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Renewables don’t risk blackouts, said the media. But they did and they do. The physics are simple. And now, as blackouts in Spain strand people in elevators, jam traffic, and ground flights, it’s clear that too little “inertia” due to excess solar resulted in system collapse. Also… here. April 29th, 2025 | 2 comments
 Credit to the Guardian for discharging their duty to report this story:
April 7th, 2025 | 15 comments
Officers of the Swedish Police have made an announcement regarding the 30 or so bombings in the country in January 2025, attributed to extortion of businesses by criminal gangs, and have said that they can’t cope and they need all of society to mobilise to help them. However, they don’t appear to say how this should be done, or what with, so there might be some misinterpretation and I don’t think that the posse is a thing in Sweden, reported by the independent, reader-funded Nordic Times.
This puts me in mind of a character in The Daily Telegraph’s Peter Simple column, who, as a fore-runner of today’s DEI activists would roundly proclaim ‘We are all guilty!’, a chilling vision of the climate today. However, coming back to Sweden, we are told:
The Nordic Times has its own take on the matter, citing, as the BBC would probably point out, ‘without evidence’ networks of immigrant criminals. The police do not seem to have gone that far in terms of specificity:
But there is a plan, nothing so far like what appears to be happening in the USA, this is Sweden after all, but the plan is an increased digital presence of the police.
January 31st, 2025 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
Sometimes the Guardian shows flashes of its old persona as a guardian of liberty. Publishing this article by Apostolis Fotiadis was one example:
The title of this post referred to this story: “Britain’s biggest choir ditches Every Breath You Take over ‘abusive’ lyrics”
January 24th, 2025 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Just not in the way the Guardian thinks.
What form did the “manipulation of the vote” by these cyber-attacks take? One would think the Guardian’s leader-writer would be clearer on this point. If it was something like changing the tallies on voting machines (I do not know if Romania even has voting machines), that absolutely would be illicit manipulation of the vote. No doubt Vladimir Putin would be delighted to literally falsify the numbers of votes cast for candidates in the Romanian election if he could, but did he? Give us evidence, or I am going to assume that these alleged cyber-attacks are of a piece with the 25,000 fake TikTok accounts – that is, not attacks at all, just the issuance of propaganda. As I have frequently said, Vladimir Putin belongs at the end of a rope. But that is because he is a mass-murderer, not because he gets a bunch of drudges and bots to say words on the internet. When I was a kid, I used to turn the dial of our family’s radio to “Moscow” quite often. Radio Moscow wasn’t as good – by which I mean it wasn’t as bad – as Radio Tirana, whose announcer would say “Good night, dear listeners” in a strange voice eerily reminiscent of the evil Dr Crow in Carry On Spying, who I have just found out after half a century was not played by Hattie Jacques but by Judith Furse, only voiced by John Bluthal in order to sound more asexual. (The character is meant to be the forerunner of a race of artificially created superior beings who have gone beyond being male or female.) Neither the supervillainesque lady in Albania or the main Russian presenter, whose English accent was eerily good, had much luck in turning me communist. But I always thought that one of the things that made the UK a democracy was that I was perfectly free to turn the dial to Tirana or Moscow and let them try. December 10th, 2024 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
I saw this comment by Paul Marks to the previous post and thought, “This is huge. Why isn’t this story the main headline on every news outlet?” It is being reported, somewhat less prominently than the Princess of Wales going to a carol concert. Heartwarming though that is, I would have thought that the fact that a Romanian court has annulled the first round of their presidential election because the Russians allegedly “ran a coordinated online campaign to promote the far-right outsider who won the first round” was bigger news. So what if they did? Where did this idea come from that the people of a country are not allowed to watch, read or listen to foreigners attempting to persuade them how to vote? Well, certain foreigners at least – those who promote this information Juche never seem to have a problem with the European Union’s taxpayer-funded propagation of its opinion. December 6th, 2024 | 40 comments - (Comments are closed)
A German man named Stefan Niehoff used a parody of a shampoo advertisement to put forward the view on Twitter that Germany’s Minister of Economic Affairs and Climate Action, Robert Habeck, was a moron – or a “Schwachkopf” in the original German. That did not please Mr Habeck. As has become customary for German government ministers since the Covid pandemic, he decided to retaliate against an ordinary citizen who had mocked him by filing a criminal complaint against Mr Niehoff for “hate crime”, and arranging for two cops to turn up at the latter’s house at six fifteen one morning. Many such incidents of repression in Germany have been chronicled by the German blogger “Eugyppius”. In his latest article, simply titled “Schwachkopf”, Eugyppius writes,
Even in Germany as it now is, on its own that attempt to bring the criminal law down on someone for insulting a politician might have provoked enough ridicule to deter Mr Habeck from proceeding. But Habeck had another card up his sleeve – or rather, his membership of the ruling class gave him the power to keep turning over cards until he found one he could use. In the course of the trawl through Niehoff’s Twitter history that Mr Habeck got his friends in the police to carry out in support of his hate crime prosecution, some bright spark turned up something that they could twist against Niehoff in the fashion of the American media talking about Donald Trump. Some time before calling Mr Habeck a “Schwachkopf”, Stefan Niehoff had posted another tweet, this time in opposition to a boycott by left-wingers of the dairy brand Müller. Niehoff posted a pair of pictures of stickers plastered over supermarket shelves that urged people not to buy Müller products, juxtaposed against a historical photo from the Nazi era showing a man in SS or SA uniform holding a placard with the words “Germans, do not buy from Jews!”. Niehoff gave the whole group of photos the caption “We’ve seen it all before!”. Do you think that Mr Niehoff’s use of a picture of a Nazi in that tweet demonstrated that he (a) did, or (b) did not admire the Nazis? Any normal person would say (b). I have no doubt that the German authorities know perfectly well that Niehoff’s tweet was anti-Nazi. But they could suck up to Habeck and make his charges look less moronic by pretending to think (a). So that’s what they did. They announced that they were not just investigating Niehoff for insulting a member of the government, but also for incitement. Anti-semitic incitement. As Eugyppius writes,
There is an amusing silver lining to this dark cloud of moronic malice. Click on the link to the word “Schwachkopf” above to find out what it is. November 20th, 2024 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
I wish I were only talking about this: “Essex Police Issue Update After WWII Bomb Safely Detonated in East Tilbury” (This Twitter thread by Tony Brown @agbdrilling shows detailed pictures of how the bomb was found and safely exploded under sand.) But the thing uppermost in my mind was actually this: “Amsterdam rioters ‘planned Jew hunt on Telegram’ before they attacked Israeli football fans” November 10th, 2024 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
Trump has long argued it was unreasonable for US taxpayers to be subsidising Europe’s defence when European governments are unwilling to stump up to defend themselves. It seems that today, many European pundits are now belatedly in agreement with Trump, yet I have encountered quite a lot of annoyance when I point this out. It is hard to not laugh 😀 November 6th, 2024 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
How to tell if the people in Europe making predictions of doom if Trump wins actually believe what they have been saying: Europeans defence expenditures go to 4%+ (i.e. Polish levels) within the next few months. Otherwise it’s just so much verbal flatulence. If Trump does indeed abandon Ukraine and tries to force a de facto surrender of occupied territories on them, and Europe still does not rapidly ramp up defence expenditure, then maybe Trump and the USA was never the problem. November 6th, 2024 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
I just liked that headline, so here it is again as a link: “How a slice of cheese almost derailed Europe’s most important rocket test”. There is video. As you might have guessed, the rocket concerned is small enough to almost spin out of control because of the weight of a slice of packaged cheese strapped to one of its legs. So perhaps Elon Musk need not lose sleep over his rivals, a group of students at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, just yet – however the headline from Interesting Engineering describing this as “Europe’s most important rocket test” was more justifiable than one might think at first sight. They ate the cheese after its flight. It was “slightly warm, but still quite tasty.” October 26th, 2024 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
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