Utopia, you are standing in it!

In a March 14th article, the Guardian’s Jerusalem correspondent Oliver Holmes attempts to explain, in advance of upcoming national elections, the decline of the Israeli peace camp. However, beyond quoting several completely non-representative Israelis, such Yehuda Shaul, founder of the NGO Breaking the Silence, and the self-described non-Zionist Haaretz reporter Amira Haas, Holmes’ piece (The fall of the Israeli peace movement, and why leftists continues to fight”) offers no actual analysis of the ‘death of the left’ and what describes as the country’s “wild lurch to the right”.

Fortunately, this very topic was the focus of a very insightful piece by Yossi Klein Halevi in The Atlantic:

…the second intifada—which began in 2000, shortly after Barak accepted the principle of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, and which resulted in thousands of deaths and injuries among Israelis and Palestinians—remains the great Israeli trauma of this…

As New Zealand grapples with the enormities of the Christchurch terrorist attack and their implications for the country’s diverse social fabric, security and law and order, some issues are paramount.

High on the list is the importance to NZ of the Five-Eyes intelligence network, no matter what some the government’s coalition partners might think.   Five-Eyes has been forwarding significantly important information in recent months. Without it, NZ would be bereft.

For example, the presence of a noxious NZ Islamist in Iraq has been monitored carefully over several months, extending to the ​presence there of other New Zealanders, not extremists,  working in various nursing and assistance roles ​in precarious situations.

None of this important information could be provided to the prime minister without Five-Eyes.

Adding inherently unreliable and heavily subsidised wind and solar to your grid is a guarantee of rocketing power prices. Every place in the world that got serious about wind and solar is being belted with serious increases in electricity costs.

Wind and solar ‘powered’ Germany and wind ‘powered’ Denmark pay Europe’s highest power prices, by a mile, and prices in both cases are still climbing at double-digit rates.

Germany’s power market is in chaos, and its grid on the brink of total collapse.

The annual cost of the subsidies directed to wind and solar is colossal: the annual cost to British power consumers and taxpayers in the UK, alone, is in excess of £6,000,000,000.

In those European states which plugged in to wind and solar, power prices are more than 50% higher than those G20 members that didn’t.

Not that the EU boffins and bureaucrats are all that…

Mar 13, 2019 Bjørn Lomborg writes about the overheated discourse that has children taking to the streets on the advice of adults who should know better.  Overheating About Global Warming was published today at Project Syndicate.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and images.

Decades of climate-change exaggeration in the West have produced frightened children, febrile headlines, and unrealistic political promises. The world needs a cooler approach that addresses climate change smartly without scaring us needlessly and that pays heed to the many other challenges facing the planet.

Across the rich world, school students have walked out of classrooms and taken to the streets to call for action against climate change. They are inspired by 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who blasts the media and political leaders for ignoring global warming and wants us to “panic.” A global day of action is planned for March 15.

Although the students’…

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a new and longish article by Tom Bartlett about the character, achievements, and demonization of Steve Pinker. Click on the screenshot below to read it.

Let me give my own take on Pinker first. It’s no secret that I consider him a friend and admire him hugely. Among all those in the atheist-sphere with whom I’ve interacted, he’s the most empathic, the most intellectually productive, and the most thoughtful. Dawkins is a marginally better writer, but not by much. I’ve never seen Steve commit a shoddy act nor engage in ad hominem arguments. I’ve read nearly all his books (save the linguistic ones except The Language Instinct), and can’t find much to quibble with.

But people still dislike him—even hate him. This is puzzling to me as he’s a nice guy and can’t be accused of Misogyny and Nazism Through Tweeting. As best…