Utopia, you are standing in it!

Parliament is currently in recess but its work continues, with select committees moving to remote hearings, and the Speaker promising to move, if only temporarily, towards a ‘virtual parliament’. David Natzler, who spent almost 40 years working in the House of Commons, draws on his experience to suggest how issues relating to the remote conduct of oral questions, voting, committees, and other key matters, might be resolved before parliament returns in late April.

In my blog of 23 March, I suggested that parliament would be judged on how well it had dealt with COVID-19. Over the past fortnight parliament has passed the Coronavirus Act and Commons select committees have held several hearings (see below) in procedurally unique circumstances. Developments in other parliaments and institutions have given an indication of how Westminster might adapt in the coming months. And there have been growing calls for business – in …

The wind and solar industries face an existential threat, with governments throwing every available resource at resuscitating their economies, instead of pandering to the renewable energy sector. The Draconian measures adopted to prevent the spread of COVID-19 mean that governments have a choice.

Throw taxpayer’s dollars at filthy rich wind and solar power outfits (which have wallowed in hundreds of $billions in subsidies over the last 20 years).

Or to provide general economic stimulus – in the form of welfare to the masses of recently unemployed and subsidies and support to keep businesses afloat and their workers employed – that might allow their countries to recover from state enforced lockdowns, with some degree of dignity.

No prizes for guessing which choice is the more palatable from a political perspective.

Proving themselves, yet again, to be tin-eared mouthpieces for the wind and solar lobby, US Democrats pulled out all stops in…

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has a new book, her fifth, and the fourth to have a one-word title (the others are The Caged Virgin, Nomad, Infidel, and Heretic, and I’ve read all but the first). The last one, Heretic, was subtitled Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now, and was her manifesto not to destroy Islam (which many think is her agenda), but to reform it from within. I wrote about it previously, and thought that while the motivation was good, Muslims would never accept Hirsi Ali’s five suggestions for reforming the faith (example: “Muslims must not take the Qur’an literally”).

If Islam is to be defanged, making the extremist and violence-prone segments go away, it not only has to be from within, but there’s no good program for doing it—even from Hirsi Ali, who spent much of her life as an ardent believer.

And…

With coronavirus sucking all the air out of room globally, I got interested in looking at how the Canadian national flu seasons compare with the new Wuhan virus. The analysis is important since there are many nations at higher latitudes that are in equilibrium relative to infectious diseases, but vulnerable to outbreaks of new viruses. Where I live in Canada, we have winter outbreaks every year, but are protected by a combination of sanitary practices, health care system and annual vaccines, contributing to herd immunity.

For example, 2018-19 was a slightly higher than typical year, with this pattern:
The various flu types are noted, all together making a total of 48,818 influenza detections during the 2018-19 season. A total of 946 hospitalizations were reported by CIRN-SOS sentinels that season (age = or >16).  Source:  Annual Influenza Reports

A total of 137 (14%) ICU admissions and 65 (7%) deaths were reported. …

One straw, up one turtle’s nostril, and here we are, on the road to banning all plastics … Typical!

The activist feeding frenzy against plastic has been going on for decades but with the recent images being multiplied on social media and the BBC it has reached its hyperbolic zenith this year. The calls to do something – the sense of urgency – to ban plastic (from straws to bags to packaging to, well, … anything and everything) has come to encompass the latest social media episode of Age of Stupid insanity. You might go to prison in California for serving someone a straw.

The drive to ban plastics, now being spearheaded by those who should know better in the European Commission, has become a cause célèbre for all activists. What’s not to like about this latest attack on technology?

1. Plastic is not a natural product. Enough said…

Image credit: autocarbrands.com
H/T The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)

The public turns out not be persuaded by EU bureaucrats that expensive short-range BEVs with high depreciation, limited recharge options and uncertain battery life are the way to go. And the current virus situation only reduces spending power, leaving car makers with nowhere to go but down as massive fines for missing absurd CO2 targets begin to bite.
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The German car industry is calling for stricter EU climate requirements to be overturned or to be delayed as car sales plummet to lowest level in nearly three decades.

It has urged the government to back them in efforts to make the European Union drop a planned tightening of emission limits on cars, reports Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Weather-dependent wind power has no inherent commercial value, simply because it can’t be delivered as and when it’s needed. The only “value” is the massive and endless subsidies that it attracts.

The graph above depicts the output for the month of March, from every wind turbine connected to Australia’s Eastern Grid, with a total notional capacity of 6,960 MW. Those turbines are spread between Far North Queensland, all along the ranges of NSW, all over Victoria, the north coast of Tasmania and across the central parts of South Australia.

Collapses of anywhere between 2,000 to 3,000 MW over the span of an hour or less are matched sudden surges of equal magnitude.

If you were looking for a definition of “chaos”, what’s thrown out by Australia’s wind power fleet on a daily basis should do the trick.

Rafe Champion adds detail to that definition, with a little wind watching of…

STATEMENT BY DR SUCHARIT BHAKDI ON COVID-19 EPIDEMIOLOGY 

MARCH 2020

SOURCE DOCUMENT: [LINK]  THE VIDEO IN GERMAN:  [LINK]  

BELOW IS AN EDITED AND ABBREVIATED VERSION OF THE BHAKDI ANALYSIS

As Emeritus of the Johannes-Gutenberg-University in Mainz and long time
director of the Institute for Medical Microbiology, I feel obliged to critically
question the far-reaching restrictions on public life that we are currently taking
on ourselves in order to reduce the spread of the COVID-19 virus. It is expressly not my intention to play down the dangers of the virus or to spread a political message. However, I feel it is my duty to make a scientific contribution to put the current data and facts into perspective. In addition, to ask questions that are in danger of being overlooked in the heat of the debate. My concern is that unforeseeable socioeconomic consequences of the drastic containment measures which are…

Earlier this week the OECD put out a useful little note Evaluating the initial impact of COVID-19 containment measures on economic activity.  

It is less than five pages long, including a couple of charts, and isn’t even attempting to offer definitive answers.   And what it offers isn’t an assessment of the impact of the differing containment measures being adopted in each country, but of the likely impact of the initial economic structure of each country’s economy to a set of common assumptions about the extent of containment and associated changes in economic activity.   Thus when, as local media have reported, this chart shows that New Zealand is one of the most adversely affected economies

it isn’t telling you anything about the impact or intensity of New Zealand policies, but simply about the pre-existing structure, given the (common across countries) assumptions OECD staff make about which sectors…

Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse battled over whether America would run on DC or AC power, but they never had to battle with the chaotic intermittency of wind and solar.

Celebrated in the recently released film, The Current War, Westinghouse and Edison fought a pitched battle over technology, patents, media approval and the support of legislators in their efforts to dominate the generation and distribution of electricity across the USA. Spoiler alert: Westinghouse won and AC remains the delivery system of choice.

In wind and solar obsessed Australia, the battle raging today about power generation and delivery is simply about keeping the lights on.

Rafe Champion takes a look at how the chaotic delivery of heavily subsidised wind and solar is the real Current War.

How intermittent energy kills coal-fired power and the grid
Catallaxy Files
Rafe Champion
16 March 2020

The damage inflicted by a good wind day. The…

by Mario J. Rizzo and Glen Whitman

Book description

The burgeoning field of behavioral economics has produced a new set of justifications for paternalism. This book challenges behavioral paternalism on multiple levels, from the abstract and conceptual to the pragmatic and applied.

Behavioral paternalism relies on a needlessly restrictive definition of rational behavior. It neglects nonstandard preferences, experimentation, and self-discovery. It relies on behavioral research that is often incomplete and unreliable. It demands a level of knowledge from policymakers that they cannot reasonably obtain. It assumes a political process largely immune to the effects of ignorance, irrationality, and the influence of special interests and moralists.

Overall, behavioral paternalism underestimates the capacity of people to solve their own problems, while overestimating the ability of experts and policymakers to design beneficial interventions. The authors argue instead for a more inclusive theory of rationality in economic policymaking.

Gerd Gigerenzer (Director of the…

Environment  Minister   David  Parker  has directed  officials to find ways  to fast-track consents  for infrastructure and  development  projects. He says   his  goal  is to  help create a pipeline of projects  so that some can  start immediately once  Covid-19 restrictions  are  lifted “so people can get back into work as fast as possible”.

Parker sees the Covid-19 pandemic as a serious global crisis that will have a wide ranging and lasting impact on almost every part of  the economy for some time.

He recognises many New Zealanders have lost their jobs, or may do so in coming months, and many businesses are doing it hard.

“These are extraordinary times that need extraordinary solutions. We need to support NZers through this crisis, and position our economy for recovery”.

 His  aim  is  to   short-circuit  the standard  Resource Management Act  consenting  processes  and  he wants   Cabinet to  put its stamp of approval on…

Choices that matter are often hard.  That is one of the messages of Matthew Hooton’s lengthy column in the Herald this morning, which people really should read if you possibly can.  It isn’t that Hooton is saying anything particularly new, but he is putting it firmly in a contemporary New Zealand context.  He poses the choices around handling the coronavirus pandemic as primarily those for the Prime Minister (and Cabinet), but really we should think of them as choices for New Zealanders as a whole, for which elected leaders –  none of whom here was seriously chosen for their ability to confront the gravest crisis in many many decades – really should primarily be there to facilitate and articulate, but perhaps help shape too, our collective view; the choices we wish to make on matters that affect life and death –  perhaps for many – and the functioning of our…

Good God, here we go again! Rowan Williams, formerly a “sophisticated” Archbishop of Canterbury, now bearing the appropriate title of Lord Williams of Mealymouth Oystermouth, is still kvetching about Richard Dawkins and his supposed New Atheist posse, and on two grounds.

First, Dawkins (and we) damaged Christianity, and it needs to be repaired.

Second, New Atheists don’t know jack about theology.

As to the first, I say “GOOD FOR US! Christianity needs to be damaged, for it’s harmful and delusional, and enables the vice of belief without evidence—in other words, faith. As to the second claim, I’ve dealt with it many times before (it’s gone under the name of “the courtier’s reply“), and address it here only briefly.

Here’s the short article from The Tablet. Click to read, and shake your head about the lucubrations of poor Lord Oystermouth:

A few short excerpts:

The former Archbishop of…