THINGS YOU CAN DO IF YOU ACTUALLY CARE ABOUT THE PLANET: Saskatchewan, Ontario to roll out mini-nuclear reactors: The GEH zero-emission reactors – each with enough power to fuel more than 200,000 homes – could be deployed by 2030s.
Archive for 2022
July 23, 2022
DEAL OF THE DAY: BLACK+DECKER 12,000 BTU Portable Air Conditioner. #CommissionEarned
GLENN GREENWALD ON TUCKER CARLSON, CHELSEA MANNING, RUSSIA, AND BIG TECH: New video from Reason TV:
THAT’S BECAUSE THEY HAVEN’T BEEN LEGALLY TRAINED: Students can’t find the right to abortion in the Constitution.
GOT WOKE, WENT BROKE: ‘Cancel culture’ backfires as donors pull cash from Edinburgh University.
The University of Edinburgh has seen its donations slump by almost £2 million after it “cancelled” the philosopher David Hume over his slavery links.
The institution said that 24 donations and 12 legacies had been “cancelled, amended or withdrawn” in response to the September 2020 renaming of a prominent campus building dedicated to its former student, one of the leading figures of the Scottish enlightenment.
While he argued against the institution of slavery, Hume was condemned by student activists largely for a footnote in a 1758 essay in which he said he was “apt to suspect the negroes to be naturally inferior to the whites”.
The David Hume Tower was rechristened 40 George Square with the university claiming that while Hume’s opinions were “not uncommon” when he wrote them more than 250 years ago, they “rightly cause distress today”.
While it refused to say how much money had been withdrawn by donors directly due to the renaming row, overall donations to the university fell from £23.2 million in 2020-21, to £21.3 million the following year.
A small number of those to cancel donations also cited the treatment of the academic Neil Thin, who was investigated and later acquitted after wrongly being accused by students of expressing racist and other “problematic” views.
Dr Thin, a senior lecturer, was a vocal critic of the campaign to rename the tower.
Pam Gosul, the Scottish Tory spokesman for higher education, said: “The reduction in donations will offer university bosses the chance to reflect on decisions they have taken.”
And not just at Edinburgh University.
SOME PARTS OF AMERICA STILL WORK: SpaceX breaks its annual record with 32nd successful launch in 2022.
I LIKE HIM TOO, BUT I DON’T THINK HE HAS DESANTIS’S KILLER INSTINCT, AND I THINK THAT’S IMPORTANT: Glenn Youngkin’s popularity builds, equal to Florida’s Ron DeSantis.
UPDATE: From the comments: “Youngkin was a fantastic candidate for VA. MAGA wouldn’t have worked there, and there is a lesson for the party to learn over that.”
Also in the comments, a suggestion that DeSantis lacks Trump’s killer instinct. I don’t think that’s right. In fact, DeSantis has shown great skill at visiting actual consequences upon his enemies, not just mean tweets.
THEY’RE NOT SENDING THEIR BEST: Grand jury indicts “undocumented” man in rape of 9-year-old girl.
I HAVE A PRE-RELEASE COPY OF THE NEW ALBUM AND IT’S EXCELLENT: SUPREME BEINGS OF LEISURE END 14 YEAR HIATUS WITH NEW SINGLE “FULL CIRCLE,” ANNOUNCE FOURTH ALBUM ’22.’
For those wondering why I care, they’ve been one of my favorite bands for over 20 years, since I discovered them on the late, lamented Listen.com, and I’ve gotten to know some of them over the past several years.
INSIDE THE WOKE MELTDOWN AT ONE DOMESTIC VIOLENCE ORGANIZATION: Women Against Abuse discouraged black domestic abuse victims from calling the police. Yes, you read that right.
It was just two months after the death of George Floyd that one of the largest domestic violence nonprofits in the United States, Women Against Abuse, brought in several diversity consultants to conduct a racial-equity audit. The goal of the audit, Women Against Abuse told staffers, was to become “a fully inclusive, multicultural, and antiracist institution.”
By November 2020, the organization, which is ostensibly devoted to “serving all survivors,” was offering to pay “BIPOC” employees more than their white counterparts and discouraging black abuse victims from calling the police. Its employees were also at war with each other, bickering over whether Jews are a persecuted minority group and whether there is such a thing as a non-racist white person.
Those events prompted Nicole Levitt, an attorney with the group’s legal center, to file a discrimination complaint against her employer with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging that it “berated, humiliated, and subjected” her to “mandatory thought reform efforts.”
“Women Against Abuse used to be liberal,” Levitt told the Washington Free Beacon. “Now it’s illiberal.”
This story is based on Levitt’s discrimination complaint, Women Against Abuse’s response to it, and materials from the equity audit that Levitt shared with the Free Beacon. It reveals how the leading domestic violence nonprofit in Philadelphia descended into dogmatism and infighting, obsessing over identity as domestic homicides in the city reached an all-time high of 43 in 2021—more than double the previous year.
That obsession manifested in avant garde policies that led the group far astray from its core mission. The policies weren’t just the product of employee activism, but of outside consultants—including Ragina Arrington, now the chief executive officer of the Clinton Foundation’s Global Initiative University, who since July 2020 has been helping Women Against Abuse conduct its equity audit.
Arrington began this work as a senior officer at Philanthropy Unbound, one of two diversity consultancies retained by Women Against Abuse in the wake of George Floyd’s death. The consultants soon injected race into every crevice of the organization, transforming it from the inside out.
Leftwing nonprofits across the country have undergone similar transformations. From the Sierra Club to the Guttmacher Institute to the American Civil Liberties Union, the Intercept’s Ryan Grim reported last month, progressive advocacy groups have “effectively ceased to function,” as their outward-facing missions fall prey to internal tumult.
Flashback: Who needs a right-wing plot when progressives are busy eating themselves alive.
ARE YOU SURE THAT’S WHERE YOU WANT THE COURT TO GO? “Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan said on Thursday at a conference that the legitimacy of the Supreme Court is tied to its conformity to public opinion, Reuters first reported.”
Might as well go to an elected Supreme Court then.
ADHERING TO OUR ENEMIES: Republicans Investigate Biden Admin for Selling China Oil From US Reserves.
THE BANNINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES: Twitter Censors ‘Groomer’ Term After Left-Wing Pressure Campaign.
Okay, groomers.
ODD MAGICS GOT A REVIEW AT THE EPOCH TIMES: Book Recommender: “Odd Magic: Tales for the Lost,” Spellbinding Fairy Tales with a Modern Twist.
“WEATHER ‘TOO HOT’ FOR SOLAR PANELS: Blistering Temperatures In Britain Cause Solar Panels To Stop Working.
I’VE BEEN MAKING THIS POINT FOR DECADES: Space exploration and the need for national optimism.
For America’s political leaders, space exploration also speaks to the need to offer a hopeful narrative about the country and its potential, as well as an unabashed point of national pride Americans can embrace without reservation. Space exploration can offer a strong antidote to the relentless doomerism and pessimism that course like a poison through our national bloodstream, injected by prominent voices on both left and right. It’s not just a matter of the technical achievements involved in space exploration, impressive as they admittedly may be, or even the limits to which it can push us as individuals and societies More than anything else, space exploration expands the frontiers of human knowledge, broadens our sense of the possible, and grants us the perspective that can only come from a more-or-less conscious awareness of the vastness of the cosmos – or what some modern philosophers call the “view from above.”
It’s far too much to expect space exploration to provide this sort of optimistic political narrative all on its own; patriotism and belief in one’s country can’t and doesn’t derive from any one achievement or enterprise, no matter how inspirational or impressive. But it can serve as a spark to think more expansively and hopefully about the country and humanity as a whole, especially at a time when so many of us seem so down on our nation and our species.
Space exploration — and even more space settlement and space exploitation — sends the signal that we don’t live in a zero-sum world.
MORE LIKE THIS PLEASE: Pennsylvania Prohibits ‘Zuck Bucks’ Ahead Of 2022 Midterms.
PEOPLE WHO HIRE “EQUITY CONSULTANTS” DESERVE WHAT THEY GET: How equity consultants created a hostile work environment at a domestic violence non-profit.
YEAH. WHEN IT’S COLD THEY TELL US WEATHER IS NOT CLIMATE. PFUI: Wrong, Legacy Media, Climate Change Is Not Causing Summer Heatwaves in the U.S. and Europe.
BEHOLD, MY SHOCKED FACE: U.S. Oil Companies Double Capital Expenditures Year-Over-Year.
THE “STREISAND EFFECT’ SHINES BRIGHTLY ON THIS ONE: AOC defends fake handcuff stunt at protest after criticism, mockery.
THEY’RE COOL WITH THE SLAVERY, THEY JUST DON’T LIKE IT BEING REPORTED: Taliban force columnist to tweet apology over articles accusing group of sex slavery.