Friday Hodgepodge

Three Things

1. Both the Daily Caller and the blog Dollars and Crosses report that yet another climate hysteria monger has refused to debate best-selling author Alex Epstein on the merits of fossil fuels. From the former:

The CEO of the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation has backed out of a debate with author Alex Epstein on the need for fossil fuels, claiming he has "urgent business" to attend to.

...

"All I can say is that this event has been scheduled for two months," Epstein, the president and founder of the Center for Industrial Progress and author of the book "The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels," told The Daily Caller News Foundation. [format edits]

And Epstein himself elaborates further, as reported by the latter:

Since the publication of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, not one person has written a remotely plausible fundamental critique of the book.

Why? Because it's not reputable?

Impossible.

The Moral Case has been reviewed favorably by dozens of publications (including the WSJ), it has a 4.7 rating across hundreds of reviews on Amazon (very unusual for a book this controversial), it was an NYT and WSJ bestseller, and one of the most respected political commentators of the last 25 years named me "most original thinker of the year" because of my reframing of the climate issue.

Almost no opponents challenge The Moral Case because they don't want to confront a good argument. [format edits]

As noted here, the pieces also confirm that Bill "The Silent Guy" Nye hasn't responded to Epstein's debate challenge, now for two months running.

2. If you are a fellow Linux user, you might want to take a look at the site explainshell.com the next time you find yourself getting ready to run an unfamiliar command. Think of it as a sentence diagram for the command line. The site features an input box, into which you dump the command (and any arguments). Once you've done this and hit the "Explain" button, the site produces an explanation of each part of the command. What's really nice is that the diagram includes a link to the "man page" documentation of the command itself.

That said, one thing the site does not do is warn of the folly of running commands that could break your computer (e.g., rm -rf / as root). The site can aid understanding, but context and caution remain your job.

3. Reader Snedcat has passed along news of an ... interesting ... idea being implemented in Japan: using old episodes of Fawlty Towers to increase fluency in English ahead of the 2020 Olympic Games.

In defense of the idea, Basil Fawlty does speak English fluently and he does work in the hospitality industry...

Weekend Reading

"Assume you can and will find an interesting job." -- Michael Hurd, in "Make Your Second Career Happen!" at The Delaware Wave

"Cognitive psychology assumes that ideas are the cause of emotions." -- Michael Hurd, in "Figure Out Your Feelings" at The Delaware Coast Press

"Since Donald Trump's election, virtue signaling among the self-conscious and proselytizing left almost qualifies as Olympic sport." -- Michael Hurd, in "Democrats Delusional Claiming 'Virtue' Drives Them" at Newsmax

-- CAV