Utopia, you are standing in it!

Updated Nov 23, 2018

As of Friday, Oregon District Court Judge Aiken has given into the Supreme Court suggestion and defendant’s request that a stay for interlocutory appeal be accepted by the lower court.  The Order by Judge Aiken is here The key excerpt is in italics with my bolds.

This Court stands by its prior rulings on jurisdictional and merits issues, as well as its belief that this case would be better served by further factual development at trial. The Court has, however, reviewed the record and takes particular note of the recent orders issued by the United States Supreme Court on July 30, 2018, and November 2, 2018, as well as the extraordinary Order of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in United States v. USDC-ORE, Case No. 18-73014 issued on November 8, 2018. At this time, the Court finds sufficient cause to revisit…

General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Ike.

By early April, 1945, US soldiers in Europe were horrified by scenes that had hitherto been semi-dismissed as “rumors.”

Death Camps and Corpses

For a few years, there had been undercurrent rumors that the Germans had embarked on wholesale internment and extermination of millions of people: Catholics, gypsies, homosexuals, political dissidents – but mostly the Jews of central and eastern Europe. The mere thought was so horrific that it couldn’t possibly be true.

But it was.

As WWII was nearing its conclusion in Europe, a battered and desperate Germany, barely clinging to its own rubble, began a systematic destruction of the evidence of its barbarity and crimes against humanity. It would soon become known as The Holocaust.

The undeniable evidence of German atrocity was witnessed at the highest level.

Those German officers and soldiers in charge of scores of concentration, work and death camps (as…

As gender clinic referrals in the UK and beyond continue to spike — with the average gender clinic patient now an autistic female in her teen years — many more people have begun to realize what this blog has been saying for over five years: that the transgender phenomenon is a culture-bound syndrome, promulgated by regressive social forces.

1,800 girls (and 700 boys) started down the path to sterility and shorter lifespans this year alone at a single clinic in the UK. If you ask trans activists, the reason for this is quite simple and easy to explain: as trans identities become less stigmatized and more understood, more people become willing to express their true transgender identity.

By way of comparison, these trans activists point to the clear increase in the out-of-closet gay, lesbian, and bisexual population, an increase that began roughly at the time when Gay Pride and acceptance…

The above images on hurricanes come via hurricane researcher @philklotzbach. The top graph shows US hurricane landfalls from 1878 to 2017 (through today). Within that data the trend is down and if you’d like to consider the data as a sample from a larger population, there is no trend. Either way you slice it, US hurricanes have not increased.

The bottom table shows summary statistics for the entire Northern Hemisphere for 2017. Even with the massive damage in Texas, Florida and the Caribbean, by the numbers 2017 is an average year. Lesson: Don’t confuse impact with climate. More on that below.

Welcome to issue #7 of my occasional newsletter on climate and energy issues. As a reminder, my day-to-day research or writing is focused on sports governance and various issues of science policy. But I’ve written a fair bit on the topics of climate and energy over the past…

As you’ve surely heard, Ilhan Omar was elected to the House of Representatives this year. She’ll be representing a district in Minnesota, and is one of the first two Muslim-American women to be elected to Congress. She’s also the first hijabi elected to Congress (the other woman, Rashida Tlaib, isn’t a hijabi). Omar always wears a fancy, high-rise hijab:

And she’s vowed that she won’t take it off, even though there’s been a ban on head coverings in the House since 1837. Here’s a recent tweet from her:

Note that she invokes the First Amendment—presumably freedom of religion—to justify wearing her hijab.  And now, according to NBC News and many other…

I’ve written a few posts here about the economics of climate change, and of the sorts of goals the government proposes to adopt in response.  On the one hand, OECD and IPCC work has suggested that, if anything, the New Zealand economy in aggregate is likely to benefit a bit from warming (albeit with sectoral and regional ups and downs –  the sort of thing that is a normal part of economic life).  And, on the other hand, the government’s own modelling, undertaken by NZIER, suggests a very high real economic costs to New Zealanders from pursuing a net-zero target.

And so I was interested to see a headline on the Wall St Journal website this morning

U.S. Government Report Warns of Economic Losses From Climate Change

The story noted

Its conclusions are at odds with statements by President Trump, who has been skeptical of global-warming trends, questioned the validity…

This is just a quick post to draw everyone’s attention to the Guardian‘s new series on European “populism”. You can read its opening salvo here, and you can follow the whole series here. You can even do the quiz to find out how much of a populist its experts think you are (I came out closest to Barack Obama).

For a while there, I thought people had stopped using “populist” as the label for the anti-democratic forces that many of us are concerned about, and were adopting more honest and precise terms like “far-right nationalist”, or just “Trumpist”. So I don’t know if the Guardian is just behind the curve, or if this is a new wave of confusion.

Nonetheless, some of their material on election results looks interesting; I’ll study it when I get the chance and report back. But my general view is that the…

This is a sad story but also a story of stupidity, even if John Chau couldn’t have done other than what he did.

What Chau did, as recounted in the story in the Guardian (click on screenshot), was to hire locals to take him to North Sentinel Island, one of the remote Andaman and Nicobar Islands that are territories of India.

And that island is home to the Senitelese, who firmly reject any contact with the outside world. They’ll fire arrows at anyone who comes near, including an Indian helicopter investigating possible damage to the island after the tsunami of 2004. Two years later, two Indian fishermen whose boat accidentally drifted ashore on North Sentinel were killed by the locals. It’s not a good idea to go there.

But Chau was on a mission from God: he wanted to introduce the Senitelese to Jesus. He approached the island…