Utopia, you are standing in it!

A Guardian report on damages awarded to the UK-based pro-Palestinian “charity” Interpal has obfuscated the organisation’s terror ties. 

The June 13th article by Matthew Weaver (“Daily Mail pays damages over hate festival allegations”) reported that the Daily Mail “paid £120,000 in damages plus costs to a UK-based humanitarian charity after the paper falsely accused it of funding a “hate festival” in Palestine which acted out the murder of Jews”.

Though that particular charge appears to have been untrue, the Guardian journalist then goes on to downplay the fact that interpal is widely reported to be affiliated with Hamas.

The second article, which appeared on the Mail Online website, referred to Interpal as a “specially designated global terrorist organisation”. It failed to mention that this referred to a contested designation made by the George Bush administration in 2003, which the charity has always denied and for which the US has…

Wasn’t it only yesterday we were told that wind and solar are so cheap that our RE ‘transition’ was inevitable? Well, that was then, this is now.

Proving the point, we make almost every day – namely that there wouldn’t be wind turbines or solar panels, on any serious scale, anywhere in the world, in the absence of massive and endless subsidies – when the UK cut subsidies to solar panels in April, the solar ‘industry’ literary collapsed, overnight.

The only thing ‘inevitable’ about wind and solar is the inevitable collapse that follows any reduction in the subsidies that sustain them. Even the mere mention of tinkering with the subsidies sends renewable energy rent seekers into apoplexy.

Here’s Jo Nova rubbing a little more salt into the RE zealots’ wounds.

UK withdraws life support for Solar Industry and 94% of orders disappear
Jo Nova Blog
Jo Nova
7 June 2019

To mark the publication at Oxford University Press of his new book ‘Voltaire: A Very Short Introduction’, a contribution to their Very Short Introductions series, Nicholas Cronk has written the following post about the wit and wisdom of Voltaire for the OUP Blog.

Voltaire: A Very Short Introduction by Nicholas Cronk is published by Oxford University Press.

As we mark Voltaire’s 323^rd birthday – though the date of 20 February is problematic, – what significance does the great Enlightenment writer have for us now? If I had to be very very short, I’d say that Voltaire lives on as a master of the one-liner. He presents us with a paradox. Voltaire wrote a huge amount – the definitive edition of his Complete works being produced by the Voltaire Foundation in Oxford will soon be finished, in around 200 volumes. And yet he is really famous for his short sentences. He…

RNZ’s Morning Report yesterday led us to hope we would hear something about the attractions of a flat tax, an idea once promoted by Roger Douglas when he was Minister of Finance in the Lange government.

A flat tax – adopted in some American states and European countries – is among the tax reforms favoured by the Act party as it tries to refresh its image.

We were led to believe the Morning Report team would kick this around with Act leader David Seymour just before 8am yesterday because they mentioned it in their introduction to an interview with him.  

Presenter Corin Dann said Act is targeting free speech “and radical tax reform” as it works to lift voter support heading into next year’s election.

The party had re-launched with the slogan ‘Act for freedom’.

Paul Collier, the controversial Oxford professor famous for his development work and his acclaimed books Exodus and The Bottom Billion, is back. But the author of Exodus and The Bottom Billion is long gone. The compelling writing and carefully reasoned world that made Bottom Billion impossible to put down has somehow disappeared. In The Future of Capitalism, Collier is tired. He is bitter. And he is sometimes quite mad – so mad that his disdain for this or that group of thinkers or actors in society consumes his otherwise brilliant analytical mind.

Instead of having his editors moderate those of his worst impulses, he doubles down on his polemic conviction. Indeed, he takes pride in offending people in all political camps, believing that it supports the book’s main intellectual point: ideologues of every persuasion are dangerous, one-size-fits-all too constricted for a modern society and we should rather turn…