An idealistic Millennial couple who bicycled through the wilds of Muslim central Asia in the belief that “humans are kind” and that “evil is a make-believe concept” have been murdered by Islamic terrorists.
Americans Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan, both in their 20s, were among four cyclists killed last month in Tajikistan by two Islamic State terrorists who first rammed them with their car, then stabbed and shot them.
Congratulations to all the kids who did well in their A Levels today.
Now do yourselves a favour: don’t waste your time going to university.
Especially don’t waste your time trying to get into Oxford or Cambridge. They’re over: you only have to watch an episode of University Challenge to see that. There’s barely a normal, rounded person among them, these days. They’re freaks – socially maladept, tragically introverted or even more painfully extroverted, some with Adam’s apples but female names, every one of them definitely a Jeremy Corbyn supporter – especially that horrible team from Balliol who won a couple of years ago.
I’ve seen it happen. A lad just down the road from us, lovely boy, nice school, posh parents, got a place at Oxford. Two years on, he thinks Jeremy Corbyn is the answer and heartily supports the “decolonisation” of the curriculum whereby in future dead white males like Shakespeare will be downplayed in order to give proper place to global historical talents like Maya Angelou and Afua Hirsch.
This is a feature, not a bug of our greatest universities. (Same, of course, applies to the Ivy League). The authorities have capitulated to the Social Justice Warriors. So have the majority of undergraduates who aren’t themselves SJWs but find it easier to get along by paying lipservice to their kill-joy, anti-free-speech, ultra-PC values.
“Donald Trump has broken the climate spell,” says a must-readarticle by Rupert Darwall. [Rather surprisingly, it’s in the NeverTrump Weekly Standard].
He’s right. And it’s an apt metaphor, too. For decades, it’s as if the entire civilized world has been under the grip of a malign spell cast by an evil green wizard.
This evil green wizard is a shape-shifter who has taken many forms – sometimes, adopting the blubbery physique of Al Gore or the wizened, yoga-loving, soft-porn-writing frame of railway engineer Rajendra Pachauri; sometimes that of the moustachioed Canadian Marxist Maurice Strong; sometimes that of the hollow orator Barack Obama, or the comedy data-manipulator and faux-Nobel-Prizewinner Michael ‘Hockey Stick’ Mann…
All these characters are just different facets of the same problem though: the suicide mission – devised by a handful of influential zealots and enthusiastically embraced by far too many politicians, academics, celebrities, lawyers, corporatists, scientists, apparatchiks and journalists – to make the global economy “transition” from fossil fuel to renewable energy.
What makes Trump so remarkable is that he is the first political leader of consequence to stand up against this seemingly unstoppable tide.
The alarmists have come up with an exciting new name for climate change: Hothouse Earth.
As we’ll see, shortly, this has nothing whatsoever to do with new discoveries or indeed plausible scientific evidence of any kind. As usual, it’s just propaganda by the usual suspects on their usual mission to usher in an era of fascistic “global governance” where democratically unaccountable “experts” police every last detail of our lives.
Hothouse earth – aka ‘climate change’; aka ‘global warming’; aka ‘global climate disruption’; aka ‘global weirding’ – was invented by a bunch of activists at a hitherto deeply obscure scientific institution calling itself Stockholm Resilience Centre. Until they got a study published last week nobody – probably not even the people who work there – had heard of the place.
But because Stockholm Resilience Centre said all the right scary things about the imminence of global man-made climate doom, the left-wing media treated it like the voice of God.
According to the BBC‘s breathless account of the Stockholm Resilience Centre’s study:
It may sound like the title of a low budget sci-fi movie, but for planetary scientists, “Hothouse Earth” is a deadly serious concept.
Researchers believe we could soon cross a threshold leading to boiling hot temperatures and towering seas in the centuries to come.
Even if countries succeed in meeting their CO2 targets, we could still lurch on to this “irreversible pathway”.
“Deadly serious concept”? No. You were right first time with “low budget sci-fi movie.”
Then, the next thing they both need to do is never, ever, ever apologize.
And not back down either.
Otherwise what’s left of Disney’s credibility as an entertainment industry player will be toast. So too will all that hard work Whitehall has put in in the last couple of years trying to make the big break from popular English stand up comedian to major Hollywood movie star.
So too will the entire point of the acting profession.
Actors, let’s be honest, aren’t generally good for much. All they basically do is pretend to be other people, usually reading out lines that cleverer people have written for them – and get paid lots of money for it.
But if it’s no longer politically acceptable for them to play anyone other than themselves, then where’s the skill? Where’s the value-added that justifies all those inflated pay checks? There isn’t any. Which means that apart from that tiny minority of actors who are loved for only ever being themselves – Clint; Michael Caine; Joey from Friends – the entire acting profession is going to die on its feet.
This is it — the moment we’ve been waiting for. The moment when the Brexit rebellion finally began.
“Enough of this pissing about. Enough lawyerly excuses and Civil Service prevarication and Remainer politician manoeuvrings. We voted Brexit. Now give us Brexit. Give us Brexit, strong and hard, Boris!”.
That, in a nutshell, is what the people of Britain have been saying this week. Except that the way they have expressed it is in the context of another issue entirely. Instead of talking about Brexit, everyone has been preoccupied with two other “b” words — Boris and the burqa.
But make no mistake, it is Brexit that is the underlying reason as to why Boris Johnson v the Burqa has been dominating the British media’s news agenda with such extraordinary persistence all week.
All the usual leftist suspects – CNN, WaPo, Sen. Kamala Harris,Governor Moonbeam – are trying to blame “climate change” and even Donald Trump for the wildfires ravaging California.
But guess who is really to blame…
That’s right: the usual leftist suspects.
Specifically the culprits are all those environmental campaigners, eco lobbyists, green NGOs, lawyers and politicians responsible turning California and the Pacific Northwest into a gigantic fire hazard.
Forests need management to stay healthy: they need thinning to promote strong, disease-free growth; they need accumulated dry brush to be cleared to avoid the risk of wildfires; they need firebreaks to stop fires getting out of control; they need managed burns in order to stave off the savage incendiary fury of the kind of wildfires that burn so hot they turn the entire area into a barren wasteland.
Not so long ago, this vital work was carried out by the forestry industry – at little or no cost to the taxpayer.
YouTube is now adding fact checks to videos that question climate change, BuzzFeed News has confirmed, as a part of its ongoing effort to combat the rampant misinformation and conspiratorial fodder on its platform.
On July 9, the company added a blurb of text underneath some videos about climate change, which provided a scientifically accurate explainer. The text comes from the Wikipedia entry for global warming and states that “multiple lines of scientific evidence show that the climate system is warming.”
This new feature follows YouTube’s announcement in March that it would place descriptions from Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica next to videos on topics that spur conspiracy theories, such as the moon landing and the Oklahoma City bombing. In doing the same for climate videos, the company seems to be wading into more fraught and complex intellectual territory.
Sure, in many ways it’s a trivial and pathetic gesture. Quoting Wikipedia as your credible source is a bit like citing CNN as the go-to site for all the latest info on Donald Trump. And anyway, that “scientifically accurate explainer” is at best vague, at worst far more misleading than the videos it is supposed to be “fact checking.”
Yes, there were the inevitable virtue-signallers, leftists and malcontents declaring how racist and divisive and Islamophobic Trump was, or how slippery Boris was, or how evil I was.
What I hadn’t bargained for, though, was the large number of people who agreed with me. Strongly.
Not that you needed another reason to loathe and despise the BBC – but check out what it has done to this interview with Jordan Peterson.
Peterson was being interviewed for a BBC World Service show called HARDTalk, presented by former foreign correspondent Stephen Sackur.
On screen – and in his presence – Sackur introduced Peterson as: a “Canadian clinical psychologist whose defence of traditional values has won him a worldwide following.”
But once Peterson was out of the way and the interview was in the bag, the BBC went and renosed the interview for the podcast version – prefacing it with all manner of sneery innuendo and barely-disguised loathing.
“His big thoughts about the importance of traditional values, the onus on men to toughen up and the dangers – as he sees it – of a neo-Marxist political correctness appear to chime with the spirit of our times. At least for a swathe of alienated, angry men. Peterson has in fact been described as the perfect public philosopher for the Age of Donald Trump. To his critics – and there are many – he is simply an intellectual apologist for a reactionary, sexist brand of conservatism which seeks to thwart progressive social change.”
