Utopia, you are standing in it!

Well, there’s your problem. The climate alarmists need tech toys that don’t exist, and insist that ‘clean’ energy can change the weather.
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Without a major acceleration in clean energy innovation, countries and companies worldwide will be unable to fulfil their pledges to bring their carbon emissions down to net-zero in the coming decades, said the IEA in a new report.

The report assesses the ways in which clean energy innovation can be significantly accelerated to achieve net-zero emissions while enhancing energy security in a timeframe compatible with international climate and sustainable energy goals, says Trade Arabia.

The Special Report on Clean Energy Innovation is the first publication in the IEA’s revamped Energy Technology Perspectives (ETP) series and includes a comprehensive new tool analysing the market readiness of more than 400 clean energy technologies.

As a tribute to the great events that occurred 241 years ago, I wanted to recognize the importance of the unity of purpose behind supporting liberty in all of its forms. While an unequivocal statement of natural rights and the virtues of liberty, the Declaration of Independence also came close to bringing another vital aspect of liberty to the forefront of public attention. As has been addressed in multiple fascinating podcasts (Joe Janes, Robert Olwell), a censure of slavery and George III’s connection to the slave trade was in the first draft of the Declaration.

Thomas Jefferson, a man who has been criticized as a man of inherent contradiction between his high morals and his active participation in slavery, was a major contributor to the popularizing of classical liberal principles. Many have pointed to his hypocrisy in that he owned over 180 slaves, fathered children on them

This guest post is by @SistaRealista on twitter (it was originally a twitter thread and is reposted here with her permission).

This is a story from personal experience about the need for single-sex exemptions under law for certain spaces, and why Self-ID trans ideology can be problematic.

It’s about ‘Colin’, a 16 year old boy, my 15 year old daughter J, and the girls’ changing room at their school.

Colin joined J’s school last year to redo year 10 (ages 14-15). He left his last school for mental health reasons & had time out. Being 16 he was year older than rest of class. He made friends but would get upset & say no one liked him (untrue) He still struggled with his mental health. One day Colin (16) wore a skirt to school. He told J & classmates he wasn’t trans, he wore it…

Throughout the war on the Eastern Front, the German cavalry played a more active and traditional role than in France. With localized exceptions, World War I from the Baltic coast to Rumania remained a war of movement. It could not be otherwise. Between Riga and the mouth of the Danube lay an airline distance of more than eight hundred miles (nearly 1,300 km), but the front could never be measured in airline distances because it included many hundreds of miles more in twists and turns. One theater of operations that was of central importance to Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia alike, namely Russian Poland, by itself measured more than 200 by 250 miles (320 by 400 km). Completely entrenching such vast distances was simply impossible. The front would always be “in the air” somewhere. Consequently, “both sides attempt[ed] vast and daring maneuvers against the enemy’s flank and rear, just as they…

In the summer of 1944 the sun shone over Southern England and success greeted the allied armies in France and Belgium. At airfields in south-west England and in Lincolnshire increased activity aroused suspicions but no one really knew what was in the wind. In August WAAF Corporal Ruth Mary Parker was posted to RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire. `This airfield had the longest runways in the country and had been used by the United States Army Air Force as a base. The billets where we slept and spent much of our off-duty time were built of corrugated metal shaped like long tunnels, with the door and only windows at each end. The bedsteads we used were made of iron and had previously been used by the Americans. The `Yanks’, as we called them, who were well known for their gumchewing habit, had left dollops of this stuck all round the frames!…

Climate cultists reckon the wholesale environmental destruction wreaked by the wind and solar industries is all for the good of planet. It’s an argument that holds all the logic of amputating an entire leg to prevent a septic toe from doing any further damage, when a dose of penicillin would do the trick.

Michael Moore’s Planet of the Humans managed to lift the lid on green hypocrisy, focusing on the raft of inconvenient truths behind the greatest economic and environmental fraud of all time.

Such as the fact that those ‘planet saving’ solar panels that give virtue signallers such a warm inner glow are really ‘coal’ panels, where the core ingredient is made from strip-mined quartz, which is converted to silica using coal-fired furnaces. Inconvenient for those claiming renewable energy piety, but true enough.

But the wanton hypocrisy doesn’t end there, as Paul Driessen details below.

Destroying the Environment to Save…

Prowling around at The Conversation, I came across a 2016 article by Paula Kover on common misunderstandings about evolution.  It’s important for those of us who teach evolution to know these, for we need to dispel them implicitly—or, better, explicitly—when we teach evolutionary biology. I keep a list on my computer, and you can see a comprehensive summary of such misconceptions at the UC Berkeley site Understanding Evolution.

Click on the screenshot to read Kover’s short article:

Kover’s list is straightforward, though not original (and, indeed, how could it be since these are well known?), and the first four are these are generally true, but #2 has a hitch and #5 is just wrong.  In the narrative below, I’ve put Kovar’s points in bold but I’ve made a brief comment on all the points in non-bolded text.

1.) It’s just a theory.  That’s used to discredit evolution since…

Aircraft carriers were first utilized in combat in World War I. During that conflict, the Royal Navy converted a merchant ship, the Argus, into the first carrier with an unobstructed flight deck, but the war ended before it could be put into action. The U. S. and Japanese navies soon followed the British example. The first U. S. aircraft carrier was the Langley, commissioned in 1922. Japan’s first carrier, the Hosho (1922), was also the first such vessel designed as a carrier from the keel up. Nevertheless, carriers still remained largely experimental and had yet to be fully tested in war. That all changed in World War II.

On 10-11 November 1940, during a British attack on Taranto, and on 7 December 1941, with a Japanese strike at Pearl Harbor, aircraft carriers proved their worth and opened a dramatic new era at sea. Carriers played leading roles in almost all…

This summer is the summer of productivity and I keep churning out new papers that needed to be finished. Here is the newest. Its with my friend Jason Dean of Sheridan College (who is an incoming professor at King’s University College) and studies the wage gap in Quebec between francophones and anglophones from 1901 to 1921. The abstract is below and the paper is available on SSRN:

For most of Canadian economic history, French-Canadians (composing more than a quarter of the country’s population) had living standards inferior to those of English-Canadians. This was true even in the province (Québec) where the French-Canadians constituted a majority. Today, no significant gap remains. However, the question of when the gap started to disappeared remains surprisingly unanswered. Most of the attention has been dedicated to the post-1970 data when census information is available and which shows rapid convergence. However, we do not know…

No country in the world has ever run itself on wind and solar power alone; no country ever will. Weather-dependent sources are simply no substitute for coal, gas or nuclear power which are available 24 x 7, on demand. And no amount of battery storage or pumped hydro will resolve the equation in favour of the unreliables.

Jay Lehr & Tom Harris pick up on the theme below.

Wind/Solar Electric Grid Needs Fossil Fuel Backup – Here Is Why
America Out Loud
Jay Lehr & Tom Harris
27 May 2020

There is Not a Wind/Solar Electric Grid In The World Without Fossil Fuel Backup!

You might be shocked to learn that no where on planet Earth does there exist a single community electric power grid that operates with only wind turbines and or solar cells. Without an equal or greater amount of fossil fuel power, usually natural gas or coal…

Image source : The Liberty Conservative

“The greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever levelled in modern times. One sure to stick in the craw of the Soviet propaganda machine with increasing discomfort until it has done its work.” — George F. Kennan (American diplomat and scholar)

“It is impossible to name a book that had a greater effect on the political and moral consciousness of the late twentieth century.” — David Remnick, New Yorker

“Best Nonfiction Book of the Twentieth Century” — Time magazine

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JORDAN PETERSON’s forward to the abridged version of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s epic The Gulag Archipelago is a literary masterpiece. Lucid, instructive and powerful. Who, having enjoyed the experience of reading it, would doubt Peterson’s claim that “If there was any excuse to be a Marxist in 1917… there is absolutely and ­finally no excuse now.” For history is littered with diabolical examples of…

I am finishing up a first draft of a paper on fiat money, bitcoins and cryptocurrencies that will be included in a forthcoming volume on bitcoins and cryptocurrencies. The paper is loosely based on a number of posts that have appeared on this blog since I started blogging almost nine years ago. My first post appeared on July 5, 2011. Here are some of my posts on and fiat money, bitcoins and cryptocurrencies (this, this, this, and this). In writing the paper, it occurred to me that it might be worthwhile to include a comment on Modern Monetary Theory inasmuch as the proposition that the value of fiat money is derived from the acceptability of fiat money for discharging the tax liabilities imposed by the governments issuing those fiat moneys, which is a proposition that Modern Monetary Theorists have adopted from the chartalist school of…

I was asked to offer some remarks on current “instability” in Israeli politics.* Instead, I am going to argue that Israeli politics suffers from too much stability—at least at the level of party and electoral politics. The fact that Israel underwent three elections between April, 2019, and March, 2020, might seem to imply political instability. So might the government recently formed, with its unwieldy power-sharing provisions and the parties’ need to reform constitutional provisions (Basic Laws) in order, at last, to prevent what could have been a fourth election within two years.

However, if we go a little deeper, there are two aspects of fundamental stability that have led the country’s politics to this current situation. First is the fact that a right-wing nationalist bloc of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party and the two Haredi (ultra-orthodox) parties, usually also joined by an ultra-nationalist and religious-Zionist party (currently Yamina), has…