Utopia, you are standing in it!

Continuing the series on the turmoil of 1659-1660, which saw a retreat from radicalism and political experiment, Dr Vivienne Larminie, assistant editor of the Commons 1640-1660 section, looks at the manoeuvrings of politicians and army officers in a period of great tension and uncertainty…

By late January 1660 the English republic had entered its last days – although its imminent extinction was probably not inevitable, and certainly not apparent to all contemporary observers. The ‘interruption’ of Parliament forced by dissident army officers in October 1659 had ended when their alliance crumbled from within and was assailed from without. In early December forces led by Sir Arthur Hesilrige and Harbert Morley, who weeks earlier had mounted unsuccessful resistance to the military coup in Whitehall, captured strategically significant Portsmouth. On 14 December they issued a strongly-worded condemnation of coup leader Charles Fleetwood and his colleagues, asserting that the army…

Renewable energy rent seekers have turned the ‘it’s a climate catastrophe’ dial all the way to 11 in an effort to convince us that our only salvation is an all sun and wind powered future.

At the top end of town where bank executives and institutional investors roam, the propaganda is directed at convincing ‘the money’ that the only safe bets in town are heavily subsidised windmills and solar panels. Investors are told that conventional base-load generators, coal, nuclear and gas are already redundant and that only a lunatic would invest in meaningful power generation from here on.

One well beat up myth used in an attempt to spook sensible investors is that China has already snubbed coal-fired power generation in favour of wind and solar. Except that the Chinese have done just the reverse.

Instead of worshipping nature’s wonder fuels, China is flat out building hundreds of high-efficiency, low-emissions…

Three years on from the collapse of the Northern Ireland Executive prompted by the RHI scandal, a power sharing government has returned to Stormont on the back of a deal that promises a ‘new approach’. Alan Whysall analyses the new deal, how it might work in practice and what pitfallls might await the new ministerial team.

We have devolved government in Northern Ireland once more, with a new political deal, New Decade, New Approach. This is a cause for real hope, responding to the public mood, and the politics dictate it must operate for the moment. Many of the underpinnings are, however, fragile. Government and politics need to operate differently if they are to succeed in the longer term.

The last thousand days

Government in Northern Ireland has been in abeyance for three years. In early 2017, one of the two main parties, Sinn Féin, withdrew over the involvement…

As New Zealand’s politicians contemplate a September election, are there lessons for them from the successes of right of centre parties in Australia, the US and UK – and their failure in Canada?

Caution is needed in drawing conclusions, given a few well-placed ballots can be the margin between radiant success and crushing failure.  Reference the election of Donald Trump with fewer votes than Hilary Clinton in 2016, and last year’s defeat of Andrew Scheer’s Canadian Conservatives despite winning more votes than Justin Trudeau’s Liberal party.

But one thing to reflect on is what right of centre parties stand for – and what the median voter thinks they stand for.

Back in 2014, I compared Hong Kong’s amazing growth with Cuba’s pitiful stagnation and made the obvious point that free markets and limited government are the right recipe for prosperity.

Especially if you care about improving the lives of the less fortunate.

Communists claim that their ideology represents the downtrodden against the elite, yet the evidence from Cuba shows wretched material deprivation for most people.

In Hong Kong, by contrast, incomes have soared for all segments of the population.

Today, let’s update our comparison of Cuba and Hong Kong. Law & Liberty has posted a a fascinating review of Neil Monnery’s book, A Tale of Two Economies, authored by Alberto Mingardi from Italy’s Bruno Leoni Institute.

As Alberto explains, the book is about how developments in both Hong Kong and Cuba were shaped by two individuals.

How important are key individuals in shaping the success or failure of economies?…

I’ve been looking into claims for concern over rising CO2 and temperatures, and this post provides reasons why the alarms are exaggerated. It involves looking into the data and how it is interpreted.

Source: Met Office Hadley Centre observations https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcrut4/data/current/download.html

First the longer view suggests where to focus for understanding. Consider a long term temperature record such as Hadcrut4. Taking it at face value, setting aside concerns about revisions and adjustments, we can see what has been the pattern in the last 120 years following the Little Ice Age. Often the period between 1850 and 1900 is considered pre industrial since modern energy and machinery took hold later on. The graph shows that warming was not much of a factor until temperatures rose peaking in the 1940s, then cooling off into the 1970s, before ending the century with a rise matching the rate of earlier warming. Overall, the accumulated warming…

Here are two interviews with Neil Young that were made fifteen years ago but apparently have just been released by the Musicians Hall of Fame in Nashville. Both videos are noted as having been “recorded in the Masterlink Studio in Nashville, TN on June 29, 2005.”

In this first interview (it doesn’t really “reveal the secrets to hit records”), Neil gives credit to musicians who are often seen as less important than the “front men” in bands, including studio groups and arrangers. Listen to why he thought Jimi Hendrix was the greatest guitar innovator of the era.  And he gives huge credit to the underappreciated J. J. Cale. Young obviously has a percipient take on rock music, able to suss out influences that the rest of us can’t. I have to say that he’s a lot more articulate than I thought given his reputation as a wild man.

Henry VIII (June 28, 1491 – January 28, 1547) was King of England from 1509 until his death in 1547. He was the second Tudor monarch, succeeding his father Henry VII. Henry VIII is best known for his six marriages, in particular his efforts to have his first marriage (to Catherine of Aragon) annulled. His disagreement with the Pope on the question of such an annulment led Henry to initiate the English Reformation, separating the Church of England from papal authority and the Roman Catholic Church. He appointed himself the Supreme Head of the Church of England and dissolved convents and monasteries, for which he was excommunicated.

Illness and Death

Late in life, Henry became obese, with a waist measurement of 54 inches (140 cm), and had to be moved about with the help of mechanical inventions. He was covered with painful, pus-filled boils and possibly suffered from gout. His obesity…

The so-called wind and solar ‘industries’ were built on lies, myths and propaganda and run on subsidies. As wind power ‘investor’ Warren Buffett put it: “We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.” Buffett might have continued, that it’s the only reason anyone invests in them.

As to the lies, myths and propaganda, the spate of bushfires that have swept Queensland, NSW, Victoria and South Australian this summer have energized doomsday climate cultists who – without a shred of scientific evidence – pronounce, with godlike certitude, that those fires were all caused by Australia’s failure to rein in its carbon dioxide gas emissions. Ergo, those fires could have been wholly prevented had we only carpeted every inch of the Australian countryside with windmills and every rooftop with solar panels.

It’s…

As noted previously, the Commonwealth Government released a Second Exposure Draft of their proposed Religious Discrimination Bill in December 2019, inviting public comment by Friday 31st January 2020. I have now provided my submission on this draft, which is linked here for those who would like to consult it:

In short, I think this legisation is an important step in improving protection of religious freedom in Australia, and the second draft is an improvement on the first. But I recommend some clarification or change of approach in the following areas:

• Defining Religious Belief – I recommend that the way that the courts should determine whether a claim to religious belief is justified should focus on sincerity rather than courts examining “reasonableness” ; I also think that the bar of “unlawfulness” determining what beliefs cannot be protected at all needs to be raised to mainly cover serious criminal…

In 2018 a paper of mine on climate policy — my first after going walkabout from climate writing for a few years — discussed how assumptions of so-called “integrated assessment models” served to limit our discussion of climate policy:

• Opening Up the Climate Policy Envelope (2018): “A third example of a key assumption used to reinforce the boundaries of the business-as-usual climate policy envelope has been the heavy reliance on a particular emission scenario, called RCP (Representative Concentration Pathway) 8.5, in climate impact studies.”

Here are quick links to the series of articles I’ve had so far on RCP8.5 at Forbes.

• 26 Sept 2019: “The misuse of RCP 8.5 involves the transformation of what is more accurately described as a worst-case scenario into the sole “business as usual” or baseline scenario that has become a centerpiece of climate policy discussions.”
• 7 Oct 2019: “One way that integrated assessment…