Links - 15th July 2019 (2)

The UK needs to spend more on researching green energy | Coffee House - "Climate policy has been littered with broken promises ever since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Indeed, the core promises written into the Paris Agreement are not being met. A recent study revealed that only 16 countries — the likes of Samoa and Algeria — are living up to their vows to reduce carbon emission growth, and they’re only doing so because they promised to do very, very little... Despite governments encouraging the roll-out of green energy technology, renewables still have two big problems.First, they take up an amazing amount of space which often replaces nature. To produce the energy equivalent to a one-hectare gas-fired power plant you would need 73 hectares of solar panels, 239 hectares of on-shore wind turbines, or an unbelievable 6,000 hectares of biomass.Second – and more importantly – solar and wind power are intermittent or unreliable... We often hear that wind and solar energy are cheaper than fossil fuels, but at best that is only true when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. On a windless dark night, the cost of wind and solar power is literally infinite. That is also why it is deeply misleading to compare the energy cost of wind or solar to fossil fuels only when it is windy and sunny. Since all solar energy is captured around the same time, the value quickly drops dramatically — one study shows that in California, when 30 per cent of the market share is solar energy, it will lose two-thirds of its value. What’s more, because modern society requires 24 hours of power, even when solar or wind is introduced, it’s still necessary to pay for back-up service from fossil fuels (for when there’s no wind or sun). Only, these are now more expensive because fossil fuels have fewer hours to pay back the capital.Battery technology is far from ready to help solar and wind energy last longer: in the US, total battery storage could power the nation for just 14 seconds... The International Energy Agency‘s newest report finds that when adjusting for the unreliability of solar and wind, existing coal will be cheaper than new solar and wind in all the major regions until at least 2040."

College Admissions: Shaky Ethics - "the University of California at Berkeley made decisions on two of our students this year, both Californians. Student A was ranked in the top third of his class, student B in the bottom third. Student A had College Board scores totaling 1,290; student B's scores totaled 890. Student A had a record of good citizenship; student B was expelled this winter for breaking a series of major school rules. Student A was white; student B was black. Berkeley refused student A and accepted B. One wonders what messages about effort, ethical behavior and action-and-consequence each of those students received. One wonders if we have moved from a position of equal opportunity to - in this case, at least - affirmative-action cubed."
From 1988

Liberal education and the moral homicide of America -- Society's Child - "Mr. D'Souza provides numerous examples of the results of this scramble for minority candidates. Florida Atlantic University offers free tuition to every black student who is admitted, while at Pennsylvania State University black students who maintain a grade point average of C to C+ get a cash bonus of $580 a year; if they do better, they receive $1,160; neither white nor other minority students are eligible for this reward. As one observer remarked, "Everybody wants a piece of these students. The competition for them has become very keen." A black graduate from Stanford was rejected from Harvard Law School only to receive a flurry of phone calls a few days later from embarrassed administrators who offered him admission: with your grades, they explained, "We assumed you were white."Not surprisingly, there have also been numerous calls for revising the Scholastic Aptitude Tests and other objective measurements of accomplishment in order to make them less culturally "elitist." A professor of religious studies at the University of Tennessee whom Mr. D'Souza quotes epitomizes this attitude: "when you see the word 'qualifications' used, remember that this is the new code word for whites." And what is meant by an alternative to traditional "white" academic "qualifications" (the ability to read, write, and compute fluently, a good stock of general historical and literary knowledge, etc.)?"
From 1991

The myth of male homosexual monogamy - "Male sexuality, whether oriented toward females or other males, craves variety. But whereas almost all heterosexual men, perhaps after “sowing wild oats,” settle down with one woman, homosexual men do not settle down. Ever. A classic, large-scale study by Bell and Weinberg conducted during the 1970s and published by the Kinsey Institute found that forty-three percent (43%) of white male homosexuals had had sex with 500 or more partners, and twenty-eight percent (28%) had had sex with 1,000 or more partners. Seventy-nine percent (79%) said that more than half of their sexual partners had been strangers.[i] In 1985, Pollack found that gay men averaged “several dozen partners a year” and “some hundreds in a lifetime” with “tremendous promiscuity.”[ii] In their 1997 study of the sexual profiles of 2,583 older homosexuals published in the Journal of Sex Research, Paul Van de Ven, et al., found that “the modal range for number of sexual partners was 101-500.” In addition, 10.2 percent to 15.7 percent had between 501 and 1,000 partners. A further 10.2 percent to 15.7 percent reported having had more than one thousand lifetime sexual partners.[iii]These numbers are extraordinary, to put it mildly.[iv] Outside of a few privileged categories—such as rock stars, movie stars, elite professional athletes, and royalty—heterosexual men do not have sex with hundreds or thousands of women. Straight men may want to behave, and sometimes fantasize about behaving, in this way, but very few actually do. A 2011 survey conducted by Britain's National Health Service found that the average number of lifetime sex partners for heterosexual men was 9.3; only 25% of men had been with more than 10 women in their entire lives. A 2007 survey in the U.S. found that the median number of lifetime sexual partners for men was seven.The reason heterosexual men do not have sex with hundreds of partners is that straight men have to seduce women, and the idea that there are hoards of promiscuous, easy women is itself an absurdly false myth... The British NHS survey found that women averaged 4.7 lifetime sex partners, and 24% of women had been with only one man in their lives. The 2007 U.S. survey found that the median lifetime number of sexual partners for women was four (4); only 9% of women reported having had more than 15 sexual partners... A study of homosexual relationships in Amsterdam found that steady partners contribute more than casual partners to HIV infection, because gays tended to engage in risky behavior (unprotected anal intercourse) more often with steady partners than with casual partners... A famous study conducted in 1983 by Pepper Schwartz and Philip Blumstein of the University of Washington found that only a third of lesbians in relationships of 2 years or longer had sex once a week or more frequently. Almost half of these lesbian couples (47%) had sex once a month or less. Schwartz and Blumstein also reported that lesbian couples seemed more limited in their range of sexual techniques, and less sexual as couples and as individuals, than either heterosexual couples or homosexual males. These findings led Pepper Schwartz to coin the term “lesbian bed death.”"

What Does Teaching ‘White Privilege’ Actually Accomplish? Not What You Might Think (Or Hope) - "nearly everybody has at least some advantages in life. It feels perverse for someone who has suffered so much [with her husband killing their sons, then himself] to be confessing their perceived advantages... it’s not even clear that being white in any way constituted a form of privilege. Recent research has found a huge surge in white working-class suicides. In 2017, whites in the United States had a suicide rate of 17.8 per 100,000; for Hispanics, that rate was 6.9; for African-Americans, it was 6.9. The only group with a higher suicide rate than whites was Native Americans, at 22.2.The phenomenon of suicide is not perfectly understood, but it is generally believed that loneliness and alienation are driving factors... among social liberals—i.e., participants who had indicated that they hold liberal beliefs about social issues—reading a text about white privilege did nothing to significantly increase their sympathy toward the plight of poor blacks. But, as Cooley told me, “it did significantly bump down their sympathy for a [hypothetical] poor white person.” (Among conservative participants, there was observed no significant change in attitudes at all.) What accounts for this? One possibility is that social liberals are internalizing white-privilege lessons in a way that flattens the image of whites, portraying all of them as inherently privileged. So if a white person is poor, it must be his or her own fault. After all, they’ve had all sorts of advantages in life that others haven’t... If we extend the logic of privilege beyond the issue of race, it’s easy to see the flaws with this approach. We know, for instance, that 93 percent of people in U.S. federal prisons are men. In nearly every part of the criminal justice system, in fact, men on average have it worse than women do. But does that then mean we should be discussing “female privilege”?... Asking whites to publicly confess their white privilege—in a manner that often resembles a religious ritual more than anything else—may lead us to unfairly flatten the experience of whites while, ironically, actually shifting attention away from those who are underprivileged. The Cooley study shows that this isn’t just a hypothetical concern; it’s a reality that has been demonstrated through research. One alternative to white-privilege discourse would be to focus on the causes and consequences of deprivation rather than on naming groups of people we believe to hold special advantages—and to stop referring to things that we should expect for all people as “privileges.”"

Evan Horowitz: IQ rates are dropping in many developed countries and that doesn't bode well for humanity - "One potential explanation was quasi-eugenic. As in the movie “Idiocracy,” it was suggested that average intelligence is being pulled down because lower-IQ families are having more children ("dysgenic fertility" is the technical term). Alternatively, widening immigration might be bringing less-intelligent newcomers to societies with otherwise higher IQs.However, a 2018 study of Norway has punctured these theories by showing that IQs are dropping not just across societies but within families. In other words, the issue is not that educated Norwegians are increasingly outnumbered by lower-IQ immigrants or the children of less-educated citizens. Even children born to high-IQ parents are slipping down the IQ ladder."

How Did a Tortoise Survive 30 Years in a Box? - "Tortoises are famous for living to a ripe old age. One giant tortoise named Adwaita is said to have lived 255 years in the Calcutta Zoo—he finally died of liver failure in 2006.But news of a tortoise that lived 30 years in a shed suggests that the survival skills of these hardy creatures may be even more astounding than we had imagined. A red-footed tortoise named Manuela mysteriously “disappeared” from a home in a suburb of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1982. The Almeida family assumed that their pet had lumbered out of the house after builders at the site left the front door ajar, according to Brazil’s Globo TV. (Watch turtle and tortoise videos.)Recently, Leandro Almeida was cleaning out a storage shed and threw away an old wooden box... red-footed tortoises have been known to go without eating for two to three years in the wild—but 30 years is off the known charts. He speculated that Manuela had survived by eating termites and other small insects and licking condensation... In the dry forests and grasslands of South and Central America where they live, red-footed tortoises will consume virtually anything: fruits, flowers, leaves, dead animals—even feces."

How Anti-Humanism Conquered the Left - "Whether it’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez questioning the morality of childbearing, a birth-strike movement that encourages people to forego parenthood despite the “grief that [they say they] feel as a result,” or political commentator Bill Maher blithely claiming, “I can’t think of a better gift to our planet than pumping out fewer humans to destroy it,” a misanthropic philosophy known as “anti-natalism” is going increasingly mainstream... Various prominent environmentalists, from Johns Hopkins University bioethicist Travis Rieder to science popularizer and entertainer Bill Nye, support the introduction of special taxes or other state-imposed penalties for having “too many” children. In 2015, Bowdoin College’s Sarah Conly published a book advocating a “one-child” policy, like the one China abandoned following disastrous consequences including female infanticide and a destabilizing gender ratio of 120 boys per 100 girls, which left around 17 percent of China’s young men unable to find a Chinese wife. Even after that barbaric policy’s collapse, she maintains it was “a good thing.” Modern-day anti-humanism emerged in the 1970s, midwifed by a doomy strain of environmental pessimism led by Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich (but with intellectual antecedents dating back to Thomas Malthus in the eighteenth century)... Undeterred, Ehrlich and many likeminded doomsayers are still claiming that disaster is imminent, despite their previous predictions repeatedly failing to materialize. Just last year, Ehrlich compared human population growth to the spread of cancer... Once anti-humanism had infected the environmental movement, it soon spread through the political Left. Robert Zubrin’s book Merchants of Despair gives an overview of the Left’s reversal of its traditional commitment to advancing the human condition, in favor of a project that viewed humanity as a plague upon the Earth... The late University of Maryland economist Julian Simon rejected the idea of overpopulation as a problem. He believed that, on the contrary, more people in the world means more people to solve problems, and less resource scarcity"

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Choa Chu Kang cemetery to be redeveloped again - "The concrete crypts complement a burial policy introduced in 1998, which limits the burial period to 15 years. After this period, graves will be exhumed and the remains cremated or re-interred, according to religious requirements.These measures have lengthened the life of the cemetery, which is expected to be kept open till 2130.Under the new project, 33,684 crypts for Muslim fresh burials and 4,700 for Muslim re-interment will be built. For Chinese fresh burials, 2,847 crypts will be built. For Christian or lawn fresh burials, 1,451 will be built.Religions such as Islam require their dead to be buried."
So non-Muslims in Singapore can still get to be buried

Female fruit bats take food from males in exchange for sex, study finds - "Male Egyptian fruit bats will allow female bats to take food straight from their mouths and scientists believe they know why: the bats are trading food for sex."
Damn patriarchy, making female fruit bats prostitutes!

Philippines’ Duterte says he used to be gay, but then ‘cured himself’ - "Philippines’ president Rodrigo Duterte made a rather unexpected admission while visiting Japan, saying he used to be gay before he met his ex wife… then he “became a man again.” Duterte is something of a self-styled expert on the question of who is and isn’t gay, if the frequency with which he makes the accusation is any indication. After accusing "most" priests in the Catholic church of being homosexual earlier in the year, during a speech Thursday he decided to ‘out’ a political opponent, and then himself... While he has never been quite so explicit, this is not the first time Duterte has hinted about his proclivities: In 2017, he joked about having considered bisexuality so he could “have fun both ways.” That is apparently not the only thing he wants both ways, as he has also flip-flopped on the issue of legalizing gay marriage in the predominantly conservative Catholic country"