Utopia, you are standing in it!

Climate change is an urgent topic of discussion among politicians, journalists and celebrities, but actual climate scientists are not so much click-bait as real celebrities, and journalists seem more interested in click-bait than deeply informed commentary. We seem to be transforming into a society that values  popularity more than accuracy, or perhaps we always were, but it just wasn’t as obvious as it is today. Richard Lindzen is one of the most esteemed climate scientists in the world, and one to whom you should pay attention.

Observer, October, 2017

The few people not caught up in leader worship in Brighton asked how the cult of Jeremy Corbyn’s personality would die. Would his support for Brexit drive his young admirers away? Have we reached peak Corbyn? They forgot the lesson of history that you don’t worry about personality cults that fail. You worry when they succeed.

Credit: BBC

A brief run-through of some of the problems with ‘man-made warming’ theories, which so often get swept under the carpet and treated as unmentionable.

One of the main accusations launched by climate activists is that anyone arguing against man-made global warming is “anti-science.”

They tell us that the science is “settled,” and that anyone who objects is ignoring a blindingly obvious set of facts.

But what to do about someone like me, asks Steven Wright in Climate Change Dispatch?

In this blog for the ‘Named Parliaments’ series, Dr Paul Hunneyball, Associate Editor of the House of Lords 1604-29 project, explores the length of parliaments, paying particular attention to the Short and Long parliaments of the 1640s and 1650s…

Down the centuries, the length of parliaments has
varied enormously, from a few days to a decade or more. That being the case,
it’s perhaps surprising that the Short and Long parliaments, both of which
opened in 1640, are almost unique in being named according to their respective
durations. (Barebone’s Parliament of
1653 is sometimes referred to as the Little Parliament, but strictly speaking
it was a nominated assembly, and can therefore be set to one side.) In part the
explanation lies in the events of these two parliaments, rather than their simple
longevity – or lack of it – but in order to make sense of all that…

Image credit: MIT
If the global warming nightmare was to happen, solar and wind systems simply don’t work in high-heat environments. So why are activists pushing them, asks Climate Change Dispatch?

Everything, and I mean everything about the man-made global warming movement is rotten to the core, says Dr. Joel Adams.

Tens of thousands of our own brave and brilliant scientists, as well as websites such as Climate Change Dispatch, are fighting the good fight against the climate change fraud every day. It’s a fight we are working hard to win.

I just completed a 435-page book on the subject of climate change fraud and the people and motivations behind it.

I discovered that as bad as the scientific fraud is, the motivations behind it turned out to be worse. These motivations are to put it in a few words: money and a political totalitarian power grab by…

Back in 2013 Karl Smith offered a startling rehabilitation of Arthur Burns’s calamitous tenure as Fed Chairman, first under Richard Nixon who appointed him, later under Gerald Ford who reappointed him, and finally, though briefly, under Jimmy Carter who did not reappoint him. Relying on an academic study of Burns by Fed economist Robert Hetzel drawing extensively from Burns’s papers at the Fed, Smith argued that Burns had a more coherent and sophisticated view of how the economy works and of the limitations of monetary policy than normally acknowledged by the standard, and almost uniformly negative, accounts of Burns’s tenure, which portray Burns either as a willing, or as a possibly reluctant, and even browbeaten, accomplice of Nixon in deploying Fed powers to rev up the economy and drive down unemployment to ensure Nixon’s re-election in 1972, in willful disregard of the consequences of an overdose of monetary stimulus.

According…

Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose (1980), episode 3 – Anatomy of a Crisis. part 1

The short paper by James Watson and Francis Crick establishing the helical structure of the DNA molecule was published in the science journal, Nature, on April 25, 1953. The blurb of this book describes it as the scientific breakthrough of the 20th century. Quite probably, although it was a busy century – the discovery of antibiotics was quite important, too, not to mention the atom bomb.

James Watson and Francis Crick with their DNA model at the Cavendish Laboratories in 1953

Anyway, what makes this first-person account of the events leading up to the discovery such fun is Watson’s prose style and mentality. He is fearless. He takes no prisoners. He is brutally honest about his own shortcomings and everyone else’s and, in doing so, sheds extraordinarily candid light on how science is actually done. He tells us that foreign conferences where nobody speaks English are often pointless. Many scientists…

Another weekend, another flurry of anti-legal aid stories finding their way into the tabloids. On the criminal legal aid front, The Mirror splashed outrage at the notion of Andrew Hill, the pilot acquitted of manslaughter following the Shoreham Airshow tragedy, “getting” legal aid to mount his successful defence at his criminal trial last year.

It’s one thing when The Mirror – a market leader in legal aid trash news – whips its readers into uninformed apoplexy over criminal legal aid being granted to those who are, after a fair trial only possible because of legal aid, convicted. But it breaks bold new ground even for this organ to resent legal aid being granted to a man whom a jury has found to be not guilty.

Then this morning, the Daily Mail, in a headline which may stand out as the apotheosis of journalistic legal ignorance, announced:

“Shamima Begum is…

Milton Friedman: Free To Choose – The Failure Of Socialism With Ronald Reagan (Full)

Published on Mar 19, 2012 by NoNationalityNeeded

Milton Friedman’s writings affected me greatly when I first discovered them and I wanted to share with you. We must not head down the path of socialism like Greece has done.

(From the film “Good Morning Vietnam”)

For years I showed the Robin Williams’ film “Good Morning Vietnam” to my history classes.  The movie reflected Williams’ genius, empathy, and commentary pertaining to a conflict that tore America apart.  I introduced the film because I wanted students to get a feel for a different aspect of the war which the character of Adrian Cronauer apply portrayed. Williams’ is also known for many other ground breaking and important films that include, “Dead Poets’ Society,” “Good Will Hunting,” “The Fisher King,” and the cartoon voiceover of “Áladdin,” along with a number that did not achieve recognition, but reflected Williams’ many talents.  Williams was a multifaceted individual whose onstage comedic insanity expressed a certain poignancy when one got passed the mask that the comedian presented to his audiences.  When he died in 2014 a cultural void was created which may never again be filled.  Williams…

(Mel Brooks)

Recently I read ROBIN by David Itzkoff, a biography that described the comic genius and troubled life of Robin Williams.  The book was thorough and replete with explanations of why Williams turned out as he did, and the role comedy played in his life.  There are few people who can approach Williams’ ability to transform themselves into different characters and employ improvisation.  One who might approach Williams’ talent is Mel Brooks, the subject of a wonderful new biography by Patrick McGilligan entitled, FUNNY MAN.

Brooks’ background and early life stems from the wave of Russian Jewish immigration to the United States at the turn of the 20^th century.  Thousands would pass through or remain on the lower east side of Manhattan or move across the Williamsburg Bridge into Brooklyn as Brooks’ family did in 1917.  McGilligan describes his subject as a pampered child as the youngest…

This posted to draw attention to the dangers we face in NZ and elsewhere with the threats posed to freedom of thought and speech in today’s politically correct world of alt right and progressive politics.

All reference text is from Wikipedia

The novel

Nineteen Eighty-Four, often published as 1984, is a dystopian novel by English writer George Orwell published in June 1949. The novel is set in the year 1984 when most of the world population have become victims of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance and propaganda.

In the novel, Great Britain (“Airstrip One”) has become a province of a superstate named Oceania. Oceania is ruled by the “Party”, who employ the “Thought Police” to persecute individualism and independent thinking. The Party’s leader is Big Brother, who enjoys an intense cult of personality but may not even exist. The protagonist of the…