Utopia, you are standing in it!

The President of the German Bundesamt für Bevölkerungsschutz und Katastrophenhilfe (Federal Office for Civil Protection and Disaster Relief, abbreviated BKK) is calling on citizens, government offices and companies to be prepared for widespread blackouts.

In an interview with German national daily Die Welt, BBK President Christoph Unger warned that in the future Germany faced higher probabilities of natural disasters arising from climate change, such as droughts, heat waves and flooding, but said his greatest concern was a power outage.

“After 24 hours without electricity we would have catastrophic conditions,” Unger told Die Welt.

He was particularly concerned about how the power supply could be switched off by a cyber attack. “We have to prepare ourselves for such a scenario and prepare ourselves for it”.

Unstable grid, more frequent interventions

He then told Die Welt that although the German power supply is relatively stable and secure in a global…

by Judith Curry

I have now completed my assessment of sea level rise and climate change.

Readers may recall that in early June listeners to BBC domestic radio’s news and current affairs station, Radio 4, were told by a presenter of the ‘Today’ show that:

“The fact remains that healthcare restrictions are being used [by Israel] to dehumanise the Palestinian people…” 

BBC R4’s ‘Today’ listeners get a distorted view of medical permits – part one

BBC R4’s ‘Today’ listeners get distorted view of medical permits – part two

The BBC of course has a history of ignoring stories which explain the need for security checks before permits are given to residents of the Gaza Strip to travel to or through Israel for the purpose of medical treatment. 

At the end of June the Israeli news website Ynet reported (Hebrew) that:

“This morning the surveying stage begins for the construction of a big international field hospital on an area of 40 dunams with 16 different departments near the Erez Crossing, which will be run…

Here are two videos from last weekend’s Atlanta, Georgia convention of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a group whose members include Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and which has endorsed (and worked for) the election of Bernie Sanders. The organization is pretty much what it says it is,—a group that favors liberal democracy but with significant socialistic aspects like universal Medicare. As they say,

We believe that working people should run both the economy and society democratically to meet human needs, not to make profits for a few. We are a political and activist organization, not a party; through campus and community-based chapters, DSA members use a variety of tactics, from legislative to direct action, to fight for reforms that empower working people.

So far so good, though I’m probably less socialistic than many of them (I’m not quite ready for “Medicare for All”, for instance). But I’m not above…

By Dan Sanchez writes at Real Clear Markets ‘Free Everything’ and Thomas Sowell’s First Law of Politics.Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

The other night, a politician criticized Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren for offering voters “free everything and impossible promises.” Remarkably, the critique came, not from a Republican fiscal conservative, but from a fellow Democrat during a primary debate. John Delaney, a former congressman from Maryland, said such policies were based on “fairy-tale economics.”

As economist Thomas Sowell wrote, “The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.”

So it was surprising to see a presidential candidate give a nod to the first lesson of economics and lay off the first lesson of politics for a moment.

The word “free” slips freely…

The House of Commons in Wilberforce’s day, by Augustus Pugin and Thomas Rowlandson

Note: unless otherwise indicated, page numbers cited are from my book. For copyright reasons I am unable to quote directly from the Wilberforce MS in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, but the quotations are to be found in the book, fully referenced.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne is the latest Conservative to claim the credit of the abolition of the slave trade and slavery for his party. This is repeated so often than it is almost becoming an established ‘fact’. The reality is that the slave trade was abolished in 1807 by a  coalition government, and slavery itself was abolished in 1833 by a Whig administration. Alongside this false claim goes the assumption that William Wilberforce was a Tory.  I am going to suggest here that this is a problematic identification that risks misunderstanding both the man…

Not long ago, Germany led the charge on wind power, now its wind industry faces Armageddon. Subsidies have been cut. Market rules against intermittent sources have been tightened. Germany’s rural residents are on the brink of revolt, fed up with their bucolic landscapes being trashed and being forced to live with practically incessant turbine generated low-frequency noise and infrasound. And a fair proportion of those neighbours forced to suffer these things are pursuing legal remedies against those ready to torment them.

All in all, it’s a perfect storm, with thousands of MWs worth of projects at a standstill and the hopes of eager developers left in tatters.

Needless to say, the rent-seekers that populate Germany’s wind industry are apoplectic.

German daily Die Welt reports on the desperate state of fear and self-loathing that’s struck amongst a group who thought that their sunny days would never end.

Collapse of Wind Power…

Having published The Maisky Diaries: Red Ambassador to the Court of St James’s, 1932-1943, an abridged version of the Soviet Ambassador to London diaries, in 2015, Yale University Press has now published The Complete Maisky Diaries in three volumes. The set is edited by Gabriel Gorodetsky, emeritus professor of history at Tel Aviv University, and presents the entire original diary which is 500,000 words in length. The editor provides annotations, extensive commentary to contextualize the diaries and fill gaps in their keeping, and three biographical chapters on Ivan Maisky (“The Making of a Soviet Diplomat,” “End of an Era: Maisky’s Recall,” and “The Price of Fame: A Late Repression).

Maisky was appointed Soviet ambassador to London in 1932, despite his having a dubious background as a Menshevik and member of the anti-Bolshevik Komuch government in 1918 who only belatedly joined the Bolsheviks. His earlier associations always cast “a huge…

It has come to this:  Sue anyone doing anything you don’t like for profit as a “Public Nuisance.”  Further on is reprinted a previous post explaining why it is legally wrongheaded to claim damages against purveyors of fossil fuels because of global warming/climate change.  What is news today is a federal judge making exactly that mistake.

Michael I. Krauss writes at Forbes Federal Judge Allows Misuse Of Public Nuisance Doctrine. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

I have written, in this column and elsewhere, about the threat to the Rule of Law created by the misuse and abuse of Public Nuisance doctrine. Now I write to bemoan a federal judge’s tolerance of a particularly egregious effort by a state to invoke this ancient tort (typically used to sanction those who blocked the public roads) to judicially create legislative policy.

In State of Rhode Island v Chevron Corp. et…

Back in 2014, I shared two videos – one narrated by Deirdre McCloskey and the other narrated by Don Boudreaux – explaining how the world went from near-universal poverty to mass prosperity (at least in the nations that embraced free markets and the rule of law).

Here’s a video with a similar theme, narrated by Dan Hannan, a British member of the European Parliament (hopefully not for long).

I like this video because it goes back 10,000 years to the invention of agriculture.

Hannan explains how this led to the creation of governments, basically acting as “stationary bandits.”

And for thousands of years, a tiny elite of kings and nobles basically acted as dictators while 99 percent of people endured horrid lives of slavery, oppression, poverty, and misery.

But then, as Hannan discusses (and also explained in the McCloskey and Bourdreaux videos), arbitrary power eventually…