On this blog/Facebook page, I try very hard to stick to scientific facts and avoid discussing politics. Nevertheless, I am frequently accused of being political, even when I am simply reporting a fact. For example, I often post facts about climate change, such as the fact that 2014, 2015, and 2016 all set new records for the warmest year (on average), and when I do that, I nearly always receive comments accusing me of “liberal propaganda” or “pushing a liberal agenda,” but that’s not how facts work. It is demonstrably true that all of those years were the warmest on record, and politics has absolutely nothing to do with it. In other words, facts are inherently not political. They are simply statements of reality. To be clear, facts can, of course, be used to make political arguments and to try to persuade people of a particular political position, but the…

Australia’s energy policy is a joke, but a plan to send subsidised solar power to Singapore proves lunatics really have taken over the asylum.

The Morrison Federal government has given major project status to a 500KW undersea cable to run from Darwin to Singapore over a distance of at least 3,350 km.

The cost of the cable alone will be staggering. Then, considering the fact that solar panels deliver power around 25% of the time (on average), the cost of any electricity that occasionally makes landfall in Singapore will be positively astronomical.

STT nearly choked on our porridge when we learnt that the notionally conservative Liberal/National Coalition was backing yet another massively subsidised renewable energy white elephant. Michael Darby must have suffered the same near-death experience. Here he is, suitably outraged about an outrageous waste of taxpayers’ money.

Flogging Unreliable Energy By Extension Cord To Singapore Looks Like An Outrageous…

COVID1984 – get TRUMP – November 3rd

“Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely
exercised for the good of its victims
may be the most oppressive.”
– C. S. Lewis

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed
 (and hence clamorous to be led to safety)
 by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins,
all of them imaginary.”
– H.L. Mencken

***

MUST READ analysis, by a concerned citizen (aka voter), of what’s really going on in the Orwellian world of COVID-19 and the politics of statistics.

via Cairns News :

No more recorded influenza cases in Australia

Letter to the Editor

Government lies, damn lies and statistics

Victorian Population – 6,359,000

• COVID tests conducted – 1,633,900
• COVID cases – 11,557
• Positive cases to Victorian population – 0.18%
• Positive Case to Test Conducted Percentage – 0.70%
• COVID Deaths…

Andrew Sullivan’s site is still free, but will shortly go to a fee scheme whereby you can pay $50 a year for full access (I’ve already subscribed). The format is still a weekly tripartite column, but with additions like his famous “The View from My Window” contest, in which readers have to guess exactly where a reader’s photo was taken. There’s also selected feedback from readers, which Andrew answers.

This week’s column (click on screenshot below) has a section on diversity, one on the possibility of a rebuilt Republican Party, and a small “1620 project” piece, in which Sullivan extols the Pilgrims’ arrival in America and, sadly, has gone back to extolling religion as well. I’ll concentrate on the diversity bit, but here’s an excerpt from his “1620 project” piece (the name, of course, is mocking the NYT’s “1619 Project”):

The [Mayflower] Compact was a way to keep the company…

The latest gambit of Woke politics is to trawl back through everyone’s history, and, if you find something unsavory, that person must be canceled. Now sometimes this is okay, as when statues are taken down that honored Confederates, particularly postbellum statues meant to solidify the established system of segregation. (I’d prefer, however, that those statues be left in place with a prominent caveat.)

But when you do that with scientific names, it causes a problem.  Sometimes a “problematic” person is part of a species’ name, either the common name like Audubon’s shearwater (Puffinus lherminieri), or both the common name and the Latin binomial, like these birds: Audubon’s warbler (Setophaga auduboni), Townsend’s warbler (Setophaga townsendi), Hammond’s flycatcher (Empidonax hammondii) , and McCown’s longspur (Rhynchophanes mccownii). These names confer instant communication between birders and other biologists, and the Latin binomials are entrenched…