Utopia, you are standing in it!

Delusions come in various sizes, but the biggest of all is the claim that we’ll soon be powered by nothing but sunshine and breezes. With the prospect of a Sleepy Joe Biden Presidency and the imposition of the Squad’s economy-wrecking New Green Deal the delusion is about to take on monstrous proportions. So, no time like the present for a little reality check.

This time Vijay Jayaraj takes us back to a time when there is a clear demarcation between fact and fantasy.

The Myth of Glorious Renewables
Watts Up With That?
Vijay Jayaraj
26 October 2020

We all love energy solutions that make life better. It is an undeniable fact that coal propelled the Industrial Revolution and led to the alleviation of poverty in the West. More recently, the oil reserves in the Middle East have made it one of the most economically developed regions in the world.

Despite…

Joe Biden has a very misguided economic agenda. I’m especially disturbed by his class-warfare tax agenda, which will be bad news for American workers and American competitiveness.

The good news, as I wrote earlier this year, is that he probably isn’t serious about some of his worst ideas.

Biden is a statist, but not overly ideological. His support for bigger government is largely a strategy of catering to the various interest groups that dominate the Democratic Party. The good news is that he’s an incrementalist and won’t aggressively push for a horrifying FDR-style agenda if he gets to the White House.

But what if Joe Biden’s health deteriorates and Kamala Harris – sooner or later – winds up in charge?

That’s rather troubling since her agenda was far to the left of Biden’s when they were competing for the Democratic nomination.

And it doesn’t appear that…

There is nothing, it seems, that can’t be blamed on the white patriarchy. The ludicrous extreme of such claims can be seen in Wednesday’s op-ed by Charles Blow in the New York Times. (click on screenshot below). Apparently the movement of the “oppressed” towards Republicans, as well as the high votes of white women for Trump, are not the results of individual reasoned decisions, but of the machinations of The Patriarchy. The column is unbelievable.

Maybe sociologists know why the votes have gone this way, but I don’t. Regardless, Blow says something that nobody disputes: people of color voted for Trump by a higher margin this year than in 2016. That’s also true for gay people—big time. Given Trump’s views and actions, I’m surprised, but I lack both the the expertise or chops to explain the numbers that Blow quotes:

In France things were slower getting off the ground. The Vichy regime and the Armistice Army took some of the sting out of occupation initially and led to a degree of confusion as to who was actually the enemy, and where effort ought to be directed. Resistance grew up in both the occupied and the Vichy zones, but the simple existence of an ostensibly legitimate government served to make overt resistance a matter of argument. When the Germans occupied all of France after the Allied invasion of French North Africa the issue became clearer. The Armistice Army dissolved, Vichy was removed as an intermediary, and the French stood face to face with the conqueror. By that time there was already a cadre of resisters living in hiding, not only the normal underground resisters, but also the genesis of a partisan army, spawned by the labor draft and the roundup of…

The German conquest of Europe was intended to be permanent. The First Reich was the old Holy Roman Empire, and it had been laid to rest by Napoleon after the Battle of Austerlitz; the Second Reich was the Hohenzollern Empire; proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles in 1871, it collapsed with the Kaiser’s abdication in 1918; the Third Reich was to last for a thousand years. At least so Hitler said, and so he meant. He was building for the ages.

Not everyone agreed with his concept of the Master Race and the inherent superiority of the Aryan peoples. In western Europe, though at first the Germans behaved themselves, the shock of conquest and defeat soon wore off, and as soon…

Jack Ketch in the Plotter’s Ballad (1678-9). Ketch is seen right of center holding a rope and an axe.

[From the archives] Jack Ketch, otherwise known as John Ketch or Richard Jaquet, began his twenty-three year career as London’s leading executioner in 1663. He was not the only executioner dispatching the condemned at Tyburn, but he was the most infamous, earning a reputation for brutality remarkable even for a man in his profession. After his death in 1686, his name became slang for any executioner, the devil, and even death itself. Over time, his reputation took on such epic proportions that he became a sort of bogeyman. So who was he?

Like many executioners, Ketch spent much of his early life on the wrong side of the law, and is known to have spent time in Marshalsea Prison. Little is definitively known about his origins. He is first mentioned in…

In the latest blog for the Georgian Lords, Dr Charles Littleton considers the way in which 18th-century elections were frequently decided on the results of petitions in Parliament, after the initial returns were challenged.

The weeks before this year’s election in the USA have been marked with commentary considering the potential for voter fraud, disenfranchisement, and the role of the courts. Although on a much larger stage, this USA election has had many of the features of the numerous disputed elections that came before the House of Commons in the 18th century. Attempts to reverse the results of elections were a normal part of parliamentary business, as every new Parliament began with a flood of petitions seeking to unseat freshly returned Members, either by trying to disqualify their voters or complaining of fraudulent methods at the polls. The high number of election petitions submitted throughout the first half of the…

Wind and solar ‘powered’ Californians and South Australians know what it is to have their power cut when the sun sets and/or calm weather sets in.

Mass blackouts and load shedding are part and parcel of our inevitable transition to an all wind and sun powered future. But now we are told, that none of this is a concern and, instead, what’s required is an ‘attitude readjustment program’. Under which we will thank our political betters for living in a brave new world, where power comes at the whims of mother nature; we’ll be glad to get it when it does and not the least bit miffed, when it doesn’t.

So, the idea of having reliable and affordable power as and when we need it is to become a mere blip in our present state of human consciousness. [Note to Ed: these characters might do a quick straw poll amongst…

For what it’s worth, my presidential prediction for 2020 will probably turn out to be more accurate than my presidential prediction for 2016.

But I doubt anyone cares about that. Let’s instead look at what happened last night (and, in some cases, what is still happening).

President

It appears that Biden will prevail in the battle for the White House when the dust settles, but you can see from this Washington Post map that the race was much closer than most people expected (Pennsylvania is expected to shift to Biden as mail-in votes are counted, and perhaps Georgia as well).

If that’s the final result, here are two obvious takeaways based on where a president has a lot of unilateral power.

• Trade policy will move in the right direction.
• Regulatory policy will move in the wrong direction.

Other policy areas generally require agreement between the executive branch…

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “roots”, came with this email note:

France deserves more support than it’s getting from its allies.

That’s for sure. And there’s a link to a Foreign Policy article (click on screenshot):

An excerpt. Note how the NYT changed the title of its article. What a rag!

In the latest of a series of personal attacks against the French president, Erdogan claimed that “Macron needed mental treatment” for his response to the attack. Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan asserted on Twitter that Macron’s words encouraged “Islamophobia,” while Mahathir Mohamad, the former prime minister of Malaysia, upped the ante by commenting that Muslims have a right to “kill millions of French people” in reaction to the “disrespect” they suffered. Some of the U.S. media coverage seems to take at face value the opportunistic accusations of illiberal leaders such as Erdogan. One article spoke grandiloquently of…

Cough up, or the kid gets it!

So-called smart meters are a very dumb response to intermittent wind and solar, even dumber energy sources. Wherever governments attempt to run on sunshine and breezes, the push to control and micromanage household power use, quickly follows.

Over the last few Australian summers, we’ve been treated to power rationing on a grand scale – which the Market Operator euphemistically tags “demand management”.

‘Demand management’ is not about supplying power consumers with what they need, it simply means shutting off power to industry, businesses and households – and even forcing hospitals to switch their lights and air conditioners off – among other indignities, whenever the sun sets and/or calm weather sets in. That’s what our ‘inevitable transition’ looks like at the macro level.

At the micro level, there’s the push to have smart meters installed in every home or business premise, in order that…

Prof Caludia Goldin gives a fascinating history of role of women in society:

My talk will take us on a Journey across a Century of Women — a 120-year odyssey of generations of college-graduate women from a time when they were only able to have either a family or a career (sometimes a job), to now, when they anticipate having both a family and a career. More women than ever before are within striking distance of these goals.

…

I recently finished most of a book on this century-long journey. But my book, like the Old Testament, was written in a BCE world — in this case, Before the Corona Era. Many inequities have been exposed by the COVID-19 economy and society, most notably those concerning social justice and our criminal justice system. The COVID economy has also magnified gender differences at work and in the home. Women are…