Utopia, you are standing in it!

(First Nobel for Literature, that is)

1899-1905

(A sign of the times: last year, 2018, as a result of sexual harassment allegations, the Swedish Academy did not award a Nobel Prize in Literature. This year Olga Togarczuk got the 2018 prize retroactively. Peter Handke got the 2019 prize.)

The Nobel Prize in Literature goes back to the beginning of the twentieth century, when the Nobel Prize Committee decided to look beyond the sciences. The first prize was to be awarded in 1901. There wasn’t much question who deserved it. Leo Tolstoy was still alive. He was not only the greatest novelist ever, probably, but also an imposing moral figure, a champion of non-violent resistance who would eventually inspire Gandhi and Martin Luther King. So the first Nobel Prize in Literature went to …

Sully Prudhomme

No, I haven’t read anything of his. Have you?

Next year they could still have…

Abigail Thompson is a well known professor (and department Chair) of mathematics at the University of California at Davis, specializing in topology. Six years ago she became an inaugural fellow of the American Mathematical Society (AMS), and now she’s a vice president.

But in the December issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, she set herself up for public pillorying by publishing an essay criticizing the mandatory diversity statements that must accompany applications for academic jobs at some colleges and universities, including hers. You can read her short essay by clicking on the screenshot below:

Mathematics has made progress over the past decades towards becoming a more welcoming, inclusive discipline. We should continue…

Bill says it’s time to stop jerking around with wind & solar.

When the world’s richest entrepreneur says wind and solar will never work, it’s probably time to listen.

Bill Gates made a fortune applying common sense to the untapped market of home computing. The meme has it that IBM’s CEO believed there was only a market for five computers in the entire world. Gates thought otherwise. Building a better system than any of his rivals and shrewdly working the marketplace, resulted in hundreds of millions hooked on PCs, Windows and Office. This is a man that knows a thing or two about systems and a lot about what it takes to satisfy the market.

For almost a century, electricity generation and distribution were treated as a tightly integrated system: it was designed and built as one, and is meant to operate as designed. However, the chaotic delivery of wind…

Stephen Kinzer’s latest book, POISONER IN CHIEF: SIDNEY GOTTLIEB AND THE CIA SEARCH FOR MIND CONTROL is a very troubling and disconcerting book.  The fact that the United States government sanctioned a program designed to conduct what the author terms, “brain warfare” highlights a policy that allowed for torture, the use of chemicals to develop control of people’s thoughts, murder, and the disintegration of people and their quality of life making one want to question what these bureaucrats, the military, and the intelligence community as well as the president were thinking.  Those who are familiar with Kinzer’s previous works, THE BROTHERS,  a duel biography of the John Foster and Allen W. Dulles; ALL THE SHAH’S MEN, which describes the errors of American policy toward Iran and the overthrow of the Shah; BITTER FRUIT, an analysis of the CIA coup in Guatemala in 1954;  OVERTHROW

The wind may be free and the sun, when it’s shining, doesn’t cost a penny. But wind and solar literally cost the earth. Put aside the wholesale slaughter of birds, bugs and bats; the destruction of idyllic landscapes and once bustling communities, with residents driven out of their homes by incessant turbine generated low-frequency noise and infrasound.

Then, there’s the inevitable surge in power prices that follows any pursuit of chaotically delivered wind and solar. It’s a night-follows-day kind of thing. Just ask a South Australian, Dane or German.

And you might also direct your enquiry to the people of Georgetown, Texas, where power prices jumped by a fifth overnight.

A town in Texas went “100% renewables” and prices jumped 20%
Jo Nova Blog
Jo Nova
6 November 2019

Georgetown Texas did the Fake Renewables Show and Dance — the one where they “buy” 100% renewables but are connected 24/7…

Canada has a long history of financial/banking stability compared to most other nations.

In this recent speech, Carolina Wilkins, DG at Bank of Canada  points how the system will remain stable despite the worst possible adverse shocks:

Canadian banks are part of a global banking system that is more solid than it was a decade ago. Globally active banks are holding over US$2 trillion more capital than they were at the beginning of 2011, when the phase-in of the post-crisis reforms began. This translates to a 7-percentage point increase in their Tier 1 capital ratio.11  The leverage limits and new liquidity regulations also make these banks more resilient.12

Canada has implemented new measures to further strengthen our banking system. For example, Canada’s prudential regulator, the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI), increased the required amount of capital that Canada’s big banks have to hold to…

Juan Carlos I (Juan Carlos Alfonso Víctor María de Borbón y Borbón-Dos Sicilias, born January 5, 1938) is a member of the Spanish royal family who reigned as King of Spain from November 1975 until his abdication in June 2014.

Juan Carlos was born to Infante Juan, Count of Barcelona, and Princess María de las Mercedes of Bourbon-Two Sicilies in Rome, Italy, where his grandfather King Alfonso XIII of Spain and other members of the Spanish royal family lived in exile following the proclamation of the Second Spanish Republic in 1931. He was baptized as Juan Carlos Alfonso Víctor María de Borbón y Borbón-Dos Sicilias. He was given the name Juan Carlos after his father and maternal grandfather, Prince Carlos of Bourbon-Two Sicilies.

Generalísimo Francisco Franco, the Spanish head of state who initiated the civil war by means of a coup d’état against the constitutional republic in 1936, took over…

The NCEA level 2 economics exam took place yesterday afternoon.  I’d been helping my son with his revision and preparation, in the course of which he’d shown me various exams papers from recent years, and some guidance they’d been given on how to answer some of those (past) questions: what might get Achieved, what Merit, and what Excellence.

I wasn’t exactly reassured by what I saw.

As one example, consider this question from last year’s paper 91222 “Analyse inflation using economic concepts and models”.

The first questions were introduced with this statement

The Quantity Theory of Money states that the quantity of money circulating in the economy is equal to the monetary value of the goods and services available in the economy.

The quantity theory of money starts from the identity –  for thus it is –  MV=PT, where

M = some measure of the money supply,

P = some…