Utopia, you are standing in it!

Back in 2017, the Center for Freedom and Prosperity released this video, which shows that free markets and small government are the best recipe for poor nations that want to become rich nations.

The CF&P video was motivated in part by a need to debunk international bureaucracies such as the OECD and IMF, which abandoned the “Washington Consensus” for economic liberalization and instead have been making the odd argument that prosperity can be achieved with higher taxes and a bigger burden of government spending.

Needless to say, neither of these international organizations has bothered to explain how such dirigiste policies produce more growth.

But the politicians who fund and control such bureaucracies doubtlessly appreciate the message.

You probably won’t be surprised that the United Nations also is on the wrong side of this issue.

A recent report from the New York City-based group regurgitates the anti-market…

Credit: OH 237 @ Wikipedia
Natural climate variability similar to what we see today has been going on for thousands, if not millions of years, whether ‘greenhouse gas’ theorists moaning about modern human activities like it or not.
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The Roman Empire coincided with warmest period of the last 2,000 years in the Med, says The GWPF.

The Mediterranean Sea was 3.6°F (2°C) hotter during the Roman Empire than other average temperatures at the time, a new study claims.

The Empire coincided with a 500-year period, from AD 1 to AD 500, that was the warmest period of the last 2,000 years in the almost completely land-locked sea.

by Judith Curry

Two important new books to discuss.

Queen Mary I of Scotland (December 8, 1542 – February 8, 1587), reigned over Scotland from December 14, 1542 to July 24, 1567.

Mary, the only surviving legitimate child of King James V of Scotland, was six days old when her father died and she acceded to the throne. She spent most of her childhood in France while Scotland was ruled by regents, and in 1558, she married the Dauphin of France, François. Mary was queen consort of France from the accession of her husband as King François II of France in 1559 until his death in December 1560. Widowed, Mary returned to Scotland, arriving in Leith on August 19, 1561. Four years later, she married her half-cousin, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, and in June 1566 they had a son, James.

Mary I, Queen of Scotland

In February 1567, Darnley’s residence was destroyed by an explosion, and he was found…

Australia’s obscenely generous subsidies and Feed-in-Tariffs for domestic solar resulted in millions of households blanketed in panels. The consequences for the power grid have been diabolical; its management is now a daily nightmare.

Western Australia’s fixation with heavily subsidised solar power is threatening to destroy its once wholly reliable electricity grid, thanks to its sporadic and unreliable delivery.

In October last year, Alice Springs (in Australia’s Red Centre) suffered a widespread blackout that lasted for around nine hours, thanks to a little pesky cloud cover that interfered with the output from its thousands of solar panels, which are meant to provide a substantial proportion of the power needed to run the outback town of around 29,000 inhabitants.

The NT government’s spin doctors went into damage control, with a waffling response that avoided any reference to solar panels being the (obvious) culprits, as the ABC dutifully reported:

The outage was…

The wind power cult have no difficulty in justifying the destruction of pristine landscapes; the dismemberment of once cohesive, rural communities; the creation of toxic waste lands in China (where the rare earths essential to wind turbines are processed); power prices that punish the poorest and most vulnerable in society; and barely bat an eyelid at the slaughter of millions upon millions of birds and bats, across the globe.

In the US, a recent study has exposed the fact that the number of bats belted into oblivion by these things is magnitudes greater than originally estimated by wind industry controlled surveys.

Instead of a mere 2 to 3 million critters being annihilated annually, it appears that the numbers of bats killed by wind turbines in the USA may well be somewhere north of 20 million, every single year.

‘Green’ Carnage Study: In 2019 US Wind Turbines Killed…

By Ronald Stein ~

The rage these days from the Green New Deal, the Paris Accord, and the recent Democrats Clean Energy Climate Policy are all focused on renewable energy to replace our demands from fossil fuels. But wait – renewable energy from wind and solar is only renewable ELECTRICITY! At best, that renewable electricity is intermittent as it depends on wind and sunshine to produce any electricity.

Before 1900 the world had no medications, electronics, cosmetics, plastics, fertilizers, and transportation infrastructures. Looking back just a few short centuries, we’ve come a long way since the pioneer days.

Also, before 1900, the world had very little commerce and without transportation there is no commerce. The two prime movers that have done more for the cause of globalization than any other: the diesel engine and the jet turbine, both get their fuels from oil. Road and air travel now dominate most…

There are many reasons to be depressed about Italy.

Bad policy is part of the problem, of course, but this chart shows that the country also is facing a demographic crisis. The blue lines show that there are now more deaths than births.

The chart comes from a Bloomberg column by Flavia Rotondi and Giovanni Salzano, and they explain some of the adverse consequences of this demographic change.

Italy isn’t just in an economic slump, its population is also sagging, pushing the country into its biggest demographic crisis in more than a century. The number of people in the country fell for a fifth year in 2019, and deaths exceeded births by almost 212,000, the biggest gap since 1918. …Italy already has huge long-term economic challenges, and the population trends, if they continue, are going to make surmounting them even harder. Italy won’t have enough young workers, and funding…

One by one, elite American colleges and universities (as well as the less prestigious ones) are giving in to Wokeness, rushing to embrace Critical Race Theory, trying to suppress “hate speech,” and indoctrinating students with a preferred ideology when they arrive on campus.  The University of Chicago hasn’t been immune to this, but I’ve taken great pride in the fact that, compared to others, we have remained the Great Holdout among elite colleges.

A large reason for this is because we have several Foundational Principles and Policies that undergird how the University is run. One comprises the Free Speech Principles as outlined by the Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression. These so-called “Chicago Principles,” mandating near-absolute free speech (and in a private university!), have been adopted by over fifty of our peer institutions.  At Chicago you can say anything you want that’s in line with the courts’…