The Digger

  Surprising science – There’s no such thing as clean energy Meticulous Research Review Questions Environmental Impacts and Feasibility of “Green Energy” Transition A meticulous new review published in the scientific journal, Energies, conducted by a team of Irish and US-based researchers including CERES researchers, raises surprising and unsettling questions about the feasibility and the environmental impacts of the transition to renewable energy sources. Concern for climate change has driven massive investment in new “green energy” policies intended to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and other environmental impacts from the fossil fuel industry. The world spent US$3,660 billion on climate change projects over the eight-year period 2011–2018. A total of 55% of this sum was spent on solar and wind energy, while only 5% was spent on adapting to the impacts of extreme weather events. Surprising environmental impacts The researchers discovered that renewable energy sources somet...

  Analyst of Totalitarianism—Reading Simon Leys Today written by  David Adler Simon Leys was perhaps the pre-eminent Western chronicler of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and it is worth returning to his work for its vivid first-hand accounts of life in Beijing during this period. But Leys was also interested in the process by which, under the right conditions and with the right ideology, a society can collapse into insanity and murder. His description of the Cultural Revolution showed how political hysteria and the legitimization of violence and hatred combined to ravage a nation. These developments, however, are by no means unique to communism in general or China in particular, and Leys explored similar themes in his retelling of the harrowing true story of a ship wrecked off the coast of Australia in 1629. His book on the topic,  The  Wreck of the Batavia , is a short masterpiece about how the small society that the ship’s survivors tried to construct in the wake of th...

   October 7th, 2020 It’s the proper morning to fly into Hell. ― Arthur Miller,  The Crucible , 1953 One of the greatest delusions of the average man is to forget that life is death’s prisoner. — Emil Cioran,  On the Heights of Despair , 1934 Increasingly, I think, the American public operates in a mild dissociative state. I  wrote about it here  (my blog). It is almost as if people are afflicted with a kind of PTSD — only one where the trauma is generalized, relatively low grade, but ongoing. Any of us who have questioned the Covid narrative have had to put up with an inordinate amount of hectoring, name calling, ridicule, and ostracism. I remember when I signed on the artist appeal as part of the Milosevic Defense Committee, and the abuse and anger I faced whenever this topic came up. People who had no history with the region, knew little of the political landscape, would nonetheless wax irate, furious and near tears that I would hold such outrageous posi...

 Thanks to Ort for bringing this to our attention... Petition to Support Mark Crispin Miller and Academic Freedom If you believe in academic freedom, as well as free speech overall, please consider signing  this petition , and sharing it with others who believe that higher education must be free from censorship of any kind, whether by the state, corporations, foreign interests, pressure groups, or by the university itself. Afull professor in NYU’s Department of Media, Culture and Communication (since 1997), and a recipient of fellowships from the Rockefeller, Guggenheim and Ingram Merrill Foundations, Prof. Miller teaches a course on propaganda, focusing not only on the history of modern propaganda, but — necessarily — on propaganda drives ongoing at the time. The aim is to teach students to identify such drives for what they are, think carefully about their claims, seek out whatever data and/or arguments have been blacked out or misreported to protect those claims from contra...