The two noteworthy incidents in Cancel Culture this week—a term that the woke hate but seems pretty accurate to me—were the attempted demonization of Steve Pinker, involving a letter demanding that the Linguistics Society of America rescind two of its honors to Steve, and a letter in Harper’s and four other international magazines calling out attempts of both Right and Left to prevent free speech and discussion by deploying or inciting Internet mobs. (There’s a good half-hour video of Pinker discussing both issues.)

As the controversy winds down, with, I think, the woke getting pretty badly pummeled despite their loudness on Twitter, we have one more item to read: a piece by Jesse Singal, former editor at New York Magazine and signer of the Harper’s letter, at Reason.com.  There’s some new stuff in Singal’s piece about the ridiculous pushback against a letter simply calling for an end of social-justice…

This letter in Areo (click on screenshot) gets the point of the Harper’s letter in a way that many outraged people and offended intellectuals didn’t. The author, who asserts that he’s a “nobody”, isn’t really: his Areo bio says this:

Angel Eduardo is writer, musician, photographer, and designer in New York City. He has been published in The Ocean State Review, The Caribbean Writer, and Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, among other publications. See more of his work at angeleduardo.com.

But never mind who he is.  His point is that, as Steve Pinker mentioned, the letter wasn’t there to protect the speech and hegemony of the many intellectuals who signed the letter; it was to call attention to a culture that demonizes and, worse, injures the livelihoods of “regular” people who committed ideological transgressions, usually on the Internet. This isn’t in the interest of debate or of producing “counterspeech”, but…

Past is past; the future is now (and it doesn’t depend on the weather).

Very few climate warriors bother to advocate for nuclear power, which is a fair indication of what’s driving them. If CO2 really was about to destroy the planet, Extinction Rebellion, Greta and her worshippers would be talking about switching to nuclear power like their lives depended on it.

Instead, for reasons that escape the logical and rational, we’re told that the only way forward is backwards: ie a life dependent upon the time of day and the weather.

Climate alarmists railing about carbon dioxide gas and not talking about nuclear power generation, can’t be taken seriously. Nuclear power is the only stand-alone power generation source that does not emit carbon dioxide gas during the process.

Whatever your views on climate change, the idea that trying to run modern, civil societies on sunshine and breezes might somehow…

The Edict of Expulsion was a royal decree issued by King Edward I of England on July 18, 1290 expelling all Jews from the Kingdom of England. Edward advised the sheriffs of all counties he wanted all Jews expelled by no later than All Saints’ Day (1 November) that year. The expulsion edict remained in force for the rest of the Middle Ages. The edict was not an isolated incident, but the culmination of over 200 years of increasing persecution. The edict was overturned during the Protectorate more than 350 years later, when Oliver Cromwell permitted Jews to return to England in 1657.

Background

The first Jewish communities of significant size came to England with William the Conqueror in 1066. After the conquest of England, William instituted a feudal system in the country, whereby all estates formally belonged to the Crown; the king then appointed lords over these vast estates…

Position of the Storegga Slide (west of Norway). The yellow numbers give the height of the tsunami wave as tsunamites recently studied by researchers [credit: Lamiot @ Wikipedia] – Mer du Nord = North Sea
The report states: ‘It is thought the tsunami, the largest to hit Northern Europe since the end of the last ice age, happened following a period of global climate change.’
We can only speculate as to the cause(s) of such climate happenings.
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Scientists have found new evidence of a massive tsunami that devastated ancient Britain in the year 6200 BC on the east coast of England, reports the Daily Mail.

The giant tsunami event, known as the Storegga Slide, was caused when an area of seabed the size of Scotland – around 30,000 square miles – under the Norwegian Sea suddenly shifted.

New geological evidence reveals three successive waves tore…

(1) Dr. John Campbell on the current situation in the UK

A few points for the impatient:

• antibody testing indicates that the official case numbers are an underestimate by about a factor of ten
• however, based on data from Sweden where they were able to test for memory T-cells (a much harder test), about twice as many people have immunity as the simpler antibody test indicates
• That corresponds, in aggregrate, to a Dunkelziffer (hidden infection rate) of about 20:1
• about 6% of school children in the UK have antibodies. Significantly, only 1 on 10 of them reported ever having had any symptoms. Or, to put it differently, 90% of cases in that age bracket are asymptomatic. I have been suspecting for a while that not just severity of the disease is age-dependent, but also the rate of symptomatic infection.

(2) An article in the Daily Telegraph comments on a…