Utopia, you are standing in it!

I wrote last October about how poor nations that followed the pro-market recipe of the “Washington Consensus” in the 1980s and 1990s got good results. Johan Norberg addresses the same topic in this video.

Sadly, international organizations are infamous nowadays for the bizarre argument that developing nations should try to boost prosperity by imposing higher taxes and bigger government. I’m not joking.

I was even a credentialed participant at a conference on precisely this topic at the United Nations. It was a strange experience to be surrounded by anti-empirical people, but at least I wasn’t threatened with arrest, as happened at an OECD event.

Needless to say, these folks also think it’s a good idea to use foreign aid to finance bigger fiscal burdens in poor nations.

I’ve previously explained why this is a bad idea, at least if we care about achieving more prosperity for people. Simply stated…

The fact that Scotland’s wind farms have pocketed £650m for not generating power has attracted more than just a little attention.

STT has run several stories over the last few months about wind power outfits being paid very handsomely to NOT generate electricity. Perhaps it’s the sense of outrage that comes with knowing a group of unscrupulous thugs are being paid for doing nothing that’s prompted a flurry of articles, including this one.

Wind turbines generate more cash when switched off and Scots customers shouldering £650m blame
Daily Record
Paul Rodger
17 January 2020

Constraint payments have been paid to energy firms in charge of wind farms, when demand for electricity falls or winds are too strong for turbines to operate.

Wind turbines generate more cash when they’re switched OFF than when they’re working – with customers shouldering nearly £650 million in payments over a decade.

So-called ‘constraint payments’, a…

A new communication handbook for IPCC scientists is published. It is compiled by Climate Outreach and was commissioned by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Working Group I Technical Support Unit. They want this handbook out “ahead of the IPCC’s 1.5 degrees special report later this year”.

Interesting.

The handbook also comes with a video explaining the 6 principles to help IPCC scientists better communicate their work. They already lost me in the second sentence in that video though:

The facts are there, thanks in great part to the IPCC – the world’s leading scientific body on climate change

As a biologist, I get especially irked at the repeated claim that sex in humans is “a spectrum, not a binary.” In fact, as I’ve discussed several times before (e.g., here, here, here and here), sex might as well be a binary, because the overwhelming majority of people conform to the definitions of either male or female, which involve differential gamete production (sperm vs. eggs), and only slightly fewer fail to conform to a binary of other primary sexual characteristics (appearance of genitalia) or secondary sexual characteristics that appear at puberty (breasts, pubic hair, etc.).

To be a bit more precise, biological sex in humans is bimodal: if you do a frequency plot with “sex” on the X axis and “frequency of individuals conforming to that sex” on the Y axis, you get a huge peak at “male”, another huge peak at “female”, and then a…

As voters across the country head to the polls this month, we thought it was an ideal opportunity to look back at some of the research on 19th century elections we have featured in our blogs over the past few years. These draw on our work for the History of Parliament’s House of Commons, 1832-68 project, which is producing biographical profiles of the 2,591 MPs who sat between the first and second Reform Acts and accounts of the 401 constituencies in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales across the nine general elections which took place during this period. You can find more details about our project here.

The system under which electors cast their votes between 1832 and 1868 was very different in many ways from the modern British electoral system. As our editor, Philip Salmon, explains in this post, before the introduction of the secret ballot in 1872…

A browse through the BBC News style guide reveals plenty of examples of the BBC’s policy of moving away from the use of place names introduced or preferred by foreign conquerors and past rulers.

“Belarus

formerly part of the Soviet Union as Byelorussia; now independent. Adjective, Belarusian.”

“Burma

The BBC has been moving towards calling the country Myanmar. We should use Myanmar rather than Burma in headlines and summaries. Inside the body of our stories, preferably on first mention, we should include the wording “Myanmar, also known as Burma”. Further references should be to Myanmar. We should talk about the main commercial city as “Yangon, also known as Rangoon”, and thereafter Yangon.” 

“Calcutta

As of early 2015, our style is to use Kolkata for the Indian city. It may be helpful for readers if we use this construction once high up in the story: People in the Indian city of Kolkata (Calcutta)…”

“Chennai

As of…

On this date in History: February 13, 1542 Execution of Catherine Howard, 5th wife of King Henry VIII of England and Ireland.

Catherine Howard (c. 1523 – February 13, 1542) was Queen of England from 1540 until 1541, as the fifth wife of Henry VIII. She (then 16 or 17) married him (then 49) on July 28, 1540, at Oatlands Palace, in Surrey, almost immediately after the annulment of his marriage to Anne of Cleves was arranged.

Catherine’s uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, found her a place at Court in the household of the King’s fourth wife, Anne of Cleves. As a young and attractive lady-in-waiting, Catherine quickly caught Henry’s eye. The King had displayed little interest in Anne from the beginning, but on Cromwell’s failure to find a new match for Henry, Norfolk saw an opportunity. The Howards may have sought to recreate the influence gained during Queen Anne’s reign…

by Judith Curry

A range of scenarios for global mean surface temperature change between 2020 and 2050, derived using a semi-empirical approach. All three modes of natural climate variability – volcanoes, solar and internal variability – are expected to act in the direction of cooling during this period.

I used to admire the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU); I used to donate to the ACLU and was a member of the ACLU; the ACLU took my case when I was drafted illegally, and got me (and several thousand COs) out of our alternative service when the courts ruled unequivocally that the government had violated its own rules. Over history, the ACLU has been a fantastic organization for preserving the civil liberties of everyone, particularly those who are oppressed.

But now they’re going woke, and thereby going downhill. Like the Southern Poverty Law Center, they have decided to get into the social-justice arena—which would be okay except that they are taking positions that are neither reasonable nor supportable. In this case, they’re trying to argue that it’s discriminatory to prohibit biological men who claim that they’re women—”transgender” athletes who have undergone neither surgical nor hormone therapy—from competing in…

Following on from Martin Spychal’s blog about the paper he gave at last month’s ‘From “Old Corruption” to the New Corruption?’ conference, organised jointly by Oxford Brookes and Newman Universities, we hear from our assistant editor Kathryn Rix. She gave the conference keynote, looking at parliamentary efforts to tackle the problem of electoral corruption in the nineteenth century.

Election medal, Ripon, 1832. Image (c) K. Rix

In December 1832 voters in the Yorkshire borough of Ripon went to the poll for the first time in more than a century. The victory of the Reformers Thomas Staveley and Joshua Crompton over their two Conservative rivals was commemorated with a medal, depicting ‘The genius of patriotism driving corruption from the constitution’ and bearing the inscription ‘Purity and independence triumphant!’ In other constituencies, too, hopes were expressed that the 1832 Reform Act would mark the beginning of a new era of electoral…