Utopia, you are standing in it!

We had a bit of excitement here on Monday when, sitting at my desk, I got three successive email alerts from the campus authorities that there were criminal suspects loose on campus. The final one was that they were apprehended. But the first ones, like this, were a bit scary:

Shelter in place! That sounds ominious. Eventually we got the all clear, and it turned out that, according to the Chicago Maroon, there was a crime, a crash, and a chase (click on screenshot):

Summary from the paper (it was an armed robbery):

At around 11:48 a.m., a stolen black Dodge Charger believed to have been involved in the robbery of a GameStop ran a red light on the intersection of Midway Plaisance and South Woodlawn Avenue, supposedly while chased by police. In the process, it ran into two additional cars, damaging both significantly. The driver of one of the vehicles escaped…

On this date in History: February 13, 1689. William III-II and Mary II were created joint sovereigns of England, Scotland and Ireland.

William III (Dutch: Willem; November 4, 1650 – March 8, 1702), also widely known as William of Orange, was sovereign Prince of Orange from birth, Stadtholder of Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Gelderland and Overijssel in the Dutch Republic from 1672 and King of England, Ireland and Scotland from 1689 until his death in 1702. As King of Scotland, he is known as William II. He is sometimes informally known in Northern Ireland and Scotland as “King Billy.”

William III-II, Prince of Orange, Stadtholder of Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Gelderland and Overijssel in the Dutch Republic. King of England, Ireland and Scotland.

Mary II (April 30, 1662 – December 28, 1694) was Queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland, co-reigning with her husband and first cousin, King William III and II, from…

Germany led the way, and others soon followed: erratically delivered wind and solar now dominates Europe’s power grid. Naturally enough, power prices have rocketed and grid managers are left to deal with the chaos delivered by sunset and/or calm weather.

Rapid surges and/or collapses in voltage and frequency – consequent upon surges and collapses in wind and solar output – require instant and very costly ‘interventions’.

These interventions involve ramping up the output from conventional generators (gas or coal-fired plant) whenever the sun sets, the skies cloud up or the wind drops. Conversely, conventional plants are knocked off-line and forced to ramp down when solar and/or wind output picks up.

The additional cost to power consumers is staggering, and continues to mount.

Pierre Gosselin takes a look at the unfolding disaster, starting with Switzerland.

The Green Energies Of Instability…Swiss Power Grid Requires 200 Fold More Intervention Than 8 Years Ago!

I don’t mean to be Pinker’s Fanboy, but I’ve had some recent correspondence with him that I thought would be enlightening to readers, and got his permission to share it. (The first exchange was about Pinker’s supposed misuse of quotations in Enlightenment Now, which turned out to be a kerfuffle about nothing.)

Now we’re on to a Guardian piece that claims that Bill Gates—and by extension, Pinker—are wrong to claim that poverty has decreased in the world over the last two centuries. It started with this tweet from Bill Gates, who, on the way to the Davos Summit, summarized in a tweet six indices of improvement that he saw on the Our World in Data site. Here’s Gates’s tweet:

Falsification.

Karl Popper stated very simply that science can only get as true as long as one cannot deem it false. This is his theory of falsification, regarding that in science, one can never reach 100% objectivity; that a scientific theory will infinitely approach this asymptotic mark we call truth. For example, Galileo disproving that our planet is the center of our solar system and Einstein redefining the method of which we consider the gravitational pulls among interstellar masses from Newtons original gravitational theory.

Although Popper nicely answers our question, which I do mostly agree with, I still remain persistent and a little disagreeing with the concept of science being nonobjective. With that, I went and searched for the definition of science, which states:  knowledge about or study of the natural world based on facts learned through experiments and observation (Note: this is only one definition, there are many…

Paul Fussell in Paris, May 1945

Many years ago in New York I saw on the side of a bus a whiskey ad I’ve remembered all this time. It’s been for me a model of the short poem, and indeed I’ve come upon few short poems subsequently that exhibited more poetic talent. The ad consisted of two eleven-syllable lines of “verse,” thus:

In life, experience is the great teacher.

In Scotch, Teacher’s is the great experience.

For present purposes we must jettison the second line (licking our lips, to be sure, as it disappears), leaving the first to register a principle whose banality suggests that it enshrines a most useful truth. I bring up the matter because, writing on the forty-second anniversary of the atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I want to consider something suggested by the long debate about the ethics, if any, of that ghastly affair. Namely, the importance of experience, sheer, vulgar experience, in influencing, if not determining, one’s…

Body language or a non-verbal communication plays an important role in how people communicate. It reveals an unspoken intention through the physical behaviors. These behaviors include body gestures, eye movement, touch, hand sign, facial expression, greeting and personal space. A non-verbal communications also indicate emotions and a state of mind of that person such as angry, frustration, satisfied, happy, pleasure and relaxation. However, one must be aware that body languages are different from culture to culture. There are many body gestures that are commonly used in one culture, but may have different meanings in other cultures.

Here are video clips showing innocent gestures that mean rude things abroad!

 10 Surprising Ways To Offend People In Other Countries

The cultural differences in body language between the UK and Asia

Related content:

7 Innocent Gestures That Can Get You Killed Overseas

Rude Hand Gestures of The World

Hand gestures in different cultures

The spinning wheel was meant to signify Indian independence, too.

It never takes them long to work out that wind power is the greatest economic and environmental fraud of all time. Eco-zealots have attempted to ram wind and solar power down the throats of Third World governments under the auspices of saving the planet and purportedly with the purpose of dragging millions out of poverty. As the initiated well-know, wind power rates zero on both scores. Pointless and expensive, wind power is a kind of first world disease being spread by UN endorsed lunatics, across the developing world.

In India, solar power is seen as ‘fake electricity’, by those being forced to use it: The Cruel Hypocrisy: West Drops Wind Power as it Forces ‘Fake Electricity’ on the World’s Poor

Now, Indians have branded wind power an outright fraud, too. The calm, and very wet weather that comes with the monsoon…

Power consumers pinning their hopes on the weather, inevitably learn to expect mixed results. 200,000 Victorian businesses and households learnt the hard way, as a sudden wind power output collapse left them sweltering during a summer heatwave.

At the other end of the temperature spectrum, the risk of being powerless is even more serious. The elderly and frail do not last long without reliable and affordable energy to heat their abodes.

Across America’s Mid-West a burst of frigid weather has exposed the fatal (literally) flaw in wind and solar power: they’re never there when you need them most.

Why “Green” Energy is Futile, In One Lesson
Powerline
John Hinderaker
31 January 2019

Here in Minnesota, we are enduring a brutal stretch of weather. The temperature hasn’t gotten above zero in the last three days, with lows approaching -30. And that is in the Twin Cities, in the southern part of…

1. Intellectuals and a century of political hero worship William Anthony Hay, Modern Age
2. John Stuart Mill: a not so secular saint James Smith, Los Angeles Review of Books
3. Irving Babbitt’s history of ideas Simon Brown, JHIBlog
4. Classical knowledge, lost & found: a history in seven cities David Abulafia, Literary Review