Utopia, you are standing in it!

Nicholas II (May 18, 1868 – July 17, 1918), known in the Russian Orthodox Church as Saint Nicholas the Passion-Bearer, was the last Emperor of Russia, ruling from November 1, 1894 until his forced abdication on March 15, 1917. His reign saw the fall of the Russian Empire from one of the foremost great powers of the world to economic and military collapse.

By early 1917, Russia was on the verge of total collapse of morale. An estimated 1.7 million Russian soldiers were killed in World War I. The sense of failure and imminent disaster was everywhere. The army had taken 15 million men from the farms and food prices had soared. An egg cost four times what it had in 1914, butter five times as much. The severe winter dealt the railways, overburdened by emergency shipments of coal and supplies, a crippling blow.

Ideologically the Emperor’s greatest support came…

As  the global   Covid-19  toll  mounts,  with  6494 deaths so  far,   how close  are  new  drugs   to  treat   the disease?

Point of  Order  has been searching  international media for news of   the   work  of    much-criticised  Big  Pharma  and found  at   least  11  companies engaged in  developing  anti-viral drugs  to be used in treatment  against the  disease.

The  most advanced of   these  appears  to be  California-based Gilead Sciences, which for the past few years  has been developing Remdesivir, an anti-viral with promising results in lab and animal studies against SARS, MERS, Ebola and other infectious diseases, including Covid-19.

Remdesivir is already  being tested in Wuhan, the centre of the epidemic, and the US National Institute of Health  has indicated the drug would also be studied in some of the patients who contracted the illness overseas and are now being treated in  the US.

The notion that a nation can run on sunshine and breezes is worse than delusional, it’s flat out dangerous. Once resilient and reliable electricity generation and delivery systems designed around the certitude of coal, gas and hydro have been replaced by pure and utter, weather driven chaos.

Rapid and reactionary load shedding (“demand management”) and widespread blackouts (“demand mismanagement”) are now the order of the day, thanks to an obsession with the occasional, unreliable and unpredictable delivery of wind and solar.

In a world where hyperbole and hysteria have kidnapped, bound and gagged our good friends, logic and reason, it’s understandable that people might fall for the idea that we can merrily run on sunshine and breezes, alone; albeit with a few trillion dollars worth of mythical mega-batteries providing backup for a few minutes, when the sun sets and the wind stops blowing.

The mob panic and overreaction in response…

It has been a while since last post (on the Doctor’s analogy skeptic style). This post will be a bit different. It will be about energy, more specifically about (grid sized) energy storage. It all started with this tweet from Jean-Pascal van Ypersele. This is the text of the tweet:

Those who argue that fossil gas plants are needed to compensate the intermittency of renewable energy should read this @McMarghem @eliacorporate @EngieBelgium @LuminusEnergie @Gregoiredallema

An editorial (yes, an editorial, with the byline “BY THE EDITORS”) in the new online issue of Scientific American,”The new science of sex and gender“, is not only biologically misleading, but philosophically unsound. Its purpose appears to be that the “new picture” of sex and gender, which is no longer “simple” but supposedly confused by a variety of factors like social construction of gender, intersexuality, and so on, somehow means that women’s rights have suddenly become more important and more justifiable. But the science is right out of Everyday Feminism, and the social lesson commits a naturalistic fallacy, implying that women’s rights are somehow connected with recognizing that gender is “nonbinary”. In other words, they make a biological case for women’s equality, when the real case is a social and ethical one.

Here’s the totality of the science in the article:

Sex is supposed to be…

EXCELLENT article written by a ‘Vegan Democrat’ and former CAGW believer, highlighting the reasons why many remain sceptical of the “settled science” of climate change…

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What is your position on the climate-change debate? What would it take to change your mind?

If the answer is It would take a ton of evidence to change my mind, because my understanding is that the science is settled, and we need to get going on this important issue, that’s what I thought, too. This is my story.

More than thirty years ago, I became vegan because I believed it was healthier (it’s not), and I’ve stayed vegan because I believe it’s better for the environment (it is). I haven’t owned a car in ten years. I love animals; I’ll gladly fly halfway…

“Social distancing” – reducing the number of daily close contacts individuals have – is being encouraged by policymakers and epidemiologists. Why it works, and why now rather than for other diseases, is often left unstated. Economists have two important contributions here. First, game theoretic models of behavior are great for thinking through where government mandates are needed and where they aren’t. Second, economists are used to thinking through tradeoffs, such as the relative cost and benefit of shutting down schools versus the economic consequences of doing so. The most straightforward epidemiological model of infection – the SIR model dating back to the 1920s – is actually quite commonly used in economic models of innovation or information diffusion, so it is one we are often quite familiar with. Let’s walk through the simple economics of epidemic policy.

We’ll start with three assumptions. First, an infected person will infect B other people…

To begin our day-by-day retelling of the trial of Charles I over on twitter, Philip Baker, Research Fellow on the 1624 Parliamentary Diaries project, discusses the circumstances behind the trial and its later interpretation…

The trial of King Charles I – which began on this day in 1649 – remains arguably the most dramatic and famous trial in English history. Monarchs had been deposed, and even murdered, before, but Charles was the first to be placed on public trial for his life by his own subjects, charged with waging war against the English people in a bloody civil war. His court, which served as both judge and jury, was a specially commissioned high court of justice of 156 civilians and soldiers, of whom – no doubt due to the status of the accused – only 101 attended any sessions of the trial. The most conspicuous absentee was

Want to know how important electricity is to modern life? Try living a comfortable and civilised life without it.

More than a billion humans struggle through daily life without access to power at all, and two billion more are limited to a meagre trickle, because in developing countries it’s both unreliable and too expensive for all but the wealthy elites.

The wind and solar obsessed in the first world are quite prepared to ensure that it stays that way. With economic development agencies peddling ridiculously expensive solar panels – seen as ‘fake electricity’ by those lumbered with it – and forcing tinpot governments to sign up to costly and pointless wind and/or solar power schemes, the ratio of haves to have-nots is likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future.

The relationship between economic development and reliable and affordable electricity is the subject of Juice: How Electricity Explains…

As mentioned by Sandeep Baliga over at Cheap Talk, Debraj Ray has a particularly interesting new essay on Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century. If you are theoretically inclined, you will find Ray’s comments to be one of the few reviews of Piketty that proves insightful.

I have little to add to Ray, but here are four comments about Piketty’s book:

1) The data collection effort on inequality by Piketty and coauthors is incredible and supremely interesting; not for nothing does Saez-Piketty 2003 have almost 2000 citations. Much of this data can be found in previous articles, of course, but it is useful to have it all in one place. Why it took so long for this data to become public, compared to things like GDP measures, is an interesting one which sociology Dan Hirschman is currently working on. Incidentally, the data quality complaints by the Financial Times seem…

Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson was mentioned in despatches during the week, in a post which dealt with MPs’ air travel expenses.

We mention her again today because of her eagerness to have taxpayers become more generous to the unemployed, no matter – apparently – how feckless or disinclined to find work they might be.

Our earlier mention of Davidson and the Greens was triggered by Taxpayers’ Union data, gleaned from the latest Parliamentary expense disclosures, which showed the list MPs from the Greens (on average) are spending more than a third more than Labour’s equivalent.

Average air travel spending for non-ministerial list MPs by party:

Greens – $9,816
NZ First – $8,059
National – $7,332
Labour – $6,499

A new paper (Faiss et al. 2020) reports that 15% of male and 22% of female endurance athletes at the 2011 and 2013 IAAF World Championships engaged in “blood doping” — defined as the use of prohibited methods to boost red blood cell amounts. No athletes are identified by name or country in the analysis, and no specific athlete is implicated in this post. However, the aggregate numbers are stunning.

With the publication of the final volume, Never Flinch, Never Weary, October 1951-January 1965, the official biography of Winston Churchill has been completed. As determined by the Guinness Book of World Records (the arbiter of such things), it is the longest biography in history. The completed project consists of eight narrative volumes and 23 document volumes. It has both physical and intellectual heft. Together the volumes, which have been acclaimed as a “classic of English scholarly biography,” total over 42,000 pages, measure 72 linear inches, and weigh 108 pounds. As Larry Arnn, the biography’s final editor, has commented its mammoth size is “befitting one of the largest lives ever lived.”

The story of the “Great Biography” starts in 1960 as the then 85 year-old Winston Churchill selected his son Randolph to write his biography based on his voluminous personal papers. Randolph Churchill had proven himself capable by researching and…