Utopia, you are standing in it!

The European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill is intended to give effect in the UK to the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) agreed by the UK with the EU-27 on 1 October 2019. The Bill received its second reading on 22 October 2019 and is currently in ‘limbo’ pending the start of the committee stage. If and when it is adopted, the Bill will make significant amendments to (inter alia) the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 (EUWA).

Attempts will naturally be made to amend the Bill as it passes through Parliament. At present, it makes no provision for a further referendum to be held before the WA is ratified. Some may seek to change that. It would, however, be futile for amendments to be sought that would require to be done something that lies outside Parliament’s control, such as creating an EU/UK customs union. This would require the WA to be reopened, which

Australia’s embattled power consumers thought they were about to get a break, then their PM decided to throw another billion dollars in subsidies to wind and solar. And it’s not like taxpayers and power consumers weren’t already on the hook.

The Federal government’s Large-Scale Renewable Energy Target (LRET) is costing all Australian power consumers over $3 billion a year – when the cost of the Small-Scale Renewable Energy Scheme is added – that hidden power tax adds up to almost $5 billion a year. The total cost of both the LRET and SRES will top $60,000,000,000.

On top of that massive stream of subsidies to wind and large-scale solar outfits, and households with panels on their roofs, comes billions in handouts and soft loans from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and the ARENA fund.

The CEFC already had control of $10 billion of taxpayer’s money, ladling that out to…

Let me say at the outset, this is not a book that anyone would read for pleasure.  The Diary of a Gulag Prison Guard is raw and confronting, written by a man struggling to maintain his mental health in an environment designed to brutalise him.  I read it for Vishy’s Red October Russian Reads, and it is indeed a very salutary reminder of the extremes of the Soviet experiment…

It has relevance today because there are, no doubt, similar situations in repressive regimes such as China’s, but also in places like Australia’s detention centres where we know from media reports that it is not just the detainees who suffer mental health problems.  (But we only know this about Australian guards, there are only hostile media reports about PNG local guards and yet it would be surprising if some of them were not also gravely troubled by their work and…

On the evening of November 1^st residents of Sderot and surrounding communities had to abandon their Shabbat dinner tables when terrorists in the Gaza Strip launched two barrages of missiles, with one home in Sderot taking a direct hit.

“According to the IDF, seven projectiles were fired during the first barrage. All were intercepted by the Iron Dome missile defense system. Following the first barrage, Palestinian media reported that an IDF tank shelled a Hamas observation post in the Strip.

Shortly afterward, three more projectiles were fired during a second barrage. Only one was intercepted.

The Sderot municipality spokesperson confirmed in a statement that a home sustained damage, but there were no injuries as all of its residents were in a bomb shelter.

“When I arrived at the street, there was chaos,” said Magen David Adom (MDA) paramedic Alex Kosinov. “Nearby there were numerous vehicles with shattered…

John le Carré
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
(Hodder & Stoughton, 1974)

Some years ago, the London branch of an American investment bank was busy ‘migrating’ financial data from one computer to another. In the process, it made the distressing discovery that erroneous information some years earlier had led the bank to believe it was a million or more pounds better off than was, in fact, the case.

I wrote a line or two in the Guardian suggesting that everyone would have been a lot happier had the data stayed on the old computer and the discrepancy never been discovered. The bank could have continued acting richer than it actually was, to the benefit of staff and shareholders.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy opens with MI6 (‘the Circus’) on a roll. An exhausted and scandal-ridden old regime has been replaced with dynamic new management that has signed up a solid-gold top-category Soviet…

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…