Utopia, you are standing in it!

A bill in California’s legislature geared to ban animal testing for cosmetics is being considered in which animal rights groups are said to be supportive of the measure. South Korea and Europe have banned the use of animals for cosmetics testing and efforts on the part of animal rights groups in other countries have attempted to highlight this issue.

For example, in 2012 a woman in Great Britain subjected herself to methods allegedly used in testing animals for cosmetics. The proposed legislation is based on the assumption that animals are cruelly treated when used to test them.

However, as a Fashionista article published three years ago points out, nothing could be further from the truth. No doubt the methods groups, like PETA, allege are used on animals in cosmetics testing are not true either. As the Fashionista explains:

Contrary to some of the propaganda you see out there, most beauty…

Tucked away in the recently passed U.S. Farm Bill is a ban on cockfighting that was signed into law last week and will affect all U.S. territories like Puerto Rico and Guam. According to NPR, the Farm Bill passed last Wednesday, and has long been sought by animal rights groups like the so-called Humane Society (HSUS).

However, when news that one of Puerto Rico’s most popular pass times was to be outlawed starting next year, Puerto Ricans at first were in disbelief, but now are angry. Cockfighting is a centuries old tradition and their island territory has numerous clubs dedicated to the sport that employ hundreds of people. But the overall cockfighting industry, according to Puerto Rican officials, generates millions of dollars a year in revenue and thousands of people are employed. As a result of the ban, it will be a blow to Puerto Rico’s economy which is…

by Judith Curry

“Concerning the inability of expert knowledge to resolve environmental controversy and the pressing need for a pragmatic reframing of policy problems to allow for solutions based on bipartisan values.”

By Anton Lang ~

Virtually every commentator who even mentions renewable power generation these days will tell you that renewable power generation is cheaper than coal fired power, but is this really the case?

It has puzzled me for a long time now how they can get away with saying that, and not actually taking the time to check the real data to see if it’s true at all. They just repeat that same old thing, time after time, and as the old adage says, repeat something often enough and it then becomes the truth.

You’ll see all sorts of ways they can justify it, usually by quoting what is referred to by the acronym LCOE. (Levelised Cost Of Electricity) Over the years I have been doing this, now almost eleven years, I have seen so many different versions of these LCOE documents, and they have changed across the years…

Recently I was invited to be interviewed by Fox News Channel for “a series of stories about changing demographics and how they’re impacting politics, policy, and our culture.” Specifically, the producer said they wanted to interview me about “your recent research on millennials and marriage and divorce rates.”

This raised the recurring question faced by responsible academics: Should I appear on Fox News? For those of us who love attention, it’s hard to say no, but I did consider saying no. I figured the segment would be a right-slanted take, but also hoped that since it was for a news program, rather than an opinion program, it might be moored to reality, and I thought I might have a chance to interject something useful, or at least true. (This differs from my previous appearance, with Tucker Carlson.) Whether to differentiate at all between news and opinion on FNC is…

Narrowing down an entire year of Guardian anti-Israel reporting to the five most egregious examples is not an easy task, but, as a public service to our loyal readers, here are a few smears and errors by their contributors in 2018 that especially stand out:

1. A Guardian contributor literally suggested that those who would defend the IDF’s actions on the Gaza border are morally sub-human (See post here)

2. Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell ties Zionism to apartheid and white supremacy (See our post for context)

3. Guardian cartoon by ‘First Dog on the Moon’ smears Australian Jews who support Israel as “apartheid enthusiasts” (See our post for context)

4. The Guardian refused to correct an op-ed by Labour Party official Jon Lansman that included a smear (debunked five years ago) that Ethiopian Israelis were – for racist reasons – given contraception against their will. (See our post 

In the postscript of a previous column, I shared some of Ben Watson’s wise and prudent counsel about the racial unrest in Ferguson.

Today, I want to share a feel-good story to come out of that town’s troubles.

Rather than looting, some citizens served as protectors of property.

Since looting first erupted following the August police shooting of black teenager Michael Brown, nearly all the businesses in a two-square-mile area of this St. Louis suburb have had to board up. All except one — a Conoco gas station and convenience store. …On Tuesday night, as police and soldiers took up positions in the parking lots of virtually every strip mall and big box store around it, the forecourt of the brightly lit gas station was busy with customers. One, a 6-foot-8-inches man named Derrick Jordan — “Stretch,” as friends call him — whisked an AR-15 assault rifle out from…

The television show House M.D. had a segment during one of its episodes when the program’s main character, Dr. Gregory House, treats a baby whose mother refuses to vaccinate her child. Known for his unconventional investigation style and bluntness, House uses sarcasm to educate her on the dangers of not vaccinating her baby.

Following adisturbingly high number of Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israelis in recent months, including the lethal stabbing assault of a 32-year-old Israeli man in the northern West Bank on Tuesday, Israeli defense officials have expressed concerns that the conflict could lead to a Third Intifada.

Whilst recent violence by Palestinians has involved rock throwing, knife attacks, shootings and the hurling of fire bombs, the fear that such a coordinated outbreak of Palestinian violence could include suicide bombings – which caused so much death and carnage during the Second Intifada – was amplified by a new Pew poll released on April 30.

The new ‘Pew Research Center Survey of Muslims around the Globe‘ finds that Muslim support for suicide bombing in the Palestinian territories is the highest among the the twenty countries surveyed – with 40% of Palestinians agreeing that ‘suicide attacks against civilians in defense of Islam…