Utopia, you are standing in it!

I can’t resist a bit of Schadenfreude about the New York Times, as both Andrew Sullivan and I recently criticized it for mixing opinion with news, and becoming unacceptably “woke”. This week, the paper screwed up in its desire to go after a Trump appointee, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. When Kavanaugh was having confirmation hearings, my judgment was that he was probably guilty of sexual malfeasance, but on character issues alone I didn’t think he deserved confirmation. There was no need, then, to adjudicate a “he said/she said” conundrum. Others differed, but I thought Kavanaugh was unfit for the bench.

Last week two authors of a “News Analysis” piece in the NYT, Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, both Times reporters, dropped a few bombshells about unreported or uninvestigated sexual harassment by Kavanaugh; these are detailed in their upcoming book, The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation.

Unfortunately…

Last week the governor of California signed into law a good vaccination bill, Senate Bill 276, which stipulates a standardized procedure for requesting medical exemptions from childhood vaccination:

By Duggan Flanakin ~

For decades, the solar industry benefited from generous federal, state, and local subsidies to increase its footprint. Yet these generous subsidies ignore the costs of disposal of solar panel waste.

Things may be changing. In May 2018, Michael Shellenberger, a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment” and Green Book Award Winner, wrote in Forbes that the problem of solar panel disposal will explode with full force in two or three decades and wreck the environment because it is a huge amount of waste which is not easy to recycle.

Shellenberger was citing comments, published in the South China Morning Post, from Chinese solar expert Tian Min, general manager of Nanjing Fangrun Materials, a recycling company in Jiangsu province that collects retired solar panels. Tian called his country’s solar power industry “a ticking time bomb.”

This is not really news. The Associated Press had reported in 2013…

Steven Crowder reveals how veganism is not only bad for animals and the environment, but actually worse than cannibalism.

by Judith Curry

The concern about sea level rise is driven primarily by projections of future sea level rise.

‘Green’ dreams completely gutted.

Seems like only yesterday when you were hard pressed to find anything in print criticising wind and solar, save for sites like this one. Nowadays, there’s a veritable smorgasbord. Quite a few mainstream journalists are waking up to the greatest economic and environmental fraud of all time. STT has been joined by dozens of other blogs around the globe, all making concerted efforts to destroy the subsidy-soaked wind and solar scam. Even hard-core green loons like Dr Bob Brown (former head of the Australian Greens) have turned on wind power, with a vengeance.

Michael Shellenberger, whose erudite work has graced these pages many times, had his road-to-Damascus-moment some years ago. Michael, once rated as America’s top green, initially went along with the ‘wind and solar will save us’ meme. But, having applied a little logic and common sense, came to the inevitable conclusion that wind…

If the phrase “may you live in interesting times” actually has its roots in a curse, then, we constitutional lawyers are indeed cursed. The specific nature of the curse is the malleable nature of constitutional controls designed to protect our institutions from the whims of executive action. At the time of writing, Britain is set to leave the European Union without a deal as to future relations on 31 October 2019. Documents from Operation Yellowhammer set out the possible real-world consequences of this. In a meeting of 28 August 2019, the Privy Council issued an Order in Council proroguing Parliament between the dates of Monday 9 September to Monday 14 October 2019. According to a Commons Library Briefing Paper prorogation has not lasted more than fourteen days since the 1980s.

Courts in England and Wales have taken radically different approaches to the lawfulness of the Government’s decision to prorogue…

Historian Robert Conquest is said to have proposed three laws of politics:

1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
2. Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing.
3. The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.

I can’t think of any counter examples to 2 and 3, can you?

Some time ago, Contrapoints made a video on autogynephilia. I’d watched it before without finding it convincing, but I finally decided to write down some notes while watching it, so now I can do a fuller response to it. I’m not going to include everything I observed with my notes, so you might want to read those too if you want a full idea of what I thought of the video.

Contrapoints misrepresents autogynephilia theory

In the beginning of the video at 2:50, Contrapoints contrasts Blanchard’s typology with the idea that trans women transition because of gender dysphoria. However, Blanchard’s typology does not assert that most trans women’s transitions are driven by pure lust, but instead that autogynephilia in some sense contributes to the development of gender dysphoria, which then usually is a main motivator for transition.

This issue comes up quite a lot of times. At 

When Robert Mugabe first gained the leadership of Zimbabwe, (forgive the pun) he was seen as the great white hope on a continent ridden with dictators.

Rob Muldoon was slammed at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Conference in Sydney for suggesting otherwise, but subsequent events soon proved him right.

Here’s an interesting tale about the Zimbabwean public’s view of Mugabe, as opposed to his much maligned predecessor, Ian Smith.

Like most libertarians, I’m a bit quirky.

Most people, if they watch The Great Escape or Rambo II, cheer when American POWs achieve freedom.

I’m happy as well, but I also can’t stop myself from thinking about how I also applaud when a successful taxpayer flees from a high-tax state to a low-tax state.

It’s like an escape from oppression to freedom, though I confess it might not be the best plot for a blockbuster movie.

In any event, here are two recent feel-good stories about this phenomenon.

Here’s a report about two members of the establishment media who are protecting their family’s finances from greedy Connecticut politicians.

After reports that married MSNBC anchors Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski have been mysteriously broadcasting their show from Florida — sources speculated that the location is to benefit Scarborough’s tax situation. The “Morning Joe” anchors have been reportedly on a home set in Jupiter, Fla…