Utopia, you are standing in it!

The 160 pages or so of this tidy little book are like a pendant to ‘Battle Cry of Freedom’, McPherson’s vast 860-page history of the Civil War Era, which I have reviewed at length.

Crossroads of Freedom is part of a series called Pivotal Moments in American History. In his introduction McPherson says that, as you might expect, there were numerous important moments in the American Civil War, before going on to explain why he thinks the Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862 justifies his focus.

Why Antietam?

Closest the South ever came to victory In a nutshell it’s because Antietam was the closest the South came to taking Washington DC, an event which would have not just demoralised the North and possibly fatally weakened its army. Far more importantly, it would have a decisive step toward achieving the South’s primary war aim which was Recognition by the International…

What’s really powering Germany …

Germany’s 30,000 wind turbines continue to disappoint those who reckon ‘coal is dead’.  In the first half of 2021, wind power output plummeted by more than 20%, whereas Germany’s coal-fired power generators increased output by a whopping 38% over the same period.

So much for Germany’s ‘inevitable transition’ to an all wind and sun powered future – aka the ‘Energiewende’.

It’s almost like there’s some kind of conspiracy at work, with an outbreak of dead calm and cloudy weather all across Germany.

Pierre Gosselin reports on the latest lament from Germany’s wind and solar worshippers.

German Wind Power Production Plummets 20% In First Half 2021… Coal Power Consumption Jumps 38%!
No Tricks Zone
Pierre Gosselin
27 July 2021

What would we do without coal?

The first half of 2021 saw a massive 20% drop in wind power production in Germany … while “coal power saw…

Latest  opinion  polling  has   created  a  stir  among  the  political cognoscenti.  On   one  side, ACT’s  rise is being seen as  a  big  problem   for  National. From  another,  Labour’s   fall  by 9.7 points   from the  previous poll points to  sharp  disillusion  with the Ardern government.

TV3’s  AM Show  told viewers ACT’s  four-point  rise  to 11 % constitutes “soaring popularity”.  Well,  not  quite.

Then there seemed to be  a  general  judgement  that Judith Collins’ fall below  ACT  leader David  Seymour’s rating  signalled  her imminent  demise  as  National  leader.

In  reality,  the  Newshub Reid  Research poll’s  findings,  while  recording sharp shifts  from  its  previous  sampling,  weren’t  much  different   from  the   Colmar  Brunton  post-Budget poll  which  recorded  Labour  down  to  46%  from  its  previous highs   in the  fifties.

On August 4,1944 Anne Frank, her family and all the others hiding in the annex in the office building in Amsterdam are arrested.

Anne was 15 at the time, the same age my daughter is now. However my daughter is free to meet her friends, go to the shop, compete in rowing regattas and even free to go to school or the freedom to be embarrassed by her dad’s singing and dancing while he is cooking a dinner . Anne was denied all these freedoms that last years of her life.

Anne’s best friend was probably Kitty, not a human being ,but a diary. On August 1,1944 which was a Tuesday, 3 days before she was arrested, she wrote her last words to Kitty.

“Dearest Kitty,

“A bundle of contradictions” was the end of my previous letter and is the beginning of this one. Can you please tell me exactly…

George I (George Louis; German: Georg Ludwig; May 28, 1660 – June 11, 1727) was King of Great Britain and Ireland from August 1, 1714 and ruler of the Duchy and Electorate of Brunswick-Lüneburg (Hanover) within the Holy Roman Empire from January 23, 1698 until his death in 1727. He was the first British monarch of the House of Hanover.

George was born in the city of Hanover in the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg in the Holy Roman Empire. He was the eldest son of Ernst August, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, and his wife, Sophia of the Palatinate. Sophia was the granddaughter of King James I-VI of England, Scotland and Ireland through her mother, Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia.

For the first year of his life, George was the only heir to the German territories of his father and three childless uncles. George’s brother, Friedrich August, was born in 1661, and the…

This took place in front of a Buddhist temple in Lop Buri, Thailand and a similar incident took place in the city last year. While monkey gang fights in the Lopburi are nothing new, the number of the animals is massive. This largely due to reduced tourism resulting from the coronavirus outbreak in which tourists typically feed the monkeys.

Image byAndre MoutonfromPixabay

The good news keeps on coming: Belgium is worldwide in the top 15 of “Wind and Solar countries”. More specifically, we are at 9^th place having a share of 20% of our electricity production from solar and wind in 2020:

It didn’t end there. China, the EU-27 and the United States are responsible for more than two-thirds of global generation, Vietnam went from 0 to 14 TWh in just 3 years, Chile and South Korea have quadrupled their wind and solar generation since 2015, and many other countries (Brazil, China, India, Mexico, Turkey and Uruguay) have tripled it. Also, many countries now get around a tenth of their electricity, which is the global average for electricity generation from solar and wind.

Of course, the transition to solar and wind is going to be cheap. According the article, the cost for solar and wind are at a tipping point…

by Tim Harding B.Sc. B.A.

(An edited version of this essay was published in The Skeptic magazine, June 2016, Vol 36, No. 2, under the title ‘Out of the Dark’. A talk based on this essay was also presented to the 2016 Australian Skeptics National Convention in Melbourne). 

To the ancient Greeks, science was simply the knowledge of nature.  The acquisition of such knowledge was theoretical rather than experimental.  Logic and reason were applied to observations of nature in attempts to discover the underlying principles influencing phenomena.

After the Dark Ages, the revival of classical logic and reason in Western Europe was highly significant to the development of universities and subsequent intellectual progress.  It was also a precursor to the development of empirical scientific methods in the thirteenth century, which I think were even more important because of the later practical benefits of science to humanity.  The two most influential…