Utopia, you are standing in it!

I’ve opined that statist policies harm young people.

I also shared this video explaining why big government is bad for millennials and the Gen-Z crowd.

This should be a slam-dunk issue. After all, don’t they know how the communist world collapsed?

Aren’t they aware of the problems in places such as Greece and Venezuela?

Or, to make it personal, don’t they have any inkling of the fact that they are going to get screwed by entitlement programs?

And what about the fact that they lose out because of Obamacare?

Sadly, it appears many of them haven’t learned the right lesson.

Support for socialism is disturbingly high among the young.

I’ve wondered, only half-jokingly, whether they’re too clueless to vote.

David Grasso opines on this topic for the New York Post.

It’s important to look at the typical millennial trajectory, and why unprecedented government intervention…

(Neville Chamberlain after returning from the Munich Conference)

In 1961 the controversial British historian, A.J.P. Taylor published THE ORIGINS OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR arguing that the war was caused by the appeasement policies pursued by England and France toward Nazi Germany.  He further purported that Adolf Hitler was more of a traditional European statesman who easily could have been stopped in March 1936 at the Rhineland bridges had England and France had the will to do so.  This book created a firestorm in academic circles and over the years numerous historians have challenged Taylor’s conclusions. Among the first was J.W. Wheeler-Bennett’s MUNICH: PROLOGUE TO TRAGEDY followed later by Telford Taylor’s MUNICH: THE PRICE OF PEACE, Lynne Olson’s TROUBLESOME YOUNG MEN: THE REBELS WHO HELPED SAVE ENGLAND,  David Faber’s MUNICH THE 1938 APPEASEMENT CRISIS, and last year a fictional account was written by Robert Harris.  These books among many…

Here’s a short Big Think talk by Steve Pinker, much demonized by the success-hating Pharyngula crowd as well as those who make their living by prognosticating the demise and degradation of humanity or our lack of social progress. Here Steve advances the well-known arguments for both free speech and academic freedom, which is simply free speech (as well as freedom of inquiry, the right to pursue what interests you) in a university setting. The arguments may not be new, but in this generation need to be repeated endlessly, for many young people and Leftists are beginning to mutter darkly that free speech is overrated.

And so Steve’s rationael for free speech is worth hearing again:

“We just don’t know any route to knowledge other than what Karl Popper called ‘conjecture and refutation’: throwing an idea out there and seeing if it withstands attempts to falsify it.”

This of course refers…

by Alain Naef (Postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley)

This research was presented at the EHS conference in Keele in 2018 and is available as a working paper here. It is also available as an updated 2019 version here.

The Bank of England. Available at Wikimedia Commons.

The 1960s were a period of crisis for the pound. Britain was on a fixed exchange rate system and needed to defend its currency with intervention on the foreign exchange market. To avoid a crisis, the Bank of England resorted to ‘window dressing’ the published reserve figures.

In the 1960s, the Bank came under pressure from two sides: first, publication of the Radcliffe report (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radcliffe_report) forced publication of more transparent accounts. Second, with removal of capital controls in 1958, the Bank came under attack from international speculators (Schenk 2010). These contradictory pressures put the Bank in an awkward…

Above: ‘that’ mural

Jeremy Corbyn has apologised for “pockets of antisemitism” in the Labour party as he attempts to deal with renewed claims discrimination against Jewish people in the party. The accusations flared up again at the weekend when it emerged that he had supported the retention of an antisemitic mural in the East End of London six years ago (for which he has now apologised, saying he “should have looked more closely” at the mural).  But Jewish leaders have issued an unprecedented open letter accusing Corbyn of “siding with antisemites” and being “ideologically fixed within a far-left worldview that is instinctively hostile to mainstream Jewish communities”. They also asked supporters to stage a show of solidarity outside parliament today as Labour MPs hold their weekly meeting. In his own statement on Sunday night, Corbyn said he was “sincerely sorry for the pain which has been caused” and said Labour was campaigning “to increase support and confidence among Jewish…

Above: Jews celebrate the declaration of the state of Israel in 1948

Labour Party conference passed a motion on Israel-Palestine, but shoehorned into the same session as Brexit, with no debate, and even less understanding of the issues.

The motion supports a majority-Palestinian state within the territory of Israel-Palestine, but in a fashion suffused with political dishonesty, written to hide rather than explain the issues.

The motion is premised on an “internationalist Labour Party” having particular responsibility “because of the role Britain played as a colonial power during the 1948 Nabka when Palestinians were forcibly displaced from their homes.”

That is nonsense. From the end of World War 2, Britain refused entry for Jewish refugees into Palestine, already heavily restricted during the war and the Holocaust. An increasingly violent Jewish insurgency in Palestine fought the British.

In 1947 Britain handed the problem to the UN, which proposed the partition of Palestine into…

In the wake of Miller (No 2), it has been contended in the media that prorogation ‘has always been treated as a “proceeding in Parliament”’ and hence protected from judicial review by article 9 of the Bill of Rights 1688.  The allegation is that in Miller (No 2), the Supreme Court overturned over 300 years of jurisprudence, including its own 2014 decision that ‘the Crown’s actions in Parliament were sacrosanct and “cannot be questioned”’.  Political motivations have been attributed to the Court for this abrupt departure from its own jurisprudence.

Is this actually the case?  A dispassionate analysis shows that the Court has taken an approach consistent with its previous jurisprudence on article 9 of the Bill of Rights and has not altered its course for political or any other reasons.  This post surveys some of the relevant evidence.

The purpose of article 9

Article 9 of the Bill…

From the Manhattan Institute:

If You Want ‘Renewable Energy,’ Get Ready to Dig

Democrats dream of powering society entirely with wind and solar farms combined with massive batteries. Realizing this dream would require the biggest expansion in mining the world has seen and would produce huge quantities of waste.

“Renewable energy” is a misnomer. Wind and solar machines and batteries are built from nonrenewable materials. And they wear out. Old equipment must be decommissioned, generating millions of tons of waste. The International Renewable Energy Agency calculates that solar goals for 2050 consistent with the Paris Accords will result in old-panel disposal constituting more than double the tonnage of all today’s global plastic waste. Consider some other sobering numbers: …

When electricity comes from wind or solar machines, every unit of energy produced, or mile traveled, requires far more materials and land than fossil fuels. That physical reality is literally visible:…

Gas is supposed to be ‘polluting’, but wood-burning power stations are OK? Yet more climate-related government policy nonsense is wheeled out, in line with the obsession over a minor trace gas in the atmosphere.

Polluting fossil fuel heating systems such as gas boilers will be banned from being installed in new homes by 2025 under new plans proposed by the government, reports Energy Live News.

They will be replaced with the latest generation of clean technologies such as air source heat pumps and solar panels, according to Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick.