Utopia, you are standing in it!

In the absence of endless subsidies there would be no wind or solar industries. Period.

The minute talk turns to cutting those subsidies, the rent-seekers profiting from the wind and solar scam scream ‘blue murder’.

In the USA, the greatest economic and environmental fraud of all time is on a scale and magnitude that would make Croesus turn green with envy.

If the wind and solar scam continues unabated, American taxpayers will be forced to fork out more than $120 billion, in the form of direct subsidies, tax credits, and mandates for the generation and transmission of chaotically intermittent wind and solar.

Bill Peacock takes a look at the staggering burden placed on American households and businesses for an obsession with sunshine and breezes.

Renewable Subsidies Leading America Toward European-Style Energy Poverty
RealClear Energy
Bill Peacock
3 March 2020

Recent headlines have touted the record $55 billion renewable sector investments…

‘Quarantine’ or mere ‘Restriction’?

In the post published yesterday, I explained that under Part 2A of the Public Health (Control of Diseases) Act 1984, UK and Welsh ministers can make regulations to protect public health that can impose ‘special restrictions’ on persons, things and premises.  They can impose such restrictions in the same way that Justices of the Peace may do against individuals and groups. However, there are four exceptions to that general rule (section 45D(3)).   The general regulation-making powers cannot be used to force a person to (a) submit to medical examination; be (b) removed to or (c) detained in a hospital or similar establishment, or, and mostly notably, (d) ‘be kept in isolation or quarantine.’   The rationale for the exclusions seems to be that these highly invasive things must be done on a case-by-case (i.e. person or group) instead of community-wide basis.

So, does the lockdown…

We’re staying inside, we’re social-distancing (or, more accurately, physical-distancing), we’re washing our hands over and over, we’re inventing new corona-words, we’re choosing new email signoffs (adieu, “Cheers!”, bonjour, “Be well”).

And here in the virtual Strong Language enclave, we’re thinking about illness-inspired swearing.

When the coronavirus began spreading, and I hadn’t heard much about India, I thought to myself, “My god, when it gets there it will be a debacle!” I’ve been all over India and love the country, but it’s an incubator just waiting for an injection of virus. The cities are terribly crowded and there’s virtually no opportunity (especially in those cities) to “self-segregate”—especially for the poor who are often jammed together in shantytowns. (Even in the country entire families occupy small spaces, often one room.)

And since many live hand to mouth, a shutdown of commerce would lead to starvation. To this add the sub-par medical care, with even that completely unavailable to the impoverished, i.e., most of the populace. Finally, the nature of the country, with a lot of independent people who have only the bare essentials (India is the world’s largest democracy) means that a draconian lockdown à…



In 1942, when Earl Tupper was given inflexible pieces of black polyethylene slag from his supervisor at DuPont Chemical, the seed was planted for unlikely success. Of course, most people wouldn’t see this as an historic exchange at the time: The slag was nothing more than a waste product of the oil-refining process. In other words, it was garbage. But Tupper didn’t see garbage. He saw an empire.

By purifying the slag and molding it, he was able to create lightweight, non-breakable containers, tableware and even gas masks that were used in World War II. This paved the way for thefounding of Tupperwarein 1946.

However, despite advertising and a showroom on Fifth Avenue, Tupper wasn’t faring very well financially. That all changed when Brownie Wise began hosting the Tupperware Home Party in 1948. By 1951, Tupper realized that the Tupperware parties were more effective than selling…

This piece is the result of a collaboration between the Economic History Review, the Journal of Economic History, Explorations in Economic History and the European Review of Economic History. More details and special thanks below. Part A is available at this link 

Man and women with the bubonic plague with its characteristic buboes on their bodies — a medieval painting from 1411.
 Everett Historical/Shutterstock

As the world grapples with a pandemic, informed views based on facts and evidence have become all the more important. Economic history is a uniquely well-suited discipline to provide insights into the costs and consequences of rare events, such as pandemics, as it combines the tools of an economist with the long perspective and attention to context of historians. The editors of the main journals in economic history have thus gathered a selection of the recently-published articles on epidemics, disease and public health, generously made…

Reader Sue Davies sent a report from Australia on how they’re handling the pandemic, and gave me permission to post it. While much of her information comes from two sites (a Guardian Australia site and an Aussie federal government site), the summary and words are her own, and I’ve indented them:

I thought you might like to know how we in Australia are handling the crisis.

The Prime Minister has set up a “National Cabinet” made up of Premiers and Chief Health Officers of all six states and the Northern Territory.  This meets daily to make decisions affecting the whole country.  All the states are implementing the same laws to ensure that the response is the same everywhere.

Presently the rules are these:

1).  No more than two people can congregate outside at any one time (excluding family members). There are stiff on-the-spot fines ($1600) for people caught flouting…

John Tamny writes at Real Clear Markets ‘Studies’ Indicate Disappearing Beaches. Markets Think Studies Idiotic.Excerpts in italics with my bolds and images.

As USA Today recently reported, a new study from the European Union’s Joint Research Center warns that a global catastrophe looms due to “the near-extinction of almost half of the world’s sandy beaches by the end of the century.” Hmmmm. Really?

It seems the only individuals who never get the message about the “near-extinction” of beaches are those who actually live at those beaches, along with those who yearn to live at beaches. Stop and think about it.

Presumably the desirability of Malibu, Laguna, La Jolla, the Hamptons, Martha’s Vineyard, Newport (RI), Ibiza, St. Tropez and other glamorous coastal locales has something to do with these destinations existing essentially on the beach. In other words, land and the housing that sits on said land is quite…

Talk about a survivor: this is unbelievable! The story (h/t Malgorzata) comes from the Jewish Journal (first headline) and Forbes (second) and you can see it by clicking on the screenshots. But I’ll reproduce the whole short report from JJ below.

The report:

A 101-year-old man, identified as ‘Mr. P’ has been released from isolation after recovering from COVID-19 in the Italian city of Rimini. Mr. P., a WWII and Spanish Flu survivor was admitted last week to a hospital in northeast Italy after he was tested positive for the Coronavirus.

According to Gloria Lisi, Vice-Mayor of Rimini, as the patient began to recover it became “the story everyone talked about” in the hospital.

“Everyone saw hope for the future of all of us in the recovery of a person more than 100 years old,” Lisi said in a televised interview.

“Every day we see the sad stories from these weeks…

I’ve spent the afternoon reading the most-recent materials from the lawsuit between U.S. women national team soccer players and the U.S. Soccer Federation (USSF). And in a word, they are incredible …

The question posed in the headline is apparently the basis of a theory being advanced by the U.S. Soccer Federation in the lawsuit brought by U.S. Women’s National Team players seeking equal pay. To the extent that this theory is accepted by the courts, it has the potential to reshape all women’s sport in the United States.

From a USSF filing yesterday (emphasis in original):

“To prevail on their motion, Plaintiffs must show, based on the facts when viewed in the light most favorable to U.S. Soccer, that any reasonable juror would conclude that U.S. Soccer intentionally paid Plaintiffs less money that it otherwise would have, simply because they are women.”

One need look no further than page 11 of the filing to see USSF making an argument that women are inherently inferior to men, concluding: “Plaintiffs have cited no case (there is none) suggesting that two jobs…

The hysteria generated by COVID-19 is nothing compared to the panic that’s broken out among renewable energy rent-seekers in the USA. With the Federal government channelling $2 trillion into a coronavirus stimulus package, wind and solar outfits appear to be suffering a #metoo moment; they’ve missed out on the cash and they’re crying foul.

The Republican-controlled Senate remains unmoved by tales of the imminent doom of the renewable energy sector in the US. Whereas, the Democrats are pulling out all stops to try and snaffle a substantial slice of that pie in order to redirect it to their benefactors in the wind and solar industries.

U.S. wind, solar industries plead for tax credit ‘tweaks’ to keep projects alive during virus outbreak
Reuters
Nichola Groom
25 March 2020

Wind and solar companies, facing project delays that threaten their ability to tap lucrative green energy subsidies, are pleading with lawmakers for help…

There was a thoughtful short piece in the BNZ’s weekly commentary yesterday on economic prospects for the next few years.  Perhaps there are others around that I missed – I only heard of this one when my son drew this report of it to my attention

BNZ’s head of research Stephen Toplis is warning that economic activity won’t return to pre-crisis levels till some time in 2023, while unemployment might not get back below 5% before 2025.

I gulped. I hadn’t quite thought about it in those specific terms.  But as I did, I realised it probably wasn’t an implausible story (as Toplis notes in his piece, and as everyone must, precise numbers/forecasts have little meaning at present; the issue is more about broad orders of magnitude and the nature of the supporting story).

Toplis’s own short-term story seemed, if anything, insufficiently bleak, although he may just have been making…