Utopia, you are standing in it!

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…

It is my great pleasure to finally fulfill my earlier promise to blog about professor Ronald H. Coase (1910 – 2013) in my Great Minds of Our Time series.

As I blogged earlier, “Here is prof. Coase’s 2003 Coase Centennial Speech (500MB QuickTime file, recommend downloading it before you watch it) from Ronald Coase Institute’s online material section.” I now can say I have watched or listened to the video more than three times now, and I am sure I will still learning from it when I watch it again.

I am going to use a different approach to blog about professor Ronald H. Coase for this Great Minds of Our Time entry. Here is my Top 10 list,

1. Ronald is a really funny and sharp witted man as we clearly can see from his 2003 Coase Centennial Speech.
2. Well, he does have a Nobel…

In his book Intellectuals and Society, Dr. Thomas Sowell points out that we live in times where intellectuals have quite a bit of influence and he provides an in depth look at the intellectual class.

According to Sowell, the high point of intellectual influence was the period between the 1960’s and 1980’s. However, intellectuals somewhat regained influence under the Obama Administration. Sowell also had something to say in his book about environmentalists too. He states:

Everything from economic central planning to environmentalism epitomizes the belief that third party elites know best and should be empowered to over-ride the decisions of others.

Nowhere was this more apparent when Paul Ehrlich advocated for policies geared to shrink populations by enforced sterilization based on his irrational claim that the availability of Earth’s resources to feed people would soon plummet due to overpopulation. Worst part about it, Ehrlich still predicts doom is right…