Utopia, you are standing in it!

In my previous post I wrote about the mistakes made by Arthur Burns after Nixon appointed him Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Here are the critical missteps of Burns’s unfortunate tenure.

1 Upon becoming chairman in January 1970, with inflation running at over 5% despite a modest tightening by his predecessor in 1969, Burns further tightened monetary policy, causing a downturn and a recession lasting the whole of 1970. The recession was politically damaging to Nixon, leading to sizable Republican losses in the November midterm elections, and causing Nixon to panic about losing his re-election bid in 1972. In his agitation, Nixon then began badgering Burns to loosen monetary policy.

2 Yielding to Nixon’s demands for an easing of monetary policy, Burns eased monetary policy sufficiently to allow a modest recovery to get under way in 1971. But the recovery was too tepid to suit Nixon. Fearing the inflationary…

Aeromagazine has a superb article that deals with twelve such arguments that are commonly heard.

While the whole thing is worth your time to read I wanted to extract two in particular.

First up is the classic one about shoutingfire!in a crowded theatre;

Answer: Anyone who says “you can’t shoutfire!in a crowded theatre” is showing that they don’t know much about the principles of free speech, or free speech law—or history.

This old canard, afavourite referenceof censorship apologists, needs to be retired. It’s repeatedly and inappropriately used to justify speech limitations. People have been using this cliché as if it had some legal meaning, while First Amendment lawyers roll their eyes and point out that it is, in fact, as Alan Dershowitz puts it, “a caricature of logical argumentation.”Ken White has already penned a brilliant and thorough takedown of this misconception. Please…

Charles II (May 29, 1630 – February 6, 1685) was King of Scotland from 1649 until 1651, and King of Scotland, England and Ireland from the 1660 Restoration of the monarchy until his death in 1685.

Charles II was the eldest surviving child of Charles I of England, Scotland and Ireland and Henrietta Maria de Bourbon France, daughter of King Henri IV of France and Navarre and Marie de Medici.

After Charles I’s execution at Whitehall on January 30, 1649, at the climax of the English Civil War, the Parliament of Scotland proclaimed Charles II king on February 5, 1649. But England entered the period known as the English Interregnum or the English Commonwealth, and the country was a de facto republic led by Oliver Cromwell.

Cromwell defeated Charles II at the Battle of Worcester on September 3, 1651, and Charles fled to mainland Europe. Cromwell became virtual dictator of…

Wind and solar are an all or nothing kind of prospect; when the Sun’s at its zenith and the wind’s blowing just right, wind and solar generators actually start to look like ‘industries’. But, a spell of calm weather and/or sunset soon buries that notion. Power delivered when it’s not needed is worthless, as are part-time power generators who simply cannot deliver power when it is needed.

The three big renewable energy fanatics in Europe, Germany UK and France have had plenty of time to prove the purported merits of wind and solar.

Charles Rotter takes a look at the (miserable) scorecard, to date.

Weather Dependent Renewable power performance in Europe DE UK FR: 2020
Watts Up With That
Charles Rotter for edmhdotme
7 May 2021

In 2020, Weather Dependent Renewables (Wind and Solar Power) made up 58% of all power generation installations in the three Nations: Germany (DE), the…

The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) Director: David Lean

★★★★★

David Lean has made a lot of great movies including Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, A Passageto India, Great Expectations, and others. However The Bridge on the River Kwai stands alone as a uniquely slow-paced exploration into the nature of courage, honor, and duty. It won seven Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director (David Lean), and Best Actor (Alec Guinness).

Set against the backdrop of World War II in 1943, the story is based on the French novel “The Bridge over the River Kwai” by Peter Boulle. It was developed by two Hollywood blacklisted writers exiled in England at the time (Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson). It was the era of extreme communist paranoia in Washington and Hollywood was purged of all potential “threats.” Thus neither writer appears in the credits for the…

Michael Shellenberger writes at Forbes Why Biden’s Climate Agenda Is Falling Apart.  He suggests that there are multiple forces opposing it,  not only political but also laws of physics. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

The Gathering Storm

Since taking office in January, President Joe Biden and Democrats have projected confidence that they will be able to pass climate infrastructure and budget legislation to expand renewables.

But in recent weeks, that confidence has rapidly faded. “I don’t think the votes are there in a reconciliation bill for the climate infrastructure-type issues,” an insider told the Washington Post.

Senate Democrats are not likely going to be able to use this year’s budget resolution to put together what is known as a reconciliation package. “Senior Democrats privately don’t believe they can finish work on a second reconciliation package,” noted a political reporter, “using the 2021 budget resolution by the end…

As David Starkey writes, “For much of the eighteenth century, the monarchy veered between deep unpopularity and a national joke” (420). The new “Georgian” age lacked the conquests of the Plantagenets, the wild religious extremism of the Tudors and the Stuarts, and all the industriousness and sophistication of the Victorians. It was an age of liberty, new ideas, Georgian-style architecture (in contrast to the ornate French style) and the rise of the novel. The power of the monarchy was in decline but under the careful administration of a clutch of “cabinet” ministers, Britain became a more liberal and cosmopolitan empire. The last gasp of the Stuarts had ended with the death of Queen Anne (followed by her husband William of Orange), and in order to avoid the threat of a despotic Catholic monarch (per the Act of Succession) the crown skipped numerous blood relatives and was handed down to the…

Fake news has a meaning, and its found in the presentation style of mainstream media journalists and their singular group think far left or “progressive” mind set, at the expense of every other reasonable perspective.

This mindset was never so brazenly displayed than in their rabid interrogation of National Party leader Judith Collins after Question Time today. Not only was their questioning rude and ignorant, they completely failed to grasp Ms Collin’s point, even though she voiced it over and over to them.

The press gallery basically acted as a very loud megaphone for the anti-free speech opinions and invalid accusations of the 2 MP Maori party that only achieved 1.2% of the vote.

Judith tried again and again to say she was questioning Jacinda Ardern in an effort to establish just what is in train with the govt and radical Maori as described in the He Puapua document. Her…

Benjamin Zycher at Real Clear Markets takes the NYT to task for its stupid article about fossil fuel infrastructure, awarding it The Dumbest New York Times Op-Ed of 2021.  Of course there are many months left for NYT to publish even worse inanities this year.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds. I have reorganized the content to juxtapose the wild claims with sober facts.

Summer still is weeks away, but already we have a winner in the fierce competition for the coveted title of “Dumbest New York Times opinion column of 2021.” The envelope please… and the winner is “Why Charles Koch Wins When Our Energy System Breaks Down,” by someone named Christopher Leonard. One really does have to read this column to grasp — actually, to marvel at — the inanity of Leonard’s argument, which can be summarized as follows.

Claim:
Our fossil-fuel infrastructure — pipelines in particular…

John McWhorter’s that is. He’s pictured here. He’s a linguist professor at Columbia University, where he also teaches philosophy and music history. His research speciality is creole languages.

Like most linguists he hates the sloppy use of words and grammar, but in this article he goes after the recent term “systemic racism” because he thinks it’s useless, unhelpful and racist itself.

But if the mantra is that what we need to do to solve black America’s problems is “get rid of systemic racism,” we’re in trouble. That analysis, be it explicit or tacit, is based on a third-grader’s understanding of how a society works. More importantly, that analysis does not help black people and often hurts us.

I’m always amused by academics who can’t see the political aspects of what they’re discussing, in this case the simple fact that “systemic racism” is far too politically useful to the…

The ‘Feudal System’ in England, as it is taught in schools, seems fairly simple and consistent, the result of the imposition by a small conquering minority of a system already developed beyond these shores, and modified even as it was imposed. But even in England it was extremely complex, developing fairly rapidly from the hour of its introduction, modified by the adoption of Saxon law and custom and by changing conditions within the kingdom, and even now still open to re-interpretation in many of its features. On the Continent, however, it differed greatly from country to country depending on the circumstances under which it developed. In those areas which have been studied, custom and feudal law varied widely and it would be quite impractical to try to cover the whole of Europe except in the most general terms. Outside northern France and those lands where feudalism was deliberately imported, England…

In order to worm their way into rural communities, wind industry goons employ a mix of varnished lies, deceit and old-school thuggery.

Over the last decade, wind power outfits have been able to beguile the gullible and hoodwink the unsuspecting.  They usually start with a colossal lie and work up from there.  However, as soon as locals rumble them, they retreat to a form of obfuscation and prevarication – dissembling over inconvenient facts, like a furtive schoolboy caught holding a slingshot a stone’s throw from a busted window.

When the lies and deceit cease to work, they resort to coercion and undue influence, as they bully the people they cynically call ‘stakeholders’ – to the extent required to get their projects up and running.

The problem for the wind industry arises from websites like STT, among others.

Laid out on this site, in over 3,000 posts, are the facts that…

Geriatrician Kate Gregorevic has tweeted a very useful thread of 8 common fears and excuses she has heard from those who are vaccine hesitant, together with her responses. These are so useful. Please copy to those in your life who may benefit from reading these.