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How many goodly creatures are there here! – William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act V, Scene I Hillel Neuer welcomes the New Year in with a look at the newly elected members of the U.N.’s highest human rights body. January 2nd, 2022 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Just how racist is The Guardian against black Africans? That they must be condemned to longer and deeper poverty to conform to fashionable metropolitan ideas? January 1st, 2022 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
Someone called sarahknapton tweeted, “I know lateral flow is important etc but all these millions of bits of plastic ending up in landfill every day makes me feel a bit ill.” Mr Worstall replied, “Umm, why? Lots of bits of plastic in landfill is where those lots of bits of plastic are safe. Dig up the oil, use the products made from it, stick the used plastic back in the ground – the cycle of non-life perhaps. Maybe we should get a warthog to sing about it for the kiddies?” IT ISN’T THE WARTHOG WHO SINGS “CIRCLE OF LIFE”, YOU HEATHEN. I love that song, despite the fridge horror of all those sentient animals submitting to being eaten. A happy new year to all our readers. May we find that place on the path unwinding that does not involve eating others or being eaten ourselves. January 1st, 2022 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
“There is a growing Covid industry of companies selling security interventions. Some vaccine manufacturers are enthusiastically promoting repeated boosters. The private gains from PPE sales are so notorious that the Treasury should be considering a war profits tax. There is a burgeoning trade in ventilation and air-filtration equipment. Behind the push for vaccine passports are software companies with digital ID pages in search of customers.” – Robert Dingwall, Daily Telegraph. The commentary made me think of President Eisenhower’s farewell address about the “Military-Industrial Complex.” December 30th, 2021 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
From the Guardian, no less (and it doesn’t mince its words):
OK, readers may ask, what’s with the energy independence headline? Well, as sometimes noted, countries such as Germany (and now Belgium) have cut back on their use of nuclear energy. Germany is a big consumer of Russian natural gas, and that reliance is going to increase via the Nordstream 2 pipeline, assuming Berlin presses ahead in the teeth of rising criticism. This gives more power to the Russian state, and to Mr Putin. In the UK, recently Shell, the energy group, decided not to go ahead with widening its North Sea oil extraction efforts, and the business of fracking in the UK is stymied. There appears zero support by the Boris Johnson administration for the UK to aggressively develop any home gas/oil sectors further. For brave little Britain, apparently, we can shrug off the winter chills and Russian nastiness with windmills, solar panels, and noble sentiments. Forgive my sarcasm, but you get the point. Western countries appear, at least on the face of it, to favour energy policies that appear guaranteed to embolden and strengthen regimes such as that of Putin’s Russia. It’s as if it was intended. December 29th, 2021 | 80 comments - (Comments are closed)
What started with the strange tale of the pandemic of an easy to beat aerosolized virus has become a global battle over the onward march to eliminate the control group. The bidding began with a clash of the propagandized fear porn-driven narrative. The stakes were upped substantially over hydroxychloroquine and anything else that might treat patients before reaching a progressed disease state. Now that controversy over vaccine harms has ramped up substantially, two sides find themselves committed. Vicious tribalism is in vogue, and the stakes could not be higher. One side wants the other to submit to a “my government can inject me with anything it likes, at any time” policy. The other has filed genocide and war crimes complaints in at the International Criminal Court. When the end states of the game involve either of,
it becomes harder and harder to imagine either side backing down. December 28th, 2021 | 37 comments - (Comments are closed)
The article I’m quoting from also notes Jesus College’s
in which
All this “comes from the University and College administrations”, who clearly grasp that the British Empire’s duty to pay reparations for abolishing slavery follows inevitably – unavoidably – from the entire woke project, which cannot make sense without it. However it seems Cambridge administrators are not yet finding this logic quite as easy as they expected to communicate to their own students. On 11 November (Armistice Day), at the Cambridge Union, the debate motion “This House is ashamed to be British” lost
You might almost suspect an element of astroturfed collusion in the narrative of woke students forcing university administrators to do these things. December 28th, 2021 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Telling people to ‘follow the science’ won’t save the planet. But they will fight for justice”, writes Amy Westervelt in the Guardian:
— The most recommended comment was by someone called “Pilotchute”. It started by quoting Ms Westervelt’s claim that the the US entering the Second World War was an example of “social change driven by moral outrage at the power being wielded by the few over the many”. Pilotchute responded:
December 28th, 2021 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
Campus magazine, a Singaporean publication aimed at students, published this article on 15th December 2021: The Paradox of Gender Inequality in STEM Education. It was one of many pieces that pointed out the odd fact that
Like almost every other article on the subject I have seen, the one in Campus spends several paragraphs explaining – and lamenting – how cultural factors push female eighteen year-olds away from science subjects. Note the scare quotes around “choosing”.
…but devotes far less attention to the reasons behind superior academic performance of younger girls compared to boys in STEM subjects. There is half a line of acknowledgement that, hey, eggheads argue about why girls do better, but not a word of what those arguments are. Female superiority at thirteen is not seen as a thing needing to be changed or explained:
If we want Iranian levels of female STEM university students, perhaps we should do what Iran does and embed the superior level of responsibility shown by females into law?
– from “Iran executes 100 young people a year, human rights group says”, the Times, 26th Dec 2021. December 27th, 2021 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
As the author says, this is a long thread, but in these days of uncertainty when so many yearn for examples of selfless effort for the common cause, well worth your time. I found #15… disturbing. Edit: Hat-tip to Duncan S in the comments – the original creators of this inspiring drama were Phil Shearrer and his son Kyle Shearrer back in 2015. December 26th, 2021 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
December 24th, 2021 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
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