Utopia, you are standing in it!

Ahead of next Tuesday’s VirtualIHR Parliaments, Politics and People seminar, we hear from Dr Max Skjönsberg, of the University of Liverpool. On 2 March 2021, between 5.15 p.m. and 6.30 p.m., Max will be responding to your questions about his pre-circulated paper, based on his recently published book: The Persistence of Party: Ideas of Harmonious Discord in Eighteenth-Century Britain and we will also be welcoming Professor David Hayton as guest chair for the session. Details of how to join the discussion are available here, or by contactingseminar@histparl.ac.uk.

Party is a crucial theme in William Hogarth’s four election paintings from the second half of the 1750s. The paintings were in part inspired by the controversial Oxfordshire election of 1754, one of the last major strongholds of Tory-Jacobitism in eighteenth-century England. The four paintings depict how Tories dressed in blue and Whigs in orange entertain and…

China isn’t even vaguely interested in intermittent wind and solar; it’s insatiable demand for coal to fuel coal-fired power plants tells the story, as does the fact that it continues to build new coal-fired plants, hand over fist.

All despite claims by wind and solar cult that China will soon turn its nose up at the black stuff.

The CCP’s efforts to make Australia kowtow with its ban on Australian coal imports has come with a particular domestic price. Disgruntled householders and businesses, faced with rapidly rising energy costs and power rationing, will cause a policy rethink at the party level, soon enough.

But, trade squabbles aside, there is absolutely no doubt that China is deadly serious about building serious power generation capacity. Much to the horror of the climate cult.

China’s coal war with Australia fuels shortage at home
The Wall Street Journal
Chuin-Wei Yap
11 February 2021

China’s…

Our Beehive Bulletin … 

Each of two fresh announcements from the Beehive involves payments of $18 million.

One lot is being poured into a trough to offer grants up to $150,000 a year “for creative spaces to make arts more accessible”.

The other is the sum involved in the Moriori treaty settlement, although Moriori get not only the money but also a bag.

Myth-busting is likely to be a consequence of the deal, too, when the Moriori Claims Settlement Bill is enacted.

Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations Minister Andrew Little welcomed Moriori to Parliament to witness the first reading of the bill, which – he said – is “the culmination of years of dedication and hard work from all the parties involved”.

He candidly acknowledged the Moriori are being short-changed, saying:

Since when did the British Press in general ‘respond to government policy’ by reversing its opinions on anything? Very strange. No evidence is offered in this article of what public opinion of government climate policy, or even of climate propaganda in general, actually is, so they resort to assertions.

H/T The GWPF
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The new green face paint of the British press is not simply a consequence of public opinion.

It’s also a response to new Government policy, says I-news.

Like a shrinking Antarctic ice shelf, collapsing into the sea in the face of global warming, the climate scepticism of large parts of the UK press is finally starting to melt away.

Earlier this month, The Times, which had caused scientists to despair at its apparent support for climate change denial, ran an editorial in support of Government proposals for new taxes to combat carbon emissions. “It…

From the 1930’s to the 1970’s California made huge plans for its future, building large numbers of power stations and the transmission grid to link them, bridges and expressways for transport, and dams, canals, and aqueducts as part of a vast system to bring water from the snowy mountains of the Sierra Nevadas to the desert of the Central Valley and the coastal cities.

It was a golden era and it was planned for 25 million people. As the 1970’s rolled around new plans for further development were made in all these areas, for a 21st century population of 40 million or more.

And then in the 1970’s it all came grinding to a halt as the newborn environmental movement cranked up, with California seeing itself as the leader, starting with Jerry Brown, the son of the legendary California Governor, Pat Brown. While Pat became known as “The Builder…

From the Star Trek TOS episode “I, Mudd”

As anyone who frequents this blog knows, I spend a lot of time talking about logical fallacies. I frequently criticize peoples’ arguments for having them, and I present them as a reason for rejecting particular lines of thought. Nevertheless, many people fail to realize just how important they are, and showing someone that they have committed a fallacy rarely makes them reject their argument. Indeed, I once had someone say, “just because my argument technically contains a fallacy doesn’t mean that the underlying logic is wrong.” In reality, however, that is exactly what it means. Logical fallacies are, by definition, flawed lines of reasoning, and anytime that an argument contains a fallacy, that argument must be rejected. Therefore, understanding logical fallacies is critical for analyzing arguments and holding rational views, and in this post, I want to try to explain why fallacies…

The US secretly flew a Russian-made Pantsir missile launching system to Germany.

A captured Pantsir S1 paraded in Tripoli by government forces, May 2020. This may be the system the U.S. Air Force flew out a month later but it is likely impossible to know for sure.

A truck-mounted Russian air defence missile system captured on a Libyan battlefield was flown intact to a US air base in Germany in a covert mission.

The operation was ordered amid concerns that the Pantsir S-1 missile battery, which can easily bring down civilian aircraft, could fall into the hands of militias or arms smugglers in the war-torn north African country.

The acquisition of a Pantsir, designed to defend against U.S. and NATO aircraft, is a windfall to the U.S. intelligence community.

A Pantsir-S1 short range air defense system abandoned by its operators in Libya was covertly transported to Rammstein Air Force…

Having taken their long summer break – not heard from since 11 November – the Reserve Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee will be out with their Monetary Policy Statement on Wednesday. Much has changed in the economic data and indicators, here and abroad, since then, and it will be interesting to see what the Governor and has committee have made of it all. There are some genuine surprises and puzzles that the Committee should have been grappling with – and most other macro economists and commentators too, but the rest of us don’t get to set monetary policy. And if the strength of the economic rebound is a surprise – and it would appear to have been to the Bank too – how resilient is that rebound likely to prove, and under what conditions?

I’m somewhat sceptical of the idea of a resilient rebound this year – and with more than…

Photosynthesis: nature requires carbon dioxide
Tackle – or generate? Carbon dioxide being a benefit to plants – which it clearly is – will be deemed false if it’s ‘excess’, according to this report. Anything that might cast doubt on climate catastrophism is likely to get the label treatment.
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Labels to be attached to posts directing users to Facebook’s Climate Science Information Center, reports The Guardian.

A new section of the Climate Science Information Center, launching alongside the labelling trial, debunks common myths such as the false claim that polar bear populations are not suffering due to global heating, or the widespread belief that excess carbon emissions help plant life.

Facebook is working with climate communication experts from around the world, including at the University of Cambridge, to produce the content.

Dr Sander van der Linden, a Cambridge academic who has worked with Facebook on the centre…

Conflating the Caretaker Convention with The Doctrine of Necessity

I remain transfixed by the spectacle unfolding in Newfoundland and Labrador and will have to report back once Elections Newfoundland and Labrador counts the ballots cast in this illegitimate election.

Last week, Ed Hollett, a political historian based in St. John’s, accused me and Lyle Skinner of construing the Elections Act of Newfoundland and Labrador too narrowly. “You need to look at the Act again as a whole document, not just a list of rules. I think there’s an element of that limited approach in Bowden’s commentary as well,” he insisted. By “limited,” he means “factually correct,” because the words in statutes must mean something. “Looking at an act as a whole” does not substitute for the absence of specific provisions that would need to exist in order for your argument to be true.