Utopia, you are standing in it!

Chinese electric car [image credit: scmp.com]
Sales of expensive electric vehicles predictably misfire as short-term subsidies inevitably slip. No signs of mass take-up despite endless climate hype.

Global sales are lower than a year ago because China lost incentives, while the U.S. is trying to overcome high Model 3 sales in 2018, reports Inside EVs.

The global plug-in passenger car sales were affected in September by a decrease in sales in China and in the U.S. Only the European market brings significant growth among the three biggest markets.

The recent controversy about the unlawful attempt to prorogue parliament and the judicial review that followed has given rise to renewed calls for the codification of the royal prerogative or the enactment of a written constitution. Anne Twomey argues that there are benefits to a looser prerogative power, and that experience in other countries has shown that codification should be undertaken with caution.

The recent controversy about the prorogation of parliament and the judicial review of its exercise in Miller No 2 (also known as Cherry/Miller) has again given rise to calls for the codification of the prerogative or the enactment of a written constitution.

A written constitution is not necessarily an antidote for ambiguity or interpretative discretion. The same issues that arose in Miller No 2 could also arise under a written constitution. For example, section 5 of the Australian Constitution confers upon the Governor-General of Australia…

These are data compiled by the UK ONS (Office for National Statistics) from the CSEW (Crime Survey for England and Wales). Data source here:

Physical injuries and other effects felt as a result of partner abuse experienced in the last year ending March 2018 CSEW

1. Patriarchy theory.
2. Safe spaces.
3. Trauma/triggering.
4. Suppression of due process.
5. Suppression of science.
6. Suppression of free speech.
7. The false accusations industry.
8. The domestic violence industry.
9. Unconscious bias.
10. Diversity ideology.
11. Toxic masculinity/male privilege.
12. Infantilization of women.
13. #metoo witch hunting.
14. Mobbing.
15. Puritanism & moral panic.

The anniversary of the famous War of the Worlds radio dramatization in 1938 inevitably brings news media references to the panic and hysteria the program supposedly set off across the United States.

Front page of the Chicago Herald Examiner, Halloween, 1938

Such references have become like a cliché, unoriginal assertions blithely made, and yet immune to compelling contrary evidence.

Take, for one example, the claim casually offered the other day on a local television news program in Salt Lake City. The news reader introduced a segment recalling the 1938 show by declaring:

“In eight decades, nothing has really scared our country like the old War of the Worlds broadcast.”

No supporting evidence accompanied that claim, as if the presumed effects of the broadcast of October 30, 1938, are so accepted that documentation isn’t necessary.

The War of the Worlds dramatization aired over CBS radio and starred 23-year-old Orson…

For some reason, many intellectuals who identify as philosophical skeptics embrace large chunks of climate dogma without critical examination. Steven Pinker is part of the progressive clan, and shares their blind spot, but speaks wisely in a recent article about the precarious balance between reason and intolerance these days. Some excerpts in italics with my bolds show his keen grasp of many aspects of the problems in contemporary discourse, even while he nods superficially to the climate consensus.  His article at Skeptic.com is Why We Are Not Living in a Post-Truth Era:  An (Unnecessary) Defense of Reason and a (Necessary) Defense of Universities’ Role in Advancing it.

Humans Are Rational Beings

In the first part Pinker does a good job clearing away several arguments that humans are not primarily rational anyway.  For example, he summarizes:

So if anyone tries to excuse irrationality and dogma by pointing a finger at…

That troubled teenage, Greta the Fretter has reignited the nonsense that we’re a heartbeat away from an all wind and sun powered future. The girl that that can see carbon dioxide gas, heads up a mathematically challenged group, who pronounce the time and date when the world will happily operate without generating any CO2 at all, with the profound certainty of the shaman and soothsayers, of old.

Renewable energy rent seekers actively encourage the farcical notion that wind and solar will deliver the results sought by Greta & Co, namely a world that runs entirely on sunshine and breezes, eliminating carbon dioxide emissions, into the bargain.

Keen to rain on their parade, Tony Thomas crunches the numbers below.

Maths is Hard for the Green-Minded
Quadrant Online
Tony Thomas
15 October 2019

Politicians and climate alarmists are running what amounts to a promises auction about getting the world to zero net…

Our leftist educational system has turned many of today’s young people into social justice warriors. Frequently they accuse older generations of trashing the planet for their own benefit and stealing the future from future generations.  As Greta says: “How dare They!”  Lost in all this ignorance and arrogance is any gratitude for the wealth of conveniences and options provided by their predecessors on a silver platter to these spoiled youth.

Matthew Kahn has a post up regarding economics for non-economists, which will appear here later on. He provokes discussion in his seminar by exposing students to a fine essay by economist Don Boudreaux You Are Richer than John D. Rockefeller Do read the linked article which is only excerpted below.

Boudreaux asks: How much money would it take for you to agree to live out your life a century ago? Would you do it for a million dollars? What about…

Many conservative critics of the academy believe that liberals dominate because of anti-conservative discrimination. While there are likely some cases of that, the evidence was always weak for discrimination as a general explanation. For example, liberals dominate in fields that are not political, like math. In technical fields, people are recruited from all over the world. I’d be surprised if the engineering professor knew the politics of the new guy from Kazakhstan, unless he made a big deal out of it.

My view, as I’ve stated before on this blog, is simply that there’s a massive self-selection process at work. Being conservative is probably correlated with certain attitudes toward work, such a desire for high compensation, that are hard to satisfy in the academy. There are also field specific self-selection effects. Sociology for example, studies all kinds of deviant behavior and the faculty tend to skew liberal, not the sort…