Utopia, you are standing in it!

Twenty-one eminent constitutional lawyers expressed this view in a letter to the Times (3 4 19): ‘Any attempt to advise refusal of Royal Assent to a Bill passed by Parliament would stand constitutional principle on its head. It would presume a governmental power to override Parliament, yet it is in Parliament, not the Executive, that sovereignty resides’.

But it is the eminent-21 who stand constitutional principle on its head.  The true principle is: it is in Parliament (not the Executive, and not the Legislature) that sovereignty resides.

The name Parliament, or parliamentum, came (from the Old French: parlement, parler) into use in England in the 14^th century (the Modus Tenendi Parliamentum, probably 1321), but by the 15^th century it had come to mean a legislature (OED 3^rd edition, 2005); and, indeed, that’s what it was.  The movement from an absolute monarch to a legislative Parliament…

What greens claim is powering Germany ….

Renewables zealots tout Germany as the benchmark for the ‘inevitable transition’ to wind and solar, but its energy system is a complete debacle.

Germany’s so-called Energiewende (energy transition) has turned into a power pricing and supply calamity. Which was as perfectly predictable as it was perfectly avoidable.

Germany’s obsession with intermittent wind and solar was never going to end well. Power prices are now the highest in Europe, if not the world. But paying for power is only a problem for those Germans who are lucky enough to be supplied with it.

As Francis Menton points out below, anyone claiming that we’re well on our way to an all wind and sun powered future has probably spent too much time in the sun. Moreover, those relying on Germany to bolster their claims about an ‘inevitable transition’ to wind and solar should start…

Artist’s rendering of the Colosseum during a naumachiae. The Water Battles at the Colosseum were documented by Ancient Roman writers who recorded that the Colosseum was used for naumachiae (the Greek word for sea warfare) or simulated sea battles.

The greatest structure erected during the age of the Flavian emperors (69-96 A.D.) and arguably the finest architectural achievement in the history of the Roman Empire. The Colosseum was originally called the Flavian Amphitheater, but it became known as the Colosseum after a colossal statue of Nero that once stood nearby. Its origins are to be found in the desire of the Emperor VESPASIAN to create for the Romans a stadium of such magnitude as to convince both them and the world of Rome’s return to unquestioned power after the bitter civil war.

Construction began in 72 or 75 A.D. Vespasian chose as the site a large plot between the Caelian…

German submarine designs exerted a major influence, either directly or indirectly, on most of the world’s submarine development in the years between the two world wars-except in Britain and, to a lesser extent, the Soviet Union. All the major navies of the victorious Allies-Britain, France, Italy, Japan, and the United States-received examples of the latest German U-boats under the terms of the Armistice and the Treaty of Versailles. They intently examined and analyzed these German craft to determine the applicability and suitability of their features for incorporation into their own types and, in several instances, commissioned former German submarines into their own services to acquire operational experience in their use. Both Italian and French designers were very much influenced by studying and operating examples of the later Mittel-U and UB-III types prior to developing their first new postwar boats. The big U-cruisers had even more impact. The first French oceangoing…

Community hostility to industrial wind power is inevitable, when the community in question is the one that ends up with 300 tonne monsters speared in its backyard.

The characters that never leave the inner-city latte zone are more than happy to destroy your rural landscape, your peaceful rural way of life and the value of your homes and properties; it’s a sacrifice that they’re always willing to make.

But, over time, those on the receiving end are becoming increasingly reticent to end up as ‘roadkill’ for the wind and solar industries.

There are few universal truths: community hostility to giant wind turbines is one, the thuggery employed by wind power outfits, is another.

Wherever in the world the wind industry plies it subsidy-soaked trade, rural folk are treated as ‘roadkill’: lied to, bullied and beaten. As in the case of Jim Field, a 79-year-old disabled farmer from Rye Park…

Earlier this morning I read a great article by Schellenberger at Forbes.  Above is his tweet.  When I returned to Forbes to read and post on the article, here is what I saw:

While I look for the text now gone missing, here are some overviews of the book, and why activists will want it suppressed. Update:  WUWT archived the article before it was revoked (here)

‘Apocalypse Never’ Review: False Gods for Lost Souls
Environmentalism offers emotional relief and spiritual satisfaction, giving its adherents a sense of purpose and transcendence. Source: John Tierney at Washington Post (paywalled)

Amazon Book Description

Climate change is real but it’s not the end of the world. It is not even our most serious environmental problem.

Michael Shellenberger has been fighting for a greener planet for decades. He helped save the world’s last unprotected redwoods. He co-created the predecessor to today’s Green New…

The author (second from right) in Maranhão, Brazil, 1995
MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER

“REMEMBER when we paved the world with electronic waste
that chopped eagles and condors and made bats extinct
because we thought wind was natural and uranium evil?
– man that was a dark age!”
– Michael Shellenberger

“MUCH that passes as idealism is disguised
hatred or disguised love of power.”
– Bertrand Russell

•••

TIME Magazine “Hero of the Environment,” and U.N. IPCC expert reviewer Michael Shellenberger drops another inconvenient truth-bomb in the fight against the dangerous and costly politicisation of science.

“But mostly I was scared. I remained quiet about the climate disinformation campaign because I was afraid of losing friends and funding. The few times I summoned the courage to defend climate science from those who misrepresent it I suffered harsh consequences. And so I mostly stood by and did next to nothing as my fellow…

Want to pay a fortune for power delivered in chaotic fits and spurts? Why not try offshore wind power?

The true cost of chaotically intermittent wind power is staggering; the cost of offshore wind power is astronomical.

The capital cost of spearing these things offshore is multiples greater than doing so in some dimwitted farmer’s back paddock. Recouping that capital cost means that offshore wind power is 25 times more expensive than coal, gas or nuclear.

Banned from the land, UK’s wind industry has been all at sea, for years. Continuing the rort, means convincing a gullible public that offshore wind power is practically free, and getting cheaper all the time.

Paul Homewood explains the difference between costly fact and propaganda-edged fiction, below.

BBC Brags About Hornsea Wind Farm–But Forgets To Mention The Cost
Not a Lot of People Know That
Paul Homewood
9 June 2020

In his…

In addition to his exemplary work as a Senior Fellow for the Cato Institute, Johan Norberg narrates some great videos for Free to Choose Media. Here are some that caught my eye.

• The foolish and counterproductive War on Drugs.
• A grim consequence of Cuban communism.
• The real lesson to learn from Sweden.

But my favorite video, which I shared back in January, is his concise explanation of why policy makers should focus on fighting poverty rather than reducing inequality.

I’m posting it again to set the stage for a discussion on inequality and fairness.

Now let’s dig into the main topic for today.

A study by three academics from Yale’s Department of Psychology concludes that people want fairness rather than equality.

…there is no evidence that people are bothered by economic inequality itself. Rather, they are bothered by something that is often confounded with inequality: economic unfairness. Drawing upon…

Here we have Karen Attiah, a major editor with the Washington Post, spewing out stuff on Twitter that’s even more vile and bigoted than the stuff Trump emits regularly. It’s racist, full of hate, and exactly the kind of stuff that got New York Times tech writer Quinn Norton fired. (Sarah Jeong, her replacement, wrote the same kind of bigoted nonsense, but was defended by the NYT because she was Asian-American and supposedly just returning Twitter hatred “in kind”. But the different fates of Norton versus Jeong show a fundamental hypocrisy at the paper. [Jeong appears to have been quietly jettisoned since then.])

Here’s Attiah’s bio at the Post (click on screenshot), and because the lettering is tiny, I’ve reproduced it below the screenshot.

Global Opinions editor, writing on international affairs and social issuesEducation: Northwestern University, BA in communication studies, minor in African Studies; Columbia University, master’s…

Electromagnetic weapons-also known as E-bombs-are designed to release a high-power flash of radio waves or microwaves. Depending on the energy of the electromagnetic pulse, effects can range from the disabling of electronic circuitry to physiological effects in those exposed to the electromagnetic pulse.

The pulse released by an electromagnetic weapon lasts for an extremely short time, around 100 picoseconds (one ten-billionth of a second). The absorption of this blast of high energy by anything capable of conducting electricity, including nerves and neurons, overwhelms the recipient.

Research and development into the effects of electromagnetic weapons on human beings and animals was underway in the 1940s. The Japanese spent considerable sums of money on the development of a “Death Ray” between 1940 and 1945. A review of these studies by the United States military concluded that it was possible to develop a weapon that would produce an electromagnetic ray capable of killing…

By Nic Lewis

The course of the COVID-19 pandemic in Sweden is of great interest, as it is one of very few advanced nations where no lockdown order that heavily restricted people’s movements and other basic freedoms was imposed. As there has been much comment, some of it ill-informed, on how the COVID-19 epidemic has developed in Sweden, but relatively little detailed analysis published in English, it is worth exploring what their excellent publicly-available data reveal.

UPDATE: Professor Brian Leiter of the Law School (he’s the director of the Center for Law, Philosophy, and Human Values) added this comment to my public Facebook notice about this whole post:

_________________________

I’m deeply saddened at how woke The University of Chicago is becoming. The students, of course, are far woker than the faculty, but I always expected the faculty and administration would hold the line by adhering to two of the great “foundational principles” of our University: the Report on the Committee on Freedom of Expression (the famous “Chicago Principles” mandating pretty unrestricted free speech), and the Kalven Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action. These principles are among several that make The University of Chicago unique among other schools. The free-speech principles have been adopted by 55 universities, and I wrote about the Kalven Report here, explaining how…