Utopia, you are standing in it!

As readers may recall, on July 29^th BBC audiences saw and heard several reports on various platforms by BBC Arabic’s Nida Ibrahim relating to the release of Ahed Tamimi from prison.

One sided reports from BBC Arabic’s Nida Ibrahim – part one

One sided reports from BBC Arabic’s Nida Ibrahim – part two

One sided reports from BBC Arabic’s Nida Ibrahim – part three

In an additional item – a news bulletin aired on the BBC News Channel on the same day – viewers heard the following: [emphasis in bold added, emphasis in italics in the original]

Ben Brown: “A Palestinian teenager has been freed from an Israeli prison after serving an eight month sentence for slapping and kicking an Israeli soldier.  Ahed Tamimi was 16 at the time of the incident and the footage of it happening went viral around the world.  Her sentence was widely condemned, as children are protected…

INDUSTRIAL Wind Turbines Are Neither “Clean, Green or Renewable” | CLIMATISM

“Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.” – Top Google engineers

“We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.” – Warren Buffett

“Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.” – James Hansen (The Godfather of global warming alarmism and former NASA climate chief)

***

WESTERN climate-theory-obsessed politicians continue their ruinous and costly obsession with wind and solar ‘energy’. ‘UNreliables‘ that repeatedly fail the environment, communities and economies wherever installed.

ENERGY poverty, blackouts, skyrocketing power bills…

CLARIFICATION; By “dreaming” here, I was asking whether blind people have visual dreams.

The NBC News tonight broadcast a segment about a little girl who was born blind but has a really positive attitude: she has her own upbeat show on local radio, reading from a Braille script, and says that the only thing she can’t do is “see.”

That instantly got me wondering: Do blind people dream?  And here’s a prediction—actually three predictions—before I’ve checked on the Internet. (I don’t think I’ll check until tomorrow, or I’ll wait until a reader tells me.)

The first prediction, which is mine, is based on the supposition that if someone is born blind, they’ve never been able to process visual input and therefore couldn’t experience it in their brain. Therefore, I predict that they would not be able to dream.

But people who go blind after they’re born would have developed…

h/t FB

On the morning of December 24^th BBC Radio 4’s ‘Today‘ programme aired yet another report produced during Mishal Husain’s recent visit to the Gaza Strip.

Presenter Justin Webb introduced the item (from 1:42:48 here) as follows: [emphasis in bold added]

Webb: “This time last week we were reporting from Gaza and for its small Christian community this of course is the time of year when many dream of getting to Bethlehem which isn’t, after all, that far away to celebrate Christmas. However, given the blockade maintained by Israel – it says of course that’s for security reasons – travelling to the West Bank requires special permission which many do not get. Mishal Husain went to meet Palestinian Christians at one church in Gaza City.”

Having described the scene at a reception for a “visiting delegation from Jerusalem” and spoken to a couple of children,

About this episode

Terry guards an antique shop owned by Alex, a friend of Arthur, after two men demand protection money. He isn’t keen on the job as he has to share a flat with Jim, a gay man, Alex’s partner. He soon discovers that the story of the protection racket is a fabrication, that Alex is also gay and that his ex-wife Gloria set up the ‘accident’ that has put Alex in hospital. (Episode title spoofs the 1972 television play Whose Life is it Anyway?)

About the series

Minder is a British comedy-drama about the London criminal underworld. Initially produced by Verity Lambert, it was made by Euston Films, a subsidiary of Thames Television and shown on ITV (originally by Thames, then Central Independent Television in 1993 and 1994 after Thames lost its franchise). The original show ran for ten series between 29 October 1979 and 10 March 1994. The series was notable for using a range of leading British actors, as well as many…

Lincoln University administrators did some consulting before answering questions first sent to them on September 21.  They finally answered the questions – about the incorporation of matauranga Maori in science classes – earlier this month but won’t say who was consulted.

The short answer is yes, it is incorporated in their science classes.

1. Is Maori knowledge incorporated in science courses, at Lincolne University

Yes.

 2.  If so, when was it introduced to science courses, why was it introduced, and is it incorporated in all science courses or just some?

Maori knowedge content began to be introduced into some courses at Lincoln University from around 2005 by individual lecturers who were motivated to do so.  Currently some courses available in 2018 have Maori knowledge content.

The university has been somewhat sparse with the information it provided and is not disclosing the identities of the people whom it consulted after insisting Bob…

There’s been a lot of kerfuffle on the intertubes about the value of evolutionary psychology, the field that studies the evolutionary roots of human thought, language, and behavior. I want to weigh in here with my answer to the question posed in the title, and my answer is, “Certainly not!”

Now I am known as a critic of evolutionary psychology, and I have been quite critical. For example, I’ve published two scathing critiques (one with Andrew Berry) of Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer’s unfounded theories of the adaptive significance of rape (see references below). I have gone after the popular distortions of evolutionary psychology that appear in the press or books (e.g., my comments on David Brooks’s New Yorker article “Social animal”—an article subsequently turned into a dreadful book). And I have criticized some evolutionary psychologists for failing to police the speculative excesses of their colleagues.  But I’ve never…

I’ve been known for a while as a critic of evolutionary psychology, particularly when it first began as “sociobiology” in the Seventies.  At that time there was a lot of unsupported speculation being bruited about as “science” (i.e., human males evolved to have “rape modules”, a view that I criticized strongly). But over the decades, evolutionary psychology has matured, and I now see it as a valuable way of studying the origins of human behavior. Not that it’s all perfect—the “pop” versions, such as those produced by Satoshi Kanazawa, seem pretty dire to me, debasing a field that’s striving for scientific rigor. But even Kanazawa has been rejected by serious evolutionary psychologists.

Sadly, some self-professed skeptics have decided to debunk the entire field of evo-psych, and for reasons that I see not as scientific, but as ideological and political. That is, like the opponents of sociobiology thirty years…

Whenever I post on evolutionary psychology, lurkers come out of the woodwork, enraged that I’ve criticized their own discipline and vociferously defending the crappy papers that I sometimes highlight.  Recently one (or more) of the lurkers asked me to provide an example of an evo-psycho paper that I considered good.   Well, that made me think a bit.  Many of the papers are tolerable rather than outright lousy, but in my opinion good ones are rare.  But I’ve just read one that I’d put in the “pretty good” category.  Some might not consider the subject to be evolutionary psychology, but I think it is, for it’s about whether behavioral differences between males and females have a genetic basis.  If they do, then one can begin to uncover their evolutionary roots.  If they don’t, then we need not engage in adaptive storytelling about why males are aggressive and females are nurturing.