Utopia, you are standing in it!

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…

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…