Utopia, you are standing in it!

This is the second post drawing on themes raised in Searching for the Catastrophe Signal.

Forty-five years ago today, two geologists penned a letter to the president of the United States warning that the rocky descent into the next ice age might have already begun.

A letter written by two Quaternary geologists George Kukla and Robert Matthews to Richard Nixon raised concerns that recent bad weather might indicated that the present interglacial was ending. This letter helped to set in train a series of events that raised the profile of climate anxieties in the USA and globally. Source: Reeves & Gemmill.

The year 1972 remains infamous in the annals of meteorology for extreme weather events all around the globe. Towards the end of that year, in a letter dated 3 December 1972, two geologists George Kukla and Robert Matthews warned President Nixon that…

What is a ‘No Deal’ Brexit? Part of the (sometimes deliberate) confusion around this is that there are, essentially, three deals to be done between the UK and the EU. The decision tree looks something like this:

Chart made with SmartDraw

Deal 1: Article 50 Agreement

This is an agreement on the terms of separation. It includes things like:

• Liability for pensions for EU staff;
• Share of the European Investment Bank;
• Funding commitments made by the UK for projects beyond March 2019;
• Relocation of EU agencies in the UK;
• Rights of UK and EU citizens after March 2019.

As Anand Menon says, a failure to agree on these basic terms could happen in two ways; the UK walking away from the negotiations or a timeout where no agreement is reached by  the March 2019 deadline. This is what Professor Menon called the Chaotic Brexit:

In the early hours of June 27^th Palestinian terrorists in the Gaza Strip once again launched rockets at Israeli civilians.

“Rocket sirens blared throughout the predawn hours of Wednesday morning in the Israeli communities surrounding the Gaza Strip as Palestinians launched over a dozen rockets at southern Israel after the military struck a Hamas vehicle in the center of the coastal enclave.

The alarms rang out in towns and small communities throughout the Eshkol, Sha’ar Hanegev, Sdot Negev and Hof Ashkelon regions, several times from approximately 1:45 a.m. to 4 a.m., sending thousands of Israeli running into bomb shelters.

At least three rockets were intercepted by the Iron Dome missile defense system. There were no reports of casualties or damage in Israel. In addition, no rocket impacts were reported inside Israeli communities.”

Twelve hours after the last incident took place, there is still no mention of the attacks whatsoever on…

Cities across the country have brought novel lawsuits seeking to hold oil companies responsible for climate change—in particular, the city’s cost to adapt to rising seas and other climate change impacts. Although property owners can generally sue those who damage their property, these cases are unusually complicated because of the number of contributors to climate change and uncertainty about where it’s impacts will be felt, when, and how costly they will be.

On June 26th, a federal court dismissed the first of these lawsuits, brought by two California cities. This is a significant setback for the cities pursuing this approach and signals similar results in the other cases.

The cases have been controversial, to put it mildly. Earlier this year, the Niskanen Center’s David Bookbinder (who represents Boulder, Colorado in one of these suits) and R Street Institute’s Josiah Neeley and William Murray had a thoughtful debate about using the…

This article in the New York Times‘s philosophy section “The Stone”, is a mixed bag, but on the whole not a bag that’s so great (click on screenshot to read it). The author is a professor of philosophy at Wuhan University, Yale-NUS College and Vassar College, as well as the author of Taking Back Philosophy: A Multicultural Manifesto. 

Click on the screenshot to read it:

Van Norden’s point is that not everyone deserves a platform to espouse their ideas, even if they deserve free speech in the Constitutional sense: freedom from government censorship. And I don’t think many of us would disagree with that. I am not, for instance, going to invite a creationist to speak to my department, though I didn’t try to prevent someone in physics from doing that a few years ago. I wouldn’t invite Alex Jones to speak here, either. But that doesn’t mean that…

I have a column in The Hill today on the decision of the Supreme Court in favor of the Trump Administration on the travel ban.  After the first travel ban decision, I predicted that (while lower courts might disagree) the Supreme Court would reverse on the heavy reliance on President Donald Trump’s campaign statements and tweets.  For prior columns, click here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here.  Nevertheless, critics have cried foul at the 5-4 decision, including Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, has said that this creates a dangerous imbalance in the separation of powers.  I believe the opposite is true.

PetSmart filed a lawsuit on Monday against a paid operative for People for the Extortion, Torture and Abuse of human beings (PETA) named Jenna Jordan. Jordan is accused in the suit of collecting information at a Bellevue, Florida location in order to implicate the animal care chain in animal abuse. According to News Channel 5, the lawsuit alleges that the PETA campaigner was fired by a zoo in the state a year before.

The Bellevue store was raided by police March 29th based on photos and video taken at the establishment in which PETA alleged animals cared for at the location were being mistreated. The lawsuit also states Jordan not only refused to give animals proper veterinary care, but did so in her campaign against PetSmart which was consistent with PETA’s militant philosophy and tactics.

The animal rights movement is not only a means of achieving the end of…

On June 25^th a report titled “Iran economic protests shut Tehran’s Grand Bazaar” was published on the BBC News website’s Middle East page.

“Traders at Tehran’s Grand Bazaar have taken part in a big protest against rising prices and the plummeting value of Iran’s currency, the rial.

Shops were shut and thousands of people took to the streets of the capital.

Riot police later fired tear gas to disperse the demonstrators as they marched towards parliament.”

The article went on to explain that:

“Fears about the impact of the US sanctions that will start to be reinstated in August and possibly trigger the collapse of the nuclear deal has led to the rial falling to a record low against the dollar on the unofficial foreign exchange market.”

However, one aspect of those demonstrations in Tehran and additional locations did not receive any BBC coverage. MEMRI reports that: