Utopia, you are standing in it!

I’m currently in Tanzania as part of a speaking tour in Africa. My remarks today largely repeated the message I gave to an audience last week in Nigeria.

So I won’t bother sharing anything from my presentation. Instead, I want to highlight some numbers from a presentation by Professor Ken Schoolland.

He shared some data showing how the “Asian Tigers” grew far faster than major Latin American nations between 1950 and 2000.

These are very impressive examples of convergence (as the Asian Tigers caught up with Latin America) followed by divergence (as the Tigers then continued to grow much faster).

I’ll be adding this data to my “anti-convergence club.”

But I also noticed that Professor Schoolland was sharing some old data from 1995.

So I went to the Maddison website and created some new charts based on the latest-available data.

As you can see, the Latin American nations…

So, we have the result of the Referendum, and a majority of voters have voted to leave the EU. A mantra of Leave campaigners seems to have been the desire to ‘take back control’. There has been much talk of sovereignty, although less clarity on what it actually means. However, at its most basic, there are at least three notions of sovereignty that are relevant in the context of Brexit, and they are often confused. The first is parliamentary sovereignty, which is said to have particular resonance in the UK because, due to the vagaries of the uncodified UK Constitution, the Westminster Parliament has been recognised as a body with unlimited legislative power. Yet the parliamentary sovereignty of a representative democracy may seem to be at odds with popular sovereignty as exercised in a referendum. Popular sovereignty also has other implications, such as in Scotland, where an indigenous Scottish tradition…

The results of the third nation-wide referendum in the United Kingdom are still sinking in at home and around the world. Just below 52% voted to leave the European Union, just over 48% voted to remain. The widespread conclusion is that the UK must leave the EU.

But there is another way of reading the result. The United Kingdom is not a centralised state. It is a ‘family of nations’. There is a strong case for arguing that the referendum carries only if a majority of voters in all four nations respectively give their backing. England and Wales voted to leave, but Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain. Recognising that split is not a matter of shifting the goalposts after the fact. It is about respecting an established, indeed a compelling constitutional order.

Before Westminster politicians think about the practicalities of withdrawing from the EU, they urgently need to…

In the 1930 we had the Nazis burning and banning books which were not complying to Nazi ideology. They were not only books by Jewish authors but also books like “the Hunchback of the Notre Dame” and Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. Or “the Time machine” and “War of the Worlds” by HG Wells. Or books by James Joyce,Ernest Hemingway .

Fast forward to 1947 -1957 during the McCarthy era where famous and successful film producers, directors and screenwriters were silenced because they were deemed to be either communist or communist sympathizers, silenced without any trial or a shred of evidence, often because of hear say or the interpretation by someone. People like The Hollywood Ten with the likes of Oscar winning screenwriter Dalton Trumbo and Oscar winning director  Edward Dmytryk.

Fast forward to today. It is not the Nazis or the McCarthy committee but extreme feminists and vegans who…

If it were only intended as a joke, wind power would be hilarious. However, the power pricing and supply calamity that follows any attempt to rely on sunshine and breezes tend to sober things up.

Random 3,000 to 4,000 MW wind power output collapses are at the heart of Australia’s self-inflicted renewable energy debacle. The consequences of an obsession with subsidised wind and solar were as perfectly predictable, as they were perfectly avoidable. Power rationing is now routine and power prices are soaring out of control.

What’s depicted above – courtesy of Aneroid Energy – is the output delivered by Australian wind power outfits to the Eastern Grid last month. To describe wind power as a power generation system, given that kind of performance is not just delusional, it’s dangerous. Australia’s Eastern Grid is, literally, on the brink of collapse.

One of the few that gets it is, the…

Is more computing power just getting us the wrong results from overheated models faster?
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Outside of their academic fascination, looked at in terms of their contribution to climate policy, it seems that we may have reached the useful limit of computer climate modelling, says Dr. David Whitehouse.

The first computers built in the 1950s allowed climate scientists to think about modelling the climate using this new technology.

The first usable computer climate models were developed in the mid-1970s.

Shortly afterwards the US National Academy of Sciences used their outcomes to estimate a crucial climate parameter we still calculate today – the Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) – how much the world would warm (from ‘pre-industrial’ levels) with a doubling of CO2 — and concluded that it had a range of 1.5 – 4.5°C.

Wherever the wind industry plies it subsidy-soaked trade, there’s a wave of avian carnage, and offshore is no exception.

While Greta & Co fret about global incineration and mass extinctions, the wind industry is doing a very fine job of extinguishing millions of birds and bats, every year. Indeed, entire species are under threat, including Europe’s Red Kite and Tasmania’s Wedge Tailed Eagle.

Plans to erect thousands more of these things around Britain’s coasts, spell the death knell for millions of seabirds, with several species under threat.

The offshore wind industry is already exacting a phenomenal toll on a whole range of seabirds in the waters surrounding Britain, including the Lesser Black-backed gull, as Jason Endfield details below.

Alarming 99% Decline In Gulls Raises Questions Over Expanding Wind Farms
Jason Endfield Blog
Jason Endfield
6 May 2022

A shocking 99% decline in the population of Lesser Black-backed gulls raises…

Fortune, which has great influence in affairs generally and especially in war, produces by a slight disturbance of balance important changes in human affairs.
(The Civil War Book 3 chapter 68)

I picked up this 1967 Penguin paperback of Julius Caesar’s Civil Wars, translated by Jane Gardner, in the sensible A format size (18 cm by 11 cm) with reassuringly browned paper, in a second hand bookshop for just £2. Though nearly 60 years old it has fewer scuff marks and scratches than a book I recently bought ‘new’ from Amazon, ‘destroyer of books’, whose cover was smeared, scuffed and scratched.

This Penguin volume actually contains four ‘books’:

• The Civil War, the longest text at 112 short ‘chapters’ or sections (often no more than paragraphs), making up 130 Penguin pages
• The Alexandrian War (78 sections, 42 pages)
• The African War (98 sections, 49 pages)
• The Spanish War (42…

A new online pharmacy funded by Mark Cuban promises to sell prescription drugs at a fixed markup, 15% over cost plus a $3 flat fee. What’s the catch?

As far as I can tell, there are two- they only sell generics, and they don’t take insurance. But I think this will still save many people a lot of money.

The most expensive drugs get that way because they are sold by monopolies, almost always because they were invented less than 20 years ago and are still on-patent. But it’s still possible for older drugs to be sold at huge markups, as Martin Shkreli could tell you now that he’s out of prison (Shkreli’s case is supposedly what inspired Dr. Alex Oshmyansky to start this pharmacy). Sometimes you can still blame these markups on monopolies, just induced by the FDA instead of patents. But even for generic drugs with competitive manufacturing…

The United States is a uniquely violent country among high-income democracies. And by the best available data on homicides, the US has always been more violent. Homicides are useful to look at because we generally have the best data on these (murders are the most likely crime to be reported) and it’s the most serious of all violent crimes.

Just how much more violent is the US than other high-income democracies? As measured by the homicide rate, about 6-7 times as violent. We can see this first by comparing the US to several European countries (and a few groupings of similar countries).

Let me make a few things clear about this chart. First, this is data for homicides, which are typically defined as interpersonal violence. Thus, it excludes deaths on the battlefield, genocides, acts of terrorism (generally speaking), and other deaths of this nature. That’s how it is defined. If…

Image credit: Zelp
An own goal for NZ farming. Where is the greenhouse they’re so frightened of? From livestock to laughing stock.
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New Zealand has unveiled a plan to tax sheep and cattle burps in a bid to tackle one of the country’s biggest sources of greenhouse gases, says BBC News.

It would make it the first nation to charge farmers for the methane emissions from the animals they keep.

New Zealand is home to just over five million people, along with around 10 million cattle and 26 million sheep.

Almost half the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture, mainly methane.

“Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work;
we need a fundamentally different approach.”
–Top Google engineers

“Suggesting thatrenewableswill let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels
in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole
is almost the equivalent of believing in theEaster Bunny and Tooth Fairy.
–James Hansen
(Former NASA-climate chief)

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Quality analysis from a quality journalist of the traditional Left, Chris Uhlmann.

Uhlmann’s well considered article ends here for mine …

“Germany stands as a stark testimony. It has spent more than€500 billion ($743 billion) transitioning its electricity system, boosting wind and solarto more than 45 per cent of generation since 2000. But it had to keep 89 per cent of its fossil-fired capacity to deal with the problems caused by calm, dark days. It now boasts Europe’smost expensive retail powerand is strategically exposed becausethe country can’t function without imported gas.”