Utopia, you are standing in it!

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…

That troubled teenage, Greta the Fretter has reignited the nonsense that we’re a heartbeat away from an all wind and sun powered future. The girl that that can see carbon dioxide gas, heads up a mathematically challenged group, who pronounce the time and date when the world will happily operate without generating any CO2 at all, with the profound certainty of the shaman and soothsayers, of old.

Renewable energy rent seekers actively encourage the farcical notion that wind and solar will deliver the results sought by Greta & Co, namely a world that runs entirely on sunshine and breezes, eliminating carbon dioxide emissions, into the bargain.

Keen to rain on their parade, Tony Thomas crunches the numbers below.

Maths is Hard for the Green-Minded
Quadrant Online
Tony Thomas
15 October 2019

Politicians and climate alarmists are running what amounts to a promises auction about getting the world to zero net…

Our leftist educational system has turned many of today’s young people into social justice warriors. Frequently they accuse older generations of trashing the planet for their own benefit and stealing the future from future generations.  As Greta says: “How dare They!”  Lost in all this ignorance and arrogance is any gratitude for the wealth of conveniences and options provided by their predecessors on a silver platter to these spoiled youth.

Matthew Kahn has a post up regarding economics for non-economists, which will appear here later on. He provokes discussion in his seminar by exposing students to a fine essay by economist Don Boudreaux You Are Richer than John D. Rockefeller Do read the linked article which is only excerpted below.

Boudreaux asks: How much money would it take for you to agree to live out your life a century ago? Would you do it for a million dollars? What about…

Many conservative critics of the academy believe that liberals dominate because of anti-conservative discrimination. While there are likely some cases of that, the evidence was always weak for discrimination as a general explanation. For example, liberals dominate in fields that are not political, like math. In technical fields, people are recruited from all over the world. I’d be surprised if the engineering professor knew the politics of the new guy from Kazakhstan, unless he made a big deal out of it.

My view, as I’ve stated before on this blog, is simply that there’s a massive self-selection process at work. Being conservative is probably correlated with certain attitudes toward work, such a desire for high compensation, that are hard to satisfy in the academy. There are also field specific self-selection effects. Sociology for example, studies all kinds of deviant behavior and the faculty tend to skew liberal, not the sort…

From a recent article in Econometricaby Johanes Abeler, Daniel Nosenzo, and Collin Raymond:

Private information is at the heart of many economic activities. For decades, economists have assumed that individuals are willing to misreport private information if this maximizes their material payoff. We combine data from 90 experimental studies in economics, psychology, and sociology, and show that, in fact, people lie surprisingly little. We then formalize a wide range of potential explanations for the observed behavior, identify testable predictions that can distinguish between the models, and conduct new experiments to do so. Our empirical evidence suggests that a preference for being seen as honest and a preference for being honest are the main motivations for truth‐telling.

Comment: Remember when Adam Smith wrote in Theory of Moral Sentiments that people want to be loved and lovely? Well, there you go. The broader point is that in an industrialized…

Being a weather-dependent enterprise, no one thinks of promising their kids a kite flying holiday, ahead of time. So just how modern, Western economies ever thought they’d power themselves with occasional breezes is a mystery.

The inherent and chaotic intermittency that’s part and parcel of wind power is only compensated by the ability of dispatchable power sources to plug the yawning, routine daily gaps in wind power output. Those sources are, in order of priority coal, gas and nuclear and (where available) hydro.

The amount of power stored and re-delivered by grid-scale batteries is so risible it barely rates a mention.

In truth, the real heavy lifting is done by [insert trigger warning] fossil fuels, being inefficiently utilised in power plants, often given the misleading tag of “backup” power. Misleading because, before heavily subsidised wind and solar came on the scene, they did just fine, all by themselves, delivering power…

Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore has made headlines in the last month due to his thrashing self-described Democratic Soclaist Alexandria Occasio-Cortez (AOC) for her Green New Deal in which Moore correctly points out implementing it would mean the destruction of our civilization.

While her fellow Leftists heaped praise on AOC for her proposals, Dr. Moore called her out by stating she was a Pompous little twit and pointed out what would happen if fossil fuels were banned under her proposal. Patrick Moore even made appearances on Fox News in which President Trump tweeted a compliment of Moore’s intelligence.

This was obviously the last straw for Good and Greenpeace and, according to Climate Depot, the far-left tech giant removed Moore from the list of Greenpeace’s founders.

In true Communist form, the Left erases undesirables from memory.

Last Friday’s New York Magazine column by Andrew Sullivan covers, as usual, three topics. This time they’re Brexit, impeachment, and Sullivan’s splenetic but largely accurate assessment of the Democratic candidates: a panoply he finds lame and dispiriting. You should be reading his column every week, and I read it even in Valparaiso (after the curfew). I’ll give a few excerpts from each of the three mini-essays; click on the screenshot to read the whole thing:

Understanding the whole Brexit mess is above my pay grade; when I asked Matthew about it, he said “Wait and see.” Sullivan was a “remain” voter (i.e., don’t leave the EU), but he thinks that the UK should respect the results of the referendum, which was to exit. He also thinks that the “remainers” are trying to nullify the people’s will in indefensible ways, including calling for a re-vote. I don’t know whether that’s true…

I don’t know why, but stuff like this depresses me and makes me wonder what the world will be like in 20 years, when students who passed this resolution are running the UK—and maybe the US. But I’ll most likely be dead then.

This event not nearly as bad as the Right supporting Trump, of course, but everybody writes about Trump while the mainstream and liberal media are reluctant to documenting the Authoritarian Left. (If you’re a reader, by the way, please don’t tell me to write more about the perfidy of Republicans. You can see that kind of discourse, whose sentiments I share, on every other site.)

So the latest occurrence is that Oxford University’s student council voted three days ago not to mandate the use of jazz hands in place of applause, but to “mandate Sabbatical Officers to encourage the use” of “jazz hands”, the British Sign Language…

An animal rights activist out of Russia named Anna Razinova is urging prosecutors to bring charges against a veterinarian for not euthanizing pets. Simultaneously, Razinova is also the head of a law club of pet owners.

If one understands the ethics of animal rights organizations, Anna Razinova’s actions make sense. Animal rights groups, like PETA, and people such as Razinova think most people can’t be trusted with the care of pets which can be trained for things other than what they determine is an animal’s true nature (including the desire to be free). Consequently, they believe that domesticated animals should be sent to that big animal shelter in the sky.

Animal rights groups hate humans to the point where they will kill off our pets after stealing them from you or calling for them to be euthanized or not resuscitated. Not a very ethical way to treat animals either…