Views you can Use: How to Detect a Two Way Mirror.
Honey, I Finished The Internet
“He knew ‘something was up’ when the island’s many birds disappeared.”
This is worth stressing. Stand on Rockall, and you’re standing on the only piece of land for hundreds of miles in every direction, in some of the tallest seas in the world. (In 2000, oceanographers recorded individual waves up to 29 metres tall over the Rockall Trough.)
So you’d be mad to try?
Flaming Sparky Cars For The Masses!
If Steve Guilbeault gets his way, every fire department in Canada is going to need a fleet of tanker trucks to attend car accidents.
Firefighters arrived to find a Tesla Model Y on fire, and troopers shut down that portion of Interstate 65.
Two hose lines were deployed, and it took more than an hour to get the fire under control. A total of three engines, two rescues, one ambulance, four water tankers, one squad, one brush truck and three command vehicles responded to the fire.
“America as the ultimate seducer, the Great Satan.”
How Baby, It’s Cold Outside took down the Twin Towers.
Punishment by Process
If you happen to be backing the wrong political horse, Canada appears to be regressing back to the Middle Ages where trial by ordeal was commonplace. It now looks like the justice system, or what passes for it these days, won’t be through with Tamara Lich for several more months.
Freedom Convoy personality Tamara Lich said Friday that her joint trial with Chris Barber has again recessed and she doesn’t expect the defense to begin summarizing its case until “hopefully 10 days in mid-March” 2024. That means a verdict shouldn’t be expected until at least the summer.
One should bear in mind that this trial began on the Tuesday after the Labor Day long weekend in September.
Get That Monkey Off Your Back
There’s nothing more addictive than something that almost works.
“…nobody had spotted it for five years.”
It’s December 2012, and someone’s just noticed something is wrong on the Internet.
Wikipedia editor ShelfSkewed (happily that’s a pseudonym) has been clicking links in an article about an obscure 17th-Century war that raged between the Portuguese rulers of Goa, western India, and the neighbouring Maratha Empire. It was called the Bicholim Conflict, after the North Goa district it mostly took place in.
Haven’t you heard of the Bicholim Conflict? ShelfSkewed certainly hadn’t. He wanted to know more – and started investigating the extensive sources listed at the bottom of the article.
But then he found many of the links led him straight to one article: the one he was editing. A perfect loop.
Ruh-roh.
Burn, Baby, Burn
Norman Spector- One of the key recommendations to come out of the Firestorm 2003 report was for communities to create wildfire-protection plans to reduce risk in and around their communities. Once the plans were complete, they could apply for funding from the province. Continue reading
Where Giants Walked
Paul Cooper’s Fall of Civilizations: How everything they told you about Easter Island was wrong (1.5 hrs).
In this episode, we take a look at one of archaeology’s most enduring puzzles: the mystery of Easter Island. Find out how this unique community grew up in complete isolation, severed from the rest of the world by a vast expanse of ocean. Discover the incredible story of how it survived for so many centuries, and examine the evidence about what happened to finally bring this society, and its statues, crashing down.
“The hospital was called ‘Killer King’ in 1977”
To better understand the phenomenon of institutions crumbling (while crushing innocents) under the weight of their own incompetence, look no further than the sordid tale of “Killer King” hospital.
Built on a foundation of affirmative action, it was finally closed when it devolved into a butcher shop of medical malpractice. You won’t be surprised to learn that community activists denounced those who tried to do anything as racists.
Why care about merit? What harm is there in affirmative action programs that reward the less qualified?
Here’s the story of the Martin Luther King Jr/Drew Medical Center (King/Drew) in Los Angeles, which operated from 1972 to 2007.
Or as patients called, it “Killer King.” […]
Patients would come in with minor medical issues and end up dead.
Locals would run away from ambulances in order not to be brought to Killer King.
Police officers had an understanding that if their colleagues were shot, they would not allow them to be taken there.
It’s long and sordid.
“an invented term with a bogus pedigree”
The ‘two-spirit’ identity is based on a crackpot rewriting of Native American history.
The term two-spirit was first formally endorsed at a conference of Native American gay activists in 1990 in Winnipeg in Canada. It is a catch-all term to cover over 150 different words used by the various Indian tribes to describe what we think of today as gay, trans or various forms of gender-bending, such as cross-dressing. Two-spirit people, the conference declared, combine the masculine and the feminine spirits in one.
From the start, the whole exercise reeked of mystical hooey. Myra Laramee, the woman who proposed the term in 1990, said it had been given to her by ancestor spirits who appeared to her in a dream. The spirits, she said, had both male and female faces.
Incredibly, three decades on, there are now celebrities and politicians who endorse the concept or even identify as two-spirit. The term has found its way into one of Joe Biden’s presidential proclamations and is a constant feature of Canadian premier Justin Trudeau’s doe-eyed bleating about ‘2SLGBTQQIA+ rights’.
Read the whole, ridiculous thing.
Jevons Paradox
“Every molecule of fossil fuel produced worldwide will be burned by somebody somewhere, and local efforts to restrict consumption merely relocate the enjoyment of that privilege.”
Prior to the widespread proliferation of the steam engine, mining for coal was back-breaking work. The industry relied on human and animal strength, with laborers using primitive tools, to extract the stuff from hand-dug mineshafts. The work was as dangerous as it was dirty, and fatalities were commonplace. Then, a revolution unfolded. A step-change improvement to existing steam engine design, engineered by James Watt, allowed miners to leverage machinery such as pumps, hoists, and ventilation systems to alleviate significant portions of direct human effort. Pumps that used Watt’s engines were particularly effective at draining water from deep mineshafts, making vast and previously inaccessible coal reserves economically viable. The genius of his invention was in delivering far more work per quanta of fuel.
What did these advances in energy efficiency do to the demand for coal? Did society limit itself to doing the same amount of work as it had done before, just more economically so? Quite the contrary.
This is a good one, worth sharing around. More discussion here.
The Sound Of Settled Science
Men are from Mars, Octopi are from Venus.
In 2023, despite our advances in technology, the ocean remains as mysterious and impenetrable as ever. So it’s both surprising and unsurprising that scientists have now found underwater ‘cities’ constructed by one of the ocean’s most alien-looking inhabitants: the octopus.
It’s been understood for some time that octopuses are intelligent animals, and they are thought to have roughly the intelligence of a three-year-old child.
There’s something about their bizarre, fluid forms which captures human imagination, and they may even have some understanding of anatomy.
If you get the chance to watch the documentary “My Friend, The Octopus”, take it. (Sorry — correct that to “My Octopus Teacher“. Thanks, dizzy!)
Conspiracies aplenty
If you go by what the leftist corporate media are saying, conspiracy theories are the exclusive province of conservatives. Jump into the “rabbit hole” of residential school controversy, however, and conspiracy theories abound.
Not one reporter even thought to ask questions such as “If 215 children had disappeared at the school, why is there no historical record of even a single Kamloops indigenous parent – or any parent anywhere in Canada – claiming that their child had failed to return from school?”, “Where is your evidence of murderous priests, nuns and secret burials?” Why are you not releasing the radar operator’s report, that you promised to release?” or Why are the RCMP refusing to investigate what indigenous leaders are calling a “crime”, and why are the RCMP refusing to properly secure what indigenous leaders are calling a “crime scene” and do at least basic excavations?
“I did my best, I took every pill, every day. …”
“You have taken too much of those medicines for too long. Things are bound to go sideways.”
Grim reading, this took a lot of courage.
New Mexico doesn’t want spent nuclear fuel
There’s a lot of talk about nuclear these days, but not so much about what to do with the spent fuel. Both Canada and the US still haven’t built final, permanent repositories. And New Mexico, it turns out, doesn’t want to be home to one.
By the way, there’s still a lot of potential with spent fuel. It can be reprocessed and used again in special reactors. Some people don’t think it’s that big of a problem, because with reprocessing, you can use it again and again.
Life, Liberty and The Pursuit of Dopamine
The Nazis are coming?
Having read a lot today about the kerfuffle that Christine Anderson’s visit to Canada seems to have caused, I decided to have a closer look at what is allegedly some sort of neo-Nazi organization. There’s probably no better place to start than the actual platform of Alternative for Germany. Judging by the comments on social media, my guess is that most critics have never actually read that platform.
The party’s commitment to free market principles is a pleasant surprise coming from a European party, although that message gets muddled and watered down with support for UBI and a minimum wage. While they’re not classical liberals, the term “Nazi” seems to be a gross exaggeration.
Government should serve its citizens, and not vice versa.
Therefore, only lean government is good government. Govern-
ment should merely provide a framework within which its
citizens can thrive. A constant and often ideology-driven
expansion of government functions has reached financial
and practical limitations, and is a threat to the fundamen–
tal rights of freedom of its citizens. Government has taken
on too many tasks. There is a need to focus on four classic
functions performed by government: domestic and foreign
security, justice, foreign relations, and financial administra–
tion.
Newfoundland will continue to get screwed by Quebec for another nearly 2 decades, just watch
Story: Ahead of Quebec premier’s visit, provincial panel recommends new Churchill Falls deal
The notion that Quebec will change this deal one minute before 2041 is laughable. Quebec locked in a fixed price, with no escalator clause for inflation, in the early 1970s. And then they were able to extend it until 2041, despite Newfoundland’s protests to the Supreme Court of Canada, which backed Quebec. It is perhaps the most lopsided, unfair deal in Canadian history. Quebec gets rich, Newfoundland starves.
Churchill Falls Hydroelectric Generating Facility, with 5,428 megawatts capacity, has more power generating capacity than the entire province of Saskatchewan, combined, if every single coal and gas turbine, every wind turbine are running at 100%, and every solar panel is entirely lit at noon. If Newfoundland actually got a fair deal from its power sales over 50 years ago, it would not have been a have-not province for the last five decades. However, numerous court cases, up to the Supreme Court of Canada, have locked Newfoundland into the deal until 2041, selling power to Hydro Quebec for $2 per megawatt-hour. In New York (which buys power from Hydro Quebec), “Higher fuel costs have led to higher average wholesale electricity prices as well. In February 2022, the average year-to-date wholesale electricity cost was $118.36/Megawatt-hour (MWh), according to NYISO data.” Where do you think they buy wholesale power from?