawyer, and this is her third book on the topic. Given her expertise and position at the ACLU, she was an excellent person to write this book.

I recommend it to all of you who want to read a succinct (186 page) argument for why hate speech should be neither outlawed nor censored by the government. (Strossen also argues—and I agree—that although censorship of hate speech is prohibited in

RE rent seekers aren’t satisfied with $trillions in wind and solar subsidies, now they want $trillions for power grids to the middle of nowhere.

The Australian wind industry has a habit of spearing its turbines way beyond the back of beyond. Increasingly remote wind farm locations require serious upgrades to transmission infrastructure, adding hundreds of $millions to transmission costs, that would have otherwise been avoided, had Australia simply stuck with conventional generators and not squandered $60,000,000,000 in subsidies to intermittent wind and solar.

As any first-year physics student will tell you, transmitting electricity over distances results in a mathematically predictable loss of the power transmitted, over any given distance. The greater the distance, the greater the absolute loss.

Just like the value of prime real estate, the most beneficial situation for generating capacity is all about location, location, location.

In the main, conventional generators are sited close enough to…

Almost thirty animal rights hoodlums have been arrested in connection with activities they conducted at Queensland, Australia animal farms in which, according to the Brisbane Times, some of the criminals trespassed on private property and chained themselves to farm equipment or even stole animals too.

Last Tuesday, police charged 11 people on 18 charges, including unlawfully entering farming land (trespass) and drug offences.

Another eight have also been charged with entering farming land (trespass) after the latest arrests.

The total 19 accused offenders, six men and 13 women, were due to appear in the Warwick Magistrates Court on various dates during the next several weeks.

Eight more people have been charged after protesters allegedly entered the Lemontree Feedlot at Millmerran, 82 kilometres south-west of Toowoomba, and took pictures of cattle on March 23.

This on top of animal rights thugs conducting mass harassment of animal farms that took place…

Partial reblog as Brendan O’Neill at Spiked Online gets stuck into the enviro-mentalists.

It actually makes sense that Ms Thunberg – a wildly celebrated 16-year-old Swede who founded the climate-strike movement for schoolkids – should sound cultish. Because climate-change alarmism is becoming ever stranger, borderline religious, obsessed with doomsday prophecies. Consider Extinction Rebellion, the latest manifestation of the upper-middle classes’ contempt for industrialisation and progress. It is at times indistinguishable from old fundamentalist movements that warned mankind of the coming End of Days. I followed Extinction Rebellion from Parliament Square to Marble Arch yesterday and what I witnessed was a public display of millenarian fear and bourgeois depression. People did dances of death and waved placards warning of the heat-death of the planet. It felt deeply unnerving.

There was an interesting new poll out the other day on public attitudes to marijuana and the possibility of law reform (on which there is to be a referendum at the time of next year’s election).  The results certainly took me by surprise.

For the record, I don’t have very strong views on the law around marijuana.  A couple of years ago I’d got to the point where I’d probably have voted for full liberalisation, but since then I’ve swung back somewhat in the other direction (influenced in part by reviews of and extracts from this recent book, a copy of which I’m expecting in the mail any day now).  In an up/down vote today I’d probably vote against full liberalisation, but as to how I will actually vote next year, a lot might depend on the specific question.  One thing I really don’t like is a law on…

Mary was born on December 8, 1542 at Linlithgow Palace, Scotland, to King James V of Scots and his French second wife, Marie de Guise. Mary was said to have been born prematurely and was the only legitimate child of James V to survive him She was the great-niece of King Henry VIII of England, as her paternal grandmother, Margaret Tudor, was Henry VIII’s sister. On December 14, 1542 six days after her birth, she became Queen of Scotland when her father died from drinking contaminated water while on campaign following the Battle of Solway Moss.

Mary I, Queen of Scots

Since Mary was an infant when she inherited the throne, Scotland was ruled by regents until she became an adult. From the outset, there were two claims to the regency: one from Catholic Cardinal Beaton, and the other from the Protestant Earl of Arran, who was next in line…

Both my grandfathers fought in the Great War, one in the Middle East and one in France. They survived (or I wouldn’t be here), but one was badly wounded in a gas attack. I’ve thought about this on Anzac Day for most of my 60+ years, but last year I learned something I hadn’t thought about and, as far as I can tell, hardly anyone else in Australia knows. We were only fighting Turkey because the British government refused their request for an alliance. I wrote about this last year, and I’m reposting it now.