Utopia, you are standing in it!

Of the more delusional claims made by wind power proponents, the notion that wind power is more dependable and reliable than coal-fired power, takes the cake.

Back in December, Victoria’s Premier, Daniel Andrews revealed his tenuous grip on reality when he made the very same assertion: Deranged & Delusional: Victorian Government Claims Wind & Solar More Reliable Than Fossil Fuels

As the readily available output data demonstrated then, Victoria’s coal-fired plants deliver the goods with all the certitude of a Swiss watch, day after day, whereas Victoria’s wind industry puts in a pathetic performance, every single day.

This time it’s the loopy hard-left ‘think tank’, the Australia Institute demonstrating its inability to think, very much at all.

Last week a single 660 MW unit at the Bayswater coal-fired plant went down for urgent repairs and, right on cue, the Australia Institute started howling that it was “dangerous” to depend upon…

Armen Alchian passed away today at the age of 98. Others have chimed in with their thoughts on Alchian and his work (see here and here, for example) and I thought that I would as well. As many others have noted, Alchian was insightful and clever. He had a unique ability to communicate clever, unique, and insightful ideas in a way that suggested that these ideas were obvious. In fact, these ideas were often profound in both clarifying topics and in inspiring the work of fellow economists.

The aspect of Alchian’s work that I have found most insightful and most challenging is thinking about the economy as a coordination problem. There are few, if any, economists who have done as much in terms of thinking about economics in this light as Alchian did and the profession is much better for his insights.

No doubt, in the next couple of…

The PBS “American Experience” documentary about Joseph R. McCarthy, the notorious red-baiting U.S. senator of the early Cold War, aired earlier this month. I have puzzled about the program since.

Timing was a source of puzzlement. Why now? Why revisit the McCarthy story in January 2020? Anniversaries can be a convenient peg for such programs. But nothing in early January was memorably associated with the McCarthy saga.

So why now? The producers no doubt wanted to suggest that President Donald Trump, in his bluster, exaggerations, and combative demeanor, is reminiscent of McCarthy.

If that were the implication, the allusion was muddled. And under-developed. Which could be because Trump is a much more complex character than Joe McCarthy, an obscure, hard-drinking Republican senator from Wisconsin who seized on his communists-in-government campaign as a ticket to prominence.

PBS ‘McCarthy’ doc: Notable for what was omitted

So the documentary was notable…

UPDATE: I left this comment after the Slate piece, but it appears to have been removed. I’m not sure why, as there are far more vitriolic comments in the thread.

Jerry Coyne

Victoria, Princess Royal (Victoria Adelaide Mary Louisa; November 21, 1840 – August 5, 1901) was German Empress and Queen of Prussia by marriage to German Emperor Friedrich III. She was the eldest child of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom and Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and was created Princess Royal in 1841. She was the mother of German Emperor Wilhelm II.

In the German Confederation, Prince Wilhelm of Prussia and his wife Princess Augusta of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach were among the personalities with whom Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were allies. The British sovereign also had regular epistolary contact with her cousin Augusta since 1846. The revolution that broke out in Berlin in 1848 further strengthened the links between the two royal couples by requiring the heir presumptive to the Prussian throne to find shelter for three months in the British court.

In 1851, William returned to London with his…

The wind industry is like the partying college students that trash their parent’s house, never sparing a thought about cleaning up the mess afterwards.

With subsidies being slashed across the globe, the great wind industry ‘party’ will inevitably draw to a close. And the adults will need to raise the tricky issue about who cleans up the mess? And who pays?

Giant industrial wind turbines have an economic lifespan around 15 years, after which the chances are that they’ll be left to rust in some idiot’s back paddock.

Decommissioning these things properly at a sizeable wind farm would run into the hundreds of millions. Then there’s the toxic waste.

Already, thousands of 45-70m blades are being ground up and mixed with concrete used in the bases of other turbines erected later or simply dumped in landfill. Which should worry locals: the plastics in the blades are highly toxic, and…

The title of this post refers to F.A. Hayek’s essay ‘Why I am Not a Conservative’, which can be found as an appendix to his 1960 book The Constitution of Liberty. What this post is really about is the deficiencies of American conservatism and the general idea of liberal conservatism or a natural alliance between classical liberals and conservatives. However, first a few words about Hayek’s essay as Hayek is an important figure for liberty advocates. The essay in question is well known and particularly easy to find online.

Hayek’s criticism of conservatism overestimates the extent to which it is just a limiting position, slowing down change. The relation of conservatism to tradition is seem too much as conservatism being too slow to accept changes to tradition. Traditionalist conservatism, however, has been a much more active and dangerous force than that. ‘Traditionalism’ as far as I know…

This is the second post inspired by a short essay in the New York Times, “When beliefs and facts collide,” by Brendan Nyhan, whose essay itself discusses a 49-page paper by Dan M. Kahan that’s in press in Advances in Political Psychology. Kahan is a professor of law and psychology at Yale. (Kahan’s paper, in advance form, can be downloaded free at the link at bottom). All the figures and quotes in this post, save for one at the end, come from the longer paper.

The subject of both pieces is why so many Americans deny palpably true science, in particular evolution and human-caused global warming. Both of these “theories” are supported by mountains of evidence (no rational scientist would deny evolution, and something like 97% of climate scientists also accept that human activities are making the Earth warmer). My previous post, a few days ago, was on evolution…

(Stalin and Svetlana during her early teens)

When one thinks about the demonic characters that dominated the twentieth century most people do not focus on the impact their lives have had on their offspring.  But with Rosemary Sullivan’s remarkable new biography, STALIN’S DAUGHTER: THE EXTRAORDINARY AND TUMULTUOUS LIFE OF SVETLANA ALLILUYEVA we have just such a book.  Sullivan’s narrative and analysis is thoughtful and reasoned and by the conclusion of her 623 page effort the reader will feel they have entered a surreal world that explored not only Stalin’s child, but the author of the cult of personality that dominated Russian history from 1924 until his death in 1953.  What emerges is a portrait of a child who is raised in the ultimate dysfunctional family.  Svetlana had to endure the suicide of her mother, Nadya in 1932, the erratic emotional roll a coaster that was her father, and the demands…

(Soviet leader Joseph Stalin)

In her first book, THE SPY WHO CHANGED HISTORY: THE UNTOLD STORY OF HOW THE SOVIET UNION WON THE RACE FOR AMERICA’S TOP SECRETS Svetlana Lokhova argues that in the early 1930s Joseph Stalin came to the realization that if the Soviet Union was to survive drastic measures needed to be taken to improve the state of Soviet technology visa vie the west.  The Russian dictator stated that “We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries.  We must catch up in ten years.  Either we do it, or they will crush us.”  Stalin feared that large numbers of enemy aircraft could easily release poisonous gases over Soviet territory resulting in the death of millions.  The Soviet dictator’s solution was multifaceted; starve millions of peasants to death through collectivization to acquire hard currency to assist in Russia’s industrialization, show trials/purges/murder of those who opposed…

If you like quizzes, you might want to see this one at the New York Times, though it’s pretty lame. It’s not one that you can get graded on, but a series of 35 question (with clicks for the “reveals”), asking how much you know about the primaries, the caucuses, how and when you should vote, who’s ahead, and, at the end—where it gets really lame)—”Are we going to be o.k.?” and “When is this all over?”. Sure, maybe those are lighthearted questions, but they’re dumb. Click below if you want to inflict more politics on your beleaguered carcass:

Here’s question 11 with the reveal, though of course it’s way early in the election to prognosticate about winners:

At least it’s an interesting race, with a centrist in a narrow lead, followed by a socialist and then a progressive, with all the rest bunching up below 10%. When I…

The long quote below, about obsession, instability and indifference to reality, is from George Orwell’s essay “Notes on Nationalism” (May 1945, Polemic). Orwell presciently captures accurately the mental outlook of contemporary Race & Gender Identity Politics social justice warriors, who are nationalists in his sense:

By ‘nationalism’ I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad’. But secondly — and this is much more important — I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests.

From: Notes on Nationalism

Obsession. As nearly as possible, no nationalist ever thinks, talks, or writes about anything except the superiority…