Utopia, you are standing in it!

Otmar Issing in this Proj Synd piece says there is no thing as Green monetary policy:

“Haredim” refers to ultra-Orthodox Jews, who constitute over 10% of the population of Israel. There are also many in New York State. They willingly live a cloistered life, having very little contact with other communities or even with less orthodox Jews.  In fact, they’re the most cloistered religious community I know of, though Jehovah’s Witnesses and some Islamic communities can be pretty cloistered, with all of these having the practice of disowning those who leave the faith.

The worst part of all such groups, and especially the Haredim, is their inculcation of the religion in children who never have a choice. This propagandizing, and forcing children to live in a restricted way, is considered by Richard Dawkins to be child abuse, and I agree. If I had my way, children wouldn’t be forced to adopt a religious belief until they had the maturity to choose, but that’s hardly…

I like to think I made this up myself, but I suspect that somebody—I can’t remember who—gave me this idea. It goes something like this:

You can gauge someone’s ideological credibility by examining their reaction to Ayaan Hirsi Ali. 

That is, if someone respects Hirsi Ali for her activities—activities that have put her life in danger from extremists Muslims—her ideas, her eloquence, and her dedication, they’re likely to have views that are, in general, ideologically compatible with my own. If, on the other hand, they decry her for “Islamophobia” or for irrelevant issues like her marriage to a conservative, then you should be very cautious.

Remember, this is a touchstone and a potential red flag for me and for those who generally agree with me. I have in fact lost a friendship after someone who had never read a word by Hirsi Ali—and couldn’t name any of her books—started criticizing…

Anthony Watts, founder of wattsupwiththat.com and a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute, talks about why the surface temperature record is flawed.

Electric SUV concept car [image credit: motorauthority.com]
The report headline also claims this ‘is terrible news for the planet’, because they are obsessing about harmless trace gases in the atmosphere. But the motoring public don’t seem to share their misplaced concerns, as ever-popular SUVs outnumber electric vehicles by about 40 to 1 worldwide.

Sales of hefty and heavily-polluting SUVs have doubled in the last decade – outweighing the progress made from electric vehicles, says WIRED. Can cleaner SUVs offer a way out?

The phenomenal rise of the SUV all started with a squabble over chicken.

It was 1963 – the height of the Cold War – and US president Lyndon Johnson was fuming over a tax that France and West Germany had imposed on cheap, intensively-farmed US chicken flooding European supermarkets.

In December 1963, after months of failed negotiations, Johnson retaliated.

June 1958 – September 1962

Malthusianism does a pretty good job of capturing the facts of life for our species before the Industrial Revolution. For example, Malthus plus standard economics helps account for some of the historic differences between wheat and rice growing societies. And Darwinism suggests the reason why Malthusianism holds for living things in general: within a population, variants with a higher intrinsic rate of increase tends to replace those with a lower rate, even if the eventual outcome is overpopulation and misery for all. So the field of human behavioral ecology, based on the assumption that people try to maximize fitness, does pretty well in accounting for behavior in pre-modern societies.

But Malthusianism, and the assumption that people are fitness-maximizers, don’t work very well for modern societies. Even as life expectancies and standards of living have been increasing around the world, fertility rates have been declining…

So, what to make of the Governor’s final decisions on bank capital?

If you are a bank or bank shareholder, you are presumably just grateful for small mercies, the modest extent to which the Governor changed his mind and allowed the banks to use cheaper forms of capital to meet the new requirements.   Consistent with that, the share prices of the parent banks recovered some ground yesterday.

Since banks are scared of their regulators and –  both here and in Australia –  are very reluctant to seek judicial review, despite the very strong sense of pre-determination about this process, and the evident failure to engage seriously with substantive concerns raised by submitters, there isn’t much else they can do.  Their behaviour –  willingness to provide credit into this economy –  can, and probably will, adjust.  But if they won’t, or can’t, do anything more about the policy decision, grizzling…

Nice speech by Klaas Knot of Netherlands central bank.

He points how Bank of Amsterdam was doing similar things as today’s proposals for stablecoin:

On December 4^th a report titled “France anti-Semitism: Jewish graves defaced with Nazi swastikas” was published on the ‘Europe’ page of the BBC News website.

Towards the end of that report – throughout which the BBC once again used the wrong spelling of the word antisemitism – readers were told that: [emphasis added]

“On Tuesday night, France’s National Assembly passed a draft resolution that includes hatred of Israel as an example of anti-Semitism.

The definition, by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, has already been adopted by the European Parliament and several other countries.

A number of MPs from President Emmanuel Macron’s ruling party voted against the resolution.”

The IHRA definition of course does not include “hatred of Israel” as an example of antisemitism. It does include the following:

• • Accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.
     

One for the ‘worse than we thought’ file. Anyone running out of power in an EV in winter due to sudden cold weather range reduction has no in-car way to keep warm while waiting for rescue.

Cold temperatures can sap electric car batteries, temporarily reducing their range by more than 40 percent when interior heaters are used, a new study found.

The study of five electric vehicles by AAA also found that high temperatures can cut into battery range, but not nearly as much as the cold, reports TechXplore. The range returns to normal in more comfortable temperatures.

Teslas in Norway [image credit: Norsk Elbilforening (Norwegian Electric Vehicle Association)]
EVs are looking like yet another ‘save the planet’ fiasco in the making. Some of the points made here were already known, but these studies reinforce them. As many EVs on the road are still relatively new, the full extent of any problems may not yet be clear. With the help of large subsidies and other incentives they sell well in Norway despite the cold winters there.

According to recent studies, cold temperatures significantly reduce the performance of electric cars, especially when it comes to battery life.

One study by AAA suggested that cold temperatures can reduce the range of the batteries in most electric cars by over 40 percent, reports Anonymous News.

It was also noted that the performance can be even worse when the interior heaters are used.