Utopia, you are standing in it!

Sometimes Bill Maher, the host of Real Time on HBO, says smart things and sometimes he says not-so-smart things.

His recent monologue on the “college scam” was an example of the former. It’s almost as if he was channeling Professor Daniel Lin.

Maher makes great points about how government subsidies for higher education are a backwards form of redistribution, taking money from lower-income people and giving it to higher-income people.

And I love what he says about credentialism, where people can’t climb the job ladder without getting useless degrees like masters in education.

But his monologue wasn’t perfect. He mentioned how tuition costs have exploded, but he didn’t make the should-be-obvious connection between rising costs and government subsidies.

To be more explicit, tuition expenses have skyrocketed because colleges and universities have raised prices to capture all the extra loot politicians are dumping into the system.

Which…

Heysham power station [image credit: Belfast Telegraph]
The UK government is running short of electricity supply options due to net zero policies based on climate obsessions, as well as years of reluctance to believe that renewable energy is, and will always be, too erratic and unreliable. A power supply crunch is looming.
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The Telegraph reports:
Two nuclear power stations crucial to keeping Britain’s lights on risk being closed next year as a result of Jeremy Hunt’s windfall tax, their French owner warns today.

EDF, which operates all five of the country’s serving nuclear plants, said the Chancellor’s raid on power producers will make it harder to keep the ageing Heysham 1 and Hartlepool stations open as long as hoped.

It would mean the sites close in March 2024, potentially removing the “cushion” of spare capacity used by the National Grid to avoid blackouts and reducing nuclear…

The anti-all-things-modern propaganda goes on…and on and on. Relentlessly blaming severe weather on humans, or saying they made it worse, is silly and in any case unscientific. Why do they do it?
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The AP and other outlets made dodgy claims about climate change in 2022, with the AP getting over $8 million from activist groups to do it, says Climate Change Dispatch.

The “Climate Fact Check 2022″ report (pdf), presented by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), the Heartland Institute, the Energy & Environmental Legal Institute, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), and the International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC), stated that “climate alarmists” and members of the media engaged in claims about the relationship between man-made emissions and natural disasters, claims that clashed with “reality and science.”

In February, the Associated Press admitted that they would assign more than 24 journalists across the…

Stardate: 5730.2 (2268)
Original Air Date: January 10, 1969
Writer: Gene L. Coon (pen name of “Lee Cronin”) and Oliver Crawford
Director: Jud Taylor

“There was persecution on Earth once.
I remember reading about it in my history class.”
“Yes, but it happened way back in the twentieth century.
There’s no such primitive thinking today.”

The planet Ariannus is a vital transfer point on regular space commercial lanes, however it has recently been attacked by a bacterial invasion which threatens to render it lifeless unless checked. The Enterprise is presently en route to Ariannus (about three hours and four minutes away) while Lt. Uhura advises the planet’s Ministry of Health that the Enterprise will begin immediate decontamination of the planet’s atmosphere upon arrival in orbit –but suddenly, a Starfleet shuttlecraft appears onscreen (it looks to be a recently stolen Starfleet shuttlecraft). Spock notes there is one…

Credit: alaskapublic.org
A researcher said: “Remarkably, the data suggest that the ice sheets can change in response to more than just global climate,” calling into question some long-held ideas. A professor connected to the study commented: “These findings appear to poke a hole in our current understanding of how past ice sheets interacted with the rest of the climate system, including the greenhouse effect.” Well, fancy that. The commentary notes that ‘global temperatures were relatively stable at the time of the fall in sea level, raising questions about the correlation between temperature, sea level and ice volume’. In short, the ice sheets grew faster than scientists had thought.
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Princeton scientists found that the Bering Land Bridge, the strip of land that once connected Asia to Alaska, emerged far later during the last ice age than previously thought, says Eurekalert. 

The unexpected findings shorten the window of…

In her interview in the Flemish newspaper (subject of previous two posts), our Minister of Energy not only said that the wind always blows somewhere in Europe, and especially at sea, but she also made following remark about Belgian offshore wind (translated from Dutch, my emphasis):

When I became minister, I hoped that our new offshore wind farm would be operational by 2027. It has a capacity of 3.5 nuclear power plants and can supply all Belgian households with electricity.

I heard members of the current Federal Government draw (variations on) this analogy between offshore wind and nuclear power plants quite a lot lately, especially (and unsurprisingly) by members of the Flemish Green party.

For the record, there is a core of truth in this statement. It is true that the capacity of offshore wind in Belgium is expected to be 3500 MW in 2027 and since most…