- “‘Graduates demanding 100% WFH and won’t come to office for interview’” – According to bosses, new university graduates are so accustomed to working from home they won’t even come to an office for an interview, reports the Mail.
- “Michelle Mone admits she stands to benefit from £200 million of PPE contracts” – The Conservative peer and Ultimo bra tycoon Michelle Mone has apologised for trying to conceal her family’s links to Medpro after it won a multi-million pound contract to supply personal protective equipment during the pandemic, says the Mail.
- “Experts ‘duped’ into starring in Michelle Mone’s PPE documentary” – Two experts who appear in Baroness Mone’s new documentary have said they would not have done if they’d known it was being funded by Medpro, reports the Sunday Times.
- “Inside the biggest Hamas tunnel ever found beneath war-torn Gaza” – Israel has revealed the biggest tunnel its troops have ever discovered, part of Hamas’s 300 mile tunnel network, according to the Mail.
- “We need a ‘sustainable ceasefire’ in Gaza, says David Cameron” – The Foreign Secretary says Israel has a right to eliminate the threat posed by Hamas, but that too many civilians have been killed, reports the Sunday Times.
- “Israel has not ‘gone too far’, insists Oliver Dowden” – Deputy PM Oliver Dowden says the U.K. continues to support Israel’s “right to self-defence” as it deals with a “very difficult situation”, according to the Telegraph.
- “Inferno tears through historic venue set to house 70 asylum seekers” – An inferno has ripped through a Galway hotel just hours after protesters gathered outside amid concerns about migrants in the area, according to the Mail.
- “Dozens of jihadi brides like Shamima Begum could return to the U.K.” – Ministers are facing growing international pressure to accept the return of ‘jihadi brides’ who fled Britain to join Islamic State, reports the Mail.
- “Eddie Izzard loses bid to be Labour’s candidate for Brighton Pavilion” – Eddie Izzard has failed in his bid to become Labour’s candidate for Brighton Pavilion at the next General Election, marking the second time the 61 year-old has failed to be selected, says the Mail.
- “Britain will be ‘Venezuela for 20 years’ if Starmer wins the next election” – The Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson has told the Telegraph that a Labour government would be “catastrophic” for Britain.
- “Milei is doing what Britain should have done a long time ago” – Argentina’s new direction could provide a blueprint for Britain and other countries, writes Matthew Lynn in the Telegraph.
- “Javier Milei’s radical reforms could start to heal Argentina’s economy” – Javier Milei’s government is wasting little time carrying out what it calls “shock therapy”, says Phoebe Hennell in the Spectator.
- “Still say Rwanda isn’t safe Sir Keir?” – Labour has been accused of hypocrisy for selecting a candidate who runs a business organising children’s holidays to Rwanda – while the party opposes Sunak’s policy of sending illegal migrants there on the grounds it is unsafe, reports the Mail.
- “Islamism is rampant in French schools” – A rigid incarnation of Islam has taken root in many classrooms, threatening the liberal values of France. It serves as a warning to Britain, says Anne-Elisabeth Moutet in the Telegraph.
- “There are two routes to growth: Migrants or fairer tax” – In the Sunday Times, Lionel Shriver explains how we can restore Britain‘s birthrate to above replacement levels and reduce immigration via a fairer tax system.
- “World governments now face a bigger predicament than the economy, stupid” – There are no easy solutions in the war between globalisation and nativism, warns Jeremy Warner in the Telegraph.
- “The middle-class army waging war on LTNs” – An army of middle-class volunteers are waging war on Lambeth Council in a bid to stop it making thousands of pounds from hefty LTN fines, reports the Mail.
- “Just Stop Oil print series of £25 calendars featuring smug snaps” – Just Stop Oil has announced it‘s bringing out a calendar for 2024, giving everyone the chance to relive all the best bits from the last two years of disruption, says the Mail.
- “From now to 2100 emission reduction policy costs greatly exceed any net benefit from averted warming” – The benefits of not meeting the Paris Accord emissions targets outweigh the costs, even in the worst-case-scenario, says Kenneth Richard in the NoTricksZone.
- “The absurdity of measuring breath for climate change” – In a worrying trend in the climate debate, even the most basic human functions are being scrutinised for their environmental impact, writes Charles Rotter in WUWT.
- “U.K.’s Eurovision entrant vows to fly the flag in the ‘gayest way possible’” – Olly Alexander, the U.K.’s Eurovision entrant for 2024, has vowed to fly the flag for the country “in the gayest way possible”, reports the Telegraph.
- “Leading doctors ‘consistently ignored’ by HSE over ‘trans health’ dangers” – Leading clinicians Dr. Donal O’Shea and Dr. Paul Moran have spoken about how their concerns regarding ‘gender affirming care’ were “consistently ignored” by the U.K. Health and Safety Executive, according to Gript.
- “No, St. Hadrian of Canterbury was not black” – Educational institutions are warping our history to make political points in the present, says Alka Sehgal Cuthbert in Spiked.
- “Southern Poverty Law Centre condemns feminists as white supremacists” – The SPLC’s report on the gender critical feminists and their opposition to trans dogma is a textbook example of misinformation, writes Eliza Mondegreen in UnHerd.
- “Discriminating against white blokes is wrong – even insurance men” – “The list of companies I am boycotting because of their stupid, adolescent grandstanding on fashionable political issues grows by the week,” says Rod Liddle in the Sunday Times.
- “Inside the free speech meltdown at the New York Times” – In his first interview since the publication of his Economist article, ‘When the New York Times lost its way’, James Bennet tells the Sunday Times that America needs a “counter-revolution” to root out “illiberal liberalism”.
- “It’s too late to ban under-16s from social media – they are smarter than we think” – When it comes to teenagers using TikTok and Instagram, the genie is already out of the bottle, says Camilla Tominey in the Telegraph.
- “‘We will fight back in the streets, in the toilets, in the single-sex spaces. We will not let this nonsense win’” – On Lee Anderson’s GB News show, author and podcast host Paola Diana pulls no punches in her debate with Peter Tatchell over trans issues.
Damn. She's good.
— Lee Harris (@addicted2newz) December 17, 2023
Very well said @paoladiana_pic.twitter.com/sclY9I3Nqw
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Here’s a claim that I’d love to be true:
100% of those who instill fear, panic and despondency have declined over the last minute.
In the meantime: Hope, Strength and Tenacity to those who think and judge for themselves!
—“we have a last chance to act.” Oh goody! Where do I sign up?
If only I had quid for every time I’ve read that or similar, I’d be rich as Croesus.
That’s not going to be your last chance for getting quid whenever someone announces a last chance to … !!!
Don’t forget how the climate data was fiddled to show warming where before there had been none:
https://realclimatescience.com/alterations-to-the-us-temperature-record/
The page from the New York Times in 1989 is worth keeping in mind. No warming trend for a hundred years. Since revised to show a warming trend. I’m not sure whether it is politics or religion but it sure isn’t science to keep fiddling the data to get the result they want.
It’s cobblers! I’ve heard all this since cofo in the 70s. There’s just as much if not more life now than then, you don’t get rid of life that easily
I remember when I was a kid, occasionally I really did see men walking about the town wearing sandwich boards proclaiming that “The End Of The World Is Nigh“. Yes, I really am that old.
Thanks to the breakthroughs of science, we’ve come a very long way since then.
Now, international NGO’s, funded by unimaginably rich megalomaniacs, can make the same nutty proclamation all around the world using electronic media.
.
The rule of thumb is simply: Whenever someone presents averages of some data which is not different measurements of the same thing (NB: measurements is important here), he’s trying to pull a fast one because averaging is a mathematical algorithm supposed to remove noise, ie, randomly distributed errors, from a set of measurement of the same quantity as each individual measurement is composed of a value part and an error part whose exact values are unknown. That’s solidly undergraduate math.
In this particular case, averaging means that outliers in the original, raw data set end up being evenly distributed over it. For an example, assume there are four species A, B and C and D. A had a 0.1% increase, B a 5% increase, C a 25% decline and D a 2% increase This means the average change will be -5.6%, composed of 1/4 of 0.1 (0.025), 1/4 of 5 (1.25), 1/4 of -25 (-6.25) and 1/4 of 2 (0.5). On average, species declined by 5.6% is a gross misrepresentation of the actual data.
I keep being amazed how shoddily constructed all of this is. One would expect people with that much money and manpower could do a lot better. This leads to two hypothesises about why they cannot:
Something I should have added to the example: The individual contributions of A, B, C and D to the average are: A 0.31%, B 15.58%, C 77.88% and C 6.23%. More than 3/4 of the average come from the change of a single species.
This article is so wrong I stumped up the £5 to comment.
1) The WWF/ZSL do not claim that 69% of Vertebrates Have Declined Over Last 50 Years (whatever that means). Chris was presumably confused by the phrase: “average 69% decline in the relative abundance” in the Executive Summary of the Living Planet report. It is admittedly tricky to know exactly what this means. But the LPI website is clearer.
Here under “common misconceptions about the LPI”:
“The LPI statistic does not mean that 69 per cent of species or populations are declining”
“The LPI statistic does not mean that 69% populations or individual animals have been lost”
The LPI is shows the average rate of change in animal population sizes – something quite different.
2) The Canadian scientists make a good point about the problems in using a geometric mean to represent overall rate of species decline. But Chris left out an important quote:
“Excluding only the 2.4% most-strongly declining populations (354 out of 14,700 populations) reversed the estimate of global vertebrate trends from a loss of more than 50% to a slightly positive growth (Fig. 2). Similarly, excluding 2.4% of the most-strongly increasing populations strengthened the mean decline to 71%.”
They are not claiming there is no problem with biodiversity decline – only suggesting a method that is not so sensitive to extremes. They concluded that decline tends to be concentrated in a relatively few species and areas but this doesn’t mean it is not a serious problem.
“Although the global BHM model reveals considerably more nuance than a geometric mean index, analysing across systems still masked important patterns. When systems were analysed separately…., primary population clusters were strongly declining (θ1 < −0.015) with high certainty (95% credible intervals not overlapping zero) in three systems, all of which occurred in the Indo-Pacific realm (freshwater mammals, freshwater birds and terrestrial birds) ….. This suggests that this region has the highest risk of system-wide declines and should be a conservation priority. By contrast, the primary cluster was increasing with high certainty in seven systems, six of which were in temperate regions. In addition, seven additional systems had strongly declining primary population clusters but with less certainty (95% credible intervals overlapped zero), four of which were amphibian or reptile groups.”
The Finnish scientists were just pointing out that the LPI is no good for measuring abundance – but as it was never intended to do that, it is kind of irrelevant.
The LPI is shows the average rate of change in animal population sizes – something quite different.
As explained in another comment: This is a bullshit metric supposed to give the impression of an strong, overall decline which doesn’t exist.
But Chris left out an important quote:
“Excluding only the 2.4% most-strongly declining populations (354 out of 14,700 populations) reversed the estimate of global vertebrate trends from a loss of more than 50% to a slightly positive growth (Fig. 2). Similarly, excluding 2.4% of the most-strongly increasing populations strengthened the mean decline to 71%.”
That’s from a different part of the text and the quote attached to the graph is correct. Further, really taking everything into account, the outcome is
Here we show, however, that this estimate is driven by less than 3% of vertebrate populations; if these extremely declining populations are excluded, the global trend switches to an increase.
[…]
16 systems contain clusters of extreme decline (comprising around 1% of populations; these
extreme declines occur disproportionately in larger animals) and 7 contain extreme
increases (around 0.4% of populations). The remaining 98.6% of populations across
all systems showed no mean global trend.
—–
That’s from the abstract. Another nice quote from the Discussion section of this paper:
Shifting the message from ubiquitous catastrophe to foci of concern,
also touches on human psychology. Continual negative and guilt-ridden
messaging can cause despair, denial and inaction. If everything is
declining everywhere, despite the expansion of conservation measures
in recent decades, it would be easy to lose hope. Our results identify
not only regions that need urgent action to ameliorate widespread
biodiversity declines, but also many systems that appear to be gener-
ally stable or improving, and thus provide a reason to hope that our
actions can make a difference.
That’s absolutely not the kind of serious problem of the WWF and it calls for targetted, perfectly traditional conservation measures, not global lifestyle changes.
It’s all irrelevant, life will do what it wants!
You can see the Board of Directors of the WWF here.
https://www.worldwildlife.org/about/leadership
There’s a lot of money in all those financial institutions so many of them work for. Is it any surprise they pursue the WEF agenda?
Incidentally, it’s only officially called the World Wildlife Fund in the US and Canada. In the rest of the world it renames itself the World Wide Fund, thus allowing it to use funds for other purposes. It’s also been accused several times of ‘greenwashing’, cosying up to big multi-nationals in exchange for donations, human rights abuses, and the use of paramilitaries.
It’s also worth noting that for very many years its patrons, directing the use of funds to protect rare species, then went off hunting those same wild species. Using donor money to keep their exclusive ‘sport’ going?
.
It is good to be sensitive and open to the damage that we do as a species but given the agendas that prevail and owe their existence to pure ruling class survival tendencies we do well to be sceptical. If you weren’t born under a Christmas tree. Don’t talk to me about environmental espoiliation when you haven’t given a monkeys about anything until now.
When I studied Physics and Biology at A-Level 35 years ago, and Physics at University thereafter, I must have missed the sections of the scientific method that told me to first determine what I wanted my research to conclude, then disregard any results that showed anything otherwise. Oh, and the step that told me to simply fabricate (adjust) supporting results if I need to. I think I’m owed a Ph. D. from someone …
Me too! And this approach would have meant getting the PhD after about 9 months or so’s study!