Hacked off

Someone, or some thing, has beern messing with my Facebook. Sending out fake friend requests, that look like this.

And telling people that yesterday was my birthday (it wasn’t).

To Agree, or Not to Agree?

Agreeableness is one of the “Big 5” traits identified by psychological profiling. And of course, being agreeable, in the usual sense of that word, is clearly to be welcomed.

But here’s the thing: it is also associated with gullibility. And so people with high agreeableness are not only the principal target of, but also the best foot soldiers for, totalitarians.

And that’s a problem. Your next-door neighbours might be really lovely. But they have also swallowed pretty much every dangerous

Sweet or Sour?

I do not live in Ireland or the UK, and so are not eligible to win the prize for solving the Sunday Times teaser. But there is nothing, I think, to stop me sharing what I think is the answer.

Gender Vendors

There seem to be quite a few people around, these days, prepared to sell their ideas and their services to those who are not happy in their skins. And to those who have been toying with the idea of being the opposite sex.

A few home truths might be in order. First up: we all (well, almost all) have 46 chromosomes. 44 of these are irrelevant for these purposes. The other two are known as the sex chromosomes. Women have two X chromosomes. Men have one X chromosome, and one Y chromosome.[1]

Just to be clear: the fact of whether you have two X chromosomes, or one X chromosome and one Y chromosome, is inbuilt. It is not something that can be changed. Tomboys have two X chromosomes, even if they grow into full-blooded lesbians. Effeminate men have one X chromosome and one Y chromosome regardless of their drag act. People who have sex reassignment surgery do not change their chromosomes.

Running Cold

I had a fun time a day or so ago teasing some of my friends on social media about the false claim that the UK was going through a record-breaking dry period. It isn’t.[1] But they raised the question of temperature. Getting hotter in the UK? Well, not so much recently, not at all if you look at the bigger picture.

It seems that the oldest temperature record in the world of any value is the Central England Temperature record, controlled by the Hadley Centre.[2] That goes back to 1659 when, of course, England was in the grip of what is known as the Little Ice Age. It wasn’t really a proper ice age at all, of course, but just a period when it was unusually cold in England. People in the other great centres of civilisation at that time – Spain, Italy, France et cetera – might have been outside enjoying themselves in their warmer weather, but it seems the people in England kept on looking at their thermometers in the desperate hope that it was going to warm up soon.

Anyway, one can download the CET records, day by day.  To make it manageable, I took the averages over each 25 year period, for each of the four seasons, and plotted them on a graph. This does indeed show that over the last 3 ½ centuries or so, average temperatures in central England have gone up by about 1°C. 

What emerges from this picture is that the pattern of the seasons has not been disturbed. Winter has not morphed into summer, or anything like it. The small rise of 1°C is a tiny fraction of the differences between the seasons.[3]

Satanic Fatwa

I was appalled to hear the news this morning of the Islamic knife attack on Sir Salman Rushdie in New York State. As I write this, the news is that he is alive but in bad shape.

Anybody who thinks that Islam is a religion of peace needs a reality check. The Old Testament is pretty bad in terms of encouraging evil and violent behaviour, but the Koran is even worse. Quite a bit worse in fact. It is insistent about the desirability of murdering non-Muslims. Jews especially, of course. But really pretty much anybody who denies their teachings. And so Ayatollah Khamenei was not really out of line, as a Muslim, in calling for Rushdie to be murdered.

Rushdie’s attacker was a young man called Hadi Matar.  Who knows what his primary motive was? Was he merely doing the bidding of his religious leaders? Or was he going for the bounty of $3.3 million? Or perhaps aiming for a different reward, that of raping umpteen virgins in the afterlife?

Pornography on the BBC World Service

Until quite recently, I used to listen to the BBC World Service quite a lot, and with pleasure. It is broadcast by the SBS here in Australia as a digital feed; happily, my Jeep receives digital radio. It is much more balanced than BBC Radio 4, which is now largely Woman’s Hour from dawn till dusk. The World Service has interesting perspectives from journalists all around the world.

But now, the World Service is also badly affected by climate pornography, such that I can hardly bear to listen to it. As with BBC Radio 4, the disinformation comes from all four quarters:

• they sensationalise any news of unusually warm weather in the world;
• they suppress news of any unusually cold weather in the world;
• they parrot the views of alarmist extremists, who they call “experts”;
• they suppress the analysis of eminent scientists who point out that, as a matter of evidence, climate change alarmism is fundamentally specious and economists (although you do not need to be a trained economist for this one) who point out that “net zero” politics is causing huge harm.

It is not the constitution, Stupid

It is mildly annoying to hear the BBC endlessly referred to “the constitutional right to abortion” in the United States.

It is blindingly obvious to anyone who’s ever looked at the point that the Constitution of the United States says absolutely nothing about abortion. Nor even anything close. And neither do any of the Amendments.

There is a respectable case to be made for the suggestion that the constitution might well be amended at some time in the future to enshrine a constitutional right to abortion in the United States. But that would require a supermajority of the democratically elected members of Congress to vote for such a thing. And the numbers are way shy of what would be required for that. And so, if you believe in democracy, you have to acknowledge that the US constitution is currently not the way to go.

In the meantime, for the BBC to parrot on about “the constitutional right to abortion” just makes the BBC look and sound silly.  And anyway, the constitution of the United States, as it has stood for the last quarter of a millennium, is such that matters like this are left up to each State to decide for itself.

Chips with Everything

I would be genuinely interested to know what makes the Communist Party of China think that it is entitled to Taiwan, an island which sits roughly between the Philippines and Japan, in the western Pacific Ocean, to the east of mainland China.

The essential facts are well known. For the first half of the 20^th century, the island was essentially Japanese, having been ceded to the Empire of Japan by the Treaty of Shimonoseki at the end of the 19^th century. But then, unsurprisingly enough, following the defeat of the Japanese and the Second World War, the Japanese ceded the island back again to the then government of China, then known as the Republic of China on Taiwan Recession Day, on 25 October 1945. So things went along for a while, and as we all know, in 1949, and following the Civil War the Chinese Communist Party led by by Mao Tse Tung (aka these days as Mao Zedung) overthrew the Republic of China on mainland China. And as we also all know, the Chinese party has ruled the roost in mainland China ever since.

But here’s the thing, the Chinese Communist Party never troubled itself to invade Taiwan. And so, whilst one has to admit, grudgingly or otherwise, that the CCP is, and has been for the last 70 odd years, the government of mainland China, it has never governed Taiwan. The Chinese Communist Party did get off its arse to invade Tibet in the early 1950s. It never really got going with military action against India. Its more recent takeover of Hong Kong has been more smothering than an outright assault. Hopefully, it has done its dash in terms of outright military invasion, preferring the more subtle method of expanding its influence through its Belt and Roads initiative.