Utopia, you are standing in it!

Today (5 Feb) marks the birthday of Sir Robert Peel (1788-1850), the 19th century prime minister traditionally credited with founding the modern Conservative party. Peel is also subject of a new BBC ‘Prime Properties’ episode – click here to view – and the latest video from the History of Parliament’s public engagement team.

Perhaps more than any other Victorian leader, Peel’s career was dominated by themes and events that continue to have striking resonances today. These include implementing controversial constitutional reforms that divided his party, heading a short-lived minority Tory government and winning a landslide Conservative election victory using new electoral techniques. The extent of Peel’s role in rebuilding the Conservative party after its catastrophic election defeat in 1832, however, has always been a moot point. Peel was notoriously aloof and awkward as a leader. A new breed of party officials instead exerted considerable control behind the scenes during…

Acculturation – the cultural modification of an individual, group, or people by adapting to or borrowing traits from another culture or a merging of cultures – is increasingly evident in this country’s public agencies.

The Reserve Bank of New Zealand has not escaped the process.  In July 2018, soon after Adrian Orr became the governor, the Otago Daily Times reported the new  head of the country’s august central bank was planning to shift the mindset of the institution towards better embracing the rich cultural diversity of the country.

Since he had taken up the post (the ODT reported)

… phrases like tikanga Maori and te reo have begun to feature prominently on its priority list.

And:

Under his watch, the bank’s Statement of Intent, where it sets out its strategic objectives to the Government for the next four years, highlights its intent to embed  te reo and tikanga Maori into…

“The common enemy of humanity is man.
In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up
with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming,
water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these
dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through
changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome.
The real enemy then, is humanity itself.“
– Club of Rome,
premier environmental think-tank,
consultants to the United Nations

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the
industrialized civilizations collapse?
Isn’t it our responsiblity to bring that about?”
– Maurice Strong,
founder of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP)

•••

ANTHROPOGENIC “climate change”, and the control of carbon dioxide (energy) has deep roots in a radical, yet gravely misguided campaign to reduce the world’s population.

A misanthropic agenda engineered by the environmental movement in the…

Whilst the Hollywood blacklisting of the mid-20th century claimed some innocent victims,it’s undeniable that the problem of communist infiltration into US society, including the motion picture industry, was a legitimate national security threat. So, if the means used to fight this threat were often flawed, it was certainly based on an entirely accurate diagnosis: That the root cause of the Cold War was Soviet Communism.

The recent release of the UN Human Rights Council’s (UNHRC)blacklist of (mostly Israeli) companies that operate in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem and other disputed territories across the 1949 Armistice lines represents a different dynamic: an entirely ahistorical diagnosis of the root cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  The political premise of the blacklist, which represents conventional wisdom at international bodies like the UNHRC, in the mainstream media and, at least until recently, within the US government, is that Israeli ‘settlements’ represent the…

A few days ago, and previously as well, I discussed the difficult issue of transgender women seeking to compete in women’s sports. The thorny issue of “what do you do with males transitioning to the female gender?” or with those who have completed their transition, is often resolved by many with the simple Diktat: “Transgender women are women.” Well, when it comes to “transgender” women who have undergone no hormonal or medical therapy, but are simply biological men who have declared that they are women, the issue isn’t so simple, at least when it comes to sports.

Of course, as I’ve repeated endlessly, anybody who claims they’re a woman should be respected as such, and not discriminated against in nearly any way. But sports is an exception.

I won’t go into the issue of men who have had hormone therapy and the like, though many times they…

Shohreh Bayat is an Iranian chess master and an arbiter, or trainer, for FIDE, the international chess organization. Here’s her FIDE profile, in which she wears the obligatory hijab (click on screenshot to see more information on the profile):

But it’s that hijab, or rather the lack thereof, that got her into trouble, but also shows us that she’s one of those brave Iranian women who fights their government’s sexist laws.

Bayat describes what happened to her in this poignant article in the Washington Post (if you’re paywalled, copies are available via judicious inquiry).

Bayat loved chess but also was losing her faith in Islam. And she didn’t want to wear the hijab, which of course is obligatory in Iran, but is also obligatory for women representing Iran overseas. It wound up putting her at odds with her government’s chess federation. As she writes:

When traveling abroad for chess tournaments…

Our new paper on IPCC scenarios is now posted as a preprint. Details below and I have summarized it in a new column at Forbes.

Burgess, M. G., Ritchie, J., Shapland, J., & Pielke, R., Jr. (2020, February 18). IPCC baseline scenarios over-project CO2 emissions and economic growth. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/ahsxw SocArXiv

Abstract

Scenarios used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are central to climate science and policy. A recent Nature commentary found observed trends and International Energy Agency (IEA) projections of global CO2 emissions substantially diverging from high-emission scenarios such as RCP8.5, which are often treated as equivalent to ‘business as usual’ in climate research and assessment. Here, we quantify the bases for this divergence by comparing “baseline” (or “no policy”) scenario projections of key fossil-fuel CO2 emission drivers to observations from 2005-2017, and also to projections through 2040 from world energy outlooks. We find most of…

I’m not a big fan of “feminist science”—the idea (promulgated by people like Evelyn Fox Keller and Sandra Harding) that women’s psychology gives them unique insights into nature and unique ways to study it.  But I am a fan of “feminist science criticism”: the idea that women can sometimes point out male biases in research strategies and in the interpretation of scientific results.  And a prime example of feminist criticism is on offer this week on Slate.  Three of its columnists have taken on evolutionary psychology, using as a springboard the Slate article by Jesse Bering that I wrote about a few days ago.

As you recall, Bering highlighted a number of “scientific” studies purporting to show that women have a genetic “rape kit”: an evolved set of behavioral modules that act only during ovulation to reduce the possibility of rape.  These behaviors include increased grip strength, avoidance…

By Larry Bell ~

As we all recognize, access to clean and reliable energy is fundamentally important to countless aspects of our lives, our social and economic communities, and our long-term abilities to live in healthy balance with natural ecosystems.

So, this being the case, can we expect a new so-called “clean energy revolution” — primarily referring to wind and solar — to replace the “dirty old” hydrocarbon industries?

For example, like what happened when hydrocarbon-fueled internal combustion horsepower disrupted buggy whip businesses of the early 1900s — and when flip-phone makers lost out at the dawn of Apple’s iPhone?

Don’t count on such reality-challenged notions regarding hydrocarbon obsolescence occurring anytime soon.

No current energy technology on the immediate horizon has a game-changing potential anywhere nearly analogous to the truly revolutionary invention of the transistor or internet.

Nor, for that matter, has any so-called “alternative” energy source or invention supplanted…

Shouting match?
Is the political element of the climate change debate taking over from the science factors? That seems to be the implication of the opinion piece reported on here.

An excellent new meme has entered the climate change debate thanks to David Harsanyi, writing in The Federalist. In his article he articulates why wide acceptance of catastrophic climate change is failing to manifest: because it comes along with an enormous amount of left wing baggage. He summarises it as ‘leftist malware’.

For those not familiar, ‘malware’ is a term used to describe software that is often harmful or intrusive and usually installs itself on your computer without your consent or knowledge. I can’t think of a better metaphor that captures the essential noxiousness of the climate change movement so neatly.

I’m still a bit under the weather with an incipient cold, but I’m taking zinc lozenges, which do have some science behind them supporting the claim that zinc shortens the duration and severity of colds. At any rate, since I’ve used them I haven’t had a full-on cold for several years. (A confounding factor: I also wash my hands a lot more.) All this is by way of explaining why I don’t have the energy to brain today.

But I will call your attention to three articles on evolutionary psychology that you may want to read.

About 15 years ago, I was known as a critic of evolutionary psychology, mainly because, along with Andrew Berry, I went after what I saw as bad science promulgated in a book about rape being an adaptation (see also here; copy of my New Republic piece available through judicious inquiry). In those pieces…

Labor – aka the ‘Workers Party’ – remains determined to destroy whole industries and thousands of jobs with a 50% RET and a giant ‘carbon’ tax. Business and job destroying policies that helped it comfortably lose the ‘unloseable’ Federal election in May, and which its deluded front bench simply can’t bear to let go.

Australian industry has been a protected species since the Victorian gold rush in the 1850s, cosseted behind an insurmountable wall of tariffs and propped up with subsidies. As the tariffs and subsidies to industries – such as motor manufacturing, clothing and footwear – were slashed in the 1990s, hundreds of businesses and entire industries have disappeared.

Nowadays, mining, manufacturing and mineral processing are being treated by politicians as a class of mangy vermin – fit only for urgent eradication – with a raft of utterly insane energy policies which threaten thousands of small and large businesses…

In yesterday’s Sunday Star-Times another article by their reporter Kate MacNamara shed further light on just how unsuited Adrian Orr is to be Governor of the Reserve Bank, exercising huge public policy and regulatory power still (in large chunks of the Bank’s responsibilities, often with crisis dimensions to them) as sole decisionmaker, with few/no effective checks and balances.  These disclosures should also raise serious questions about the judgement and diligence of the Board who were primarily responsible for Orr’s appointment and are primarily responsible for holding him to account, and of the Minister of Finance who formally appointed Orr, and is responsible now for both him and for the Board.

In this latest in her series of articles, MacNamara draws on the responses to one of several Official Information Act requests she had lodged late last year.  She had sought from the Bank copies of communications between the Governor and…