Utopia, you are standing in it!

From a recent article in Econometricaby Johanes Abeler, Daniel Nosenzo, and Collin Raymond:

Private information is at the heart of many economic activities. For decades, economists have assumed that individuals are willing to misreport private information if this maximizes their material payoff. We combine data from 90 experimental studies in economics, psychology, and sociology, and show that, in fact, people lie surprisingly little. We then formalize a wide range of potential explanations for the observed behavior, identify testable predictions that can distinguish between the models, and conduct new experiments to do so. Our empirical evidence suggests that a preference for being seen as honest and a preference for being honest are the main motivations for truth‐telling.

Comment: Remember when Adam Smith wrote in Theory of Moral Sentiments that people want to be loved and lovely? Well, there you go. The broader point is that in an industrialized…

Being a weather-dependent enterprise, no one thinks of promising their kids a kite flying holiday, ahead of time. So just how modern, Western economies ever thought they’d power themselves with occasional breezes is a mystery.

The inherent and chaotic intermittency that’s part and parcel of wind power is only compensated by the ability of dispatchable power sources to plug the yawning, routine daily gaps in wind power output. Those sources are, in order of priority coal, gas and nuclear and (where available) hydro.

The amount of power stored and re-delivered by grid-scale batteries is so risible it barely rates a mention.

In truth, the real heavy lifting is done by [insert trigger warning] fossil fuels, being inefficiently utilised in power plants, often given the misleading tag of “backup” power. Misleading because, before heavily subsidised wind and solar came on the scene, they did just fine, all by themselves, delivering power…

Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore has made headlines in the last month due to his thrashing self-described Democratic Soclaist Alexandria Occasio-Cortez (AOC) for her Green New Deal in which Moore correctly points out implementing it would mean the destruction of our civilization.

While her fellow Leftists heaped praise on AOC for her proposals, Dr. Moore called her out by stating she was a Pompous little twit and pointed out what would happen if fossil fuels were banned under her proposal. Patrick Moore even made appearances on Fox News in which President Trump tweeted a compliment of Moore’s intelligence.

This was obviously the last straw for Good and Greenpeace and, according to Climate Depot, the far-left tech giant removed Moore from the list of Greenpeace’s founders.

In true Communist form, the Left erases undesirables from memory.

Last Friday’s New York Magazine column by Andrew Sullivan covers, as usual, three topics. This time they’re Brexit, impeachment, and Sullivan’s splenetic but largely accurate assessment of the Democratic candidates: a panoply he finds lame and dispiriting. You should be reading his column every week, and I read it even in Valparaiso (after the curfew). I’ll give a few excerpts from each of the three mini-essays; click on the screenshot to read the whole thing:

Understanding the whole Brexit mess is above my pay grade; when I asked Matthew about it, he said “Wait and see.” Sullivan was a “remain” voter (i.e., don’t leave the EU), but he thinks that the UK should respect the results of the referendum, which was to exit. He also thinks that the “remainers” are trying to nullify the people’s will in indefensible ways, including calling for a re-vote. I don’t know whether that’s true…

I don’t know why, but stuff like this depresses me and makes me wonder what the world will be like in 20 years, when students who passed this resolution are running the UK—and maybe the US. But I’ll most likely be dead then.

This event not nearly as bad as the Right supporting Trump, of course, but everybody writes about Trump while the mainstream and liberal media are reluctant to documenting the Authoritarian Left. (If you’re a reader, by the way, please don’t tell me to write more about the perfidy of Republicans. You can see that kind of discourse, whose sentiments I share, on every other site.)

So the latest occurrence is that Oxford University’s student council voted three days ago not to mandate the use of jazz hands in place of applause, but to “mandate Sabbatical Officers to encourage the use” of “jazz hands”, the British Sign Language…

An animal rights activist out of Russia named Anna Razinova is urging prosecutors to bring charges against a veterinarian for not euthanizing pets. Simultaneously, Razinova is also the head of a law club of pet owners.

If one understands the ethics of animal rights organizations, Anna Razinova’s actions make sense. Animal rights groups, like PETA, and people such as Razinova think most people can’t be trusted with the care of pets which can be trained for things other than what they determine is an animal’s true nature (including the desire to be free). Consequently, they believe that domesticated animals should be sent to that big animal shelter in the sky.

Animal rights groups hate humans to the point where they will kill off our pets after stealing them from you or calling for them to be euthanized or not resuscitated. Not a very ethical way to treat animals either…

Renewable energy zealots keep telling us that wind and solar are free and getting cheaper all the time. Germany puts paid to that lie, as does Denmark and South Australia, which each jockey for line honours in the world’s highest power prices stakes.

No country has squandered more treasure on giant windmills and an endless sea of solar panels than Germany.

For all that wanton environmental destruction, Germans get a meagre 2.5% of their primary energy demand satisfied by wind and solar. And in the mother of all ironies, contrary to the stated aim of the ‘Energiewende’, carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise.

Its nuclear-powered, next-door neighbour, France wins the low CO2 power generation competition by a mile – and makes a killing selling electricity to power-starved Germans, whenever the sun sets and/or calm weather sets in.

All in all, Germany’s (apparently) inevitable ‘transition’ to an all wind and…

You know we’ve reached peak stupid when adults line up to be lectured by troubled teenage girls on energy and world economics. Greta the Fretter and the lunatics gluing themselves to roads under the banner of the Extinction Rebellion have made the work of the sane and rational so much easier. For a decade or so, the great mass in the middle have mouthed platitudes about doing more for the planet and supporting renewable energy.

The profiteers and rent seekers who’ve done so very nicely over that time, soaking in subsidies, lapping up soft loans and benefiting from tax credits, RETs and the like, pushed and prodded politicians to the extent necessary to establish the greatest financial rort of all time; and the general populace went along with it.

Clever marketing and guilt laden propaganda helped pushed the right emotional buttons and left rent seekers thinking that their world would…

In early August we noted that work had begun on a sixteen-department field hospital near the Erez Crossing at the north of the Gaza Strip and that the Palestinian Authority was objecting to the project.

“Although BBC audiences are told plenty about the dire state of medical services in the Gaza Strip, they rarely hear about the PA actions which exacerbate that situation such as the longstanding insufficient supply of medications. Whether or not they will be informed of this latest own goal from the Palestinian Authority remains to be seen.”

Despite the fact that the BBC has a staffed office in the Gaza Strip, audiences have indeed heard nothing about the new hospital or the Palestinian Authority’s specious claim that the field hospital was “part of a plan to separate the West Bank from the Gaza Strip”.

Since then the PA’s official media has managed to come up…

After 1422 the royal title remained unchanged for almost a century. For these many years the title was, Rex Angliae et Franciae et Dominus Hiberniae (King of England and of France and Lord of Ireland). Numerous amendments, however, were effected during Henry VIII’s reign.

Here are the different ways Henry VIII was styled throughout his reign.

1535–1536
By the Grace of God, King of England and France, Defender of the Faith, Lord of Ireland, and of the Church of England in Earth Supreme Head.
1536–1542
By the Grace of God, King of England and France, Defender of the Faith, Lord of Ireland, and of the Church of England and of Ireland in Earth Supreme Head.
1542–1555
By the Grace of God, King of England, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, and of the Church of England and of Ireland in Earth Supreme Head.

After Henry wrote a book against…