On top of the earlier news, where he was having a difficult time getting tradesmen to work on his place, Dan Andrews is not all that popular with the golfing set either.

Last two EconTalks have been urging religious belief for non-religious reasons. Seems a bit dippy to me. The one with Jonathan Rauch seemed motivated by raw political desires. He wants Christians to behave more like Jesus, while he continues living as an "atheistic homosexual Jew" who is clearly of the progressive political persuasion.

He seemed to think he was offering an olive branch, but it left me with the impression: Just you come along quietly while we crucify you.

Jo Nova says the site problems were/are a DDOS attack, based on a tripling of accesses to the site. Doesn't sound like the right magnitude to me. Suspect it was a problem with her hosting service (whois query says cloudflare.com). A misdirected server (hence the "site under development" screen) making ordinary users try again, hoping to get the right screen, could easily have led to 3x as many requests.

Jo's now upgraded the server. Ironic if a CloudFlare error has been an opportunity for them to up-sell.

Jo Nova's seems to be responding ok today (cut to next scene...). She reports the UK "cloud brightening" research with appropriate derision.

JD Vance talk in Jaipur plays nicely with the crowd. Sounded pretty good to me too.

tomo,
That sort of thing strikes me more as blackmail than any serious intention to pump garbage into the atmosphere: more or less the magazine with a cute puppy on the cover with a gun to its head and the message "Subscribe, or Fido gets it". In this case it's "Sign on for windmills or it'll be pollutants into the upper atmosphere".

Jo Nova's is still misbehaving. Somewhat like a mentally-ill person off his medication: today I'm cured, only to relapse a few hours later.

tomo,

I give! I give! Enough! You win.

For serious comment on those points, words fail me, but the Hitchhiker's/Pythonesque picture — a clandestine civic beautification project with riot squad attending just in case — merits a rueful smile.

So: emigrate now, or wait a little longer so you'll be able to claim refugee status?

tomo,
Jo Nova site isn't down as such. I was able to look in just now. If you look at its DNS, it has two addresses. Both are hosted by Cloudflare. My guess is that one of the addresses goes to a good server, and the other variously to an unconfigured Apache or an offline server. Nature of DNS makes it a coin-toss whether you'll get the good one. And whichever you get will live on in your cache, your ISP's cache and who knows what other caches for some indeterminate time. Ultimate problem might be in the site-mirroring stuff.

Interestingly, bishophill.squarespace.com has four IP addresses. Should be able to cope with the traffic here!

Your Aberdeen tale: is there any explanation other than the council being drunk with power?

From all you say, I'm convinced that it's far worse in Britain than here.

It might be a benefit of such decisions being in state government hands. When the Cross-Sydney Tunnel was opened (~20 years ago), it was a worthwhile road that could easily save you half an hour if you were headed to the eastern suburbs (say). Made the toll worth paying unless you didn't value your time. To encourage people in this decision, the original main road, William Street, was pared down from 6 lanes to 2 (1 each way).

Traffic chaos ensued and there were a lot of very angry motorists around. Didn't mollify them a bit to hear that the road narrowing was part of the contract with the owners of the new tunnel. I think it was only a couple of months before all the silly planters, etc. were dragged off William Street. The tunnel owners were paid compensation by the state.

Bloody noses all around. I think the memory has stayed with them.

Meanwhile, how many British local councils are going to have to get bloody noses before they work out that bastardry is bastardry, and not likely to make you popular?

To prove I've visited Jo's this morning, here's an odd interview with a pair of witnesses to a crime. Someone suggested it might be AI generated, but it looks plausible enough to me. I used to joke with a work colleague that she was my left brain (left because of where we sat, brain because she often got the answers I was hunting for). This pair takes that sort of relationship up a few notches.