Utopia, you are standing in it!

I found this article, from VICE, mentioned in a public tweet from activist and atheist Ali Rizvi, who was aping the “first they came from the bird names. . ” craziness. This time, though, it’s not bird names, but veganism.

I suppose that anything these days can be found racist, like knitting and young adult fiction, not to mention bird names, but the idea that veganism was inherently white was alien to me. Perhaps that’s because I live in Chicago, which has a fair number of vegan restaurants run by African-Americans (many Black Muslims are either vegan or vegetarians). And a well known vegan retaurant run by blacks,  B’Gabs, is just a few blocks from me. The fact that veganism is seen as “white people’s culture”, then, surprised me. But Anya Zoledziowski, who is of Polish Armenian descent, and identifies as a privileged European, has seen fit to chide…

Posted by Sara M. Butler, 18 August 2020.

Towards the end of the fifteenth century, William Hemyng, a chaplain associated with Hereford cathedral, experienced a harrowing ordeal. Richard Rollesden, undersheriff to Thomas Parker, the county sheriff, stole 21 marks of goods and chattels from a local gentleman, then pinned the crime on Hemyng, whom he arrested and indicted by means of a jury fraudulently empaneled with jurors he had bribed. Hemyng’s time in prison was truly horrific. He tells us that they

sette a pon hym a peyre of grete gyves and boltys of iron to importable to bere and bolted his armes the space of a yerde frome other and then leyde hym yn a peyre of stockys in a depe pytte and with all this peyn ther hongyd hym frome the grounde and kepte hym frome mete and drynke and frome his frendys

(set upon him a…

Net zero carbon dioxide emissions targets are just the latest wheeze to grip our political betters, driven by climate alarmists and rent seekers ready to profit from the wind and solar subsidy scam.

The idea that modern economies can function without the energy generated by fossil-fuels (whether consumed by motorcars or in power generation) is up there with living on Mars and perpetual motion machines.

And yet, there are plenty paying lip service to a concept that has the engineers who built the systems upon which we rely, thoroughly flummoxed. One of them, Mike Travers CEng, MIMechE, FIET spent twenty years in the Royal Engineers and in the 1960s ran a Geodetic Satellite Tracking Station. In the 1970s he worked in the hydroelectric sector on the Columbia and Snake River systems in the USA. He was also a member of the IET Wiring Regulations Committee. In the 1980s he was in…

This week, briefing began in WildEarth Guardians v. U.S. Department of Justice, a case of critical importance to anyone concerned about federal overcriminalization. The Endangered Species Act makes it a crime to “knowingly violate” the statute’s prohibition against taking listed species. For decades, the United States has interpreted this to mean that, to be convicted, a defendant must know his actions will cause take and know the species that will be taken. The case seeks to overturn that interpretation in the case; in effect, to force federal prosecutors to convict and imprison people for innocent mistakes resulting from ordinary, traditionally lawful activity. [Disclaimer: I, along with several of my PLF colleagues, represent agricultural organizations in the case. You can find our brief here.]

Overcriminalization is another example of the due process deficit in environmental law. Traditionally, the rule of law has prevented this sort of…

The federal Clean Water Act is a notoriously complex statute, imposing federal permitting on a wide variety of land uses, industrial activity, and conservation projects based on turbid regulatory standards. For decades, the Environmental Protection Agency and Army Corps of Engineers, which jointly administer the law, have tried to bring a modicum of clarity by issuing “nationwide permits“—a suite of boilerplate permits authorizing anyone to engage in certain, common activities subject to conditions to mitigate the impacts of those activities. In April, a federal court upended this regime, holding that the most recent issuance of nationwide permits violated the Endangered Species Act. Last month, the Supreme Court intervened to limit the effect of the lower court’s decision, an early indication that the case has drawn the Justices’ interest.

Nationwide permits are a rare example of a bipartisan reform of environmental regulation. Dating back to the 1970s, they…

In 2018, I shared a video from Professor Russ Roberts (a.k.a., @econtalker) on the economic status of the middle class, followed by a video last year on whether the rich are the only ones earning more income.

Today, we’ll look at his video on household income and mobility.

All of his videos are models of clarity, but nonetheless they require close attention because they are filled with so much useful information.

You’ll learn that some people manipulate numbers to paint a grim picture about economic mobility in America. But when you do honest apples-to-apples comparisons, you’ll see that capitalism is capable of delivering big benefits to ordinary people so long as it has enough breathing room to function.

In other words, we’re getting richer – as I wrote last year.

And, as I pointed out in an interview on CNBC, we should care about growth and opportunity instead of…

In my post late last week I wrote about Martin Lally’s attempt at a cost-benefit analysis around the current government’s strategy of eliminating Covid from (the wider community in) New Zealand.    I was interested in it as much as anything because there was, and is, no sign that the government –  or official agencies (notably Health and Treasury) – has attempted anything of the sort.  As I noted in the body of the post, whatever view one takes on events of the last six months, decision-making from here requires a genuinely marginal analysis, setting aside sunk costs and benefits and focusing just on things that can be controlled or influenced from here on, by New Zealand.

Prompted by that observation, Martin Lally modified his paper slightly to introduce an explicit forward-looking dimension (both versions are now linked to in the earlier post).  He ended up with this strong conclusion

Over the last few months, the output from Australia’s wind power fleet has not only been erratic, it’s been utterly pathetic. Any other enterprise that delivered its goods on such a haphazard, sporadic and chaotic basis would be laughed out of town. But not the wind industry. No, instead, its inherent unreliability is being rewarded with around $3 billion a year in subsidies paid in the form of Renewable Energy Certificates under the Federal government’s Large-Scale Renewable Energy Target.

Depicted above – courtesy of Aneroid Energy – is the output delivered by Australian wind power outfits to the Eastern Grid last month.

Spread from Far North Queensland, across the ranges of NSW, all over Victoria, Northern Tasmania and across South Australia its entire capacity routinely delivers just a trickle of its combined notional capacity of 7,728MW.

Collapses of over 3,000 MW or more that occur over the space of a…

• Introduction – the four main phases of the war
• The role of individual rulers
• Why was the Thirty Years War important?
• Wilson’s interpretations of the war
• The deep historical context of the Thirty Years War
• The Holy Roman Emperors
• Issues facing the Holy Roman Emperor in the early 17th century
• The role of religion in the Thirty Years War
• Events leading up to the Thirty Years War
• The defenestration of Prague 1618
• The Edict of Restitution 1629
• The role of Sweden
• Historical events happening alongside the Thirty Years War
• The Peace of Westphalia
• Devastation and disease
• Summary
  • It’s a long book
  • Writing about war requires special skills
  • Not enough signposting of key events
  • Wilson’s revisionist intentions
  • Wilson’s interest in the finances of the war
  • Lack of maps
• Conclusion
• Video of a lecture by Wilson about the war
• Appendix: Origin of the word ‘Protestant’

Introduction

This is an enormous book (weighing…

I think it’s great that Joe Biden chose Kamala Harris to be his running mate, which also positions her to be the Democratic Presidential candidate in (likely) 2024 or (if Biden is still healthy) 2028.  It’s time we had a woman on the ticket, and if she’s a racially mixed woman, so much the better. For Harris is not only a woman of color (half Jamaican black, half Indian), but one who’s well qualified for office—smart, eloquent, pugnacious when she has to be, and with a proven track record. (Some will, of course, take issue with her accomplishments.) But I have no beef with those who put her ancestry above her accomplishments, for she remains accomplished and qualified, and to me that’s the most important criterion. If she makes a group proud because of her ancestry, what’s the problem with that?

So I have no beef with those who see…

They say “hard cases make bad law“. What little case law there is about single sex spaces and transgender people’s access to them falls into that category.

Croft v Royal Mail was an employment case which considered the issue of toilets and changing rooms. It went to the Employment Appeal Tribunal and then to the Court of Appeal in 2003. The outcome is not popular with anyone, since it does not give a clear answer either way.

It says that

But it it also suggests that employers can not solve the issue by simply offeringa unisex alternative. The Court of Appeal said that at some point a male person should be considered transitioned enough to gain access to women’s facilities, even if they had not…