Utopia, you are standing in it!

In 1970, Neil Young released his classic album, After the Goldrush. One of its standout tracks was Southern Man.

The following year, Young recorded the follow up, Harvest. This featured the song Alabama. The South more generally, and Alabama in particular was in his sights.

In 1973, Lynyrd Skynyrd recorded their classic song in reply, Sweet Home Alabama.

Well, I hope Neil Young will remember

A Southern man don’t need him around anyhow

Over the years, it was often assumed that the band hated Young, or even that they were the voice of the white racist south. Neither ‘fact’ was true.

Skynyrd’s Ronnie Van Zant would later claim that:

We wrote Alabama as a joke…We didn’t even think about it — the words just came out that way. We just laughed like hell, and said ‘Ain’t that funny’… We love Neil Young, we love his…

Like night follows day, adding chaotically intermittent wind and solar to your grid sends power prices into orbit. South Australians know it: they suffer the world’s highest power prices as a result of their 50% RET.

Other Australian states are heading in the same direction. Victoria’s great wind rush has already sent prices rocketing: wholesale prices jumped 19% last financial year. Part of a trend (see above) which is all set to continue.

The effect of surging power prices is economically insidious. Electricity is a critical input to a range of businesses, such that rising power prices reduce margins, squeeze profits and limit the opportunities to employ staff and otherwise re-invest in those businesses. Ultimately, profits become losses and a date with insolvency and a liquidator soon looms.

On the consumption side, households being belted by ever-rising power costs naturally reduce their spending on everything else.

Not that the…

An open letter to Jan Thomas, Vice-chancellor of Massey University.

Massey University in Wellington is the venue for an event on 13 November called Feminism 2020, organised by Speak Up For Women (SU4W). The university has come under pressure from rightist forces masquerading under the banner of transgender rights to break its contract with the meeting organisers and cancel the booking. At the time of writing, the university has resisted the pressure to cancel the venue booking. However, on 27 September it released a statement which can only be read as paving the way for cancelling the meeting. This open letter was written response to that statement.

To Jan Thomas,

Vice-chancellor,

Massey University,

Wellington.

Dear Ms Thomas,

I commend Massey University’s stated commitment to free speech, and in particular, its decision to host the event Feminism 2020 in face of criticism and pressure to shut the meeting down.

However…

My son is doing the Scholarship history exam this year and the topic is something like “populism in history”.  It got me interested and I’ve been reading various books and talking the issue over with my son trying to get straight in my own mind just what “populism” actually is.

It seems like one of those elusive terms where each user means something subtly different, usually –  at least when it is quasi-academic usages –  things/beliefs/actions the author themselves disagrees with, often almost viscerally.  I’m still left unclear that it means anything much different than “things/views which are popular with a significant share of the population, perhaps even a majority, but where those views cut across or defy those held by the contemporary elites of the society in question”.   Since there is no particular reason to suppose that contemporary “elite” opinion is any better or closer to being right…

This illuminating article by Bruce Moon (no relation to Paul) appeared in the Northland Age last Thursday.

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It is a curious fact that there are many part-Maoris today (though certainly not all) who have remarkably good memories about their alleged sufferings since 1840, but completely blank minds about what happened to them any earlier.

It is not hard to work out why this should be.

But it is more helpful, perhaps, to assist them in remembering a bit more about their earlier days.

When Europeans first arrived in New Zealand, Maoris were an aggressive warrior race, ready to attack for the slightest reason, as Tasman found out quickly to his cost. [1]

This happened again when, just over a couple of years after Captain Cook, Marion du Fresne arrived off our shores.

While fishing innocently in calm waters, as he thought, he broke a tapu unknown to him.

His…

There have been two competing visions of the constitution battling it out since the Brexit referendum in 2016, which David Howarth described on this blog as the Whitehall view and the Westminster view. The Whitehall view is that the UK constitution, and the relationship between Parliament and Government in particular, is designed to allow the Government of the day to deliver its promises to the electorate. Parliament’s role is to scrutinise how those promises, as well the everyday decisions of Government, are delivered, no more no less. The relationship between Parliament and Government is a purely political one, and therefore raises no questions that are relevant to the courts. The Westminster view, I would argue, is based on the notion that the UK constitution is based on a number of constitutional principles that ensure that Parliament is ‘the senior partner’. Those principles, despite not being codified and subject to legislative…

Bjorn Lomborg, Director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, breaks down the facts about the environment and shows why the reality of climate change may be very different from what you hear in the media.

by Judith Curry

Doing so erodes scientific credibility — and distracts from the urgent need to shore up our vulnerability to storms’ impacts.

The recently launched ‘Make It 16’ campaign – aimed at lowering the voting age in New Zealand to 16 – has support from Children’s Commissioner Judge Andrew Becroft.

Becroft said lowering the voting age would enhance turnout, ingrain the habit of voting and uphold young people’s rights.

If this be so, why stop at 16?

Becroft says

“Children and young people have the right to have their voices heard and taken into account.”

This suggests there should be no age limit.

This week’s Supreme Court judgment against Boris Johnson on parliament’s prorogation has shaken British politics and will be looked back on as a landmark case. Yet at the same time, Meg Russell argues, it simply reinforces the core principle of parliament’s centrality in our constitution. There has long been a myth of executive-dominance in the British system. Perhaps after this case, the fact that the government gains its power and authority from parliament will be better recognised – by those both inside and outside the system.

The Supreme Court’s judgment in the prorogation case was damning. Short of deciding that Boris Johnson had misled the Queen (which would be difficult to know, given private conversations) the court issued the strongest possible condemnation on all counts. The government had argued that prorogation was non-justiciable: i.e. not a matter in which the courts could get involved. The justices instead ruled it justiciable…

Nick Gillespie gets the focus right in his Reason artilce Think Globally, Shame Constantly: The Rise of Greta Thunberg Environmentalism. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Her future—and that of the planet—hasn’t been “stolen” and the best way forward is through serious policy discussion, not histrionics.

To say that reactions to Thunberg are as extreme as her rhetoric is an understatement. . . But despite the volume and vitriol of the attacks directed her way, it’s vitally important that the worldview she represents and the policies she espouses are refuted. Like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), and a host of other American politicians, Thunberg believes that we’ve only got a few years left to settle the fate of the planet, a basic tenet pushed by supporters of the Green New Deal and by most of the Democrats running for president. In fact, Thunberg thinks that “cutting our…