Utopia, you are standing in it!

An astonishing decision from an Employment Tribunal in the UK has ruled that it is acceptable to dismiss an employee because of their view that sex is biological and immutable (unable to be changed). In a preliminary ruling in Forstater v CGD Europe (18 Dec 2019; Case No 2200909/2019, Employment Judge Tayler) this view was found to be “incompatible with human dignity and [the] fundamental rights of others” (para [84]), and hence not a protected “belief” for the purposes of a claim of “belief”-based discrimination under the UK Equality Act 2010. While this case is not based on a religious belief, it brings into sharp focus a number of issues connected with religious beliefs and the workplace.

While Greta frets about global incineration and mass extinctions, the wind industry is doing a very fine job of extinguishing millions of birds and bats, every year. Indeed, entire species are under threat, including Europe’s Red Kite and Tasmania’s Wedge Tailed Eagle.

More generally, there’s a wave of avian carnage wherever the wind industry plies it subsidy-soaked trade; and offshore is no exception.

As Jason Endfield details below, the offshore wind industry is exacting a phenomenal toll on a whole range of seabirds in the waters surrounding Britain.

Isle Of Man Seabird Populations Plummet As Wind Farms Overwhelm The Irish Sea
Jason Endfield Blog
Jason Endfield
21 June 2019

Herring Gulls are down 82%, European Shag down 51%, Razorbills down 55%. The list goes on….

* The world’s biggest offshore wind farm is just a few miles away.
* Isn’t there a conspicuous connection?

The Isle Of Man wildlife…

While I’ve long been a critic of evolutionary psychology, I’m not stupid or woke enough—unlike some bloggers I won’t name—to dismiss the entire field as worthless. While it’s hard to test whether some behaviors in our species have evolved by natural selection, there are degrees of confidence we can get, and predictions one can make, to judge the likelihood that these behaviors are indeed “darwinian.” While nobody argues that behaviors like preferring your own children over others aren’t products of natural selection, there are those who claim that behavioral differences between men and women are not—and in fact cannot—be based on genes installed in our species by natural selection.

The two sex differences I find most evolutionarily convincing involve human sexual behavior—in particular the observation that males tend to be relatively indiscriminate in choosing someone to mate with, while females are pickier—and the fact that males are more aggressive…

Norwegian oil platform, North sea [image credit: Wikipedia]
Sounds like a woman of much commonsense, then. Of course any perceived deviation from climate alarmist orthodoxy translates as ‘controversial’ in much of the media.

Norway appointed on Wednesday a skeptic on wind power and climate change as its new oil minister who will oversee oil and gas drilling and wind turbine installations on and offshore Western Europe’s largest oil producer, reports OilPrice.com.

Sylvi Listhaug of the right-wing Progress Party was appointed Minister of Petroleum and Energy on Wednesday, replacing Kjell-Børge Freiberg who was “honourably discharged from his office,” the Norwegian government said.

Listhaug is taking over one of the most important ministries which oversees one of Norway’s top exports—oil and gas—as well as the government’s majority stake in energy giant Equinor.

A Guardian op-ed defending Bernie Sanders from charges that he’s abettedantisemitism, “Accusing Bernie Sanders of antisemitism? That’s a new low”, Dec. 18, by Kate Aronoff, contributing writer to The Intercept, includes the following claim:

For [those] on the right that have jumped on the [Sanders is antisemitic] bandwagon, though, details don’t really matter. Sanders, an avowed democratic socialist, simply belongs to an opposing political camp with opposing values. Like the attacks against Corbyn abroad and Ilhan Omar at home, those now being lobbed at Sanders aren’t about defeating antisemitism so much as using it as a narrative device to undermine a worldview that offends them. Sanders’s solidarity with Palestinians suffering under occupation is not an affront to Jews but to the right’s propaganda that looking out for their best interest means a blanket, unquestioning support for whatever the Israeli government happens to be doing, which at the…