Utopia, you are standing in it!

Artist’s impression [credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser]
From Phys.org:
Is there life beyond our solar system? If there is, our best bet for finding it may lie in three nearby, Earth-like exoplanets.

For the first time, an international team of astronomers from MIT, the University of Liège in Belgium, and elsewhere have detected three planets orbiting an ultracool dwarf star, just 40 light years from Earth.

The sizes and temperatures of these worlds are comparable to those of Earth and Venus, and are the best targets found so far for the search for life outside the solar system. The results are published today in the journal Nature.

Summary: Today Martin van Creveld looks at one of the most exceptional aspects of US defense policy, our weapons. A naïf would describe it as quite mad, unaware of the lavish salaries and great corporate fortunes created by tapping the almost limitless flow of taxes from the apathetic and credulous citizens of America.

“In the year 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase just one aircraft. This aircraft will have to be shared by the Air Force and Navy 3-1/2 days each per week except for leap year, when it will be made available to the Marines for the extra day.
— One of Augustine’s Laws.

“White Elephants”

By Martin van Creveld
From his website, 28 April 2016

Posted with his generous permission

At least since 9/11, and possibly since the First Gulf War back in 1991, it has been clear that the most immediate threat facing…

By Andrew Bolt ~

The Australian Labor Party will open us up to being rorted blind by carbon credit shysters trading in hot air.

Here is Labor’s plan:

Labor’s Climate Change Action Plan will … create new opportunities for Australian firms to trade and engage with other ETS [emissions trading scheme] jurisdictions – already 40 per cent of the world’s economy.

Labor’s plan [is] for an Emissions Trading Scheme with access to international carbon offsets…

Here is New Zealand’s latest experience with such schemes which allow business to buy a certificate from people overseas who claim they’ve cut their own emissions by so much that their certificate allows the buyer to emit a little more – at a modest charge:

The New Zealand government may have participated in major climate fraud through the use of dodgy “hot air” carbon credits issued by the Ukraine and Russia, according to a new…

“Parliament is not a congressof ambassadors from different and hostile interests; which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates” but rather “a deliberativeassembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole” (E. Burke, Speech to the Electors of Bristol, 3 November 1774). With these words, Edmund Burke conveyed a clear message to his electors on 3 November 1744: though chosen in a specific constituency, he was “not a member of Bristol”, but “a member of Parliament”. What does it mean, after the introduction of the EVEL procedure into the House of Commons, to be a Member of Parliament? Is there a risk that “different and hostile interests” will prevail upon “the interest of the whole”?

These questions stem from the observation that EVEL procedure, introduced on 22 October 2015 by amending the Standing Orders, “territorializes” the House of…

There’s an old legal saying that goes something like, “When the facts are on your side, pound on the facts; when the law is on your side, pound on the law; when neither are on your side, pound on the table.”

We’ve heard a lot of table-pounding in response to our discussion of sugar taxes in Jenesa’s report. Most of it points out that we’re a member-based organisation and darkly hints that member interests guided our pens.

John Roughan’s column this week is very much on point.

If you wonder why social research never produces unexpected results like real science, so do I. Be that as it may, the researchers share their findings in academic journals and convinced of its importance they march fearlessly out of their faculty into the public domain.

There, something strange happens. They are lionised by the media. Public health campaigns make compelling news because…