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When only the best will do:
Babylon Bee
“I thought I knew all there was to know about communist indoctrination, but I was wrong,” said the ruthless dictator to reporters after sitting through a 2-hour lecture on why fidget spinners are a remnant of Western patriarchal oppression. “Your American college professors have this down to an art!” …
The murderous leader of North Korea plans to go back to his home country and start his own Ivy League school: Kim Jong UNiversity.
Thanks to the Babylon Bee. Click the logo to read the rest.
9.9 out of 10 based on 44 ratings
It’s almost like China’s climate action was just window dressing. It seems to be unraveling…
China’s National Carbon Trading Scheme was supposed to go into full operation later this month, but now it’s been cut back by two-thirds. Instead of burdening 6,000 companies it will only afflict 2,000. And only a week ago, the Chinese government suddenly axed solar and wind subsidies, with the cuts starting just six weeks from now. Oilprice calls it “a crushing blow for wind and solar”. In a devastating move, there are even demands that solar plants have to sell electricity at the same price as coal power. The cruelty!
China produces three quarters of all the world’s solar panels, having subsidized-the-heck out of the global industry, exploited slave labor and driven the US leaders out of production.
Judging by the Wall St Journal story — in the last two months the paradigm has shifted from Environmental control to Economic priority. Perhaps solar power wasn’t much use for building ballistic missile submarines?
How different things would be if solar was actually cheaper than coal…
No new solar power plant subsidies. Just like that? China to stop subsidies for new solar power stations, onshore wind projects […]
Would you like bunions with that? | Photo: Mshirk
Believe it or not, Medieval shoes tell us something important about modern civilization. The hyper-gregarious Homo Sapiens might be able to walk on the moon, but ultimately a large proportion of the species just want to climb the social ladder. And the smarter, higher order sapiens might paradoxically be willing to pay the most stupid price.
In this case, being “progressive” in the 14th Century meant wearing pointy shoes that left 4 out of 10 people buried at the friary with bent and sometimes broken bones. Bunions make it harder to balance so they increase the risk of falls. The undeniable benefits of scoring social fashion points were apparently worth spending decades distorting foot bones. Before you dismiss this as a teenage girly thing, ponder that two thirds of the victims were men.
The social competition to have the pointiest shoes became so dangerous that in 1463 King Edward IV passed a law declaring toe-points had to be 2 inches or less within London.
Pointy shoes in a statue from 3,000 BC. | Camocon
The pointy shoe fashion bubble has struck all over the world: Japan, China, […]
With the US Defence Force about to release “something” on UFO’s, these very engaging videos from Mick West are persuasive and apropos. But if smart guys with trigonometry and metadata can explain how these aliens are mysterious camera artefacts — surely the Pentagon can too?
Why then are they called “unexplained” and why are they being released as teasers for “the big news?” Did the DoD forget parallax and gymbal corrections?
Apparently 120 incidents will be reviewed in June. Former intelligence director John Ratcliffe has hinted the report will be a big deal. Let’s hope they saved the best stuff. I’m looking forward to a good tantalizing mystery.
Michael Shermer (of Skeptic.com infamy) wrote this all up in a long feature on Quillette:
Understanding the Unidentified
The “Go Fast” video purportedly shows an object with no heat source (and therefore propelled by some unconventional engine) that appears to move impossibly fast just above the surface of the ocean. West then conducted what he describes as “10th grade trigonometry” (based on the numbers provided in the video image itself) to show that, in fact, the object was well above the ocean surface at around 13,000 feet and was probably […]
China just doesn’t know how to make friends in a free world
Image by AngMoKio
China’s great weakness — or rather the Chinese Communist Party’s is that no one likes authoritarian rulers, or people that lie, steal, spy and send out bioweapons. As I said over a year ago, The one thing China may have achieved with the Covid is to rally the rest of the world against it. It’s taken a year because the craven media couldn’t admit Trump was right about the lab leak, but there’s no hiding it now.
China has few friends. As well as infecting the whole world, it has fought with Indians, threatened the Philippines and Malaysia over the South Sea, flown fighter jets over Taiwan, and bullied Australia, even saying our weak military would be the first hit in a war. China is leaning on Japan to give it strategic islands, and to distance itself from the US. Like a mafia state, the threat is blunt: “no rational country would want to contain or offend its biggest trading partner” says Beijing. Nice economy you have there, be a shame if something happened to it. The PRC even took on a boy […]
We all need some good news and who doesn’t like seeing overbearing-undemocratic-parasites lose? In terms of the cycle of civilizations, perhaps we are past the peak of Big Government, and headed for decentralization. As state entities grow too big and get too disconnected from the voters, they inevitably became overconfident, and overplay their hand — micromanaging hair dryers and droughts at the same time. But “the mood has changed”…
Nigel Farage predicts the EU will collapse within a decade.
Speaking to Fox Business, the former Brexit Party leader said that Brexit’s success will become a model for other European countries “impressed” by Britain’s life outside of the EU. He said that many in Europe were looking on in jealousy after much of the EU scaremongering about Brexit failed to materialise. “There is now a 70 percent approval rating for Brexit now. “
After seven years of trying to get Switzerland under tighter EU control, the Swiss have abandoned the talks.
The Swiss talks with Brussels collapse after seven long years
Damian Wilson, RT
Switzerland shocked Brussels by walking away from a closer relationship and into an uncertain future, but MP Thomas Aeschi says the Swiss will […]
History books will be written and some professors, academics, and bureaucrats will have no excuse.
Which organisations can serve now?
It took two court hearings and major complaints and assertive activism to save eighty year old Judy Smentkiewicz. But how many others died because their sons or daughters didn’t see Pierre Kory on TV? Or they didn’t have the wherewithal to go to court? Or their friends trying to share the message were censored on Facebook? It shouldn’t have to be this way.
This is Judy’s story below, but so much more. Read the whole thing. It’s very well written by Michael Capuzzo. Surely, this is a story that needs an answer. Where are the Forth Estate, the Opposition, The AMA, or the publicly funded professors at our universities?
I am but a cog passing on points of view that should be part of our national conversation. Some things matter: like antivirals and closed borders.
Nick Corbishley says “I don’t know of a bigger story in the world”
Michael Capuzzo, a New York Times best-selling author , has just published an article titled “The Drug That Cracked Covid”. … But unfortunately most reporters are not […]
Skeptics have known for years that Nature was more about fashion than science. A parody from 2019.
When it comes to scientific truths, even in top journals like Science and Nature, the more wrong it is, the more it gets cited. Even after other researchers have failed to repeat it, and been published saying so, the citations don’t slow down. Almost 9 out of 10 of the new citations keep citing it as if it were still correct. Who said science was self-correcting?
It’s so bad that the junkier articles in Nature and Science that couldn’t be replicated were cited 300 times as often as the more boring papers that could be replicated. In other words, the supposedly best two science journals, and the industry that reads them, have become a filter for eye-candy-science-junk.
And it was all so predictable — with the fixation on “counting citations” as an inane substitute for analysis: we got what we didn’t think about. The drive to get citations and media headlines means the modern industry of science has become a filter to amplify sensationalism, not science.
Science is a form of entertainment, not a search for the truth.
A new […]
Bragging, so soon? This kind of talk will not endear:
The comments were made by Chen Ping, a Senior Researcher at The China Institute of Fudan University, a CCP affiliated think tank, and a professor at Peking University.
The video, which appeared online recently, was translated by New York-based Chinese blogger Jennifer Zeng:
His main argument is that the Western model has failed, the 500-year maritime civilization is doomed, the #CCP has won and “will lead the way of the modernization in the new era after the biology revolution” after the 2020 #CCPVirus #COVID19 pandemic. https://t.co/Z6pUJZIYzp
— Jennifer Zeng 曾錚 (@jenniferatntd) May 18, 2021
Note the caveat. Professor Ping says that the Biological War was launched against China.
Ping states in the video that “In 2020, China won the trade war, science and technology war, and especially the biological war.”
…“the Western model has failed, the 500-year maritime civilization is doomed, the CCP has won and ‘will lead the way of the modernization in the new era after the biology revolution’ after the 2020 CCPVirus (COVID19) pandemic.”
The achievement is unprecedented. This is an epoch-making historical record,” […]
In 2020, the WHO did not protect even one country, but now says they just need more money and more power. The WHO should be disbanded, it failed at the one most important job it was set up to do — stop pandemics.
It’s only a year too late, but the WHO is finally telling people they could avoid deadly pandemics. A new report is out, with former New Zealand PM Helen Clark admitting only that the World Health Organisation was a week too late in calling it an emergency. After that tiny mini-culpa, then she blames slow nations for “wasting the month of February”. Though Clark seems to have forgotten the same stupid nations were all following WHO’s advice at the time.
This is what failure looks like — Tedros, the WHO Director General on Jan 29, last year
When he could have saved the world, he was being a one man Xi Jinping fan club. Listen to this shameless rave:
…Tedros said it is admirable that the Chinese government has shown its solid political resolve and taken timely and effective measures in dealing with the epidemic. President Xi’s personal guidance and deployment show his great leadership […]
I knew they were bad, but this was blistering:
Big Tech’s Monopoly Creep
by Napolean Linarthatos, The AmericanConservative
… generations that come after us will have the opportunity to wonder how on earth we had been duped for so long and so pathetically by a few Big Tech monopolists, how it was possible to have such a grand accumulation of power and wealth preserved by a system so bluntly corrupt in its modus operandi.
In October 2020, the House Antitrust Subcommittee issued a damning report of steamrolling corruption. It was so brazen, Amazon even sold counterfeit copies of products until the targets gave in — even big names, like Nike. The supergiant went into business against smaller companies, dumping product on the market in impossibly good offers, until it beat them, and stole their customers, and then bought them anyway. (After that customers discovered the deals were not so sweet.) Employees of Amazon even admitted they used private customer data to find market opportunities for Amazon to exploit. The situation is so rapacious now that little companies are not even bought out anymore, they are just cloned and crushed.
And it’s not just Amazon. Smaller partners […]
Evil weather-destroying equipment will be banished:
Photo Kwon Junho
Victorians building new homes will be denied the choice to pick their preferred heating and cooking appliances in the hope that this will stop storms and droughts for their great grandchildren.
As household prices rise, the money that could have been used for holidays, health, or education will be used to enrich a few corporations and make a small percentage of the population feel important and calmer.
If only the low carbon revolution was clean, green and cheap, no one would have to ban anything.
Suffer the children:
Push to turn off gas to help reach state’s climate goal
Tom Cowie and Nick O’Malley, The Age
Gas appliances including heaters, hot water services and cooktops would be phased out under a proposed moratorium on new gas connections to Victorian households to help the state achieve its 2030 target to cut carbon emissions by up to 50 per cent.
Victorians are the nation’s biggest users of natural gas for heating, hot water and cooking due to the state’s historically cheap and plentiful supply piped in from Bass Strait since the 1970s.
But […]
And so the mask comes off. After forty years of cheating in a “forced technology transfer” the game is up. Trump called China for the theft of intellectual property, then launched a trade war, but the CCP already had stolen much of the information it needed.
This is not just an economic war, this is a big wet blanket on some kinds of scientific research. With one big bad player in the game breaking the rules, there is less incentive for people to announce and share discoveries. Royalties can’t be enforced, and a competitor might copy and compete against you. Are we entering a new era cold war of secrecy?
Back to Zang: Now that there is no need to hide the theft, nor pander in the hope of taking more, another Chinese Professor openly bragged about the situation last week:
China ‘Copied Its Way’ to Economic Success, Chinese Professor Boasts
Nicole Hao and Cathy He, Epoch Times
For the past 40 years, the Chinese regime only did one thing: plagiarize, Zang Qichao, a prominent marketing expert and visiting professor of Beijing’s Tsinghua University, told a group of Chinese entrepreneurs recently.
“We plagiarized wildly, […]
The Antiracist educators are at it again, creating racism everywhere they go:
Here’s a case of soft racism disguised as a righteous lecture (and a call for funding)
Profs help push program that claims math is ‘racist’ because it requires a ‘right answer’
Wyatt Eichholz, CampusReform
A new program promoted by the Oregon Department of Education is designed to “dismantle” instances of “white supremacy culture in the mathematics classroom.”
Calling all victims! (And if you aren’t one now, you will be soon.)
“White supremacy culture infiltrates math classrooms in everyday teacher actions,” the guide states. “Coupled with the beliefs that underlie these actions, they perpetuate educational harm on Black, Latinx, and multilingual students, denying them full access to the world of mathematics.”
From the headline, this new “maths” has all the racist underpinnings of a gloriously oppressive education — one that tells students that maths is really a “white” thing. It’s implicit in the mission statement that those with a colored complexion probably won’t be good at maths and furthermore, that they can blame white supremacists for that. It’s almost like someone was working to make it harder for black mathematicans to believe […]
There are lessons for conservatives from this eclectic election in the most isolated state on Earth. It was historic, epic, and “A complete and utter landslide“. And the message is “borders”. Remember “Build the Wall?” Conservatives all around the world seem to have forgotten the power and appeal of being able to control who and which viridae, come across the border. If the Democrats in the US fortified the wall, they might not have to fortify election results.
It’s a complete blitz. | The West Australian
…
The election Saturday was a wipeout of legendary proportions among democracies anywhere. Only four years ago, the Liberals (conservatives, theoretically) were the ruling party in Western Australia. Today they hold but two, as in one plus one, seats in the lower house of the WA Parliament, out of 59. They may win 3. The Labor Party took 58% of the first preference votes (that’s almost unheard of). Labor will take the Upper House too. See: WA Election Results. Things are so extreme, the talk now is how the Parliament is not big enough to hold the Labor M.P.’s. The rooms are just not designed for one party having almost […]
Can you spot a dead coral from 120 meters in the air?
The media and academic experts keep telling us the reef is dead. Jen Marohasy points out that the death of the Great Barrier Reef was diagnosed from the sky, so she had the radical idea of going out to reefs like Pixie reef to photograph it underwater instead. She didn’t receive any of the $440m Malcolm Turnbull sent to save the reef. But strangely, none of those millions appears to be used to do something as banal as a swimming near a coral. In an earlier post she described how many of the corals grow in vertical walls, which are very difficult to spot from a plane. Now she’s demonstrating how hard it is to spot even obvious things from a plane.
This reef, Pixie Reef, was ‘surveyed’ back on 22nd March 2016 from the air by Terry Hughes of James Cook University during one of his fly pasts. It was concluded from that single observation/glance-down from 150 metres altitude that that this reef was 65% bleached. The inshore reefs north of Cairns were more or less all written-off, back then, by the experts and the […]
It’s not the hard and fast rules on censorship that are the worst — it’s the vague ambiguous ones. That way no one really knows what is permitted, and what isn’t. With random punishment and vague rules the underclass have to guess what is OK, and usually err on the side of silence.
Self censorship of a whole nation is so much more efficient. Otherwise the rulers need a lot of police. And if people are only punished randomly, there are no rules to work around — and the fear and guessing sets the boundaries way further out.
Communist Tactics to Force Self-Censorship Sweeping America
by Petr Svab, The Epoch Times
The principle of self-censorship is that people, just to be on the safe side, refrain from saying even things that aren’t outright banned by some applicable rules.
Vague Rules
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the world’s most notorious censor of free speech, has for decades used the method of making its policies intentionally vague. During its past political campaigns, for instance, the central leadership would issue a decree that “rightists” and “counterrevolutionaries” were to be punished. The next lower rung of party officials […]
…
Mexico, the eleventh biggest population on Earth, was all enthused about renewables a few years ago, but now they are actively winding back wind and solar and reactivating coal projects. Mines are being reopened, coal miners are being hired and the state owned Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) has been told to buy electricity from its own coal generators before they buy electricity from the privately owned renewables generators.
López Obrador is called a populist, he talks of energy sovereignty, and speaks badly of predecessors who opened up the energy sector to foreign and private interests. He vowed to put ” at least 80% of the budget – into fossil fuels.””
Mexico was once a climate leader – now it’s betting big on coal
David Agren in San Juan de Sabinas, The Guardian
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, popularly known as Amlo, has unveiled plans to buy nearly 2m tons of thermal coal from small producers like Rivera. He also plans to reactivate a pair of coal-fired plants on the Texas border, which were being wound down as natural gas and renewables took a more prominent role in Mexico’s energy mix.
Not […]
Is there a better badge to show the intellectual collapse of The West than the idea, from a NATO chief, that we should put solar panels on battlefield tanks? One hundred years from now, there will be a stage in the collapse of civilization called the “Solar powered battle tank” phase. An idea so radioactively stupid that any science writer’s first question is “is this satire?”
Apart from the whole power to weight ratio non-starter, there is the problem of night time and rainy-day warfare, camoflaging a shiny surface, and the general vulnerability of glass and electronics in a situation known to “have bullets”.
Oh the dilemma: how to camouflage solar panels and also collect sunlight?
Not only are these Solar Powered Tanks at risk of being immobilized by a stray shot, they could be struck down with a paint bomb.
Another day in Fall of the West Nato chief suggests battle tanks with solar panels as militaries go green
Thomas Harding, National News
The Nato chief [Jens Stoltenberg] suggested that militaries should advance research into low-emitting vehicles because of the advantages they bring, at an online seminar titled New Ideas for Nato 2030.
[…]
Whatever you do, don’t give the voters a choice
It seems a major reason for impeaching Donald Trump “no matter what” is to make sure that even if the majority of American voters wanted to get him back in office, they will not get that choice. After all, if Trump incited a violent coup against a legitimately elected government, and it was broadcast every night on prime time sympathetic news for the next four years, how could he ever win again? What population would be insane enough to vote for that?
Hypothetically, though, imagine a government was elected through late night vote dumps, fake ballots, dead votes and electronic flipping? That same government would surely be vulnerable and possibly afraid that if word were to spread, protests would mount and State legislatures might be forced to fix the gaping holes in the system – at least in some states. All of which might give the cheated leader a chance to be re-elected.
David Catron had the same thought, and notes Rep. Al Green (A democrat from Texas) explained why they tried the first impeachment:
I’m concerned if we don’t impeach this president, he will get re-elected. If we don’t impeach […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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