Utopia, you are standing in it!

You have surely heard the hype that claims the Earth’s temperatures are the highest in 2,000  years, and we have the current heat waves to prove it. Not to worry, it’s just summer. Happens every year. (From Climate Depot:)

Reality Check:

When it comes to killing majestic raptors, ‘green’ hypocrisy is the new black. Apex avian predators are top of the food chain for 60 m wind turbine blades with their outer tips travelling at over 350 Kph.

RE zealots seem untroubled by the carnage. The usual nonsense retort is that cats, motorcars or skyscrapers kill more birds than wind turbines. Except cats are not renowned for downing healthy Eagles, Hawks or Kites – and that group of raptors rarely succumb to motorcars or tall buildings, either. Oh, and if moral equivalence is your game, motorcars and tall buildings are objects of useful necessity. Whereas a wind turbine is a pointless energy source, abandoned centuries ago, for very obvious reasons.

The wind industry itself, has spent a fortune to try and cover up the inconvenient little problem: Not Content with Lying About its Bird Slaughter-Houses, Wind Industry Sues to Cover up…

Among the many BBC reports concerning the second Intifada which remain online and accessible to this day is one dated May 8^th 2002 and carrying the interestingly punctuated headline “Arafat orders end to ‘terrorist’ attacks” in which readers are told that:

“Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has ordered his security forces to prevent “all terrorist operations” against Israelis after a suicide bomber killed 15 people and himself in an attack near Tel Aviv.

Mr Arafat condemned the attack as Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon flew back to Israel for an emergency cabinet meeting after cutting short a visit to the United States. […]

Amid growing expectations of Israeli reprisals, the Palestinian leader said he was ordering “the security forces to confront and prevent all terrorist operations against Israeli civilians from any Palestinian group”.

He said he was committed to the US-led fight against terrorism and appealed to the…

photo by Stuart McMahon

Next year will mark twenty years of tax credits for the wind energy industry. The federal renewable energy production tax credit which allows producers of wind energy a 30 percent investment tax-credit or a 2.2-cents-per-kilowatt-hour production tax credit has been in force since 1992.  There are more than14,000 abandoned wind turbines in the United States. The picture above is of a very recent fire from hurricane-force gales in Scotland.

The 2.2¢ subsidy doesn’t sound like much, but it is on average 40 percent of the wholesale price of electricity. The tax cuts, according to the Treasury Dept. cost taxpayers $1.5 billion annually.  A billion here, a billion there, and soon you’re talking about real money. The United States is facing $15 trillion of debt, but it has access to vast supplies of diverse sources of electricity perfectly capable of supplying our energy needs…

Written by Joe Geary

On Sunday, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn admitted that his party has “a real problem” with antisemitism, while launching a website to educate the party’s members and supporters about bigotry.

Called “No Room for anti-Semites, We’re Already Full,” the website provides “some basic tools to understand antisemitism so that we can hide it better.”

The website includes a video of Corbyn denouncing antisemitism in his party. He apologized for the “hurt that has been caused to many Jewish people,” admitting that attempts to hide the antisemitism in his party have been bungled.

Corbyn said that he spent his entire life campaigning for a multicultural society. He credits the Jewish people for being at the “heart of the Labour Party” but that the concerns of the Jewish community in the U.K. could now be dismissed, given that Labour had a new much larger block of voters.

People…

Emma Vere-Jones – according to a website in that name  – describes herself as a journalist, author and copywriter.   What distinctions she draws among those different forms of writing are a moot point, assuming she is the same Emma Vere-Jones who has brought a bunch of political pamphleteers to account as “advertisers” for disseminating material with which she disagrees.

Pamphleteering – we should not forget – was an early form of journalistm and in the days before the advent of the periodical press, pamphleteers were the world’s proto-journalists.

As a paper platform for a spectrum of religious fanatics, eccentrics, social commentators, and satirists, the pamphlet evolved as a weapon of propaganda (forged between the fledgling press and Star Chamber censorship) for powerful vested interest groups, political parties, governments – and revolutionists.

The Guttenberg revolution of the Renaissance provided the spark and the Reformation of the sixteenth century…

How many times can you say the same thing over and over and over again?

When it comes to the minimum wage, we may never know the answer.

No matter how often new research is produced showing that low-skilled workers are hurt when politicians cut off the bottom rungs of the economic ladder, politicians persist in pushing for bad policy.

Many state already have increased minimum wages, and the “Fight for $15” crowd wants a nationwide increase.

So let’s explain, for the umpteenth time, why this is misguided.

We have lots of data and anecdotes to review, so let’s begin with some scholarly research from Europe.

Here are some results from a study in Denmark, where the minimum wage increases when workers reach age 18, at which point many of them lose their jobs (h/t: Marginal Revolution).

This paper estimates the long-run impact of youth minimum wages…

Two months ago, I pointed out that San Francisco’s housing crisis was a “learnable moment” because some folks on the left actually now understand the negative consequences of government intervention.

Now I’m wondering if we might actually have a learnable moment on the issue of minimum wages for Crazy Bernie.

The Vermont socialist is experiencing something akin to what it’s like to be an entrepreneur or business owner. He’s having to generate revenue for his campaign and figure out the best way to allocate the funds.

And – surprise, surprise – he doesn’t want to pay above-market wages. Which makes him a giant hypocrite since he wants to use government coercion to impose higher minimum wages on the private sector.

Professor Art Carden highlights three things that Bernie should learn from this experience.

Bernie Sanders is having trouble with his unionized–and apparently underpaid–labor force. …the Sanders campaign…

The media went nuts when former Greens leader, Bob Brown turned on a wind farm in his backyard. Rampant hypocrisy, was just the first of the charges levelled at a man renowned for his hatred of reliable and affordable electricity.

In the result, the Liberal/National Coalition were very grateful that Dr Bob’s hatred of coal led him and his acolytes on a protest tour of Far North Queensland during the Federal election campaign in May, where Bob and a bunch of sandal wearing troglodytes railed against Adani’s proposed Carmichael mine.

Locals were ready to lynch him and his entourage (pubs refused to serve them beer) and, thanks to Bob’s job and economy wrecking stance, voters took their baseball bats to the heavily green tinged Labor party, returning the Coalition to Federal government.

The party that he founded, the Australian Greens enjoy enormous financial support from renewable energy rent seekers and…

Charles Plosser’s review paper entitled ‘Understanding real business cycles‘ is a must for all those interested in the modern theories of the business cycles. A major advantage of the paper that it is written in plain English, it has a well-organized structure and summarizes by giving a clear vision of future development. Some of the most important suggestions of the paper:

1. Keynesian macro is not a theory judged by the modern choice-theoretic standards. Keynesian models had significant empirical success but failed to trace the macro-level back to solid microfoundations.
2. The aim of general equilibrium modelling is to help us to understand the role played by optimization and equilibrating tendencies at the agent-level. It makes no sense to postulate a disequilibrium framework or market failures before understanding the contribution of a general macroeconomic equilibrium.  Large-scale fluctuations may be triggered even in the absence of market failures.
3. RBC-theory has common…

In last year’s excellent book, The Wizard and the Prophet, Charles Mann juxtaposed two polemics on the environment in the 1940s during the turning point of agricultural development: Norman Borlaug and William Vogt. Borlaug (the Wizard) took the scientific approach to innovate and develop new tools to solve problems facing agriculture. Vogt (the Prophet and arguably the founder of the modern environmental movement) would see an environmental problem as a reason for man to pull back and let the planet heal itself.

To this day, both approaches (to innovate or to pull back and take precaution) have defined environmental debates. There is no doubt which side I fall on. Borlaug’s scientific route has allowed humanity to thrive over the last 70 years. The Green Revolution in agriculture led to global economic expansions as abundance led to generations of risk-takers being able to leave the land and develop other opportunities…