Utopia, you are standing in it!

People are getting remorseful about everything tied their personal ecological footprint. They are told the meat on their plate is choking mother nature, their car represents capitalism’s suffocation of the planet and that they will have to give up the idea of flying for a holiday or to visit their family abroad. A year ago, we were consumers; now we’re disgraceful polluters.

It’s painful and every day we hear from gurus and virtue signalling campaigners how ashamed we should be for having consumed. The imminent extinction of all humanity is urgently guilting us into some public sacrifice to save the planet: cathartic climate cleansing … atonement with a selfie-stick.

That is until the Risk-Monger suggested on social media to the Extinction Rebellion catastrophe peddlers that we should also then give up our pets (they eat a lot of meat). He even launched the #PetFree2020 hashtag (it failed to take off)…

Nathaniel Comfort, author of the risible Nature essay at hand (click on screenshot below), is a professor in the history of medicine at Johns Hopkins University. We’ve met him three times before on this site; he seems to be a postmodernist who dislikes genes, New Atheism, and Richard Dawkins.  Now he’s written about. . . . well, it’s hard to discern. If you read the essay (and I both pity you if you do and challenge you to see its point), you’ll see it’s laced with criticisms of Enlightenment values, white males, scientism, and the oppression of the disabled. Oh, and it lauds postmodernism, especially its “other ways of knowing”.

One of Comfort’s main points, at least as I discern it, is that science has somehow deeply changed how humanity has perceived itself. Not so much in the Darwinian way, in which we now see ourselves as part of the…

Ringhals nuclear power site, Sweden [image credit: Vattenfall]
Or, theoretically at least, an equivalent amount of power from other so-called ‘green’ sources, requiring vastly greater amounts of non-renewable mined materials than are currently available – assuming they even exist on such large scales. Not to mention all the other practical difficulties of such dodgy ideas.

What makes achieving Net Zero by 2050 impossible is a failure to accurately understand the scale of the challenge and the absence of policy proposals that match that scale, says Roger Pielke Jr. @ Forbes (via The GWPF).

More than a decade ago, Gwyn Prins and Steve Rayner characterized climate policy as an “auction of promises” in which politicians “vied to outbid each other with proposed emissions targets that were simply not achievable.”

For instance, among Democrats competing for the presidency in 2020, several, including Joe Biden, have committed to achieving net-zero carbon dioxide emissions by…

Moana Jackson, described as a “Te Tiriti specialist” in a recent Stuff report, dismissed Tuia 250 as a load of humbug.

To celebrate the dual heritage of navigation across the Pacific, he contended, “then it wouldn’t be Tuia 250, it would be Tuia 2000 or something.”

More egregious, to “commemorate” Captain James Cook’s arrival in this country seems “weird” to Jackson:

“When it comes to explorers, you usually make a big deal of whoever did something first.

“Neil Armstrong is acknowledged as the first astronaut to land on the Moon. There’s no real celebration of the 12th astronaut to land on the Moon. And Cook wasn’t even the 12th navigator to sail across the Pacific.

“So I’m not sure what the baseline was for commemorating him – except that he has become an important part of the misremembering of colonising history.”

The New York Times is going overboard with disingenuous columns.

A few days ago, I pointed out the many errors in David Leonhardt’s column extolling the wealth tax.

I also explained back in August how Steven Greenhouse butchered the data when he condemned the American economy.

And Paul Krugman is infamous for his creative writing.

But Mr. Leonhardt is on a roll. He has a new column promoting class warfare tax policy.

Almost a decade ago, Warren Buffett made a claim that would become famous. He said that he paid a lower tax rate than his secretary, thanks to the many loopholes and deductions that benefit the wealthy. …“Is it the norm?” the fact-checking outfit Politifact asked. “No.” Time for an update: It’s the norm now. …the 400 wealthiest Americans last year paid a lower total tax rate — spanning federal, state and local taxes — than any other…

In this issue of Uncommon Knowledge from the Hoover Institute, Peter Robinson is joined by British author and columnist Douglas Murray to discuss “The Death of Europe.” Important and chilling. You can just shove stuff to the side and avoid taking it on for so long, but at some point you have to take a hard look at what is, and decide what, if anything, you are willing to do or even can do about it. Do watch the whole thing, it is important.

This is the second of a two-part discussion of this theme. The first part addressed the obligations under the Benn Act and the legal response to attempts to frustrate it; this second part addresses non-confidence motions, resignation and change of Government. Heading numbering is continued from Part 1.

5. Non-confidence procedure under the FTPA – the PM ‘squats’

Section 2 of the FTPA provides for an early election if a motion in the words ‘That this House has no confidence in Her Majesty’s Government” is passed in the Commons and another in the form ‘That this House has confidence in Her Majesty’s Government.’ does not pass within fourteen calendar days.  In its 2010 Report (HL Paper 69) on the Fixed-term Parliaments Bill, the Constitution Committee concluded at [121] that the provision ‘does make it clear that an alternative government can be formed.’  The Explanatory Note to section 2(3) simply states…