Utopia, you are standing in it!

The real ‘news’ in today’s official GDP data for Q2 is not that the UK economy shrank for a second successive quarter in the three months to June, thus meeting the usual definition of a ‘recession’. That was a racing certainty anyway given the collapse in economic activity in April and the limited recovery in the monthly data for May, which had already been reported.

Given these numbers, it was also no surprise that the UK is likely to have recorded the biggest quarterly decline in GDP of any major economy (but I’ll come back to the significance of this later).

Indeed, as well as being ‘old’ news, this is not necessarily even ‘bad’ news. The slump was the result of the government’s decision to shut down large parts of the economy and to discourage many people from doing what they would normally be doing – in order to save…

Speculating about tax policy in 2021, with Washington potentially being controlling by Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi, there are four points to consider.

1. The bad news is that Joe Biden has endorsed a wide range of punitive tax increases.
2. The good news is that Joe Biden has not endorsed a wealth tax, which is one of the most damaging ways– on a per-dollar raised basis – for Washington to collect more revenue.
3. The worse news is that the additional spending desired by Democrats is much greater than Biden’s proposed tax increases, which means there will be significant pressures for additional sources of money.
4. The worst news is that the class-warfare mentality on the left means the additional tax increases will target successful entrepreneurs, investors, innovators, and business owners – which means a wealth tax is a very real threat.

Let’s consider what would…

So the inevitable has happened – Judith Collins is finally leader of the National Party.

I think this is very good for the country.

The worst government in living memory is sleep-walking to victory. It cannot be allowed to continue down the path is is travelling down, without an effective opposition leader holding them to account, and firmly.

Judith will probably do that in part.

But elections are won in the middle. And Judith and National both have a lot of work to do to convince middle New Zealand to vote for her as their prime minister.

Gareth Morgan (in)famously said you can put liptick on a pig, but it’s still a pig. Since MMP, National has been very wet and soft. Its policies are similar to Labour’s, except they’re just managed better. As an example, Bill English was thumping his chest when announcing his budget was more to the…

. . . but it’s not what you think. This short film is called “Homecoming”, it won several awards and it’s pretty reflective of Liberal attitudes these days, both good and bad. And it’s funny.

h/t: Lenora

The Equality Act 2010 provides protection against discrimination for people who have the protected characteristic “gender reassignment” (broadly: being transgender), such as in the workplace, in housing, transport and other services.

It was never intended that this general protection should mean people gain the right to access to single sex services for the opposite sex, such as males having access to specialist services for women, and their children, who have been the victim of sexual and domestic violence.

The need for women’s refuges, rape crisis centres and counselling…

John Bolton’s book on his time as Donald Trump’s National Security Adviser – The Room Where it Happened –  is worth reading.  His forensic training means he sets out clearly his own actions and their motivations.  His recording of the responses of others appears scrupulous, albeit disputed. Failings of omission or judgement in the record seem more probable than failings of accuracy.

I went to George Mason University for my Ph.D. specifically because of my interest in both “public choice” and “Austrian theory.”

The former deals with analyzing how politicians, bureaucrats, and voters really behave (as opposed to the naive view you may have learned in a civics class), and the latter refers to a particular type of economic analysis that was developed by scholars (mostly based in Vienna) in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

I occasionally put in a plug for Austrian economics, largely because it has a lot to offer when analyzing business cycles, monetary policy, and entrepreneurship (it is generally similar to other market-friendly schools of thought when looking at other issues, such as public finance, trade, and regulation).

But I’ve never done a column explaining Austrian economics. It’s time to rectify that oversight thanks to a 7-part video series narrated by Professor Steve Horwitz.

Still waiting
Climate modellers have a fairly dismal record in trying to predict sea ice patterns in the Arctic, always erring on the side of too much warming. Will this research do anything to improve matters? They seem to be using Earth’s past climate as a guide, while asserting that human-caused carbon dioxide is the main problem today.
– – –
A new study, published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change, supports predictions that the Arctic could be free of sea ice by 2035, reports Phys.org.

High temperatures in the Arctic during the last interglacial—the warm period around 127,000 years ago—have puzzled scientists for decades.

Now the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre climate model has enabled an international team of researchers to compare Arctic sea ice conditions during the last interglacial with present day.

Their findings are important for improving predictions of future sea ice change.

Effervescent claims that offshore wind power is cheap have fallen flat. When the rising capital cost of taking wind turbines offshore is accounted for, the power that they occasionally generate turns out to be the most expensive electricity of all, and by a very substantial margin.

A couple of years back in the UK, rent seekers’ claims about the falling cost of offshore wind power were lapped up by mainstream journalists and regurgitated ad nauseam.

Not all were convinced.

Indeed, the team at the Global Warming Policy Forum were sceptical from the outset. Now, having run the hard numbers, Gordon Hughes, Capell Aris, and John Constable are able to claim vindication. The true cost of offshore wind power is gobsmacking.

Offshore Wind: Definitely Expensive
The Global Warming Policy Forum
Andrew Montford
31 July 2020

Back in 2017, there was great excitement among environmentalists and the media, when it was announced…

As Joe Biden’s mental decline has got worse over the last six months his campaign team have decided on a basic strategy of limiting his exposure to the public.

The Chinese Sinus Rot disease was an alibi made in heaven for such a scenario, as Biden stayed in his home like tens of millions of other elderly Americans and used the Internet to conduct interviews, give speeches and so forth. Even then, Biden has not done well, with the following merely one of an almost endless run of incidents where he’s wandered off-topic, lost the thread of what he was saying (even when reading from notes), garbled words and generally produced word salads. By contrast this is merely the sort of foot-in-mouth gaffe that has marked his entire career:

I’ve reported before on what happened during the recent troubles in Seattle (see here, for instance) , in which a six-block area of the downtown (renamed “CHAZ” or “CHOP”) was taken over by protestors and was abandoned by police, who wouldn’t respond to calls from within the area. Mayor Jenny Durtkan, too, refused to do anything, and even had concrete barriers and portable toilets brought in to reinforce the occupation. Roving groups of armed citizens policed the area, especially at night.

Eventually, the site was cleared by police after several shootings occurred, but things still aren’t back to normal: businesses are either shuttered or aren’t doing much trade, and a group of local businesses is suing the city for abandoning the district, leading to “enormous property damage and lost revenue.”

That revenue is estimated at about $200 million.

I still can’t completely fathom why the city didn’t stop this…

Some time ago PM Trudeau floated the idea that pandemic shutdowns can’t be lifted until a vaccine is available.  More recently, the lack of a vaccine is touted in the US as a reason for keeping schools closed and travel restrictions in place.  What is this obsession with a vaccine as the savior whose healing powers we must await while hiding in isolation?  As a previous post reprinted below explains, it is again a case of generals fighting a past war rather than the current one.

But let’s also be attentive to a bait and switch involving shifty use of words.  A vaccine by definition works by training our immune system to recognize and resist a targeted pathogen.  And it’s a long road to perfecting an agent which achieves that without doing harm to some or many individuals.  Meanwhile Bill Gates is promoting something termed a “vaccine” which intends to…

In Chapter 3, Reich talks about the discovery of the Denisovans, a sister archaic group to the Neanderthals that lived in eastern Asia. It all started out with a pinky bone found in a cave in southern Siberia. The DNA in the little bone was very well preserved – they got better info from that one bone than all previous Neanderthal DNA work. It’s an odd situation – we now know a lot about Denisovan genetics, but we don’t have a skeleton and have no idea what they looked like.

The Denisovans were closer to the Neanderthals than they were to AMH, but not by much. Apparently modern humans split with the common ancestors of Denisovans and Neanderthals about 700,000 years ago, while Neanderthals and Denisovans separated not much later. Almost a trichotomy. Something similar happened when AMH spread into Eurasia: quite early, maybe 50,000 years ago, we split into…

No ‘green’ dream – built with coal, powered by coal.

In their sillier moments, wind and solar advocates claim that we’ll all soon be driving electric vehicles, lovingly recharged with sunshine and breezes.

In Australia, those seemingly virtuous souls with EVs are really being propelled by coal, because 85% of the electricity passing through its Eastern grid comes from coal-fired plants. It’s an irony, to be sure.

While there’s nothing wrong in theory about all-Electric Vehicles, if they really were a sensible substitute for petrol or diesel-powered vehicles, they’d already be jumping off the shelves. Except, for some strange reason, they aren’t.

Of course, taxpayer funded subsidies to the manufacturers (and in some cases to the owners) of EVs are the only reason you’ll find them on the road, at all.

But, for those still eager to parade their purported moral virtue, before signing up for a new Tesla, here’s…