Utopia, you are standing in it!

Fake news has a meaning, and its found in the presentation style of mainstream media journalists and their singular group think far left or “progressive” mind set, at the expense of every other reasonable perspective.

This mindset was never so brazenly displayed than in their rabid interrogation of National Party leader Judith Collins after Question Time today. Not only was their questioning rude and ignorant, they completely failed to grasp Ms Collin’s point, even though she voiced it over and over to them.

The press gallery basically acted as a very loud megaphone for the anti-free speech opinions and invalid accusations of the 2 MP Maori party that only achieved 1.2% of the vote.

Judith tried again and again to say she was questioning Jacinda Ardern in an effort to establish just what is in train with the govt and radical Maori as described in the He Puapua document. Her…

Benjamin Zycher at Real Clear Markets takes the NYT to task for its stupid article about fossil fuel infrastructure, awarding it The Dumbest New York Times Op-Ed of 2021.  Of course there are many months left for NYT to publish even worse inanities this year.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds. I have reorganized the content to juxtapose the wild claims with sober facts.

Summer still is weeks away, but already we have a winner in the fierce competition for the coveted title of “Dumbest New York Times opinion column of 2021.” The envelope please… and the winner is “Why Charles Koch Wins When Our Energy System Breaks Down,” by someone named Christopher Leonard. One really does have to read this column to grasp — actually, to marvel at — the inanity of Leonard’s argument, which can be summarized as follows.

Claim:
Our fossil-fuel infrastructure — pipelines in particular…

John McWhorter’s that is. He’s pictured here. He’s a linguist professor at Columbia University, where he also teaches philosophy and music history. His research speciality is creole languages.

Like most linguists he hates the sloppy use of words and grammar, but in this article he goes after the recent term “systemic racism” because he thinks it’s useless, unhelpful and racist itself.

But if the mantra is that what we need to do to solve black America’s problems is “get rid of systemic racism,” we’re in trouble. That analysis, be it explicit or tacit, is based on a third-grader’s understanding of how a society works. More importantly, that analysis does not help black people and often hurts us.

I’m always amused by academics who can’t see the political aspects of what they’re discussing, in this case the simple fact that “systemic racism” is far too politically useful to the…

The ‘Feudal System’ in England, as it is taught in schools, seems fairly simple and consistent, the result of the imposition by a small conquering minority of a system already developed beyond these shores, and modified even as it was imposed. But even in England it was extremely complex, developing fairly rapidly from the hour of its introduction, modified by the adoption of Saxon law and custom and by changing conditions within the kingdom, and even now still open to re-interpretation in many of its features. On the Continent, however, it differed greatly from country to country depending on the circumstances under which it developed. In those areas which have been studied, custom and feudal law varied widely and it would be quite impractical to try to cover the whole of Europe except in the most general terms. Outside northern France and those lands where feudalism was deliberately imported, England…

In order to worm their way into rural communities, wind industry goons employ a mix of varnished lies, deceit and old-school thuggery.

Over the last decade, wind power outfits have been able to beguile the gullible and hoodwink the unsuspecting.  They usually start with a colossal lie and work up from there.  However, as soon as locals rumble them, they retreat to a form of obfuscation and prevarication – dissembling over inconvenient facts, like a furtive schoolboy caught holding a slingshot a stone’s throw from a busted window.

When the lies and deceit cease to work, they resort to coercion and undue influence, as they bully the people they cynically call ‘stakeholders’ – to the extent required to get their projects up and running.

The problem for the wind industry arises from websites like STT, among others.

Laid out on this site, in over 3,000 posts, are the facts that…

Geriatrician Kate Gregorevic has tweeted a very useful thread of 8 common fears and excuses she has heard from those who are vaccine hesitant, together with her responses. These are so useful. Please copy to those in your life who may benefit from reading these.

Just received: My copy of Party Personnel Strategies: Electoral Systems and Committee Assignments.

A preview of most of Chapter 1 is available for free at Google Books. More details, including the table of contents, can be viewed at the book’s Oxford University Press page.

The back cover has the short summary, as well as some very kind words from other scholars:

The country cases covered in the book, each with its own chapter, are Germany, Japan, Israel, Portugal, Britain, and New Zealand. The research design leverages the electoral-system changes in Japan and New Zealand.

The book develops two “models” of party personnel practices, tested on the patterns of assignment of a party’s legislators to committees, broken down into three categories: high policy, public goods, and distributive. Under the expertise model, parties are assumed to want to harness the perceived expertise of their individual members by assigning them…