Utopia, you are standing in it!

On November 16, 1936, King Edward VIII invited Prime Minister Baldwin to Buckingham Palace and expressed his desire to marry Mrs Wallis Simpson when she became free to remarry. Baldwin informed him that his subjects would deem the marriage morally unacceptable, largely because remarriage after divorce was opposed by the Church of England, and the people would not tolerate Simpson as queen. As king, Edward VIII was the titular head of the Church, and the clergy expected him to support the Church’s teachings. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Gordon Lang, was vocal in insisting that Edward VIII must go.

Edward VIII proposed an alternative solution of a morganatic marriage, in which he would remain king but Simpson would not become queen consort. She would enjoy some lesser title instead, and any children they might have would not inherit the throne. This was supported by senior politician Winston Churchill in principle…

I had earlier pointed to an excellent interview of Robert Barroon Fiscal Multipliers and Paul Krugman. In a new interview he says the same things – fiscal multipliers are less than one (which means not a multiplier at all) and also lists a reading list on Great Depression.

His take on fiscal multipliers:

IMF F&D (Dec-2019 edition) profiles Ed Glaesar of Harvard Univ:

Growing up in New York City in the 1970s, Edward Glaeser saw a great metropolis in decline. Crime was soaring. Garbage piled up on sidewalks as striking sanitation workers walked off the job. The city teetered on the edge of bankruptcy.

By the mid-1980s, it was clear that New York would bounce back. But it could still be a scary place; there was a triple homicide across the street from his school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Glaeser was nevertheless captivated by New York’s bustling street life and spent hours roaming its neighborhoods.

“It was both wonderful and terrifying, and it was hard not to be obsessed by it,” Glaeser recalls in an interview at his office at Harvard University.

Today, that sense of wonder still permeates Glaeser’s work as an urban economist. He deploys the economist’s…

The hidden cost of attempting to rely upon sunshine and breezes is truly staggering, ask a German, Dane or South Australian about the power prices they suffer. They’re the world’s highest, by the way. And all three of them compete for bragging rights about which of them has the greatest proportion of renewables in the grid. In short, if you want rocketing power prices just add wind and solar to your grid (see above the Australian experience, so far).

From the get go, renewable energy rent seekers have attempted to conceal a raft of costs associated with the inherent unreliability and chaotic intermittency of wind and solar.

In an address to Indiana’s 21st Century Energy Task Force, Mike Nasi (an electricity markets expert and regulatory attorney) lifts the lid on what the wind and solar ‘industries’ would rather care to avoid.

True costs of renewables – the Texas lesson
YouTube

Different decades have been obsessed with different doomsdays. From the 1940s to the early 1960s, people worried especially about nuclear war. From the late 1960s on, fears of overpopulation and ecological doom came to the fore. John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (1968) is still one of the best science fictional imaginings of a planet cracking apart under the stress of overpopulation, a richly detailed piece of world-building. Like all visions of the future, it reflects the time it was conceived in, carrying a sense that the cultural revolutions of the 60s were spinning out of control.

For non-fiction there was The Limits to Growth (1972). Here is Scenario 1 from the book, generated by a computer model of the interaction of population, resources, industry, food, and pollution. Fiddling with the model suggested that it would be very hard to avoid a massive collapse in one form or other. If…

“We have about ten years before we get into a irreversible situation”, said Nic Balthazar (see previous post). Just as in an earlier interview at the end of December 2018, he based his claim on the IPCC SR15 report that was “clearer than ever”. But then, I read the SR15 report before and I didn’t find anything that suggests that there would be tipping points at a 1.5 C temperature increase.

As far as I know, the SR15 report was commissioned at the 2015 Paris conference and the question back then was: which are the effects of the threshold of 1.5 C (proposed at the conference) compared to the 2 C threshold that was valid until that conference?

That is what I also see in the SR15 report: how do the two thresholds compare. So how on earth does he come to the conclusion that the SR15 report shows that…

Note: I just saw that this is the post #21,000 on this site. I like round numbers.

As I reported splenetically the other day, an “artwork” consisting of a banana duct-taped to a wall, “created” by “artist” Maurizio Cattelan, sold for $120,000. What a scam, if for no other reason than the banana was going to rot. In fact, Cattelan created two of these “installations”, and the second sold for $150,000, making a cool $270,000 going into the pocket of this charlatan. It also proves that there are “art” lovers with far more money than sense.

I was thus pleased to hear that, according to several sources, a prankster yanked the banana from the wall and ate it. Here’s the New York Times report:

From the article:

Jeremy Corbyn’s record of defending, embracing and expressing support for extreme anti-Semites is extremely well-documented, and goes back decades.  Whilst it would be hard to determine which example mostly aptly demonstrates his visceral contempt for Israel and hostility towards Jews qua Jews, a new video surfaced from 2013 which certainly would belong on any short list.

https://twitter.com/GnasherJew/status/1203240625270861825

Before commenting on Corbyn’s words, we should point the insidious lie by the preceding speaker in claiming (in response to a question) that no Arab country carried out an expulsion of Jews, which Corbyn of course fails to challenge.

The fact is that there is no historical debate over the fact that, from the 1940s through the 1960s, over 800,000 Jews (almost the entire population) were ethnically  cleansed from Arab lands.  Though policies in individual Arab countries varied, the ethnic cleansing largely consisted of (Nuremberg style) antisemitic laws limiting Jews’ social and…

I’ve written many columns about Sweden and Denmark over the past 10-plus years, and I’ve also written several times about Norway and Iceland.

But I’ve mostly neglected Finland, other than some analysis of the country’s experiment with “basic income” in 2017 and 2018.

Now, thanks to a very interesting column in the New York Times, it’s time to rectify that oversight. According to the authors, Anu Partanen and Trevor Corson, Finland is a great place with lots of goodies provided by taxpayers.

Finland, of course, is one of those Nordic countries that we hear some Americans, including President Trump, describe as unsustainable and oppressive — “socialist nanny states.”…We’ve now been living in Finland for more than a year. The difference between our lives here and in the States has been tremendous… What we’ve experienced is an increase in personal freedom. …in Finland, we are automatically covered…