Utopia, you are standing in it!

DISASTER divided : Two countries, one island, life-and-death differences

WITHOUT access to fossil fuels, every tree on the planet would have been cut down by now to provide for heating, cooking and industry.

THE greatest threat to the environment is not affluence, it is poverty.

BORDER between Haiti and Dominican Republic, a pristine example…

• ONE country embraces Fossil Fuels 🇩🇴

• THE other, signed up to the UN Paris Accord 🇭🇹

BORDER between Haiti and the Dominican Republic: Guess which country contains eco-criminals that can afford to use fossil fuels, and which country contains nature-lovers who are dependent on natural renewable organic biomass for energy?

*

HAITI is almost 99% deforested, as they rely almost entirely on natural ‘biomass’ (wood) for domestic and industrial fuels and building materials.

ON the other side, the forests of the fossil fuel burning, eco-terrorists – the Dominican Republic – remain lush and…

Gabriele Ciminelli and Sílvia Garcia-Mandicó in this voxeu piece:

There are still many unknowns about COVID-19. We don’t know its true mortality rate, nor the speed through which it spreads across communities. This lack of evidence complicates the design of appropriate response policies. The case of the UK is illustrative. The government first opted for the bare minimum in terms of mitigation. It then drastically reversed course after micro-simulations by the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team showed that that strategy could have resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths (Ferguson et al. 2020).

In a new paper (Ciminelli and Garcia-Mandicó 2020), we source daily death registry data for a sample of 1,161 Italian municipalities in the seven regions most severely hit by COVID-19 (Emilia-Romagna, Liguria, Lombardia, Marche, Piemonte, Toscana, and Veneto) and match them to census data to analyse COVID-19-induced mortality. Overall, the dataset covers a population of almost…

It’s been impossible to ignore the calls for the UK government to announce that it will be seeking an extension to the Brexit transition period, or at least to make clear that it’s still keeping its options open, as a result of the coronavirus crisis. Here I review the arguments on both sides – before coming down in favour of sticking to the current timetable.

The background

The UK has, of course, already left the EU. But it remains a member of the single market and customs union, and is still bound by EU rules, during a ‘transition period’ which is due to end on 31^st December. This period is meant to provide time for the two sides to negotiate a new long-term relationship, covering issues such as trade and security cooperation, and to make the necessary preparations to implement the new arrangements.

The Withdrawal Agreement (WA) allows the…

Angela Saini is a British science writer who belongs to what I call the Cordelia Fine School of Science Journalism (CFSSJ): a school whose members have an explicit ideological bias that colors all of their popular writing. In the case of Fine, her ideology is that there is essentially no evolutionary/genetic difference between the brains and neurology of men and women, and so any behavioral differences we see are of purely social origin. Further, hormones play little or no role in behavioral differences between the sexes. Fine’s motive is good—to reduce sexism and bias—but her modus operandus is not, for it involves misrepresenting science.

To buttress Fine’s ideology, her books aim at debunking every study that contradicts her preconceived thesis, even though there is now convincing indication of not only genetically based behavioral and morphological differences based on hormones, but also of differences in the brain. In contrast…

Planet of the Humans | By Jeff Gibbs, Executive Producer Michael Moore

“The documentary does a good job
at proving that conservatives
were right to say that green energy is a scam“

“This urgent, must-see movie,
a full-frontal assault on our sacred cows,
is guaranteed to generate anger, debate.”

***

A must watch.

IT gets going at around the 13 minute mark, and then, kaboom…

•••

SEE also :

• SCOTLAND’S Net-Zero Forest Management Program | Climatism
• Michael Moore stumbles upon the truth about so-called ‘green’ energy – American Thinker (Climatism post title-tip)

RELATED :

• ‘GREEN’ Energy Future | Climatism
• IF CO2’s Your Poison, Renewable Energy Is No Antidote (Peer-reviewed) | Climatism
• TEAM GRETA Admits Climate Change Has Nothing To Do With The Environment | Climatism
• CADMIUM : The Toxic Problem Of Not-So-Clean Energy | Climatism
• ANGELA MERKEL : The New Climate Change ‘Denier’ | Climatism
• HOW DARE HE!…

When I wrote about the wealth tax early this year, I made three simple points.

• A war on wealth is a war on capital (increased double taxation is needed since rich people have a lot of saving and investment).
• A war on capital is a war on productivity (every economic theory agrees there is no added output without saving and investment).
• A war on productivity is a war on workers (every economic theory agrees that there is a link between wages and how much workers produce).

I obviously have not been very persuasive.

At least in certain quarters.

A story in the Wall Street Journal explores the growing interest on the left in this new form of taxation.

The income tax..system could change fundamentally if Democrats win the White House and Congress. …Democrats want to shift toward taxing their wealth, instead of just their salaries and the income…

As in no other air war in recent history, the Korean War was fought by opposing combatants who had no stake whatsoever in the territory in dispute. When the North invaded the South, Americans entered the battle openly and with heavy commitment. The Soviets elected to go undercover with limited aid in material and especially in manpower. For whatever reason, neither side expressed a specific goal or objective, other than to fight one another and to hopefully bring the whole sad affair to an end. Unfortunately, the war never officially ended. In spite of over a half century of negotiation, neither side has surrendered or agreed on a formal truce to end the armed conflict. Instead, both sides signed a tenuous cease-fire agreement and technically the combatants remain in a state-of-war.

By the end of October 1950, the Korean and Chinese aviation assets had been combined into a single Unified…

A couple of days ago I looked at how one might best classify countries, as to whether or not they had experienced a “financial crisis” since 2007.  But this chart is one reason why I’ve become increasingly sceptical that “financial crises”, however one defines them, have large or enduring adverse real economic effects.  I think I first saw it in a sets of slides by Nobel laureate Robert Lucas, and every so often I would use it to try to stir up a bit of debate at the Reserve Bank.

It is a quite simple chart of real per capita GDP for the United States, back as far as 1870.  These are Angus Maddison’s estimates, the most widely used set of (estimated) historical data, and as Maddison died a few years ago they only come as far forward as 2008.  The simple observation is that a linear trend drawn through this…

The stories of King Henry VIII and the men around him have fascinated generations of historians, but there was one man who has received a negative reputation for his actions. He was the supposed son of a butcher who rose to be Henry VIII’s right-hand man, until his dramatic fall in July 1540. Thomas Cromwell was credited for helping Henry with his Great Matter, the fall of Anne Boleyn, the establishment of the Church of England, and the disastrous marriage between Henry and Anna of Cleves. Diarmaid MacCulloch has taken on the challenge to figure out who Thomas Cromwell really was by sifting through all remaining archival records that we have from this extraordinary man. It is in this book, “Thomas Cromwell: A Revolutionary Life” that MacCulloch masterfully explores the story of this man who changed English and European history forever.

Personally, I have never read a book about Thomas…