I am currently watching the live streem of the Notting Hill Carnival on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tW7-sBbF7E

The MSM especially the BBC Lavished time and resouces on the Glastonbury Festival but next to nothing on the Notting Hill Carnival which IMHO is a much more important cultural event. The arrogent liberal elete as usual !

DaveS,
Disappointed I had to click so many times before getting to the Sydney Opera House. No drowning polar bears either. What's the alarmist cause coming to? For a more optimistic view, they might offer scenes of future Glasgow, with bananas and coconut palms growing by the Clyde and calypso music in the balmy air.

tomo,
yes, resorting to such tactics suggests there's a shortage of compelling arguments. I am fairly agnostic on the question of windfarms and whales (there have been plenty of strandings pre-windfarm, and all whales become corpses sooner or later), but the economic arguments are the ones to make.

John Campbell's latest is well worth watching. Features that rare creature, a worthwhile Australian senator, and a couple of big pharma's apologists sticking to the company line. Campbell rounds it off with his crack at answering the question and suggests how the vaccines might set our own immune systems at war with more or less any bodily system. Any big companies volunteering to test his hypothesis? No? How about universities then? No? Governments?

A little something for the weekend: an example of the hysterical climate change nonsense that appears on the internet.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/travel/tripideas/a-look-at-earth-in-2050-if-climate-change-isn-t-stopped/ss-AA1fIdlB?ocid=winp1taskbar&cvid=84df74d5ac6d433392d6a7e06bdcdcbf&ei=15#image=1

This video, Douglas Macgregor: Eradicated, was linked by a commenter at Jo Nova's today. The comments all seem favourable enough, but the content? 17 minutes of Churchill-lite soundbites with just one interesting detail (the problems with turbine-powered US tanks' fuel consumption and heat signature). The rest of the video took us nowhere.

tomo,
I have sympathy for Harry, and for the other royals; it's a very tough card to draw in the birth lottery. However, years pass quickly, old habits die hard, and I too find it easy to think of Harry as a "lad". A quick check tells me that he will soon turn 39. It is about time the "lad" notion was wound back and, with it, the indulgence for his lack of insight.

As for the Kennedys being "royalty", that's no biggy. It was once widely perceived that the Kennedy clan were America's blue bloods, but that notion appears to be on the ebb these days. Slightly amusing to read people's explanations for why the Kennedys aren't American royalty. Apparently it's nothing to do with whether or not they're in the public eye, or having weddings reported in the gossip pages, etc., it's because they can't demand "Off with his head". While much has changed in the US, it appears they still have the old cartoon picture of Britain seared in during childhood.

Perhaps we can consider royalty *has* returned to the US if, at some stage, RFK Jnr's head parts company with his neck.

Enjoyed the interview with Vivek Ramaswamy. Quite liked his notion that revolution is coming one way or another so better it be the nice kind (I'm not sure it's a possibility, but refreshing to see an optimist). Also liked his response to the the activist's questions on trans rights, etc. Well played. I doubt Trump would be keen, but they would make a fun team. We'll see what comes.

The Aussie sport stuff is a bit of cringeworthy pantomime. At all the big swimming things, and cricket, and random ones like this where our team has done better than expected, and of course the Melbourne Cup: we're all expected to climb into our bronzed Aussie, larrikin ocker outfits and pretend we're keenly interested. I admit, the barbecues and beer are good fun, but I don't understand why we need the sports excuse.

Speed skater one was good value though.

Mailman, DaveS,
You might remember the tennis contest between the Williams sisters and some bloke I'd never heard of.

Ross Lea,
Thanks for the link. Very enjoyable interview, though Tom Switzer's interviewing style could do with a bit of polish. Equivalence of CIS and IEA is about right I think.

Judith Curry article is on my reading list, but not yet read.

tomo (again),
I liked this bit on the magical windows:

... able to produce up to one kilowatt of energy per hour. These tests confirmed that FLUIDGLASS is capable of providing all of a building's heat and cooling needs, that no additional heating or cooling systems were required,

Listened to a recent Brendan O'Neill Podcast at the weekend. It wasn't great IMO — the guest was apparently a good writer, but rambled a bit much when talking — but it did draw attention to the suicide of Richard Bilkszto, a Canadian school principal, who sounds like he was pretty woke himself, but not enough for the racist "anti-racist" trainer. Not a cheerful story at all.

As an aside, that NP article demonstrates the dangers of not thinking about hyphenation when it described the course as "anti-Black racism training". Hmmm.

And in comments to that article was this Thomas Sowell quote:

Racism is not dead, but it is on life support — kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as "racists."

Applies to the Canadian case, and to Australia's "Voice to Parliament" nonsense.

I'm now halfway through the latest EconTalk with Adam Mastroianni. He was on not long ago talking about how hopeless peer review is. This time he's discussing the difficulty of getting knowledge from your head into other people's heads (whether for teaching, or for argument).

One of his first examples was noteworthy. Apparently he did a postgrad course at Oxford as an international student. He deemed it a low standard and concluded that Oxford just used these high-fee-paying students to subsidise its excellent undergrad courses.

I'm glad to hear they still have the latter. Seems to me the Australian universities have the cash cow as their main objective.

(his example was in the context of his bad experience not being enough to convince other students to take a year off rather than head for Oxford)

The psychology part of the talk has been interesting so far. He points out how discomfiting it would be if, in an Internet argument (say), your opponent were to simply concede (and not sarcastically). He posits a self-preservation mechanism that makes us resistant to direct idea transfer, even with compelling evidence. Personal experience is the best teacher.

Fair enough. I'd call it scepticism.

Then again, I'll be interested if the credulity of so many people during the COVID mania comes up. It demonstrated that some ideas can get the express lane into (at least some) people's most deeply cherished beliefs without having a hint of experience behind them.

It might be like so many biological systems: there are both whips and reins pushing us on and holding us back. I have a vague inkling that the same might be true of the weather systems.

Phew. Long one today!