Utopia, you are standing in it!

I wrote this article which was originally published online by The Irish Times on Friday, 4 September 2020. The 6 September 2020 marked the 80th anniversary of the Irish state executions of IRA members Patrick ‘Paddy’ McGrath and Thomas Harte, the first executions of IRA members since the Civil War. See the link to the original article here.

Eighty years ago this week, a barely remembered event in the history of law and order within the Irish state occurred, yet the significance of it cannot be underestimated.

Looks like the UK government and the police are finally getting tired of allowing themselves to be made to look weak by XR climate buffoons. Tolerance doesn’t work with fanatics.

H/T The GWPF
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Extinction Rebellion could be treated as an organised crime group as part of a major crackdown on its activities that may also include new protections for MPs, judges and the press, the Telegraph can disclose.

Whitehall sources said Boris Johnson and Priti Patel have asked officials to take a “fresh look” at how the group is classified under the law, after the Prime Minister described its blockading of major printing presses as “completely unacceptable”.

On Saturday, police were criticised for failing to act more quickly after the blockade began on Friday evening.

Hertfordshire police faced anger for stating that officers were “working to facilitate the rights of both the protesters and those affected by…

California’s a place renowned for its woolly-headed thinking, not least its suicidal obsession with chaotically intermittent wind and solar.

A couple weeks back, during a blistering Californian Summer, a spike in electricity demand (think millions of air conditioners running at full tilt) combined with calm weather, desert cloud cover and, later, sunset to leave millions of Californians sweating it out in the dark. No doubt wondering about where their next kilowatt might come from.

Not content with wrecking their power supply, Californian policymakers now want to, of all things, force an increase in demand for the most costly and erratically supplied electricity in the US. Robert Bryce takes us on another trip down the rabbit hole that is Californian energy policy.

Blackouts Expose Perils And Costs Of California’s ‘Electrify Everything’ Push
Forbes
Robert Bryce
18 August 2020

The blackouts that hit California over the past few days exposed the fragility…

Paul Kelleher caught some flack for a blog post last week in which he approvingly cited a 2003 study by Angus Deaton and Darren Lubotsky (DL) that supposedly refutes the idea that income inequality causes poor health. I was curious. Paul sent me the original paper, a 2009 published critique by Ash and Robinson (AR), a reply by DL, and a longer article by Deaton.

Even though the original DL paper is getting old, and the field has progressed substantially since 2003, there is still an important take home message from this debate. Stated simply: income inequality may be one cause of poor health, but income inequality is also likely to be a mediator of other upstream causes of mortality.

Fifty Years of Growth in American Consumption, Income, and Wages By Bruce Sacerdote (Darmouth) Abstract: Despite the large increase in U.S. income inequality, consumption for families at the 25th and 50th percentiles of income has grown steadily over the time period 1960-2015. The number of cars per household with below median income has doubled since […]

via Is the Glass Half Full?: Positivist Views on American Consumption — The NEP-HIS Blog

Before examining the May convoy battles, it is worth noting another result of the ORU’s work. (Blackett had become Director, Naval Operational Research.) It was appreciated that the number of escort ships with a convoy reduced the loss rate and that air cover of about eight hours a day decreased ship losses by a third. However:

Since it was by no means safe to rely on the increase of air support to stop the crippling ship losses of the autumn of 1942, an energetic search was made for some other measures which could be put into operation quickly. Detailed attention was given, therefore, to the organizational aspects of the Atlantic convoy system. Perhaps some alteration in the organization of the convoys might conceivably improve the situation.

Hitherto, organization of convoys…

The ocean carbon cycle [credit: IAEA]
Shockingly – for some – nature’s ocean carbon cycle is functioning quite well, despite constant attempts by feckless humans to undermine it [/sarc]. Time to revisit those troublesome computer models yet again.
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The world’s oceans soak up more carbon than most scientific models suggest, according to new research, reports Phys.org.

Previous estimates of the movement of carbon (known as “flux”) between the atmosphere and oceans have not accounted for temperature differences at the water’s surface and a few metres below.

The new study, led by the University of Exeter, includes this—and finds significantly higher net flux of carbon into the oceans.

It calculates CO2 fluxes from 1992 to 2018, finding up to twice as much net flux in certain times and locations, compared to uncorrected models.

There’s debate over which did more harm: the coronavirus or government policy responses to it. But there’s no argument that our economic recovery requires reliable and affordable electricity. Which means that the current arguments about recharging economies using heavily subsidised and chaotically intermittent wind and solar are as dangerous as they are delusional.

Ross McKitrick makes the point that, if subsidised renewables didn’t make economic sense the lockdowns were enforced, they make even less sense now.

Ditch the fashionable green recovery plans
Financial Post
Ross McKitrick
19 August 2020

Green technologies that were known money-losers before the pandemic are still money-losers today.

There’s a curious idea floating around that the COVID crisis undid the principles of economics. Nobody puts it exactly like that, but it’s implied in the various proposals for restructuring the post-pandemic economy so that it will look very different from the one we experienced up to the…

Just returned from a couple of days in Wellington. Boy, you need to look no further than our airports to see the effect of the lock-down on the economy. Both Auckland and Wellington terminals were dead. 5 pm on Friday night in Wellington and you would expect the Koru lounge to be rocking … twas less than half full. When I got to the Auckland Regional lounge just before 7 and just 8 persons there in a facility catering for 150. I digress.

James … when you’re in a hole stop digging. Your latest attempt to shift the blame for your deliberate decision to fund the Green (Party) Private School by claiming that the Education Minister gave his tacit endorsement to the grant keeps giving the story legs. Charitable interpretation … you heard what you wanted to hear and didn’t hear it very well. Less charitable interpretation … either you…

Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., center right, is escorted into a mass meeting at Fisk University along with Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee chair John Lewis, left, and Lester Mckinnie, center, in Nashville, Tenn., in 1964.Bettmann Archive/Getty ImagesJuly 21,

When John R. Lewis died recently, part of America’s conscience passed with him. With all the turbulence, chaos, lies, and antipathy toward race that is endemic to the Trump administration it makes every day difficult. A case in point was yesterday in Kenosha, WI when Trump refused to acknowledge the shooting of Jacob Blake by police and his subsequent paralysis or his support for Kyle Rittenhouse, the seventeen year old AR-15 carrying killer of two men. For me this has led to despair as I do not see a way out of America’s current condition with a “serial igniter” when it comes to race. Trump and his acolytes blame everyone but their…