Utopia, you are standing in it!

New year, new lockdown. I’m instinctively sceptical that such severe restrictions on our lives can ever be justified, but two factors have surely tipped the balance in their favour.

The first, of course, is the far more rapid transmission of the new Covid variant. This has increased the benefits of locking down, as the risk of the NHS being overwhelmed by Covid patients is now much greater.

The second, more positively, is the rollout of the new vaccines, which has reduced at least some of the costs of locking down. This is because there is now light at the end of the tunnel, and households and businesses can be more confident that this is the final push.

Here we can take some comfort from the strong public support for the new lockdown, and the relative sanguine response in financial markets. In particular, the FTSE has continued to grind higher. Even…

Guy Caruso writes at Real Climate Energy Supreme Court Hearing Should Signal Shift From Baseless Lawsuits to Realistic Climate Solutions  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

For years, energy manufacturers have helped drive down U.S. carbon emissions by unleashing a flood of home-grown, low-carbon natural gas, reducing America’s carbon footprint even as we use more energy. At the same time, despite emissions reduction progress, a handful of cities and counties including Baltimore, New York City, and Washington, DC among others have sued energy manufacturers in the name of climate change, spurred on by ambitious trial attorneys and imaginative legal theories.

Federal law is clear, though, with the Supreme Court clearly ruling in American Electric Power v. Connecticut in 2011 that it’s EPA’s job to regulate carbon emissions. That’s why trial attorneys have fought so hard to move climate lawsuits to state courts and that’s why a January…

We’ve already talked about different methods for distributing the vaccine in the face of limited supply on this blog (see my post and Doug Norton’s post). But today I want to talk about something different: the speed at which this vaccine was developed. It is truly amazing.

This chart from Nature (adapted from the fantastic Our World in Data) dramatically shows just how quickly the COVID-19 vaccine was developed compared with past vaccines. What used to take decades or even a century was done in mere months (yes, even with all the regulatory barriers today).

Exactly how we developed this vaccine so quickly is a complex story that involves the advanced state of modern science, incentives offered by concerned governments, and the harnessing of the profit motive to advance the public good. We don’t know all the details yet, and likely won’t for a long time since, like…

“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish” (opening line).

The Old Man and the Sea is a rich and deep novella about an old fisherman named Santiago and his Herculean effort to overcome a fishing dry-spell. Much like the character, Ernest Hemingway was also going through a dry-spell. The Old Man and the Sea was written at a time when Hemingway was considered a writer in decline. His last critically praised work was more than a decade old: For Whom The Bell Tolls in 1940 – read my reflections on For Whom The BellTolls and its Pulitzer controversy here. Hemingway had published Across The River And Into The Trees in 1950, the first book he had published post-World War II, and it was panned by critics. In a word,

The case of Taylor v Jaguar Land Rover has been trumpeted as a “landmark”  employment tribunal decision recognising that people who identify as non-binary or gender-fluid can be covered by the Equality Act protected characteristic of “gender reassignment”.  

The case concerns Mr/Ms Taylor, a man who began to wear women’s clothing to work in 2017 as part of a process of exploring his gender. He now identifies as a transwoman. He can be seen here being interviewed by Pink News at the time:

The tribunal seemed particularly keen on inhabiting the role of landmark decision-makers, going into a soliloquy about individuals who make a difference including Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King and Ruth Bader-Ginsberg (“The Notorious RBG”, as they noted).

But there is a lot less to the landmark part of the decision than has been promoted. It was already clear that the protected characteristic of “gender reassignment” in the…

On 28 September 2016, the automatic shutdown of wind turbines in South Australia during a spring storm delivered a statewide ‘system black’.

South Australia’s hapless Premier, Jay Weatherill led the wind industry’s propaganda charge, pointing the finger at the collapse of a couple of power pylons in the state’s mid-North as the cause of a statewide calamity that left 1.6 million people powerless; and parts of the State without electricity for more than a week. BHP Billiton’s Olympic Dam mine in South Australia’s far north was without full power from September 28 to October 13.

The collapse of a few power pylons occurred late in the day, and affected a single transmission line that could not have caused the collapse of the State’s entire power supply. The rest of the State’s transmission lines remained untroubled by the strong winds. But the power pylons collapse is still touted by renewables advocates…

Greta and her handlers are upset that political leaders followed advice from epidemiologists and imposed lockdowns against Covid, but not against climate change.  Commenters at Not a Lot of People Know That exposed Greta’s ignorance for championing Net Zero policies to reduce atmospheric CO2.  One problem is the impracticality of removing CO2 to put into storage.  Broadlands noted:

NET stands for Negative Emission Technology. That means industrial removal and geological burial of billions of tons of CO2 under pressure. The irony is the fact that they cannot fit a lot into those geological locations…not even one part-per-million. Greta’s puppeteers don’t even realize that themselves. Certainly not Mr. Biden’s experts as they tool up to spend trillions.

Even more dangerous is activists failing to recognize we are presently suffering from a dearth of CO2, not a surplus  Pardonmeforbreathing drew the implications from the above graph (excerpted):

If you look at…

Having declared its intention to be guided by a set of treaty principles, Stuff has set about suppressing the views of a political group which questions the establishment of special seats for Maori on local  local authorities.

Or rather, two publications in the Stuff stable have got into the suppression business.

We learn this from Breaking Views, which has published an item headed Democracy Northland: The Ad Stuff Refused to Publish.

We look forward to a denial from Stuff and a statement which rebuts the Breaking Views claim that the Whangarei Leader and the Bay Chronicle have refused to publish an advertisement which promotes a petition from Democracy Northland.

The advert says:

Family First today is highlighting the findings of a new poll (which it commissioned) that gauged public opinion on so-called hate speech.

The poll found just one in ten New Zealanders think it should be a crime

• to publicly claim that gender is revealed at birth and is not a matter of personal identity, or
• to publicly state that marriage is between a man and a woman only.

Family First – and all other critics of the government’s readiness to further crimp our liberties – should make much of the judges’ landmark ruling in the British case of a mother who called a trans woman “he” on Twitter.

The judges said:

‘Freedom only to speak inoffensively is not worth having.’

But the government in this country is under pressure from several quarters to deliver on its promise to tighten the laws on “hate speech”, further requiring Kiwis to watch what…

Since part of my job is to persuade skeptics to support a free society, I’m always trying to figure out how best to convince people to favor liberty over statism.

I start with the premise that most statists are misguided rather than evil and I try to understand how they see the world. If I know what makes them tick, after all, then perhaps I can explain to them how freedom is preferable to big government.

In my efforts to win people’s hearts and minds, I run into the same obstacles over and over again.

• Many people equate Republicans with limited government, so you have to explain that there’s a giant difference between the views of the Cato Institute and the decisions of statists like Richard Nixon or George W. Bush.
• Some folks think capitalism and cronyism are the same thing. I try to show them that there is…

Back on December 28, I shared four charts for the explicit reason that I wanted everyone to understand that average living standards in the western world have skyrocketed over the past few centuries.

I could have used that data to clear up myths about “robber barons” or “sweatshops,” but I had a more modest goal. I simply wanted to show that it’s possible for all of us to become much richer if we give the economy enough breathing room.

And that means policy makers should focus on growth rather than inequality (especially since the policies to reduce inequality generally lead to less prosperity).

Some pundits don’t grasp that essential point. Christopher Ingraham of the Washington Postgroused in a recent column that Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk became much wealthier in 2020.

Billionaires as a class have added about $1 trillion to their total net worth since the…

If there’s one city in the USA that is ground-zero for the Antifa movement it’s poor old Portland, Oregon. I don’t know why that should be but the results are not good. The city where BLM/Antifa never stopped rioting. Disturbances continue nightly in Portland, as it has since May 29, though the targets are now more diffuse and away from the CBD (the morons tried recreating Seattle’s CHAZ in Portland).

It’s notable that things have cooled a bit since the November election, leading me to wonder how many of these BLM/Antifa types were just Democrats stirring things up so that “healing” could occur were Trump defeated. I base that suspicion on the fact that the anti-war movements of the Double O’s, including Code Pink, basically fell apart soon after January 20, 2009, leaving true believers like Cindy Sheehan to wonder why they had been abandoned when nothing on the ground…

History came full-circle on 29 October 1944, when Benito Mussolini made his last public speech in Milan. Exactly twenty-two years before, he had set out from this same city in the ‘March on Rome’ that brought him to power. That early triumph had been preceded by a period of violent struggle, just as years of difficult warfare seemed to culminate somehow in the 1944 mass-rally. The outpouring of popular support it generated for him inspired his sometimes flagging spirits, while stiffening the backbone of the Salo Republic under an increasingly heavy siege from the air. His words were broadcast from the…