I recall Monbiot's unshakeable belief in climate change catastrophe being upset a little by Climategate but that disturbance soon settled and he resorted to type. Will his latest observations have a longer lasting impact on his outlook, I wonder?

World's largest sailing cargo ship (paywalled, but the teaser's enough) carries a whole 1000T of cargo at speeds up to whatever the wind says. If you could stack them suitably, that opens the door for satisfactorily transporting up to 10,000 Greta Thunbergs per voyage. The world's been waiting for this.

Jo Nova's latest shows how George Monbiot might be slowly waking up to how the supposed climate schemes achieve nothing at all towards the supposed climate goals.

tomo,
I think Cooper might be falling into the McBride trap. William McBride became famous in Australia for spotting the link between thalidomide and birth defects. He was feted far and wide over that, and well rewarded too. He wanted to drink at the same fountain again and completely faked up "research" into another morning-sickness remedy. Didn't end well for McBride. Cooper did well with his Jonestown story, perhaps to a point of intoxication.

Tucker Carlson deserves a fair share of the blowback. It's taken him another step away from being an intelligent commentator, and a step towards just being another internet shit-stirrer.

John Cleese is fantastically funny as a comedian, but has always struck me as a crashing bore when speaking as himself.

But it *is* Pythonesque, the times we're living in with voters' wishes being thwarted through political party wrangling in order to save democracy: France, Germany, ... USA? Will the eventual solution to the numbers of illegal immigrants turn out to be that they stop wanting to come at all: the quondam promised land is just another shithole?

Agree with the Dave Jones tweet about Dutton's announcement. Bang goes *all* anonymity, and for what benefit? The kids who want to can still do their social media via VPN through Russia (say). The state makes a truly woeful substitute for a parent.

I suspect buyer's remorse may be in store for the people switching to E85. Was funny seeing them acknowledge the worse fuel consumption and that this could be helped by driving technique. That works with petrol too.

Flex fuel seems a bit of a hack. Dedicated alcohol burners would be much more efficient, with compression ratios to optimise bang for the buck.

Australia has had its Excess Mortality Inquiry. As you might expect, it's a whitewash. Article's ok. Comments were better IMO.

It's no surprise that the findings relied on modelling. The usual story of it's bad, but would have been worse.

There's a similar flavour in the actuaries inventing an alternative present from a past where we didn't have the COVID vaccines and Cooper inventing an alternative past where the Nazis just wanted to live in peace. Neither is good, but the first does more harm.

tomo,
I didn't know about the kerfuffle either, but it's no great surprise. And I'm sure it won't just be lefties. There'll be other camp-followers too, chasing clicks for themselves.

What I transcribed in that comment a few days ago was the part that struck me as most telling. It culminated in: and millions of people ended up dead. Oh yes, somehow they found themselves closed in a room filling with Zyklon B. More unfortunate victims of poor logistics.

Though he's probably just chasing notoriety, Cooper is doing the work of the Ministry of Truth: inventing history out of whole cloth to support a political story. The ultimate effect is the malleability of history. After umpteen revisions, maybe the latest revision really is what happened. Who will know.

In a Spock-like rational world, this wouldn't matter much. In the world we occupy, is there *any* political cause that wouldn't benefit from being able to point to one or two historical martyrs?

Victor Hanson article was beautifully written, though rather depressing. Present situation in the USA is beyond parody. It's one thing to reconstruct history, but you have to bow to the Python team. They saw the future more clearly than anyone would have believed.