School Propaganda

Seen at a local school, outside the gates, January 2023. Well past when all these are pretty much debunk, but children and parents sill can see. I hope they are intelligent enough to ignore and perhaps push back on the school administration.

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Gary Lineker is correct, I guess…

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2022/12/15/google-goes-full-on-racist-will-start-marking-the-race-of-business-owners-n1654000

USA is indeed a racist country if this action by Google, surely supported by American academia and federal and coastal state governments holds…

Not my experience, though, that USA a racist country. Any racists? Of course. Any using Alinsky’s Rules about racism against their enemies by hurling false accusations of racism. Appears to be.

As a kid in the 1950’s we used to take family trips all over the USA. Driving trips in 1950’s model cars. My mom put a hardboard on the backseat floor to make a flat sleeping area for my sister and I, over the drive train hump. Underneath was luggage. Those were the days.

Some trips where into the Deep South. This was before the end of so-called Jim Crow laws (which Democrats put into force decades before and refused to repeal), and before the Civil Rights Acts of 1964.

I very much remember, even as a child, seeing signs saying “Whites Only” (or worse, using today’s Rules) in many places and establishments. Much segregation. All that was shocking to me, even as a child. As I grew up in rural northern Midwest USA, never really had to experience real segregation, but seeing it in the US South made it real and shocking. I remember discussing with my parents.

All that disappeared throughout the USA, but now the there are strong forces by government, academia, et. al. to re-segregate the country. Let’s Gary claim the country is Racist. He hasn’t a clue.

Climate Policy is Greater Risk than Climate Change

Money Quote:

Let’s come right out and say it: Anyone who still thinks climate change is a greater threat than climate policy to financial stability deserves to be exiled to a peat-burning yurt in the wilderness.

Wall Street Journal, “The Coming Global Crisis of Climate Policy”, 8 Sep 2022″

And they conclude with:

Politicians are happy to blame Vladimir Putin and his Ukraine invasion for the current energy disaster. But what transformed that one-off shift in the relative price for energy into a global disaster was two decades of green-energy policy beforehand. In Europe, that includes a fixation on renewables incapable of powering industrial economies absent battery technologies that don’t exist, a refusal to tap domestic fossil-fuel reserves such as shale gas, and a deep and irrational hostility to nuclear power in many parts of the Continent.

This has created an energy system of dangerous rigidity and inefficiency incapable of adapting to a blow such as Russia’s partial exit from the European gas market. It’s almost inevitable that the imminent result will be a recession in Europe. We can only hope that it won’t also trigger a global financial crisis.

Coal

Of course there are a lot of articles about USA and European countries reverting to coal to *try* to avert power blackouts, rationing, etc. Whether successful or not remains to be seen.

I just notice that in all the mainstream media I see such articles they all take great pains to call out coal in one way or another as “the dirtiest fossil fuel”.

Fighting words: “dirtiest” and “fossil fuel”. Both are inflammatory and “dirtiest” means nothing unless one defines “dirt”. Surely all coal plants conform to laws about release of “dirt” by using filters, scrubbers, etc.

I contend until we can get more nuclear plants on-stream (maybe that will never happen) we must add to the coal plants (and ensure they have modern pollution control measures, as best as possible). Changes to the environment will be hardly if at all noticed. Only in our imaginations stoked by this inflammatory talk.

Alternative, make use of electric vehicles, electric heat, etc. illegal so as to not squander what electricity we do have.

Handling the & Character in Scrivener Tables doing LaTeX

Thanks for a great idea from @AmberV, I was able to get my journey into LaTeX tables from a Scrivener project working just fine.

In case others find this of interest for future use, here is what I do which works.

The issue is that LaTeX Tables use a & symbol to delineate table cells. I use & symbols in my writing and LaTeX considers & a special character and doesn’t print them on output. So I have a Scrivener replacement rule which converts all &’s into [backslash]&. The problem that creates is that it does that replacement on LaTeX table definitions. So, here’s how I now handle with success.

One Time Steps for the Project (but I also put all this into my LaTeX template for future projects to avoid repeating these one-time steps):

• In Scrivener replacements, *after* the & rule, I added a rule to convert all tick characters (`) into & symbols. I chose ticks as I do not use ticks in my writing. Any other non-used character can be used.
• In my Preamble Settings where I put my own LaTeX packages, I added:
• % \usepackage{graphicx}
• % \usepackage{booktabs}
• In the Table Section Layout, I made the following changes:
• in the Prefix, changed \begin{table}[H] — so that tables go “here”
• in the Prefix and Suffix, moved the \caption line to after the lorem ipsum so that my table caption will be after the table (my convention for captions)
• in the Suffix changed to \caption{$title} — to make the caption the name of the Scrivener Document.

For Each Table during the writing process:

• I build the tables in Scrivener in their own document. I keep the tables simple with just rows and columns. I build in Scrivener as it’s easier. When the tables are basically done, I then make the LaTex version in a new document just under the Scrivener source.
• I use https://www.tablesgenerator.com to generate the LaTeX table. I start by copy/paste from/to the Scrivener source into the gride on this web site. They provide full instructions. I use the “BookTabs” style choice. When completed, I “copy to clipboard” the generated code, then paste that into a new Scrivener Document just under the Scrivener Source. I name the document to what I want the table caption to be.
• I use Scrivener Find/Replace to change all & to Ticks (“). I change the name of the Document to be what I want as a caption to the Table.
• I remove the \begin{table} and \end{table} that the TablesGenerator provided since my Scrivener Table Section Layout includes that.
• In the Compile List, I uncheck the document holding the Scrivener source for the table, and check-on the document holding the LaTeX code. I give that document a Section Type of “Table”.
• Then compile to Plain Tax and open in “texmaker” for to create the PDF.

If I did this a lot, I’d find ways to do a bit of automation, but that not a priority nor probably worth the time spent (for me).

Note: My own LaTeX template is based on the standard “General Non-Fiction (LaTeX)” template provided in Scrivener.

This tip originally published at Scrivener’s Forum https://forum.literatureandlatte.com/t/handling-characters-in-latex-tables/128374/4. Look there for possible future comments.

Media Malfeasance Continues (What else is News?)

https://www.foxnews.com/media/clinton-campaign-manager-media-russia-hoax

Not seeing any of this reported in UK media today, including BBC web site. Under oath in a trial for a Clinton Campaign Lawyer (2016 election) for lying to FBI et. al. which launched a hoax engineered by Hillary to use the Federal Government policing and legal power against the Trump campaign. While this not reported here, certainly at the time the story of the Trump’s secret “back channel” connection with a Russian Bank covered repeatedly and continuously for months on BBC and I got a lot of questions about it as of course so many of my acquaintances here in the UK were keen to talk about the election. Joe Biden even repeated this claim against Trump in the 2020 election, along with repeating other provable hoaxes.

It’s media malfeasance which creates hate that is sometimes directed my way.

This lawyer (Sussman) who is being prosecuted has a strong liklihood of being found “not guilty”. While the facts are clear in my view, there are these testimonies and depositions in court under oath, and text messages and emails which prove beyond doubt he lied (and thus kicked off so many crimes), the case is being tried in a District of Columbia court and the jury will like to an “OJ” and ignore the evidence as they also have been conditioned on “hate”.

Check out writings by Margo Cleveland, Jonathan Turley, and Technofog to get the full story.

Times are a changin…

Went to the nearby mall for coffee and a mall-walk, as you do.

Looked at books in Waterstones … Best Sellers section prominently displayed Bill Gates’s book “How to avoid a climate disaster” … Credible? I think not. A few other “climate emergency” books that I did not recognise. In their “Smart Thinking” section, I found at least a score (stopped counting) of “climate emergency” type of book and zero about the other side of the this narrative. I know Waterstones stocks what sells, but ….

On the magazine rack at WHSmith, Scientific American prominently displayed. For years I was a subscriber but they succumbed to pseudo science a long time ago. But, I did occasionally buy a copy, perhaps on the way to board a flight. Price grew to about £5 or so. Now they want £10 and this issue (a month out of date, actually) highlighted “Marine Oxygen Levels Are the Next Great Casualty of Climate Change”. and “Backward-Flowing Rivers can Destabilize Ice Shelves” — who would have guessed that. But buy this for £10? No way. New Scientist magazine, which I used to devour every week, is even worse.

I’m trying to change my focused reading into “geopolitics” and “history”. Bought a digital subscription to “Foreign Affairs”. Was reminded of that publication I used to read when I saw it at WHSmith, but for the most recent issue of the quarterly they expected me to pay £15. I won’t even buy Kindle books for that much! Pensioners have to watch pennies!

Thank goodness for the Internet. Will use as long as I can.

Scottish Wind Power Output

I found a source of data from the National Grid at https://data.nationalgrideso.com/generation/monthly-operational-metered-wind-output and chose to graph a histogram for power output from all of Scottish windmills from 1 Jan 2019 to 31 Jan 2022.

https://data.nationalgrideso.com/generation/monthly-operational-metered-wind-output

I was surprised at the prevalence of low power under 1000 GW per 1/2 hour settlement period. I expected a more “normal” distribution but skewed right. It’s hardly a normal distribution and skewed very hard left toward low power output.

“It’s just misuse of council resources.” Port Macquarie Revokes Climate Emergency – Watts Up With That?

“It’s just misuse of council resources.” Port Macquarie Revokes Climate Emergency – Watts Up With That?:

Scenerio

Joe: “Look Vlad, I know we’re hyping this war stuff over here.”

Vlad: Yes, you are. While alarming, I think you know very well what I want.”

Joe: “Yes, I do. But as you can appreciate I have a lot of my people in gov’t who want war, but we’ll handle them. My bigger problem is that after a year at this gig the American people still don’t understand how great of a President I am. And you are fully aware from our many discussions as VP how you and I can easily get along. By the way, thanks for that help you gave to by son Hunter.”

Vlad: “Yes, I do recall that and I look forward to further discussions. I understand if you phone from your home in Delaware, nobody can listen in?”

Joe: “Yes, that’s what I’m told. They have turned off all that techy stuff Hillary used on Trump. So let’s do our our chats the long weekends I take every weekend. You remember that Barak asked Dmitry for some patience until after the elections when he and I would have more flexibility. Thanks for that. I’m sure you can see how things worked out better for both of us after that election. I now ask you again for some flexibility.”

Vlad: “I’m interested. What do you have in mind.”

Joe: “Let me keep hyping the war stuff. My close staff and the gov’t minions are all on board. But when you don’t invade Ukraine, which I know is your intention, let me claim a lot of credit so that the American’s can see how much of a leader and foreign affairs expert I am. I will of course send plaudits your way. That will help me in the upcoming elections and then after we win the Congress decisively to allow them to do as they want, with your and Xi’s continuing help on that of course, as this my last term, I’ll have a lot of flexibility in the Executive Branch and we can continue what we started when I was VP. I’ll brief Hunter.”

Joe: “And, almost forgot. Thanks for your efforts to shutdown the gas industry and kill fracking in Europe. We haven’t gotten that far yet here in US, but we’ll nudge ’em. Meantime, we’re making a killing sending our LNG ships there. We’ll help you get your Southstream [sic] pipe going soon, but not right now.”

Vlad: “Excellent. Talk to you this weekend.”