Utopia, you are standing in it!

The New York Times Magazine has a very long article on Robin DiAngelo, her white fragility hypothesis (and her best-selling book about it), and her methods of training people in government, colleges, and businesses to be anti-racist and promote diversity in the workplace. As the article notes, she’s made a ton of money off her hypothesis, but I don’t begrudge her that. After all, the Kardashians, who are completely useless, make much more. Rather, I’ll focus on the efficacy of her methods and whether her very message is consistent. If you read this site yesterday, you’ll have seen a post about John McWhorter’s take on DiAngelo’s book White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism, a take that was not only highly critical, but accused her methods of fostering a bigotry of low expectations towards African-Americans.

The NYT piece, which is pretty positive, raises…

Experimental E-plane [image credit: Siemens]
If only batteries could lose some of their heavy weight during flight, matching the reductions achieved by burning fuel, he might be onto something. But as they can’t, this looks like more pie in the sky.
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Exclusive: Acting Liberal Democrat leader calls for green short haul flights to be UK’s next “moon landing mission”, reports i-news.

Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey is calling for all domestic flights to be zero carbon by 2030, arguing the target must become the UK’s new “moon landing mission”.

Commercial planes run mainly on fossil fuels, and engineers are struggling to design a zero carbon passenger jet to replace them.

New ‘Green’ Deal Democrats, headed by AOC’s Squad are determined to destroy the USA from the inside. Presidential hopeful, Sleepy Joe Biden appears equally determined to help them.

The Democrats have been doing the bidding of America’s cabal of crony capitalists who designed the wind and solar scam for years; characters who’ve made obscene profits from massive taxpayer subsidies to renewable energy and who are obviously very keen for more of the same.

Back in April, the Democrats went on the offensive in an effort to help America’s renewable energy rent seekers snaffle $billions from Trump’s $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus and failed. AOC and her Squad are still at it.

Paul Driessen takes a look at what might happen in the US in the event that these lunatics ever get anywhere near the controls.

Report renewable energy risks, too
Watts Up With That?
Paul Driessen
9 July 2020

Joe…

When we study history, we tend to focus on the lives of the elite and the royalty because their lives are well documented. However, there was a large majority of the population who tends to be forgotten in the annals of the past. They are the lower classes who were the backbone of society for centuries, the people who we would call peasants. Now, if we know so much about the higher echelons of society, we must ask ourselves what was life like for those who had almost nothing in life. How did they work? When they did speak out about injustices through revolutions, how were they received? How did they worship? How were they educated? How did they relax after long days of back-breaking labor? Where did they live? These questions and more are answered in Terry Deary’s latest book, “The Peasants’ Revolting Lives”.

I would like to thank…

John McWhorter is a professor of comparative literature at Columbia University (he specializes in Creole languages), is black, and appears, politically, to be a Liberal/Centrist.  That, at least, should give him enough credibility so that one couldn’t from the outset totally dismiss his piece at The American Interest called “Atonement as Activism.”

It’s a two-barreled indictment, first of activist, writer, and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates, about whom I can’t say much as I haven’t read him, and, second, about the self-flagellation of white people in the face of the indictments that Coates apparently levels at America: we’re a land of endemic, structural racism where blacks are due reparations and improvements in civil rights have been merely cosmetic.

All I can say is this: reparations is a hard problem, but I think something must be done to repair the damage of slavery and racism. That “something”, in my…

Knowing a bit about Robin DiAngelo‘s book White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism, having heard some of her lectures online, and also having read John McWhorter and listened to his exchanges with Glenn Loury, I was pretty sure that McWhorter’s review of DiAngelo’s book wouldn’t be full of encomiums. And indeed, it’s a pan.

Yes, I admit I haven’t read the book, and when I write about reviews like this one I’m always accused of not passing my own judgment on the book, but that’s like saying that you can’t criticize thumbscrews until you’ve had your digits crushed. At any rate, I’ll just present McWhorter’s take. I may read the book some time, but there are so many other books out there in the queue, and I’ve listened to several online lectures in which DiAngelo presents her thesis. (I’ve put one…

(April 9, 2018, Donald Trump and John Bolton)

In all candor I debated whether to purchase and read John Bolton’s new memoir THE ROOM WHERE IT HAPPENED: A WHITE HOUSE MEMOIR.  Apart from stealing the title from a song from the Broadway show “Hamilton” I believe that Bolton’s approach is about maximizing his book royalties rather serving democracy, something he claims he has done throughout his years in government service.  By eschewing an appearance before the House Impeachment hearings for his own self-serving interests is rather hypocritical and Bolton showed his true colors.  In the past whether arguing for an invasion of Iraq or other foreign adventures one at least saw a man whose beliefs were clear, in the present instance I wonder except for the fact that his reputation for never finding a war he didn’t like remains.  After reading Bolton’s somewhat self-serving memoir one gets the feeling…

If you think computer-assisted and computer-display modern cars are complicated (I do; I have a low-tech 2000 Honda), then you’re going to be blown away by this new 14-minute video about now the McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle jet fighter is controlled.  Col. Themely, who has flown these things in extenso, tells us what all the buttons are displays are for, though some of the displays aren’t activated because they’re classified. The amount of redundancy and safety features is impressive. Though the plane has been around since 1967, with continual upgrades, it remains a marvel of human ingenuity. And remember, every bit of this plane was made out of material wrested from the Earth, and designed by a mess of neurons in our heads.

Now guess what all this costs? After you’ve watched the video, click below the fold to find out, but guess first.  Oh, and the top speech is…

Rick first alerted me to the end of the popular rationalist blog Slate State Codex. Then it was all over my internet. I have never been a huge fan of the rationalist community, mostly because they don’t do history very well, but this is a big deal.

It has also produced some great conversation on both sides of the American cultural divide. Gideon Lewis-Kraus wrote an excellent meta-piece on the whole affair. Lewis-Kraus uses “Silicon Valley” as shorthand for the intellectual right. This is more correct than wrong, even though the region votes Democrat, because Silicon Valley is more of a mindset than a geographic place.

Lewis-Kraus’s Silicon Valley is a new, decentralized informational ecology. He contrasts Silicon Valley with the old media: big corporations trying to maintain a stranglehold on “the narrative.” (Lewis-Kraus readily admits he’s part of the old media.) For Lewis-Kraus, Silicon Valley is trying…

Lady Jane Grey (c. 1537 – February 12, 1554), also known as Lady Jane Dudley (after her marriage) and as “the Nine Days’ Queen”, was an English noblewoman and de facto Queen of England and Ireland from 10 July until 19 July 1553.

Lady Jane Grey was the eldest daughter of Henry Grey, 1st Duke of Suffolk, and his wife, Lady Frances Brandon, the second child and eldest daughter Princess Mary, and Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk. Princess Mary was the daughter of King Henry VII of England and Princess Elizabeth of York. This meant that Princess Mary was King Henry VIII’s younger sister.

Lady Jane Grey

The traditional view is that she was born at Bradgate Park in Leicestershire in October 1537, while more recent research indicates that she was born somewhat earlier, possibly in London, in late 1536 or in the spring of 1537. Jane had two younger…