Utopia, you are standing in it!

The Israel Security Agency’s report on terror attacks (Hebrew) during August 2019 shows that throughout the month a total of 149 incidents took place including 97 in Judea & Samaria, 25 in Jerusalem and inside the ‘green line’ and 26 in the Gaza Strip sector.

In Judea & Samaria and Jerusalem the agency recorded 95 attacks with petrol bombs, 14 attacks using pipe bombs, five arson attacks, two shooting attacks, two stabbing attacks, one attack using a grenade and one vehicular attack.

Incidents recorded in the Gaza Strip sector included nine attacks with petrol bombs, three attacks using pipe bombs, one attack using a grenade, three shooting attacks and seven incidents of rocket fire.

Two people were murdered and eight wounded in attacks during the month of August.

The BBC News website reported the August 7^th murder of Dvir Sorek the following day but no follow-up reporting was seen…

Richard Tol posted at Climate Economics: How much energy do building code save?

Not nearly as much as expected, according to this paper by Arik Levinsohn. California has had building codes for energy since 1978, and they are tightened every so often. Levinsohn compares the energy use of buildings build before and after a code change, compares Californian houses to houses elsewhere in the USA, and compares the weather sensitivity of houses with different building codes. He finds that codes save energy, but the ex post estimates are lower than the ex ante ones on which the regulation was based.

Arik Levinsohn wrote at American Economic Review  How Much Energy Do Building Energy Codes Save? Evidence from California Houses 

Abstract

Regulations governing the energy efficiency of new buildings have become a cornerstone of US environmental policy. California enacted the first such codes in 1978 and has tightened them every…

This, sent by reader Michael, is a video of Bill Maher’s show last night, featuring Andrew Sullivan and Sarah Haider, as well as Samantha Power, Timothy Naftali and Heather McGhee Watch it while you can, because these things are taken down soon. I haven’t even watched it in my rush to make it available here.

Haider is the special guest, and appears at 31:32.

I’ve now watched it. It’s a good show overall: there’s discussion of Justin Trudeau’s blackface, NZ prime minister Jacinda Arden’s unwise donning of a hijab after the Christchurch mosque massacre, Trump Derangement Syndrome, and much more.

Feldheim village near Berlin, Germany.
H/T The GWPF

Consider the uproar that greets most kinds of environment-related proposals that even might have a negative impact on any sort of wildlife. Then wonder at what the wind industry has so far been allowed to get away with. Does the pushback stand a chance in the face of current climate change mythology?

The ban on killing endangered species is turning into an ‘absolute obstacle to planning’ new wind farms in Germany, says Die Welt.

Now, the wind lobby wants to water down conservation laws protecting endangered species. The wind power industry can hardly erect any new turbines because of a flood of complaints.
– – –
The ban on killing endangered wildlife is turning into an ‘absolute obstacle to planning’ – extrapolated death figures show that tens of thousands of birds are affected.

When the wind power industry presented its interim results…

Sexual reproduction, the generation of offspring by fusion of genetic material from two different individuals, evolved over 1 billion years ago. It is the reproductive strategy of all higher animals and plants, including the mammalian class to which humans belong.

Humans can be differentiated into two categories by their reproductive roles. Females make eggs and gestate live young. Males generate sperm to fertilise the female egg. In accordance with their respective roles, females and males have different reproductive anatomies (“biological sex”).

No other reproductive mechanism exists in humans.

In contradiction of evolutionary history and millennia of human observations, highly-esteemed scientific periodicals are running articles undermining the observable reality of biological sex.

“Biologists now think there is a larger spectrum than just binary female and male.”

                Scientific American, Oct 22 2018

“The research and medical community now sees sex as more complex than male and female.”

                Nature, Oct 30…

Our MP of the Month is John Stuart Mill (1806-73), who sat as Liberal MP for Westminster, 1865-8.

One hundred and fifty years ago this week, the House of Commons voted for the first time on the question of granting the parliamentary franchise to women. In this landmark division, an amendment to the Conservative ministry’s 1867 reform bill put forward by the Liberal MP for Westminster, John Stuart Mill, 75 MPs backed women’s suffrage. However, 196 MPs, including the Liberal party leader, William Gladstone, entered the opposite lobby.

In his autobiography, Mill, who sat in the Commons from 1865 until his defeat at the 1868 general election, described his amendment of 20 May 1867 as

by far the most important, perhaps the only really important public service I performed in the capacity of a Member of Parliament: a motion to strike out the words which were understood to limit…

We wonder if Sparkling Strawberry Ltd – and other businesses which provide fancy dress costumes – have been obliged to review the range of garments they offer.

We mention SparklingStrawberry, based in Cheshire in the UK, after stumbling upon its website and running through its list of Fancy Dress Party Ideas

Here’s a few fancy dress ideas to inspire you when planning your Birthday, Halloween, Christmas, New Year’s Eve or Hogmanay fancy dress costume party. If you need any more excuses to throw a fancy dress party then you’ll find 52 reasons towards the bottom of this page.

An Alice in Wonderland party is one idea, but some of the suggestions in connection with this seem problematic.  The Mad Hatter, for example.  This is bound to give offence to the mentally enfeebled and/or their families.

The White Rabbit and White Queen raise racism issues.

But then we come to the…

I’ve started a new column at Forbes on energy and climate. Here are my first four columns:

• When Is Climate Change Just Weather? What Hurricane Dorian Coverage Mixes Up, On Purpose (link)
• Democrat Climate Policies Are Ambitious But Fail The Reality Test (link)
• The Case for a Goldilocks Carbon Tax (link)
• The Yawning Gap Between Climate Rhetoric and Climate Action (link)

Comments welcomed and more to come!

The number of wildfires sparked by these things grows by the day. Contrary to their ‘super-safe’, ‘clean’, ‘green’ image, giant industrial wind turbines are the perfect incendiary device.

Around the world, hundreds have exploded into in palls of smoke and balls of flame – in the process – each one raining molten metal and over 1,000 litres of flaming gear oil and hydraulic fluid (see our post here) and burning plastic earthwards.

Wind turbine fires are ten times more common than the wind industry and its parasites claim (see our post here and check out this website: http://turbinesonfire.org).

The wind industry has been forced to concede that at least 4 bushfires were started by wind turbines in Australia, so far:

• Ten Mile Lagoon in Western Australia in the mid-1990s;
• Lake Bonney, Millicent (SA) in January 2006 (see the photo below);
• Cathedral Rocks Wind Farm, Port Lincoln (SA) in…

1. Responsible Government

Parliament is an institution of responsible government.  The essence of the common law principle of responsible government is the constitution of a regime of confidence: a government is required to carry the confidence of Parliament. This is the fundamental connexion of the executive (the Government) to the Parliament.

The European Union (Withdrawal) (No 2) Act 2019 does two main things.  It requires the Prime Minister to write a wholly dictated letter seeking a further extension of the Brexit date, and it requires from the executive certain reports to the Parliament as to progress in the Brexit negotiations.  The first I shall show is unconstitutional because it is (a) inconsistent with the principle of responsible governance, (b) it is undemocratic, and (c) it is not an Act of real legislation at all.  But the second is clearly valid: progress reports by the executive to the Parliament are a…

I wrote yesterday about the generic desire among leftists to punish investors, entrepreneurs, and other high-income taxpayers.

Today, let’s focus on one of the specific tax hikes they want. There is near-unanimity among Democratic presidential candidates for higher tax rates on capital gains.

Given the importance of savings and investment to economic growth, this is quite misguided.

The Tax Foundation summarizes many of the key issues in capital gains taxation.

…viewed in the context of the entire tax system, there is a tax bias against income like capital gains. This is because taxes on saving and investment, like the capital gains tax, represent an additional layer of tax on capital income after the corporate income tax and the individual income tax. Under a neutral tax system, each dollar of income would only be taxed once. …Capital gains face multiple layers of tax, and in addition, gains are not adjusted…

Richard Finlay and Anny Francis of RBA in this research note give a fascinating account of currency counterfeiting. They focus on Australia but pull examples from other countries too. Perhaps one of the best things that have read in this year so far.

Counterfeiting has a rich and varied history going back to the very earliest forms of money. It has been pursued for personal gain – although at the significant risk of jail time, or, in the past, death – as well as for economic and political destabilisation by hostile countries. Both high- and low-value denominations are liable to be attacked. Currency issuers and counterfeiters are, and always have been, locked in a battle of innovation, with government authorities adapting and innovating in order to deter counterfeiting. Acceleration in the rate of technological development, however, seems to have shortened the timeframe over which each new security feature remains counterfeit-resistant…