Utopia, you are standing in it!

Intelligence officials are discounting Helen Clark’s pronouncement that NZ has lost its “independence” through its participation in the Five Eyes intelligence arrangement that links NZ with Australia, Canada, the UK and the US. Her enthusiasm as prime minister for the flood of intelligence is well remembered by the intelligence community.

Rather, they say, in an increasingly troubled world, the arrangement is extending the flow of information and provides Wellington with a stronger voice. It has become a useful tool for promoting shared values and it remains an international forum in which NZ can play a significant role in shaping policy

Earlier this month, as China announced its final assumption of power in Hong Kong, the group issued a rebuke as Washington, London, Ottawa and Canberra criticised China for undermining the “one country, two systems” framework that was meant to determine Hong Kong’s future for 50 years…

New Zealand’s 2020 general election, experts  are telling  us, will be like no other in  history.  And,  if opinion polls  are  to  be  believed,  Labour  is so far  ahead,  its  strategists  only  need to   keep  Jacinda Ardern front and centre of the campaign  for the  party to break out the  champagne  on the night of September  19.

Jack Vowles, a  professor of  political science at Wellington’s  Victoria University, says the election comes in the wake of a remarkable government-led act of building collective solidarity that has sacrificed businesses and livelihoods in the cause of protecting those who would have been most vulnerable to Covid-19.

 “By a combination of luck and good crisis management, the elimination policy has worked. NZ is among the first Covid-hit countries to return to near normality.In the process, the popularity of Jacinda Ardern and her government has soared. The initial response to a crisis…

J. K. Rowling has got herself in trouble again by implying, in the following tweet, that trans women—biological men who take on the gender identity of a woman—aren’t identical to biological women.

Because of this, she’s been called a “transphobe” and a “TERF” (trans-exclusionary radical feminist). She’s been excoriated all over Twitter, people are calling for her books to go unread, a school in England has dropped plans to name a house after her, and some people are saying it’s time for her to stop publishing completely, as in this specimen from The Washington Post (click on screenshot), which argues that it’s time for her to relinquish control of…

Adding wind power generating capacity is one occasion when ‘more’, truly means ‘less’. No matter how much of other people’s money gets spent spearing wind turbines all over the countryside, the result is the same: whether it’s 10,000 or 100,000 MW of available wind power capacity, when calm weather sets in, the combined output adds up to nothing.

Like pushing on string, eventually there is absolutely no return on the effort expended.

The simplest way to demonstrate why no economy has ever powered itself using wind power (and why no economy ever will) is to run the numbers. Paul Homewood does just that, with the aid of a new website that collects the pathetic performance of wind farms across Europe and the UK.

New Website For Wind Farm Data
Not a lot of people know that
Paul Homewood
17 May 2020

Someone tipped me off about this website, which has…

Yesterday I featured a provocative blogginheads.tv discussion with Glenn Loury and John McWhorter, both of whom issued some opinions that would be condemned as racist if coming from white people.

But one opinion, which is not that controversial but does have its critics, is that the violence and looting accompanying the George Floyd protests should be loudly and unequivocally condemned. Some like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar don’t approve of the violence, but find it “understandable” in a way that comes close to excusing it. Others—some on this website—have said that the violent incidents are few and overplayed in a way that overshadows the peaceful protests. We should, they imply, simply ignore the violence. Others argue that all the looting and physical assaults were not committed by “real” protestors, but by white supremacists, Antifa-ites, or simply greedy people.  I don’t accept that claim.

Now I’m not sure how many incidents of violence or…

This past March, Public Choice published an article I found to be very interesting. It is called “The anti-discrminatory tradition in Virginia School public choice theory” by Phil Magness. I found this article interesting for two reasons. First, I’ve read a fair amount of public choice and, honestly, I had no idea that racial discrimination was a topic they dealt with in detail. Second, after the really misleading work by Nancy McLean on Buchanan, I wanted to read something written that is more level headed and, to be blunt, truthful.

So what is the article about? Magness examines the published and unpublished writings of scholars associated with the “Virginia School” of public choice theory, which focuses on how incentives affect state actors, the theory of rules and and constitutions, and issues like regulatory capture. He focuses on scholars who visited or were affiliated with the organizational home of public choice…

Within a year of George’s accession the Whigs won an overwhelming victory in the general election of 1715. Several members of the defeated Tory Party sympathised with the Jacobites, who sought to replace George with Anne’s Catholic half-brother, James Francis Edward Stuart (called “James III and VIII” by his supporters and “the Pretender” by his opponents).

George’s distrust of the Tories aided the passing of power to the Whigs. Whig dominance grew to be so great under George that the Tories did not return to power for another half-century. After the election, the Whig-dominated Parliament passed the Septennial Act 1715, which extended the maximum duration of Parliament to seven years (although it could be dissolved earlier by the Sovereign).

After his accession in Great Britain, George’s relationship with his son (which had always been poor) worsened. George Augustus, Prince of Wales, encouraged opposition to his father’s policies, including measures designed…

Price gouging on the grand scale to keep the ruinables show on the road, regardless of electricity grid stability. But our leaders love this fiasco and label it as climate policy, so that’s OK? No, but they seem to face few obstacles to their blinkered obsession, even though the problems look bound to get worse.
– – –
Lockdown reveals the UK’s power grid is fragile, costly, and failing – because of renewables, says Dr. Benny Peiser @ Climate Change Dispatch.

The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) is today publishing a collection of papers by energy expert Dr. John Constable, documenting the rapid decay of the UK electricity system, with system balancing costs spiraling out of control over the last few weeks.

The cost of balancing the grid over the Bank Holiday weekend amounted to £50m, and National Grid has predicted additional costs of £700m from May to August…

Lieutenant Chard’s famous drawing of the Rorke’s Drift battle, showing the main thrusts of the Zulu attack.

The Battle of Rorke’s Drift fully deserves its elevated status in the annals of British military history, if only as one of the most heroically fought and efficiently conducted small-scale military actions of the last 100-odd years. The British were, from the outset vastly outnumbered by up to thirty to one by their Zulu protagonists. In the context of the relatively confined space of the garrison, and the considerable opportunities for enemy concealment in the shrubs, bushes and caves outside and overlooking the garrison, British technical superiority had been much more limited than some observers have suggested. After the initial, albeit destructive volleys fired against the first wave of Zulu attackers, much (if not the majority) of the fighting was at close quarters. The survival of the garrison depended at its most…

This is a cross post. It was originally published on Harry’s Place on May 31st 2012, 9:15 am

On The Commentator blog, James Boys has an article which ostensibly attacks President Obama’s statement that would put the commencement of the Vietnam War in 1962, a year when John F Kennedy (JFK) was President. In practice, the article presents a severe distortion of the reality. Boys tries to suggest a substantial difference of view between JFK and his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ), of American involvement in Vietnam.

Specifically, Boys states:

Defence Secretary Robert S. McNamara and General Maxwell Taylor reported back from Vietnam that One thousand troops could be withdrawn by the end of 1963, and that the United States would be able to withdraw all military personnel by the end of 1965.”

This plan was outlined in the Top Secret national Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 263, dated October 11^th, 1963. This…

The late Leszek Kolakowski is missed. In 1985 he wrote a review of David Miller’s book, Anarchism for the TLS. Not only is it worthwhile reading for his views on anarchism: “a puerile utopia,”  it is also instructive for what he had to say  on Marxism: “Anarchists… are strongest when they criticize Marxism as an infallible prescription for despotism.”  However what struck me as particularly insightful were his comments on the market economy. I copy them below.

One cannot perhaps suppress the market entirely, it persists even in a concentration camp – which probably comes closest to what an ideal non-market economy would be in modem society. One can suppress it, however, to such an extent as to destroy all the sources of information which only the market can provide, to stifle the possibilities of innovation, to make the entire production system highly inefficient .and to organize a police state which is…

While long supporting the right of Americans to protest injustices peacefully, I’ve also decried the use of violence, whether that be hurting other people without provocation (including both demonstrators and police), destroying property, or looting. I consider this immoral because you are hurting others, or destroying their property, with no justification. Further, it’s also ineffective, at least judging by the several studies cited in the CNN report below.

While violent protests may in some cases achieve their aim, there’s no control experiment here: who knows whether peaceful protests might be even more effective? In fact, I can’t imagine a situation in which scenes of protestors burning cars or police stations, beating up people without provocation, or looting stores could move people to rectify injustices more strongly than when seeing many peaceful demonstrations that are, for instance, occurring now. Indeed, many people have warned—and I think this is true—that violence…

(1) (H/t: masgramondou). Matt Ridley tells the story of the 1890 Russian flu epidemic 

The killer came from the east in winter: fever, cough, sore throat, aching muscles, headache and sometimes death. It spread quickly to all parts of the globe, from city to city, using new transport networks. In many cities, the streets were empty and shops and schools deserted. A million died. The Russian influenza pandemic of 1889-90 may hold clues to what happens next — not least because the latest thinking is that it, too, may have been caused by a new coronavirus.

In addition to the new diseases of S[ARS], M[ERS], and C[COVID]-19, there are four other coronaviruses that infect people. They all cause common colds and are responsible for about one in five such sniffles, the rest being rhinoviruses and adenoviruses. As far as we can tell from their genes, two of these coronaviruses came…