Heaven forbid trying increase gas supplies in a time of gas shortage. Amazing how many greens seem to have a convergence of interests with nice Mr. Putin. Funny that.
– Perry de Havilland on the opposition to fracking in UK from the usual suspects.
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Fair play to the Guardian for running (sorry) this article, which will have gone against the preconceptions of many of its readers: ‘We don’t have to feel like prey’: the female joggers running with guns
September 23rd, 2022 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
 “PayPal shut down the accounts of the Free Speech Union, its founder the journalist Toby Young and a news website he created after alleged Covid-19 vaccine misinformation”, the Times reports:
For the record, I have had all the Covid vaccinations, and plan to have the booster. But if Big Tech wanted to spread doubt about the safety of Covid vaccines there would be no better way to do it than what they are doing now. The purpose of this is obviously to censor. Like all types of lying, censorship can often work well for the liar at first, but once people know that censorship is occurring, they start to doubt every subsequent statement from a censored source. Every line is read through a lens stamped with the words “What else are they hiding?” In this case, “Are they hiding reports of adverse reactions? Do they even know if adverse reactions are occurring, given that you can’t talk about it?” What about the argument that Paypal are a private company and ought to be able to exclude whoever the hell they like? This is one of many things I would gladly leave to the free market if we lived in anything like a free market. Unfortunately, in the real world the big companies are locked in a loving embrace with the State. They are quite happy to squelch troublesome people like Toby Young in exchange for regulators squelching troublesome competitors. In an industry where there are very few big players, it does not take long for a senior civil servant to make all the necessary calls. Then suddenly all sorts of ordinary things get difficult. Want to buy or sell on eBay? This is the list of permitted payment methods. Short, isn’t it? How long before all of them follow Paypal’s lead? I miss the days when these verses from the Book of Revelation were the preserve of wild-eyed men walking the streets wearing sandwich boards:
September 22nd, 2022 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
“He who rides a tiger is afraid to dismount” – Chinese proverb. *
– Philip Sherwell, in a (paywalled) piece for the Sunday Times called “Millions under lockdown to stop Covid spoiling Xi Jinping’s party congress”. Meanwhile, in an interview broadcast on Sunday, President Biden declared that the pandemic was over. Then someone noticed that would mean that the “Covid emergency” justification for his student loan payoff was also over, along with the justification for mask mandates. So the White House undeclared the president’s declaration:
I am not sure why “the administration” trumps “the president”, unless it is to give him practice in getting Trumped. September 21st, 2022 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
We live in a world where Ricky Gervais and JK Rowling are, to everyone’s surprise, not least their own, ‘right-wing’. The supposed rule breakers such as Frankie Boyle, Nish Kumar and Stewart Lee are crushingly orthodox. Roger Waters has a portfolio of crankery going back decades but remains unbesmirched, whereas a single tweet from Winston Marshall saw him exiled from polite society. (As I write, it seems Craig L Potter of the band Elbow might be heading the same way, merely for daring to criticise trans charity Mermaids.) – Gareth Roberts (£) September 20th, 2022 | 48 comments - (Comments are closed)
After four centuries, I think her namesake lets that “nor ever” be retired, or at least equalled. Echoing the thoughts of many, the Archbishop of Canterbury said
in his sermon at the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II, adding (for the benefit of the assembled world leaders?)
Indeed they are, as the founding fathers knew.
When someone reaches a place of power by being born to it instead of choosing to seek it, then it is a bit more likely that they will end up feeling, as Elizabeth I said,
But that is no more guaranteed than any of the other defences that have been tried against the rule of those who love power. Wisdom wants little government, not much. Wisdom wants constitutional rule, not arbitrary. And Wisdom knows these alone cannot protect us for ever. Every now and then, we will need the lucky chance of a ruler who loves us more than power. ____________ [The so-called “golden speech” of Queen Elizabeth I (given in parliament on the last day of November 1601) was written down by several hearers in several versions, all essentially the same but with minor differences of phrasing here and there, including in the passages I have quoted.] September 19th, 2022 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
Here is an interesting thread about the ongoing Ukrainian counter-offensive by Mick Ryan. September 19th, 2022 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Canada’s Post Millennial reports, “Canadian biologically male teacher wears massive prosthetic breasts to school” The teacher is Kayla Lemieux and the school is Oakland Trafalgar High School in Ontario. Please note that there exist several other people with the same name, some of whom have been in the news recently. The Daily Mail picked up the story: “Canadian high school defends transgender teacher who wore enormous prosthetic breasts underneath tight T-shirt to class”, and has plenty more pictures if you need to be convinced that this is not a joke. Even after I was convinced that it was not a joke, I originally had plenty of jokes to make. But upon reflection I edited them out. This is not a funny story. Kayla Lemieux’s motivations bear no relation to the motivations of a transwoman who was born male but simply wants to be female. Nor does Ms Lemieux want to be accepted as having an ambiguous gender identity. She does not want to be accepted at all. Kayla Lemieux wants to shock. She also wants the pleasure of knowing that the people she shocks dare not say anything. Better yet, she wants to have the pleasure of thinking that some of the people seeing her are secretly, even unwillingly, sexually aroused by her fetish costume. She is a teacher, so when I say “people” I mean “children she teaches”. Imagine the sexes/genders were reversed, and a female-to-male transgender teacher turned up at school to teach the children while wearing an enormous prosthetic penis. Imagine – but the imaginary scenario scarcely differs from what is actually happening. Let me be clear that I believe that adults should be free to alter their appearance in any way that pleases them. I would go further than most in defending people’s right to have body modifications that are designed to shock, though I would also defend the right of others to exclude such people from their premises, and that is one of the reasons why I would like to see less public space (which is open to absolutely everyone by definition) and more private space that is open to the public so long as they adhere to rules of behaviour. I would also, though more reluctantly, defend the right of a private school to employ a person with deliberately shocking body modifications as a teacher, and the right of parents to send their children there. However, Oakland Trafalgar High School is a public school in the North American sense, a state school. Most of the families whose children attend have no other option. Even if that were not so, the pupil quoted at the beginning was correct to say, “I don’t think the school can fire him.” As the statement from the school says, “Gender identity and gender expression are protected grounds under the Ontario Human Rights Code”. And Kayla Lemieux knows it. September 19th, 2022 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Yet another outstanding dissertation from Perun looking at the big picture. It is long but jam packed with good analysis. Recommended. September 18th, 2022 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Mahsa Amini, a young Iranian Kurdish woman, was arrested by the morality police for having an improperly adjusted hijab. Witnesses say that she was beaten in the police van. Her relatives published pictures of her lying in a coma in intensive care. They wanted the world to know what had been done to her. She never woke from that coma. Anything a social media company might do pales in comparison to the evil of beating a woman to death because she did not cover her hair in the approved way – but what Twitter did next is still worth noting. Vahid Yücesoy reports,
Alinejad Masih’s post was mass-reported by supporters and hirelings of the Iranian regime. The grounds for suspension of her account were that she had included an image of “graphic violence” in her tweet. The fact that it was a true image of Iranian government brutality that Mahsa Amini’s family wanted the world to see was ignored. This is how a system of pre-emptive censorship inevitably works. (Via Jim Treacher.) September 18th, 2022 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
From the White House website:
To be fair, these remarks by Dr. Alondra Nelson, head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Alexander Macgillivray, Principal Deputy United States Chief Technology Officer, and Nik Marda, Policy Advisor do acknowledge the existence of risks:
Given the record of the FBI, the CIA and the NSA, I would put very little faith in their definition of “strictly necessary” as a shield against the US government spying on its citizens. September 18th, 2022 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
“German Galushchenko, the minister of energy, told the YES conference that Ukraine could potentially supply two gigawatts of power to the EU right now, but was being prevented from doing so by bureaucratic obstacles on the European side” – Niall Ferguson (not that one, the other one). September 17th, 2022 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
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