SATURDAY NIGHT THE STONE ROSES, ANYA MARINA.

The Stone Roses with I wanna be adored. From their 1989 album The Stone Roses.




Madchester frontrunners around Ian Brown.



Anya Marina with Satellite Heart. From the New Moon soundtrack, 2009.




New York singer/songwriter.


Nite.



MFBB.

RECOMMENDED READS: WALTER WILLIAMS ON CLIMATE CHANGE.

An excellent Walter Williams contribution over at Townhall:

"... GlobalChange.gov gives the definition of climate change: "Changes in average weather conditions that persist over multiple decades or longer. Climate change encompasses both increases and decreases in temperature, as well as shifts in precipitation, changing risk of certain types of severe weather events, and changes to other features of the climate system." That definition covers all weather phenomena throughout all 4.54 billion years of Earth's existence.
You say, "Williams, that's not what the warmers are talking about. It's the high CO2 levels caused by mankind's industrial activities that are causing the climate change!" There's a problem with that reasoning. Today CO2 concentrations worldwide average about 380 parts per million. This level of CO2 concentration is trivial compared with the concentrations during earlier geologic periods. For example, 460 million years ago, during the Ordovician Period, CO2 concentrations were 4,400 ppm, and temperatures then were about the same as they are today. With such high levels of CO2, at least according to the warmers, the Earth should have been boiling.

Then there are warmer predictions. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, warmers, such as the Union of Concerned Scientists, made all manner of doomsday predictions about global warming and the increased frequency of hurricanes. According to the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, "no Category 3-5 hurricane has struck the United States for a record nine years, and Earth's temperature has not budged for 18 years."

Climate change predictions have been wrong for decades. Let's look at some. At the first Earth Day celebration, in 1969, environmentalist Nigel Calder warned, "The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind." C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization said, "The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed." In 1968, Professor Paul Ehrlich predicted that there would be a major food shortage in the U.S. and that "in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people (would) starve to death." Ehrlich forecasted that 65 million Americans would die of starvation between 1980 and 1989 and that by 1999, the U.S. population would have declined to 22.6 million. Ehrlich's predictions about England were gloomier. He said, "If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000."




To the right the last polar bears. Or so the warmists would want you to believe. In reality however...


In 1970, Harvard University biologist George Wald predicted, "Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind." Sen. Gaylord Nelson, in Look magazine in April 1970, said that by 1995, "somewhere between 75 and 85 percent of all the species of living animals (would) be extinct."

Climate change propaganda is simply a ruse for a socialist agenda. Consider the statements of some environmentalist leaders. Christiana Figueres, the U.N.'s chief climate change official, said that her unelected bureaucrats are undertaking "probably the most difficult task" they have ever given themselves, "which is to intentionally transform the (global) economic development model." In 2010, German economist and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change official Ottmar Edenhofer said, "One must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy." The article in which that interview appeared summarized Edenhofer's views this way: "Climate policy has almost nothing to do anymore with environmental protection. ... The next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world's resources will be negotiated."

The most disgusting aspect of the climate change debate is the statements by many that it's settled science. There is nothing more anti-scientific than the idea that any science is settled. Very often we find that the half-life of many scientific ideas is about 50 years. For academics to not criticize their colleagues and politicians for suggesting that scientific ideas are not subject to challenge is the height of academic dishonesty."

Listen to Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC):




People like Figueres need to be stopped.


MFBB.

BEN SHAPIRO'S REALITY CHECK: HILLARY CLINTON IS A LIAR.

Via Theo Spark, Ben Shapiro's take on Serial Liar Hillary Clinton:



Echoes of Jerry Zeifman, lifelong Democrat:



What a gruesome woman. She would literally kill for her perverse ambitions.



MFBB.

RECOMMENDED READS: JOHN STOSSEL'S "WHAT'S FAIR?"

Nail on the head article by John Stossel over at Townhall:

"Donald Trump's kids and Paris Hilton's siblings were born rich. That gave them a big advantage in life. Unfair!

Inequality in wealth has grown. Today the richest 1 percent of Americans own a third of the assets. That's not fair!

But wherever people are free, that's what happens.

Some people are luckier, smarter or just better at making money. Often they marry other wealthy, well-connected people. Over time, these advantages compound. Globalization increases the effect. This month's issue of Forbes says the world now has 1,826 billionaires, and some struggle to find enough parking places for their jets.

President Obama calls inequality "the defining issue of our time." Really? Not our unsustainable debt? Not ISIS? The president also said, "No challenge? poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change!"

Politicians constantly find crises they will solve by increasing government power. But why is inequality a crisis?





Alexis Goldstein, of a group called The Other 98 percent, complains that corporations got richer but workers' wages "are lower than they've been in 65 years."

That's a common refrain, but it's wrong. Over the past 30 years, CBO data shows that the average income of the poorest fifth of Americans is up by 49 percent. That doesn't include all the innovations that have dramatically improved everyone's life. Today even the poorest Americans have comforts and lifespans that kings didn't have a century ago.

George Mason University economist Garett Jones says, "If I was going to be in the bottom fifth in the America of today versus the bottom fifth of America in 1970 or 1960, it's hard to imagine that anybody would take that time machine into the past."

And despite America's lousy government schools and regulations that make it tough to start a business, there is still economic mobility. Poor people don't have to stay poor. Sixty-four percent of those born in the poorest fifth of the U.S. population move out of that quintile. Eleven percent of them rise all the way to the top, according to economists at Harvard and Berkeley. Most of the billionaires atop the Forbes richest list weren't rich. They got rich by innovating.

Rich people aren't guaranteed their place at the top, either. Sixty-six percent fell from the top quintile, and eight percent fell all the way to the bottom.

That mobility is a reason most of us are better off than we would have been in a more rigid society, controlled by central economic planners.

Life will always be unfair. I want to play pro basketball. It's unfair that LeBron James is bigger and more talented! It's also unfair that George Clooney is better looking! It's unfair that my brother is smarter than me.

Jones points out, "I was born with an advantage, too. Being born in the United States ... totally unfair." He also has two married parents -- another huge advantage.

The question is not whether people start out life in homogeneous circumstances, he adds. "The question is whether government policies that try to fix this actually make things better or worse."

Worse, in most cases. Government "help" encourages poor people to be dependent and passive. Dependent, people stay poor. Also, most government handouts don't even go to the poor. They go to the middle class (college loans, big mortgage tax deductions, Medicare) and the rich (corporate welfare, bailouts to banks "too big to fail").

Instead of making government more powerful, let's get rid of those handouts. Left and right ought to agree on that.

America has prosperity and innovation because we have relatively free markets.





Progressives say, "Keep the innovation but have government make us more equal." But that doesn't work. It's been tried. Government-enforced equality -- socialism -- leaves everybody poor.

Equality is less important than opportunity. Opportunity requires allowing people to spend their own money and take their own risks.

Instead of talking about "fairness," it would be better to talk about justice: respecting other people, respecting their freedom and their property rights.

Real fairness requires limiting government power."

MFBB.

RECOMMENDED READS: MARK STEYN WITH MODS VS CHOPPERS.

Our MSM do their damnedest best to pretend Mark Steyn does in fact not exist, so here's Outlaw Mike helping them out of their dreams: Our Man From New Hampshire with Mods vs Choppers:

"Is it "racist" to impute to moderate Muslims the intimidatory character of that last sentence? Well, here's Douglas Murray at a post-Charlie demo in the UK:


*** Yesterday in London a crowd of more than a thousand British Muslims (carefully divided between males and females) gathered outside Downing Street. The rally – organised by something calling itself 'The Muslim Action Forum' – was a protest against freedom of speech, specifically to cartoons of Mohammed in the French publication Charlie Hebdo. Among the banners carried by protestors were ones that read, 'I am a servant of holy prophet Muhammad (pbuh)', the sinister 'We love prophet Muhammad (pbuh) more than our lives', 'Jesus and Moses were prophets of Islam' and the even more presumptuous 'Learn some manners'. Among those holding a banner reading 'Charlie and the abuse factory' was a little boy. Others bore banners with the fantastically awful words spoken by the Pope last month: 'Insult my mum and I will punch you (Pope Francis).' A large banner hung beneath the stage from which speakers addressed the crowd carried the barely concealed threat: 'Be careful with Muhammad.'

As I said, Islam itself has no feeling for free speech, and so the more Islamic a society gets the less free speech it will have. So all the above was to be expected. This, on the other hand, has an inspired audacious brio:


*** Charlie Hebdo has been named 2015 International Islamophobe of the year, despite many of its staff having been killed by Jihadists in January. The annual 'award' was given by Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC), a British group that claims to campaign against terrorism.

What did the late editor Stéphane Charbonnier and his deceased cartoonists and writers do to merit such an honor? Well, Charlie Hebdo won the Islamophobia Oscars for "its continual stoking of Islamophobic sentiment by caricaturing Muslims as terrorists".

So a group of Muslim terrorists killed them. Which you would think might lend sufficient credence to Charlie Hebdo's editorial line as to make the Islamic Human Rights Commission wary about giving them a posthumous award for their supposedly absurd, irrational phobia. If, say, I were to be killed by a deranged climate activist, I've no doubt Michael E Mann and his chums would be having a grand laugh about it, but I think a certain self-awareness would caution them from making me Climate Denier of the Year in absentia. So it's tempting to think that no one at the IHRC has sufficient sense of irony to understand what they're doing with their award to Charlie Hebdo. But I think, au contraire, they do understand - and they're dancing in the blood of the dead because, like those hundreds of thousands of British Muslims, they think those attacks were "justified". And they want you to know that.

What is the "Islamic Human Rights Commission"? Well, it has consultative status with the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, and it's given evidence to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. Its supporters include Ilan Pappé, the Jewish "anti-Zionist" Exeter University professor. All very respectable, all very "moderate".

The problem is "moderate Islam" - because "moderate Islam" is largely indistinguishable from "radical Islam" in its views on free speech, Jews, the role of women, apostasy, and the special privilege that must be accorded to Islam by everybody else. The difference between the savages who murdered Charb and his colleagues and the "moderates" who pinned Islamophobe of the Year medals on their corpses is that the jihadists are killing a few individuals while the mods are killing the very spirit of a free society. If you believe in all the above, you can't be a citizen of a functioning pluralist western society, and, wittingly or otherwise, you're part of the campaign to replace that society with something else.

Former Labour man Leo McKinstry writes in The Daily Express:


*** When the bloodthirsty Islamist brute nicknamed "Jihadi John" was exposed as a London computer graduate and terror suspect called Mohammed Emwazi, the cry went up, "How was he allowed to slip through the net?"

*** But it was an absurd question.

*** There is no net.

Indeed. Unless "moderate Islam" can be prevailed upon to change its views on free speech, etc, it's part of the problem, and ensures that instead of a "net" there's a vast comfort zone for the likes of Mohammed Emwazi to roam and sport in."

This is such a "wonderful" pic from a Cultural Enricher at that demo that I just had to include it:



Photo courtesy The Spectator and Getty.

... but also because it contains the quote to the left.


Now, as a sidenote, I knew George Bernard Shaw was a disingenuous leftist idiot, but he wasn't as far gone as today's leftists. So, alas for the hatebeard in the picture above, but that quote about Shaw having proclaimed once that the prophet (Piss Be Upon Him By The Hectoliters) is the Saviour of Humanity is BOGUS. Check out The Australian in 2013:

"ANTI "Islamophobia" advertisements due to screen on major free-to-air channels from today rely on a fabricated quote from Irish playwright and avowed atheist George Bernard Shaw, from a book that does not exist, according to the International Shaw Society.

The 30-second ads have been funded by the Sydney-based Mypeace organisation, which says it hopes to "build bridges" between Muslims and other Australians.

Animated with voiceovers and with quotations displayed on the screen, they feature major historical figures including Mahatma Gandhi and Shaw praising the prophet Mohammed.

The advertisements quote Shaw proclaiming the prophet Mohammed was "the saviour of humanity" in a book he is supposed to have written entitled The Genuine Islam.

But International Shaw Society treasurer Richard F Dietrich said he had compiled a complete list of Shaw's works, which did not include the book.

"I think The Genuine Islam is bogus," he said. In his writings, Shaw described the religion in a 1933 letter to Rev Ensor Walters as "ferociously intolerant"."

That dork should grow a brain instead of a beard.



MFBB.

MONDAY NIGHT VICKERS VIMY VIDEO.

Via Theo Spark, this wonderful video of the Vickers Vimy in flight:




Designed by Reginald Kirshaw "Rex" Pierson, who was chief designer of Vickers Limited (Aviation Department) in Leighton Buzzard, the Vickers Vimy was a two-engined biplane bomber which came too late to play a role in WWI (three aircraft actually made it to France before the cessation of hostilities, but were never deployed in combat missions), but which equipped many RAF squadrons post-Great War and had a successful career in a civilian role. It is probably best remembered as the mount of Captain Alcock and Lieutenant Colonel Brown, pilot and navigator respectively, on their memorable transatlantic flight in 1919.



The rather uninspired Alcock and Brown Memorial near Clifden, in Galway, Ireland. If all goes well, we're spending our summer holiday this year in County Sligo. We might go a little south to visit the site. Photocredit Wikipedia.


The Vimy prototypes were equipped with a variety of engines, but the production aircraft the RAF received had the 360HP (270kW) Rolls-Royce Eagle VIII engines. Main characteristics:

Empty weight: 7,104 lb (3,222 kg)
Max. takeoff weight: 10,884 lb (4,937 kg)
Maximum speed: 100 mph (161 km/h)
Range: 900 mi (1,448 km)
Service ceiling: 7,000 ft (2,134 m)

The armament consisted of two .303 in (7.7 mm) Lewis machineguns in Scarff rings, one in the nose and another one in mid-fuselage. Bombload was 2,476 lb (1,123 kg).

Cutaway drawing:


Magnificent huh? Such a wonderful piece of engineering, now almost a century old!

Some quick anecdotal facts before Outlaw Mike calls it quits. The Vimy was named for the Battle of Vimy Ridge, which took place from 9 to 12 April 1917, and in which the four division strong Canadian Corps and one British division, with overall commander the later Field Marshal Sir Julian Byng, were pitted against three German divisions of the German Sixth Army under Von Falkenhausen. It was an Allied victory.

Although Alcock and Brown's Vimy crashed in a bog near Clifden - it was a miracle they escaped unhurt - the plane was rebuilt and is now on display in the London Science Museum.

Vickers would merge with Armstrong-Whitworth in 1927, and the resulting company would ultimately become a part of BAC in 1960.

The brand name Vickers however would continue to be used until 1965. Perhaps the most inspiring Vickers creation would be the Vickers Valiant, the most conventional design among the three bomber types of Britain's airborne nuclear deterrent force. But even so, it's amazing that a mere 34 years separate the Vimy from the Valiant, which made its first flight in 1951.


MFBB.

RECOMMENDED READS: THE GREEN LEFT'S FASCIST ROOTS.

Do not miss this article by American Thinker's Mark Musser:

"The current presidential administration and State Department have been long touting that global warming/climate change are just as dangerous as Russian bears and Islamic terrorists. In February 2014, Secretary of State John Kerry addressed Asian leaders in Jakarta by informing them, “Climate change can now be considered another weapon of mass destruction, perhaps the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction.” With such attitudes, is it any wonder the east-west divide all the way from the Middle East to Ukraine in the north is literally on fire with no promising solution or relief to be found anywhere on the horizon? While common sense cries out that the world is entering into very serious times not seen since perhaps World War II, America has a presidential administration and a State Department seemingly far more concerned about global warming/climate change than the cauldron that has erupted in the Middle East, and the seething geopolitical dangers that could easily blow up all of Europe itself.

Worse, leftist pressure has made the U.S. military go green over the last decade. The U.S. armed forces are now buying more and more energy from expensive renewable technology contractors. Presumably by 2025, the U.S. Army will become a virtual green model of sustainability for the entire country. In other words, the Left is using the Defense Department to keep renewable energy boondoggles afloat by wasting taxpayer dollars on green pipe dreams.

......


What many on the Left do not appreciate is that when they started to jump on the bandwagon of Nature and environmentalism, they began to drift more and more toward fascism and away from their original humanistic workingman class-warfare Marxian values. Fascism essentially means holism, which denies the otherness of the human being from nature. In fact, it was the father of German Social Darwinism, Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), who coined the term “ecology” in 1866.

In the early 1900s, Haeckel established the German Monist League, which was one of the first politically-active groups in both racial science and environmentalism. Monism means “one” and many Germans at the time believed that Darwinism established racism as a scientific fact. As such, eugenics became the scientific methodology that was to be used in order to restore humanity’s racial evolution that had been compromised by the Judeo-Christian worldview and her unnatural beliefs and practices. Allegedly promoted by Jews and Christians, humanism had led the modern world astray away from the scientific natural laws of evolutionary monism, i.e., racism, which needed to be recovered in order to save Aryan Europe from weakness, overpopulation, and inevitable decline. In those days, German Social Darwinism was called Monism, and many of Germany’s early greens were environmental racists and nationalists.




While there were some nuances that distinguished the Monist League from National Socialism, the Nazis drank deeply from Haeckel’s Social Darwinism. More than a few Nazis were very attracted to what has to be understood as an early form of environmentalism as well. With the exception of Martin Bormann, all the leading Nazis, including the Führer himself, had their fingers in a piece of the green pie that National Socialism offered to Germany -- everything from animal rights to green hunting laws, to environmental preservation and planning, to green building and a back-to-the-land farming campaign, organic farming, recycling, sustainable forestry, and even sustainable development. As early as 1935, Nazi Germany was far and above the greenest regime on the planet. Eco-fascism is thus no metaphor, but a historical fact.

.....


Closely related, one of the original gurus who championed the cause of environmentalism over national security concerns was German green activist Dr. Erich Hornsmann (1909-1999). In postwar West Germany, Hornsmann often complained that the destruction of Mother Nature was “Enemy Number One.” In 1947, Hornsmann became a founding member of the Protection of German Forests. In 1955, he wrote The Forest: The Foundation of our Existence. He warned of spreading desertification problems associated with the cutting down of trees and expanding ski resorts on mountain slopes. Dr. Hornsmann even led the postwar charge on promoting radical water conservation measures. Hornsmann also belonged to the Alliance for the Protection of German Waters and wrote extensively on how water was becoming an increasingly scarce commodity. Hornsmann applied Malthusian math to the waters of Germany as he was convinced water consumption would outstrip water supplies as personal usage of it skyrocketed with ever-increasing showers and baths. Industry itself wasted more water than entire cities combined.

Hornsmann also wrote an apocalyptic environmental book entitled, Otherwise Collapse: The Answer of the Earth to the Abuse of Her Laws. To counteract the green catastrophe looming just around the corner, Hornsmann was convinced that environmental land use planning was absolutely required to avoid doomsday. Much of the apocalyptic environmentalism so rampant in today’s political world goes back to Germany and rabid environmentalists like Dr. Hornsmann. After the war, the German greens became extremely vitriolic, since Germany had been bombed into oblivion with an industrial destruction never seen before in the history of the world. That the capitalistic Americans wound up with the nuclear bomb only made Germans more apocalyptic in fervor.

Dr. Hornsmann’s ahistorical environmental record from the 1930s and 40s is highly suspicious. Not much is known about his actions during the heyday of the green Nazi movement of the 1930s, but it is highly likely he was deeply involved in one way or another. Eco-fascist greens like Martin Heidegger, Guenther Schwab, and Alfred Toepfer have been already been caught in a web of lies, deceit, and denial. Whatever the exact case may be on how much of a Nazi was green Dr. Hornsmann, what is known is that he sent a postcard to a relative in Bloomington, New Jersey on Hitler’s 50th birthday stating, “We think of you sincerely on a great Day! We must pity, however, ‘God’s own country’ as long as it is ruled and exploited by Jews and their servants.”

Even the father of deep ecology, Aldo Leopold (1887-1948) complained of America’s ‘Abrahamic’ use of the land in his famous book called The Sand County Almanac written in 1947. Unbeknownst to many, Nazi Germany gave Leopold an all-expense-paid trip to the fatherland in 1935 so he that could observe the new environmental direction the Third Reich was implementing. Leopold was generally impressed with what the Nazis were doing. Not only did Leopold drag home the “Never Cry Wolf” cult from Nazi Germany, he also wrote the Germans, unlike the Americans, were actually doing something about environmental problems, not just talking about them. Nazi Germany was the first country in the world to protect wolves. The Führer fancied himself as “Uncle Wolf." "

While I generally agree with the author on Haeckel, I nevertheless think that, even though his influence on the racial aspects of the Nazi ideology cannot be underestimated - note that Alfred Rosenberg, top Nazi ideologue, was an admirer - humanity nevertheless owes Haeckel the discovery, naming, and description of thousands of new species.



MFBB.