Utopia, you are standing in it!

Wherever the wind industry plies it subsidy-soaked trade, there’s a wave of avian carnage, and offshore is no exception.

While Greta & Co fret about global incineration and mass extinctions, the wind industry is doing a very fine job of extinguishing millions of birds and bats, every year. Indeed, entire species are under threat, including Europe’s Red Kite and Tasmania’s Wedge Tailed Eagle.

Plans to erect thousands more of these things around Britain’s coasts, spell the death knell for millions of seabirds, with several species under threat.

The offshore wind industry is already exacting a phenomenal toll on a whole range of seabirds in the waters surrounding Britain, including the Lesser Black-backed gull, as Jason Endfield details below.

Alarming 99% Decline In Gulls Raises Questions Over Expanding Wind Farms
Jason Endfield Blog
Jason Endfield
6 May 2022

A shocking 99% decline in the population of Lesser Black-backed gulls raises…

Fortune, which has great influence in affairs generally and especially in war, produces by a slight disturbance of balance important changes in human affairs.
(The Civil War Book 3 chapter 68)

I picked up this 1967 Penguin paperback of Julius Caesar’s Civil Wars, translated by Jane Gardner, in the sensible A format size (18 cm by 11 cm) with reassuringly browned paper, in a second hand bookshop for just £2. Though nearly 60 years old it has fewer scuff marks and scratches than a book I recently bought ‘new’ from Amazon, ‘destroyer of books’, whose cover was smeared, scuffed and scratched.

This Penguin volume actually contains four ‘books’:

• The Civil War, the longest text at 112 short ‘chapters’ or sections (often no more than paragraphs), making up 130 Penguin pages
• The Alexandrian War (78 sections, 42 pages)
• The African War (98 sections, 49 pages)
• The Spanish War (42…

A new online pharmacy funded by Mark Cuban promises to sell prescription drugs at a fixed markup, 15% over cost plus a $3 flat fee. What’s the catch?

As far as I can tell, there are two- they only sell generics, and they don’t take insurance. But I think this will still save many people a lot of money.

The most expensive drugs get that way because they are sold by monopolies, almost always because they were invented less than 20 years ago and are still on-patent. But it’s still possible for older drugs to be sold at huge markups, as Martin Shkreli could tell you now that he’s out of prison (Shkreli’s case is supposedly what inspired Dr. Alex Oshmyansky to start this pharmacy). Sometimes you can still blame these markups on monopolies, just induced by the FDA instead of patents. But even for generic drugs with competitive manufacturing…

The United States is a uniquely violent country among high-income democracies. And by the best available data on homicides, the US has always been more violent. Homicides are useful to look at because we generally have the best data on these (murders are the most likely crime to be reported) and it’s the most serious of all violent crimes.

Just how much more violent is the US than other high-income democracies? As measured by the homicide rate, about 6-7 times as violent. We can see this first by comparing the US to several European countries (and a few groupings of similar countries).

Let me make a few things clear about this chart. First, this is data for homicides, which are typically defined as interpersonal violence. Thus, it excludes deaths on the battlefield, genocides, acts of terrorism (generally speaking), and other deaths of this nature. That’s how it is defined. If…

Image credit: Zelp
An own goal for NZ farming. Where is the greenhouse they’re so frightened of? From livestock to laughing stock.
– – –
New Zealand has unveiled a plan to tax sheep and cattle burps in a bid to tackle one of the country’s biggest sources of greenhouse gases, says BBC News.

It would make it the first nation to charge farmers for the methane emissions from the animals they keep.

New Zealand is home to just over five million people, along with around 10 million cattle and 26 million sheep.

Almost half the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture, mainly methane.

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

“Suggesting thatrenewableswill 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 theEaster Bunny and Tooth Fairy.
–James Hansen
(Former NASA-climate chief)

•

Quality analysis from a quality journalist of the traditional Left, Chris Uhlmann.

Uhlmann’s well considered article ends here for mine …

“Germany stands as a stark testimony. It has spent more than€500 billion ($743 billion) transitioning its electricity system, boosting wind and solarto more than 45 per cent of generation since 2000. But it had to keep 89 per cent of its fossil-fired capacity to deal with the problems caused by calm, dark days. It now boasts Europe’smost expensive retail powerand is strategically exposed becausethe country can’t function without imported gas.”

What a relief. It turned out like the fundamentals of this state said it should all along. But the risk was high. Maybe those polls that showed the recall ahead or close were just rogues. But a process that lets a motivated minority potentially replace an effective but unexciting incumbent with someone elected by a small percentage of the vote is deeply undemocratic.

It needs to be reformed before an extremist minority puts us through such an attempted power grab again, and maybe pulls it off.So this planting is all about brainstorming for some possible improvements to the process.

As I have noted before, I oppose recalls in principle, at least against the elected chief executive. I explained why in the first in my series on this recall. But for this discussion, I will assume we are stuck with a recall provision, and only focus on how it could be…

To date over 16,000 books have been written on Abraham Lincoln, so why another? In the current case, John Avlon a former Daily Beast editor, author of serious studies of political centrism, and a current CNN analyst has authored LINCOLN AND THE FIGHT FOR PEACE AND FREEDOM which takes a unique approach toward our 16^th president. The book focuses on the six weeks from Lincoln’s second inauguration through his assassination as the Civil War finally concluded and the war over the peace had begun. According to Avlon, Lincoln evolved into the conciliator-in-chief in his approach to the south and was vehemently against a punitive peace. Lincoln sought to reunite the country through empathy, understanding, humility and a deep belief that in order to bring the country together after four years of war and over 600,000 casualties a reconstruction policy must be implemented that was perceptive of the…

After the excitement of her US visit and White  House call, PM Jacinda Ardern is  now  engaged in  the  harsh realities of  running  a  government that  appears  to be  crumbling  by  the  week.

Ministers  are  tripping  over  themselves – this  week it  was Police Minister Poto Williams who became the   butt  of  Opposition calls  for her  to be  sacked.  Then there  were  the  polls charting  a  governing party’s  falling popularity, despite  a huge spend-up  in the latest budget.

The One News Kantar poll at the end of  May put Labour’s  support  down  at 35%. Then came the Roy Morgan poll which had Labour even lower, at 31.5%.

This is  the sixth Roy Morgan sampling to  show  there would be a change of  government  if there were an election now.  According to Ipsos polling, people rate  National as  more capable than Labour on four out of the five top issues –…

This essay was first published at The Conversation news siteon June 2, 2022, and appears here slightly edited.

The “Napalm Girl” photograph of terror-stricken Vietnamese children fleeing an errant aerial attack on their village — taken 50 years ago today — has rightly been called “a picture that doesn’t rest.”

‘Napalm girl,’ 1972 (Nick Ut/AP)

It is one of those exceptional visual artifacts that draws attention and even controversy years after it was made.

Last month, for example, Nick Ut, the photographer who captured the image, and the photo’s central figure, Phan Thi Kim Phuc, made news at the Vatican as they presented a poster-size reproduction of the prize-winning image to Pope Francis, who has emphasized the evils of warfare.

In 2016, Facebook stirred controversy by deleting “Napalm Girl” from a commentary posted at the network because the photograph shows the then-9-year-old Kim…