Utopia, you are standing in it!

On 4 November, the House of Commons elected Lindsay Hoyle to serve as Speaker, following the resignation of John Bercow. It has been treated as accepted wisdom that a different approach to the Speakership is called for. However, Bercow has taken decisions about the Commons’ handling of Brexit in circumstances where several – or all – of the available choices were potentially controversial. Jack Simson Caird argues that his successor might therefore find that trying to ‘play a straight bat’ is not as easy or appropriate as it might appear.

Lindsay Hoyle is the new Speaker of the House of Commons. Hoyle, like many of his fellow candidates for the role, sought to emphasise that he would be very different from John Bercow. One of the main narratives around the election was that the Speaker should be, in the words of Chris Bryant, ‘an umpire and not a player’…

A key point of the new theory is that as the Moon migrated outwards from Earth, its orbit reached a critical distance where the Sun’s gravitational influence overtook that of the Earth, as Phys.org explains. Needless to say there’s more to it than that.

Earth’s Moon is an unusual object in our solar system, and now there’s a new theory to explain how it got where it is, which puts some twists on the current “giant impact” theory. The work is published Oct. 31 in the journal Nature.

The Moon is relatively big compared to the planet it orbits, and it’s made of almost the same stuff, minus some more volatile compounds that evaporated long ago. That makes it distinct from every other major object in the Solar System, said Sarah Stewart, professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Davis and senior author on the…

In the 48 hours during which terrorists in the Gaza Strip fired over 450 rockets and mortars at civilian targets in Israel the BBC News website produced four written reports about the events.

Although missile attacks against civilians are clearly an act of terrorism and the people responsible for such attacks are terrorists, the BBC chose not to inform its audience of that fact and instead adhered to its much criticised editorial guidelines.

Israel kills top Palestinian Islamic Jihad militant in Gaza12/11/2019, all versions here, version 1 discussed here

The word militant or militants were used 6 times in this report in relation to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad or Hamas. The words terrorist appeared twice, exclusively in a quote from an Israeli official.

“Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Abu al-Ata an “arch-terrorist” and said he was “the main instigator of terrorism from the Gaza Strip”.

“He…

With their punitive proposals for wealth taxes, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are leading the who-can-be-craziest debate in the Democratic Party.

But what would happen if either “Crazy Bernie” or “Looney Liz” actually had the opportunity to impose such levies?

At the risk of gross understatement, the effect won’t be pretty.

Based on what’s happened elsewhere in Europe, the Wall Street Journalopined that America’s economy would suffer.

Bernie Sanders often points to Europe as his economic model, but there’s one lesson from the Continent that he and Elizabeth Warren want to ignore. Europe has tried and mostly rejected the wealth taxes that the two presidential candidates are now promising for America. …Sweden…had a wealth tax for most of the 20th century, though its revenue never accounted for more than 0.4% of gross domestic product in the postwar era. …The relatively small Swedish tax…

The world today has a myriad of energy policies. One of them seems to be to encourage renewables, especially wind and solar. Another seems to be to encourage electric cars. A third seems to be to try to move away from fossil fuels. Countries in Europe and elsewhere have been trying carbon taxes. There are alsoprograms to buy carbon offsets for energy uses such as air travel.

Maybe it is time to step back and take a look. Where are we now? Where are we really headed? Have the policies implemented since the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 had any positive impact?

Let’s look at some of the issues involved.

[1] We have had very little success in reducing CO2 emissions.

CO2 emissions for all countries, in total, have been spiraling upward, year after year.

Figure 1. Carbon dioxide emissions for the world, based on BP’s 2019 Statistical Review of World Energy

There has been a series of Tuesday events (“Tax on Tuesday”) held at Victoria Univerisity recently, jointly promoted by Tax Justice Aotearoa, the PSA, and the university’s own Institute for Governance and Policy Studies.  I wrote about one of the earlier events here.

The final event was held this week, marketed as “Where’s the party at?”   Political parties that is.   In an event moderated by the Herald’s Hamish Rutherford, speakers from four political parties (NZ First declined the invitation) each spoke about some aspect of tax policy for 8-10 minutes, with plenty of time for questions.   It wasn’t a hugely well-attended event, but it is pretty safe to assume that the overwhelming bulk of the audience was on the left of the political spectrum, and I guess the speakers recognised that in what they chose to say.

First up was ACT’s David Seymour.  He started well…

In Germany, real environmentalists are mounting a well-drilled revolt against the destruction of forests – the natural habitat of apex predators, like the endangered Red Kite. Environmentalists are also furious at the fact that Kites, Eagles and dozens of threatened bat species are being sliced and diced with impunity across Europe.

Rural residents, driven mad in their homes or driven out of them by practically incessant turbine generated low-frequency noise and infrasound have taken their cases to law seeking injunctions and damages.

The result being is that new wind farm construction in Germany has ground to a halt: so far this year a trifling 35 onshore wind turbines have been erected.

The fact that chaotically intermittent wind power can’t be delivered as and when power consumers need it means the wanton destruction of pristine wilderness, bucolic landscapes, rural communities, and millions of birds and bats (including plenty of species…

This question, which of course is fatuous, struck me because, owing to my recent flights and cruises, which exposed me to many safety demonstrations, I was struck by how calm people are in these videos and photos.

If you’ve ever seen a cellphone video of the interior of an airplane cabin in which people think they’re going to crash, it’s pandemonium. People are crying, screaming, making what they think are their last phone calls, and so on. That’s to be expected, especially if the plane is lurching, or an engine’s on fire, or the aircraft is plummeting downward.

But in the safety demonstrations, people putting on oxygen masks or bracing themselves or donning lifejackets are calm as cucumbers. They even look placid, and move with assuredness.

I can tell you, though, that if the eight-tone “abandon ship” signal sounded on this cruise, and I had to put on one of…

In his recent Guardian op-ed, US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders (“Fighting antisemitism is at the heart of the left’s struggle against oppression”, Nov. 12) aptly defines antisemitism thusly:

“it is important to understand that that is what antisemitism is: a conspiracy theory that a secretly powerful minority exercises control over society”.

Whilst Sanders, whose father left Poland at age 17 due to antisemitism, and who lost family in the Holocaust, clearly has a personal connection to the subject, he also seems to have a big blind spot, as he appears convinced that those who peddle Jewish conspiracy theories come entirely from the political right.

Like other forms of bigotry – racism, sexism, homophobia – antisemitism is used by the right to divide people from one another and prevent us from fighting together for a shared future of equality, peace, prosperity and environmental justice.

Conversely, he sees the left (progressiveness) as…

The hard part about being a libertarian is that there are endless opportunities to be frustrated. Especially if you’re job is trying to convince politicians to restrain the size and scope of government when that’s not in their self interest.

One of my special frustrations, though, is that many people don’t understand economic history.

• They blame the Great Depression on capitalism when it was largely the result of bad government policy.
• They blame the financial crisis on capitalism when it was largely the result of bad government policy.

Today, let’s talk about another example of bad economic history. Many people think corporations are rapacious entities that – in the absence of wise government – will create monopolies that screw workers with sweatshop conditions and screw consumers with ever-higher prices.

Much of this mythology goes back to the era of supposed “Robber Barons” in the late 1800s.

Fortunately…