Utopia, you are standing in it!

We know there will be an election on 12 December, but the outcome, in terms of parliamentary seats and who will form the next government, remains uncertain. Robert Hazell and Harrison Shaylor answer some of the key questions about what happens if the election creates another hung parliament.

With an increasingly volatile electorate, and uncertain forecasts in the polls, it is possible the 2019 election will result in another hung parliament. Although bookmakers currently have a Conservative majority as comfortably the most likely election result, and the Conservatives are currently polling around 11 points ahead of Labour, a hung parliament is by no means out of the question. It would be the third hung parliament in four general elections. This explains what lessons can be learned from our previous experience of hung parliaments at Westminster and around the world. It addresses questions such as how a new government is formed…

The wind industry is built on lies and runs on subsidies. But, in a rare turn of events, an effort to cover up the cost of those subsidies has come unstuck, in grand style.

Initially, Andrew Cuomo’s cronies put forward a lowball figure for the cost of subsidies to wind power in New York State, which drew attention from the Empire Center’s Ken Girardin.

In a blog post, Girardin sought to get behind those figures (based on rubbery accounting) and calculate precisely what Cuomo’s wind power obsession is likely to cost New Yorkers over the long haul.

Cuomo’s propaganda squad launched a missive against Ken Girardin, claiming that he’d misled his readers.

Turns out that Girardin’s estimates were, if anything, light on; in fact, the ultimate cost of subsidies to wind power in New York State are greater than Girardin’s estimates and magnitudes greater than Cuomo’s understated figures.

State blows…

What Are Lost Continents, and Why Are We Discovering So Many? Is published at The Conversation by By Simon Williams, Joanne Whittaker & Maria Seton.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

For most people, continents are Earth’s seven main large landmasses.

But geoscientists have a different take on this. They look at the type of rock a feature is made of, rather than how much of its surface is above sea level.

In the past few years, we’ve seen an increase in the discovery of lost continents. Most of these have been plateaus or mountains made of continental crust hidden from our view, below sea level.

One example is Zealandia, the world’s eighth continent that extends underwater from New Zealand.
Several smaller lost continents, called microcontinents, have also recently been discovered submerged in the eastern and western Indian Ocean.

But why, with so much geographical knowledge…

The role of the BBC’s Middle East editor is to provide “analysis that might make a complex story more comprehensive or comprehensible for the audience, without the constraints of acting as a daily news correspondent”.

Hence, when Jeremy Bowen appeared on two BBC radio stations on November 19^th to provide answers to questions concerning “the legal status of […] settlements” following a statement made the previous day by the US Secretary of State, BBC licence fee payers no doubt expected to hear accurate, impartial and comprehensive information which would enhance their understanding of that undoubtedly “complex story”. 

The November 19^th edition of the BBC Radio 4 programme ‘PM’ included an item (from 22:40 here) introduced by presenter Evan Davis as follows: [emphasis in italics in the original, emphasis in bold added]

Davis: “Last night the US made a dramatic shift in its position on Israeli…

1) Third quarter loss of US $1.3 billion.

2) License to operate in London cancelled. (14,000 recorded incidents of unlicensed drivers).

3) Further share-price decline, now under US $30.

4) Uber’s CEO announces he will take the focus off price (Uber’s strong point) and concentrate on company profitability.

As I’ve repeatedly written, Uber, an in-demand service, can only work as a drivers’ co-operative. Its massive flotation was a time-proven signal of a share-market boom about to end. The other is when take-overs take off, they’re currently at record levels.

(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