Utopia, you are standing in it!

Heather Roy

27 August 2020

Congratulations James Shaw! I never thought I would be complimenting the Green Party co-leader for his support of school choice for parents and students. But we are of course living in very strange times.

The Green Party endorsement of a private school in Taranaki is one of those unexpected election year surprises. Who would have thought the Greens would support a private school, in complete contradiction of their education policy which explicity states “Public funding for private schools should be phased out and transferred to public schools”?. Flexible ethics are alive and well, including in the Green Party.

In fact James Shaw has announced more than an endorsement of the Taranaki private school – it’s more like a lotto style win of $11.7 million for the Green School, with the funding coming from the Government’s $3 billion shovel-ready projects fund. Much as I object…

When I give talks about why Americans reject evolution so frequently, I refer to Steve Stewart-Williams’s excellent book from 2010: Darwin, God, and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything you Though You Knew.  It goes through reason after reason why evolution not only undermines our ideas, but why that undermining makes people resistant to evolutionary biology and its conclusions. It explained to me, for instance, why 27% of American Catholics are creationists, embracing Biblical literalism despite the fact that the Church itself explicitly accepts evolution. Those people, like many, just can’t get past the naturalistic and non-human-centric implications of evolution. The book is like a bucket of cold water tossed on the idea that evolution doesn’t conflict with religion.

Steve has a newer book, published in 2018 (click on screenshot below to go to Amazon site). I haven’t yet read it, though it’s coming to me…

Drake’s map of his attack on Cádiz.

DRAKE’S ATTACK ON CADIZ, 1587, BY WILLIAM BOROUGH

Elizabeth I of England and Philip II of Spain formally went to war in 1585, ensuring that Spain had an enemy that could only be decisively defeated at sea. Spain could deploy significant naval strength before, as in the conquest of Portugal in 1580 and then in 1582–83 off the Azores, in which an opposing French fleet was defeated at Ponta Delgada in 1582. The Spanish fleets used a combination of galleons and galleys, but the planned invasion of England was of a totally new order of magnitude for Spain and for Atlantic expeditions, and its scale and ambition helped mark a major extension in naval operations. It was postponed because of the English spoiling attack under Sir Francis Drake on the key Spanish naval base at Cadiz. The lack of reconnaissance capabilities made surprise…

An obsession with intermittent wind and solar is delivering rolling Summer blackouts to Californians, once again. That same obsession – in the form of the Democrat’s New ‘Green’ Deal – promises to deliver much more of the same across the USA, should Sleepy Joe Biden, AOC and her Squad get the keys to the White House this November.

With the disaster playing out in the Golden State, one might expect a little circumspection, if not contrition and remorse from those who’ve been pushing the so-called ‘inevitable transition’ to an all wind and sun powered future. However, clearly untroubled by reality, logic or reason, Biden & Co continue to claim that Americans will all soon be powered by nothing but sunshine and breezes.

Californians left sweltering in the dark over the last week or so might beg to differ.

The Institute for Energy Research takes a look at the causes…

Admitting the problem is a start, but not installing the turbines in the first place is obviously the most effective solution. Reducing deaths and injuries would hardly be a triumph.
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Painting one blade of a wind turbine black could cut wind farms’ fatal bird strikes by up to 70%, reports BBC News.

Painting one blade of a wind turbine black could cut bird strikes at wind farms by up to 70%, a study suggests.

Birds colliding with the structures has long been considered to be one of the main negative impacts of onshore wind farms, the authors observed.

I’ve been moving through the sad list of US cities controlled by Democrats that have been experiencing riots and general criminal mayhem over the last few months and since I started off with my second home, Chicago, a month ago, saw no need to re-visit what’s happening there.

But the events of a two weeks ago cannot be ignored. On the afternoon of Sunday, August 9, after false reports were spread by BLM on social media sites that the cops had shot a 15-year old boy, protests broke out. By the time the truth emerged that it was a 20 year old with a gun who’d opened fire on the cops it was too late. The shooter was wounded but survived.

Having started the “peaceful protests” at the scene of the shooting in the Englewood neighbourhood (the shittiest part of the city and a killing zone in general) the…

by Ross McKitrick

Two new peer-reviewed papers from independent teams confirm that climate models overstate atmospheric warming and the problem has gotten worse over time, not better.

With holidays abroad still a major challenge due to the ongoing coronavirus epidemic, Dr Paul Hunneyball, assistant editor of our Lords 1558-1603 project, considers the risks associated with travel overseas four hundred years ago…

One of the standard clichés of life a few centuries ago is that people tended not to travel very far. While this was broadly true for the bulk of the population, there were in fact more opportunities to explore the world than we generally assume. By the early seventeenth century enterprising mariners and merchants were crossing the Atlantic, and reaching as far afield as Russia and India, in addition to more routine contacts with most coastal areas of continental Europe. For several decades, England had permanent garrisons in the Netherlands, which generated a great deal of traffic across the North Sea. For the privileged classes, the option of foreign travel for cultural or educational purposes…

The latest issue of Science Advances has a provocative and clever piece of research aimed at answering a long-standing question—one considered by Charles Darwin himself: are the facial expressions associated with human emotions universal across all cultures? And, if so, is that the result of evolution? The paper suggests that, at least for a limited set of emotions, the answer is yes to both questions. You can read the paper by clicking the screenshot below, or reading the pdf here.The full reference is at the bottom.

Cowen and Keltner note that there have been a fair number of attempts to answer this question, all involving going to remote areas where there is little contact with Westerners, and seeing if people in those areas match photos of Western expressive signals (joy, anger, sympathy) with similar words in their native language. The results have been mixed. That, one would think, already…

The reign of James I

Queen Elizabeth I died aged 70 on 24 March 1603. She had resisted marrying a husband or bearing an heir throughout her reign and now died childless. King James VI of Scotland was chosen to inherit the crown of England, ascending the throne at the age of 37, having himself ascended the Scottish throne while still a child aged 13 months, after his mother, Mary Queen of Scots was forced to abdicate in his favour.

James had been brought up by four regents and umpteen guardians, and had survived the poisonous faction-fighting of the Scottish court for 20 years since coming of age.

Kidnapping Scottish kings was almost constitutional practice and James himself was abducted twice. (p.79)

Upon hearing he’d inherited the throne of England, James hastened south to Scotland’s rich, sunny neighbour and never went back. Unfortunately, he brought quite a few Scottish aristocrats…

Yesterday, in Part I of this series, we enjoyed a video from the U.K.-based Centre for Economic Education, about how capitalism lifted the world from deprivation and oppression (also see videos by Don Boudreaux and Deirdre McCloskey).

Today, in Part II of the Case for Capitalism, here’s a video from CEE that explains how markets provide you a cup of coffee.

An obvious takeaway from the video is that consumers benefit from global markets, which hopefully helps to explain why free trade is desirable.

But there are four other messages that are even more widely applicable.

1. Capitalism is based on competition, but also should be understood as a system of cooperation.
2. Voluntary exchange means that both buyers and sellers expect to benefit from a transaction.
3. Prices should be set by unfettered markets rather than politicians, regulators, or bureaucrats.
4. Our prosperity is a result of the invisible hand

The latest issue of Science Advances has a provocative and clever piece of research aimed at answering a long-standing question—one considered by Charles Darwin himself: are the facial expressions associated with human emotions universal across all cultures? And, if so, is that the result of evolution? The paper suggests that, at least for a limited set of emotions, the answer is yes to both questions. You can read the paper by clicking the screenshot below, or reading the pdf here.The full reference is at the bottom.

Cowen and Keltner note that there have been a fair number of attempts to answer this question, all involving going to remote areas where there is little contact with Westerners, and seeing if people in those areas match photos of Western expressive signals (joy, anger, sympathy) with similar words in their native language. The results have been mixed. That, one would think, already…