Utopia, you are standing in it!

We may not yet know the result of the election, but we do know that we will have a new parliament. David Natzler and David Beamish explain what will happen when the new parliament commences next week. No matter the outcome of today’s vote, certain processes will need to be followed: parliament will need to be officially opened, MPs will need to be sworn in, and committees will need to be re-established — and their members and chairs must be elected.

The dates

The first days of a new parliament follow a well-trodden path, and the surest guide to what will happen is usually to look up what happened last time, in June 2017. However, much depends on the political context. And we will not know that context until the early hours of Friday 13 December at the earliest. All we know for sure is that the new parliament will…

Media coverage in this election has been dominated by the Conservatives and Labour, and their competing policy plans. But a key difference between the parties is that, while a Conservative majority government is clearly possible based on the polls, a Labour majority government is not. Hence a Labour-led government would need to negotiate its policy with other parties, which would soften its stance. Robert Hazell and Meg Russell reflect on the lack of coverage of these questions, and what a Labour-led government would actually look like – in terms of personalities, policies and style.

Consistent opinion poll evidence during the general election campaign suggests that there are two possible outcomes: a majority Conservative government led by Boris Johnson, or a hung parliament. In the event of the latter, Johnson might still remain Prime Minister, but he has few allies – even having alienated Northern Ireland’s DUP. So a…

For two simple reasons, I want Boris Johnson to win a clear majority tomorrow in the elections for the British Parliament.

1. He’s not a lunatic socialist, like Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party and the British version of Bernie Sanders.
2. He’s promised a real Brexit, meaning the U.K. escapes a doomed-to-decline, ever-more-dirigiste European Union.

Beyond that, his platform is not terribly exciting for supporters of limited government.

Which makes me all the more nostalgic for Margaret Thatcher, the only good British Prime Minister in my lifetime (just as Ronald Reagan was the only good President in my lifetime).

I’ve previously shared two great videos of Thatcher, one about the real source of government funds and the other about the poisonous ideology of class warfare.

I can’t imagine Boris Johnson giving either speech.

Or making this statement.

Or giving these remarks.

As far as I know, Boris…

Electricity that can’t be delivered as and when it’s needed has no commercial value. Indeed, when the gales rip across the Scottish Highlands and there’s a surfeit of wind power generated, that electricity can’t even be given away. Instead, taxpayers become the ‘buyers’ of last resort; not that they could never be called willing purchasers, and not that any power ever gets delivered to them, or anyone else.

Euphemistically called “constraint payments”, European governments are squandering hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars each year, directing it to wind power outfits, literally paying them to NOT generate electricity, simply because the (wholly weather-dependent) supply they occasionally generate is incapable of matching (wholly human-dependent) demand.

In Scotland alone, since 2010 taxpayers have transferred more than £600 million to Scottish wind power outfits, with the result that around 8.2 TWh of Scottish wind power has been discarded, a quantity that would have supplied…

The next day, after signing the Act of Abdication, the last act of his reign was the royal assent to His Majesty’s Declaration of Abdication Act 1936. As required by the Statute of Westminster, all the Dominions had already consented to the abdication.

Although Edward VIII had signed a declaration of abdication the previous day—December 10, 1936—he remained king until giving Royal Assent to His Majesty’s Declaration of Abdication Act, which he did onDecember 11, at 1.52 p.m., and the Act became immediately effective from that time. Ironically, his last act as king was giving the royal assent to his own abdication.

His brother, the Duke of York, succeeded to the throne as George VI. Instead of becoming King Albert, his given name, he selected the name George to suggest continuity with his father George V. King George VI’s elder daughter, Princess Elizabeth, became heir presumptive.

King George VI of…

Climate Litigation Watch is reporting the ruling by Judge Barry Ostrager ending the case brought by NYAG Leticia James against ExxonMobil.  The loss could hardly be more complete.  The full text of the ruling is here.  The juicy bits are excerpted in italics below with my bolds.

Supreme Court of New York, New York County, the Honorable Barry Ostrager presiding.

Decision After Trial

Nothing in this opinion is intended to absolve ExxonMobil from responsibility for contributing to climate change through the emission of greenhouse gases in the production of its fossil fuel products. ExxonMobil does not dispute either that its operations produce greenhouse gases or that greenhouse gases contribute to climate change, But ExxonMobil is in the business of producing energy, and this is a securities fraud case, not a climate change case. Applying the applicable legal standards, the Court finds that the Office of the Attorney General failed…

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
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