Utopia, you are standing in it!

Last week, a nominee to lead the Federal Emergency Management Agency generated fireworks when, during his confirmation hearing, he said he does not know the cause of climate change. The comment reignites the debate over how FEMA, which provides subsidized flood insurance and disaster relief, should respond to the risk climate change poses for both functions. Fortunately, given FEMA’s role, the cause of this increased risk shouldn’t matter. If FEMA recognizes the risk, the only question is figuring out whether and how to respond to it.

Climate change, to the extent it increases the risk of sea level rise and destructive natural disasters, substantially affects FEMA programs. It increases the National Flood Insurance program’s liabilities, if the risks are not appropriately priced (as they’re usually not). And it may increase the frequency and costs of FEMA disaster responses. But that climate change may pose risks that FEMA should account for…

Prof Geoff Jones of HBS has recently written a case on role of IBM in Nazi Germany.

He discusses the case and its broad lessons in this superb interview:

It is rare that you pick up a book and just say, ” wow, this is an achievement.” For the last five years or so, Bryan Caplan has immersed himself in the extremely large social science literature on immigration and its impacts. You would expect a 300 page academic monograph. But that’s not what you get. Instead, he teamed up with Zach Weinersmith of SMBC fame to write a graphic novel. Open Borders: The Science and Ethnics of Immigration is truly something else. It’s a slim tome that lays out the argument for unrestricted migration. It’s joyful , it’s beautiful, and most importantly, it’s right.

Not unlike the OECD, our Productivity Commission tends to lean left.  Not usually in some overtly partisan sense, but in a bias towards government solutions, a disinclination to focus on government failures as much as “market failures”, and a mentality that is often reluctant to look behind symptoms (which government action can sometimes paper over) to look at deeper causes and influences.

Sometimes the cheerleading for the left becomes more overt.   There was a streak of that evident in their climate change report a year or two back, but it seems particularly evident in their latest draft report out this morning.    Reflecting the change of government, the political complexion of key personnel of the Commission, the Commissioners –  while each individually capable –  appears to have shifted leftwards.

The Productivity Commission’s inquiries are into topics selected by the government of the day.  The current Minister of Finance has…

The wind cult works overtime to avoid the bloody reality that their beloveds are responsible for millions of bird and bat deaths, every year. Lying, dissembling and attempting to bury the evidence is just the start. There follows a game of moral equivalence, asserting that more bats and birds are clobbered by cars, cats and tall buildings.

Cars, cats and skyscrapers don’t kill healthy Eagles – like the critically endangered Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagle, but 60 m wind turbine blades with their tips travelling at 350 Kph routinely smash them out of existence.

As part of the same race to the periphery, wind worshippers also spin the line that evil fossil fuels are responsible for even more avian carnage. Except, as James Taylor points out below those claims ring just a little hollow.

Wind apologists laughably claim fracking harms wildlife
CFACT
James Taylor
3 November 2019

Apologists for wind power…

Today I will begin a series on the life of King Charles I of England. In the coming weeks I will include entries on his marriage his accession to the throne, his reign and the English Civil War, culminating in his trial which I will cover on its anniversary this January.

Charles I of England was the second son of King James VI of Scotland and Anne of Denmark, Charles was born in Dunfermline Palace, Fife, on November 19, 1600. At a Protestant ceremony in the Chapel Royal of Holyrood Palace in Edinburghon 23 December 1600, he was baptised by David Lindsay, Bishop of Ross, and created Duke of Albany, the traditional title of the second son of the King of Scotland, with the subsidiary titles of Marquess of Ormond, Earl of Ross and Lord Ardmannoch.

James VI was the first cousin twice removed of Queen Elizabeth I of England…

Jerry Ravetz writes at Nature Stop the science training that demands ‘don’t ask’.Jerry Ravetz is an associate fellow at the Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, University of Oxford, UK.Excerpts In italics with my bolds and images.

It’s time to trust students to handle doubt and diversity in science.

As a child, I realized that my parents spoke in Yiddish when they didn’t want me to know what they were talking about, so I became aware that some knowledge was intended only for grown-ups — don’t ask. In college, I was taught an elegant theory of chemical combination based on excess electrons going into holes in the orbital shell of a neighbouring atom. But what about diatomic compounds like oxygen gas? Don’t ask; students aren’t ready to know. In physics, I learnt that Newton’s second law of motion is not an empirical, approximate relation such as Boyle’s…

(Some questions at the end about comparative context. Help, please!)

This Wednesday night, Benny Gantz’s period as designated formateur expires. His odds of successfully forming a government look bleak. Nothing has changed to make it any easier than when I last wrote on the topic of government-formation options. And at least one thing has changed to make it harder. It is important to understand that a third election (April 2019, Sept. 2019, and potentially March 2020) is the default if no agreement is reached. There is actually a 21-day period after Gantz’s mandate expires before the election becomes automatic, but there’s scant reason to believe the next 21 days would result in an agreement. (During this 21-day period, it requires 61 Knesset members’ signatures to nominate a PM. Fat chance.)

The change that makes forming a government harder than it was in April or even immediately after the September election…

The manufacturers of turbines and solar panels are dropping like flies, as subsidies are rolled back across Europe.

So-called ‘green’ jobs are a case of easy come, easy go. The wind and solar ‘industries’ that gave birth to those jobs simply can’t survive without massive and endless subsidies, which means their days are numbered.

With the axe being taken to subsidies across the globe, their ultimate demise is a matter of when, not if.

The wind back in subsidies across Europe has all but destroyed the wind industry: in Germany this year a trifling 35 onshore wind turbines have been erected, so far.

Twelve countries in the European Union (EU) failed to install “a single wind turbine” last year.

Danish turbine maker, Vestas is on the brink and was recently forced to axe 600 of its groovy ‘green’ jobs. Its rival Siemens Gamesa, has also been forced…

So the plan was only virtue signalling to try and impress gullible voters, not an actual belief that the climate needs saving any time soon. Does the UK really want inadequate, unreliable and expensive electricity in perpetuity?

Labour has dropped a radical plan to end the UK’s contributions to climate change by 2030 and will stick to a target of achieving it “well before 2050”, reports The Independent via Yahoo News.

Activists passed a motion at the party’s conference in September to dramatically speed up the date for net zero carbon emissions – pushing for inclusion in the general election manifesto.

(President John F. Kennedy and Arthur M. Schlesinger)

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary a “gadfly” is “a person who stimulates or annoys other people especially by persistent criticism.”  According to Richard Aldous, in his new biography, SCHLESINGER: THE IMPERIAL HISTORIAN, the definition fits Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.’s role as Special Assistant to the President during the Kennedy administration.  Aldous’ work is the first full-length biography of Schlesinger and he successfully grapples with a number of questions as his narrative unfolds.  First, was Schlesinger a great and important historian, a model of how academics and public service can mix?  Second,  was he a popularizer and court historian held captive to the establishment that nurtured his career?  After reading Aldous’ monograph there is no conclusive answer and elements of each question make up Schlesinger’s academic career at Harvard, as well as a speech writer and advisor to President Kennedy.  However…

As long-time readers will be aware, during Operation Protective Edge in 2014 the BBC failed to independently verify casualty figures and civilian-combatant casualty ratios provided by the Hamas-run health ministry in the Gaza Strip. Instead, its coverage during and since that conflict was based on data obtained from partial sources which it promoted to audiences without fact-checking.

Since then BBC journalists appear to have ceased trying to independently verify information provided by a terrorist organisation and instead adopt a qualifying ‘he said-she said’ approach which includes describing all Gaza Strip casualties as “Palestinians”, regardless of whether or not they belonged to terror groups.

Here are some examples from the first two days of BBC reporting on the recent events in Israel and the Gaza Strip. [emphasis in bold added]

November 12^th 2019, BBC News website, ‘Israel kills top Palestinian Islamic Jihad militant in Gaza’:

“Israeli aircraft also…