Utopia, you are standing in it!

Aliens (1986) Director: James Cameron

“You’re going out there to destroy them, right? Not to study. Not to bring back, but to wipe them out?“

★★★★☆

Aliens is a remarkable action film. In some ways it is James Cameron’s radical departure from the classic original Alien (1979) which was directed by Ridley Scott. By all accounts it should have been a cheap, sophomoric effort but Aliens is a surprisingly powerful roller-coaster of a sequel. Beset by roadblocks and lawsuits, a sequel to Alien was delayed for some seven years.

Aliens picks up 57 years after the original. Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) has been floating through space while in stasis and she happens to be picked up and returned to members of her company at the “Weyland-Yutani Corporation.” She explains to them what happened to the Nostromo, but the leadership do not believe her story about an alien race on…

Posted by Sara M. Butler, 19 May 2021.

On July 1, 2021, Ohio courts are entering into a new age of bail reform. Ohio’s Supreme Court ruled recently that not only must all Ohio counties adopt a uniform monetary bail schedule, but before resorting to cash bail, the courts must explore the option of release on non-monetary personal recognizance.[1] The motivation behind this extraordinary change is socioeconomic: it has long been recognized that the bail system privileges the rich. Those who cannot afford to cough up the cash for bail (or, at least the 10% required by a bail bondsman) are left to languish in prison until trial. This is true even of those accused of minor crimes, in which, if convicted, the maximum prison sentence would be less than the time it takes for the case to work its way through the judicial system to trial. Despite the…

Jordan Peterson delves into the reasons why Marxist ideology fails both in theory and in practice.  For those like me who prefer to read a text, I have made a transcript of Peterson’s talk, with some light editing to transpose a verbal presentation into a written one.  My bolds are added.  H/T Chiefio.

Jordan Peterson’s critique of the Communist Manifesto

Since we are talking about Marxism, I tried to reread the Communist Manifesto. The first time I read it I was 18 years old, more than 40 years ago. When you read something, you you don’t just follow the words and follow the meaning, but you take apart the sentences. And you ask yourself:

At this level of phrase and at the level of sentence and at the level of paragraph, is this true?
Are there counter arguments that can be put forward that are credible?
Is this solid thinking?

Climate models overheating

Explanation, or vague excuses? They seem to be saying the models are a wonder, just a shame they don’t reflect reality – mainly due to pesky natural variation.
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A new study led by Dr. Wei and Dr. Qiao from the First Institute of Oceanography, Ministry of Natural Resources provides an evaluation of the performance of the newly released CMIP6 models in simulating the global warming slowdown observed in the early 2000s, says Phys.org.

This study reveals that the key in simulating and predicting near-term temperate change is to correctly separate and simulate the two distinct signals, i.e., the human-induced long-term warming trend and natural variabilities, especially those at interannual, interdecadal and multidecadal scales.