Links roundup 6 February

"A sceptic's crime is a warmist's virtue". From Andrew Bolt. The short version - the Sierra Club, which among other things campaigns against coal-fired power, savages a denier of climate-change propaganda for taking Big Oil's money. Later, the same Sierra Club is found to have taken $26m from a company dealing in natural gas energy.

Tim Blair gives us a further example of why "environmentally friendly" tech does not work.  The lowdown - a school in the US installs low-water-usage toilets. Like, really low water usage. The urinals literally DO NOT FLUSH. From Blair's post, excerpting the primary source:

School officials at Spanish River High School thought they had found an environmentally-friendly, cost-saving solution for their bathrooms when they installed Falcon Waterfree urinals in their boys bathrooms.

But with no water moving through the school’s copper pipes to flush the urine into the sewer system, the waste produced noxious gases that ate through the metal, leaving leaky pipes that allowed urine to drip into walls and flow onto floors.

‘It was pretty disgusting,’ school board chairman Frank Barbieri told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

‘The girls had to step over a river of urine. I could smell it as soon as I walked into the hallway.’
Leave it to the fucking Greenies and their starry-eyed followers to ignore basic sanitary engineering principles. They might as well have just invited the boys to piss on the floor.

Professor Bunyip meanwhile descants upon the competence or otherwise of the Left media. Unimpressed with Fairfax, whose fortunes and performance are accurately mirrored by its share price and the number of papers handed out free to those buying a coffee at various places, he has a look at the latest (heftily funded) entry into the Lefty media arcana and finds nothing short of complete incompetence. From the link:

Total time to find and open those three .pdfs: 4 minutes and 47 seconds by the Billabong's stopwatch. This included several brief interruptions when the cat attempted to occupy the keyboard.

Now it is true that the business of finding those records could be a bit more streamlined, but one imagines any hospital administrator examining Jones' CV and performing a pre-employment background check would be familiar with where to go and which tabs to click. Yet five investigative journalists -- quality, advertising-averse investigative journalists, no less -- leave Global Mail readers with the impression that Nurse Jones' record of shame cannot be found.

Prof Bunyip refers to the Global Mail as a "sheltered workshop", and frankly I think he is not too far wrong. These people wouldn't last a month in a newspaper which actually had to turn a profit to survive. But the Global Mail will last only as long as rich and either stupid or ideologically crafty people continue to pump money at it. After that, it will go the way of all flesh.