This blog, which explores the parliamentary context of the abolition of slavery, is based on Michael’s full-length seminar paper, ‘The West India Interest and Colonial Slavery in Parliament, 1823-33’, which is available here.
It might be natural to think that, when Parliament abolished the British slave trade in 1807, it also abolished slavery itself. But it did not. In fact, when the Slave Trade Abolition Act came into force on New Year’s Day, 1808, there…
If this Summer’s power rationing and rolling blackouts weren’t enough, California’s wind and solar worshippers are determined to deliver much more of the same.
One of their hopes is to ban all household gas appliances, forcing families to use electric powered kit, instead.
The premise is that all the power needed will come courtesy of mother nature, milked from sunshine and lovingly caressed from the Golden State’s occasional breezes.
Not content with preventing Californians from using natural gas to cook and heat their homes, its climate cult is now looking to put an end to fossil-fuelled motor vehicles, as well.
Again, the cult reckon that California’s windmills and solar panels will be more than sufficient to charge up millions of all-electric vehicles, with power to spare to run everything else.
It is, of course, fantastic nonsense, as Larry Bell outlines below.
Subtracting Fossil Fuels Plus Adding Electric Cars Equals Disaster
We’ve heard often lately that colleges are afflicted with “structural racism”, and that every white person carries a degree of racism—of “implicit” bias—that is not even accessible to consciousness. These claims, at least those about the deep racism of American colleges, are never accompanied by systematic data, only by anecdotes. Are those claims true? A new paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General from the University of Wisconsin at Madison (UWM, reference at bottom) suggest that they aren’t, at least on that campus.
The authors of the paper, also at UWM, tested predictions from two contrasting theories of bias on college campuses. One, the “dispersed discrimination account”, posits that bias is widespread, with most individuals holding biases against groups like women, blacks and Muslims. This is implicit in the anti-racism work of people like Robin DiAngelo, who accepts that everybody has “implicit or unconscious biases” that cannot be…
Very occasionally, when political trouble draws up from the depths some of the most obscure arcana of the British constitution, you may hear about Queen’s Consent. It’s one of the most recherche little pieces of parliamentary flummery. Bills which have a direct impact on the remaining prerogative powers or the private interests of the sovereign are submitted during their passage through parliament for the sovereign’s formal consent. Without it, they will not be allowed to proceed further. It is, crucially, to be distinguished from the Royal Assent to bills, the last stage in legislative procedure and an entirely more significant process. Royal Assent offers the theoretical possibility of a royal veto on bills that have been passed by both houses, although the veto – which has not been used since 1708 – is regarded as effectively defunct. It is suggested from time to time that Queen’s Consent might be used…
If economic suicide was the object, then our current obsession with chaotically intermittent and heavily subsidised wind and solar will surely deliver it.
Rocketing power prices, power rationing and rolling blackouts are all part and parcel of any serious attempt to run on sunshine and breezes. Ask a Californian or South Australian: both suffer power prices at the top of their respective countries’ league ladders; both have suffered serious power rationing and mass blackouts whenever the sun sets and/or calm weather sets in.
Given the choice, no properly informed voter would give any political party licence to do what’s being done in the name of ‘saving the planet’. Sure, loaded surveys suggest that the proletariat is all in favour of wind and solar power. But, when the question turns to what power consumers might be prepared to pay for it, the great majority won’t pay a nickel more for so-called…
FYI, here are some hard data on UK poverty, with links to the original sources (unfiltered by pro/anti-Tory newspapers, think tanks, or UN rapporteurs…).
First, trends in inequality and child poverty in the UK (before the pandemic, obviously, but also before the surge in government spending on job subsidies and welfare payments). (Source)
Second, a bit more from the ONS on different measures of income inequality. (Source)
Third, the same again for wealth inequality (a small increase overall, with rising property wealth inequality and a smaller increase in financial wealth inequality largely offset by a reduction in pension wealth inequality). (Source)
Fourth, an international comparison of income inequality, using the OECD’s definition of ‘child poverty rates’ (the ratio of the number of people in a given age group whose household income is less than half the median income of the total population). (Source
Forty-four public schools in San Francisco have been advised that their names are polluted by association with slavery, colonization, oppression, genocide, abuse, or homophobia, and are likely to have their names changed late this year. This, of course, is part of the nationwide frenzy of renaming anything named after someone who offends the Woke. Now perhaps some renaming might be in order, but in this case the names scheduled for erasure include those of Abraham Lincoln, Roosevelt (not sure whether Teddy or FDR), James Monroe, Herbert Hoover, George Washington and even Dianne Feinstein (one of California’s progressive Senators), for crying out loud. I’ll give some of the rationales for renaming below.
The whole story appears in the San Francisco Chronicle, which you can access by clicking on the screenshot below. If you’re paywalled, judicious inquiries might yield you a copy.
The S.F. school board has been pondering name changes…
Although all liberal media sites are getting woke, sites like Salon and HuffPost have gone beyond the pale, while Slate always seemed to retain more sanity. After all, that was where Hitchens often wrote—though I’m not sure he’d be welcome there now were he still alive. At any rate, there’s a new Slate piece that not only indicts classical music and its pedagogy as racist and sexist, but argues that this bigotry is instantiated in using “mononyms”—last names only—for famous classical white male composers (“Mozart,” “Beethoven,” etc.), but demeans female and nonwhite composers by using both first and last names.
The author, Chris White (an assistant professor of music theory at the University of Massachusetts Amherst), suggests that to rectify this disparity, we “fullname” all composers, putting them on a level playing field of respect. What I’m trying to figure out is how much of what he says carries some…
GRAPHIC CONTENT WARNING – THIS STORY CONTAINS DESCRIPTIONS OF VIOLENT CRIME.
The two blokes in question were jailed for their part in what the Herald described as
“ … a brutal kidnap where the victim was tortured over 12 hours – his pinky finger cut off with secateurs, both feet shot and his naked body burned with a blowtorch while he was tied up and gagged.
“His attackers, who believed he had robbed another person of “thousands of dollars”, burned his eyes with cigarettes, urinated on him and beat him for hours in a bid to get him to disclose where the money was.”
When I opine about class-warfare taxation, I generally focus on the obvious argument that it’s not a good idea to penalize people for creating prosperity.
This argument against punitive tax policy is based on the fact that entrepreneurs, investors, business owners, and other successful people can choose to reduce their levels of work, saving, investment, and risk taking.
And it’s also based on the fact that they can shift their economic activity to tax-favored (but generally unproductive) sectors such as municipal bonds.
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
In Hume’s spirit, I will attempt to serve as an ambassador from my world of economics, and help in “finding topics of conversation fit for the entertainment of rational creatures.”
“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. - J Robert Oppenheimer.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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