Utopia, you are standing in it!

Mark Bauerlein explains the dichotomy in his Federalist article With Anti-Woke College Trustee Picks, DeSantis Chips Away At The Political Poison In Education.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Something remarkable happened in fifth-century Athens when Socrates set up shop, conversed freely on the things of this world, and followed the truth wherever it would lead. It also happened in 1609 when University of Padua professor Galileo Galilei pointed his telescope at the moon and found that the heavenly orb wasn’t as pure and smooth as everyone said. It happened in America as well when in 1940, the American Association of University Professors issued its “Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure,” which hailed “the free search for truth and its free exposition.”

However, no group has been less tolerant of dissent than the academic left, neither Christian fundamentalists nor corporate donors who like to see their…

Bill McKibben: King of the Climate Cult

Eco-zealots, like Bill McKibben reckon rural folk just can’t wait to get 240m high wind turbines whirling in their backyard; and that if they express any resistance to such a ‘golden opportunity’, it’s all down to the nefarious activities of ‘evil’ fossil fuel overlords and right wingers spreading “misinformation” about how wonderful it is to be surrounded by hundreds of giant 300 tonne monsters, grinding and thumping away all night long.

McKibben is not alone in his unhinged belief that ‘dark forces’ at work; the MSM is filled with plenty of co-travellers – cynical characters who couldn’t care less about hard-working rural communities – they call it ‘flyover country’; a class that treats America’s farmers with ridicule and contempt, at the best of times.

So, when rural communities began to push back in earnest against wind and solar power outfits ready to wreck…

From the Samizdata blogsite comes this nice set of reflections following the death of the renowned historian Paul Johnson.

Paul Johnson, one of the great figures of post-war British journalism, has died at the grand age of 94. He was the author of about 50 books, and I read several of them in my youth. Of all the books, the one that stands out for me is Modern Times. That was a one-volume study of the 20th century.

Johnson was unafraid to challenge stereotypes. He defended US Presidents Harding, Coolidge and Nixon from the reputational shade cast upon them and was unsparingly hard on the likes of F D Roosevelt and JFK. He slammed the United Nations, lauded the NATO alliance, and pointed out how so many “third world” countries went disastrously wrong in embracing Fabian socialist ideas after the Western empires ended. In that sense, he gave every…

Solar panels were meant to be all sunshine and lollipops, with nothing but tingly virtuous feelings for their subsidised owners. With an effective economic lifespan of little more than a decade – after 12 years in service their output is nothing like their original capacity and at the 15-year mark, it becomes a pointless fraction, especially if they’re not cleaned on a very regular basis. Which is the reason why millions of panels are already being crushed and dumped in landfills, with millions more to follow.

Got a landfill in your neighbourhood? Well it’s probably time to do some homework and what is being dumped there.

Solar panels are a veritable toxic cocktail of gallium arsenide, tellurium, silver, crystalline silicon, lead, cadmium and other heavy metals. Ground up and dumped in their millions into landfills, it’s not difficult to imagine the effect on water supplies, the environment and human health…

The Kingdom of Greece was established in 1832 and was the successor state to the First Hellenic Republic. It was internationally recognised by the Treaty of Constantinople, where Greece also secured its full independence from the Ottoman Empire after nearly four centuries of Ottoman rule.

Background

The Greek-speaking Eastern Roman Empire, also known as Byzantine Empire, which ruled most of the Eastern Mediterranean region for over 1100 years, had been fatally weakened since the sacking of Constantinople by the Latin Crusaders in 1204.

The Ottomans captured Constantinople with ease in 1453 and advanced southwards into the Balkan peninsula capturing Athens in 1458. The Greeks held out in the Peloponnese until 1460, and the Venetians and Genoese clung to some of the islands, but by 1500 most of the plains and islands of Greece were in Ottoman hands. While in contrast, the mountains and highlands of Greece were largely untouched, and…

There’s sometimes a stereotype that in poor countries with low car ownership, alternatives to the car are flourishing. I saw a post on Mastodon making this premise, and pointed out already in comments that this is not really true. This is a more detailed version of what I said in 500 characters. In short, in most of the third world, non-car transportation is bad, and nearly all ridership (on jitneys and buses) is out of poverty, as is most walking. While car ownership is low, the elites who do own cars dominate local affairs, and therefore cities are car-dominated and not at all walkable, even as 90%+ of the population does not own a car.

What’s more, the developing countries that do manage to build good public transportation don’t stay developing for long. The same development model of Japan, the East Asian Tigers, and now China has built both…