Utopia, you are standing in it!

George I (George Louis; German: Georg Ludwig; May 28, 1660 – June 11, 1727) was King of Great Britain and Ireland from August 1, 1714 and ruler of the Duchy and Electorate of Brunswick-Lüneburg (Hanover) within the Holy Roman Empire from January 23, 1698 until his death in 1727. He was the first British monarch of the House of Hanover.

George was born in the city of Hanover in the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg in the Holy Roman Empire. He was the eldest son of Ernst August, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, and his wife, Sophia of the Palatinate. Sophia was the granddaughter of King James I-VI of England, Scotland and Ireland through her mother, Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia.

For the first year of his life, George was the only heir to the German territories of his father and three childless uncles. George’s brother, Friedrich August, was born in 1661, and the…

This took place in front of a Buddhist temple in Lop Buri, Thailand and a similar incident took place in the city last year. While monkey gang fights in the Lopburi are nothing new, the number of the animals is massive. This largely due to reduced tourism resulting from the coronavirus outbreak in which tourists typically feed the monkeys.

Image byAndre MoutonfromPixabay

The good news keeps on coming: Belgium is worldwide in the top 15 of “Wind and Solar countries”. More specifically, we are at 9^th place having a share of 20% of our electricity production from solar and wind in 2020:

It didn’t end there. China, the EU-27 and the United States are responsible for more than two-thirds of global generation, Vietnam went from 0 to 14 TWh in just 3 years, Chile and South Korea have quadrupled their wind and solar generation since 2015, and many other countries (Brazil, China, India, Mexico, Turkey and Uruguay) have tripled it. Also, many countries now get around a tenth of their electricity, which is the global average for electricity generation from solar and wind.

Of course, the transition to solar and wind is going to be cheap. According the article, the cost for solar and wind are at a tipping point…

by Tim Harding B.Sc. B.A.

(An edited version of this essay was published in The Skeptic magazine, June 2016, Vol 36, No. 2, under the title ‘Out of the Dark’. A talk based on this essay was also presented to the 2016 Australian Skeptics National Convention in Melbourne). 

To the ancient Greeks, science was simply the knowledge of nature.  The acquisition of such knowledge was theoretical rather than experimental.  Logic and reason were applied to observations of nature in attempts to discover the underlying principles influencing phenomena.

After the Dark Ages, the revival of classical logic and reason in Western Europe was highly significant to the development of universities and subsequent intellectual progress.  It was also a precursor to the development of empirical scientific methods in the thirteenth century, which I think were even more important because of the later practical benefits of science to humanity.  The two most influential…

‘Bombs’ are designed to store and quickly release copious amounts of energy, so are the mega-batteries said to save wind and solar from their hopeless intermittency.

The notion is that giant lithium-ion batteries will quell the power delivery chaos that comes with attempting to rely wholly weather-dependent wind power and wholly sunshine-dependent solar power; thereby bringing stability and security to plenty a power grid teetering on the brink of collapse, all the consequence of our “inevitable transition” away from reliable and dependable power generation sources, like coal and gas.

But there’s nothing ‘stable and secure’ about lithium batteries.

As Samsung mobile phone owners are painfully aware, lithium batteries have a horrifying habit of spontaneous ignition. STT has fond memories of watching fellow airline passengers being berated for having a Samsung 7 in their pocket.

And there have been plenty of incidents where the lithium batteries in Tesla’s electric cars have…

Senator Bernie Sanders wants to dramatically increase the burden of government and he claims that his policies won’t lead to economic misery because nations such as Sweden show that you can be a prosperous country with a big welfare state.

Perhaps, but there are degrees of prosperity. And a large public sector imposes a non-trivial burden on Nordic nations, resulting in living standards that lag U.S. levels according to OECD data.

Moreover, according to research by a Swedish economist, people of Scandinavian descent in America produce and earn much more than their counterparts at home.

That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement of the Nordic Model.

But there actually are some things we can learn from places such as Sweden. And not just things to avoid.

As Johan Norberg explains in this short video (you may have to double-click and watch it on the YouTube site), there are some…

Since I called Trump a big-government Republican during the 2016 campaign and just condemned his capitulation to a spendaholic budget deal, it goes without saying that I’m not a huge fan of the President.

Heck, I also recently criticized his protectionism, warning that additional barriers to trade could offset the pro-growth effect of lower tax rates.

But I like to think I’m fair in my criticisms. I stay away from the personal stuff (other than for humor purposes) and and simply focus on whether liberty is increasing or decreasing.

Today, though, I want to quasi-defend Trump because a professor from the University of Richmond wrote a really strange column for the Washington Post with a very bizarre assertion about Juan Perón, the populist post-World War II president of Argentina.

It’s en vogue for enraged liberals to compare Trumpism to Argentine Peronism, wielding the analogy as a warning…

Economists widely agree with the theory of “convergence,” which is the (mostly true) idea that poor nations should grow faster than rich nations.

This means that we can learn important lessons by looking at examples of “divergence,” and I provide 20 examples in this presentation.

The above video is an excerpt from a presentation I made earlier this week to a seminar organized by the New Economic School in the country of Georgia.

While it seems like I was making the same point, over and over again (and I was), I wanted the students to understand that the real-world evidence clearly shows that good policy is critical if less-developed nations want convergence.

And I also wanted them to realize that there are many examples of free market-oriented nations growing much faster than anti-market countries.

But, by contrast, there are not examples that go the other way.

Image credit: livescience.com

It’s not as hot as we thought, they could say. That’s been obvious for a long time, but the defensive bluster of modellers has finally dried up, it seems. Time to dump the pointless and ‘implausible’ extreme scenarios and think seriously about some of the assumptions, such as greenhouse gas theory and its supposed climate consequences, and other suggested shortcomings.
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Leading climate scientists conceded that models used to estimate how much the world will warm with rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are running too hot, reports The Australian (via The GWPF).

“It’s become clear over the last year or so that we can’t avoid this,” Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told Science ­magazine.

The admission is seen as a significant development by scientists who argue that not enough attention has been paid to natural ­cycles in…

It only takes a moment’s consideration to understand why wind and solar will never amount to meaningful power sources. Sunset is a daily phenomenon and repeated bouts of extended calm weather occur with remarkable regularity.

While there’s plenty of lip service paid to the ‘inevitable’ renewable energy transition, the reality bites every day.

Always clear and to the point, Mark Mathis provides another helpful insight on to why wind and solar will never really power us.

Flip the Fossil Fuel Script
Clear Energy Alliance
Mark Mathis
8 June 2021

No shortage of anti-energy agitators would LOVE IT if wind & solar were our primary energy providers with fossil fuels relegated as only minor players. Ok…. That’s crazy and impossible, but as an exercise we thought it would be fun to play along. Let’s flip the fossil fuel script with so-called renewables and see what that looks like. We would need…

Those interested in European Royalty and its history know the story of how William II, Duke of Normandy became King of the English in 1066. In this short series I will instead examine what type of King William the Conqueror was and how he ran his administration.

The Norman conquest of England began in 1066 after William II, Duke of Normandy conquered England to capture the throne he believed was rightfully his. And although William was crowned King of the English on Christmas day in 1066 his subduing and conquest of England was not completed until 1071. English nobles and the populace in general did not easily and willingly submit to Norman rule.

As part of his efforts to secure England, William ordered many castles, keeps, and mottes built – among them the central keep of the Tower of London, the White Tower. These fortifications allowed Normans to retreat into…