Utopia, you are standing in it!

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) had a fascinating podcast that was done earlier this year that describes not just what the anti-vaccine movement is all about, but it’s overall underpinnings. Among them are environmentalist influences which include overlap with animal rights groups. U.C. Berkeley’s Dr. Elena Conis was among the historians interviewed in which she notes the backlash against the measles vaccine helped laid the groundwork for today’s opposition to immunization that intertwined with the Woodstock years.

Running time is almost 30 minutes and you can listen to the podcast here. The New York Times also published a very good article last year about how the backlash against vaccines got started in the United States as well.

PHOTO CREDIT:A cartoon from a December 1894 anti-vaccination publication

According to both the New York Times and Variety, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which awards the annual Oscars, has set new diversity standards for the Best Picture award. The standards, though they don’t apply to other categories like Best Actor, could apply to other awards like Best Animated Feature and Best International Feature, and, according to Variety (which has the better of the two articles), these categories will be addressed later.

The action is a response to the outcry about the lack of diversity in awards as well as the composition of the Academy, which led to the well known #OscarsSoWhite campaign in 2015. In response to the lack of diversity (racial diversity, though the adjective is rarely mentioned), the Academy did make and fulfill a promise to double the number of women and minority members between 2016 and 2020. This new initiative is meant…

Californians & South Australians know the drill: when the sun sets and/or calm weather sets in, be sure to have flashlights and diesel generators at the ready.

The first few minutes of a mass blackout can be kind of exhilarating; the candles come out, adding romance to the evening Uber Eats dining experience and, with TVs inoperable, the potential for a little uninterrupted conversation.

Then the portable devices run flat – mobile phones and tablets run out of juice and, should the blackout last more than a couple of hours, the mobile phone network itself runs dead.

Dimly lit romance, soon turns to a “what do we do, next?” form of panic.

Before we started our love affair with wind and solar, it would take a violent (often electrical) storm to deliver mass blackouts. Now a burst of calm and/or cloudy weather will do the job.

Of course, windmills and…

President Trump has recently ordered federal agencies to stop teaching critical race theory. While Trump’s order is a good move, unfortunately, there are other critical theories the Left has in its quiver that they can utilize. The president’s next step should be to prohibit federal funding of schools that teach critical race or any Marxist-oriented critical theory.

As it turns out, the Marxist indoctrination of students using Marxist-based critical theories went into overdrive thanks to Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama. As Thomas Sowell explains in the video below, Harvard Professor Derrick Bell was not only a racist but also the ideology’s incubator to Obama.

NOTE: Despite being ethnically Jewish, Karl Marx was a rabid anti-Semite.

See the French translation

How is it that some  environmental NGOs can continually distort facts (lie), misrepresent themselves (deceive) and relentlessly promote idealistic policies widely known to be environmentally, economically and societally disastrous without losing public support? Not only are these horrible people still welcome at the policy table in Brussels, they are often leading the meetings and directing the debates (over a cliff).

In this third part of my State of the NGOs series I’ll try to understand how this activist Teflon veneer continues to breed a socially-accepted hypocrisy. I’ll consider how the NGOs know they do not have to follow the same rules as everyone else, and how they profit from it. Like Part 1 of this series, which looked at the need to scrutinise how NGOs waste public funds with no accountability nor transparency, and Part 2, which considered how the wily social media upstarts and…

Richard I (September 8, 1157– April 6, 1199) was King of England from 1189 until his death. He also ruled as Duke of Normandy, Aquitaine and Gascony, Lord of Cyprus, and Count of Poitiers, Anjou, Maine, and Nantes, and was overlord of Brittany at various times during the same period.

Richard was the third of five sons of King Henry II of England and Duchess Eleanor of Aquitaine and seemed unlikely to become king, but all his brothers except the youngest, John, predeceased their father. Richard is known as Richard Cœur de Lion (Norman French: Le quor de lion) or Richard the Lionheart because of his reputation as a great military leader and warrior. The troubador Bertran de Born also called him Richard Oc-e-Non (Occitan for Yes and No), possibly from a reputation for terseness.

By the age of 16, Richard had taken command of his own army, putting down…

In September of 2003, Britain’s Channel 4 TV network began airing The First World War, a 10-part series based on historian Hew Strachan’s eponymous book about the cataclysmic conflict that broke out in the summer of 1914 and ended on the “11^th hour, of the 11^th day, of the 11^th month” in 1918. Produced and narrated by Jonathan Lewis (The Boer War, Stalin), the 500-minutes-long documentary is an engrossing overview of World War I that explodes many of the clichés and myths about the conflict that shaped the 20^th Century and whose repercussions echo well into the 21^st.

The series’ writing credits include Strachan and various historical figures from whose memoirs and other writings much of the narrative is drawn, including Karen Blixen (Out of Africa)…