Raising a raft of unnecessary danger, the wind industry’s body count currently stands at 192. Flying blades, collapsing and/or self-immolating towers account for their fair share of corpses. But those that take to the air, shouldn’t overlook the number of pilots and their passengers who’ve come to grief, thanks to a wind turbine or their associated METMast wind monitoring towers. For a rundown on the wind industry’s pointless death toll refer: Summary of Wind Turbine Accident data to 31 March 2019

Slamming into a 100 m tower or 60 m blade is one thing, but coping with dirty, turbulent air generated by these things, which spans out to the horizon, is another:

The spread of giant industrial wind turbines across the US of A has attracted a range of detractors, not least the US military.

As Mark Mathis details in the video below (transcript follows), America’s Armed Forces…

Much has been made of Kamala Harris’s attack on Joe Biden in the Democrat Debates. Biden slipped way down in the polls, and Harris’s carefully rehearsed attack advanced her standing.

In her blast at Joe Biden, she claimed that:

Two decades after Brown v. Board, I was only the second class to integrate at Berkeley public schools. Without that decision, I likely would not have become a lawyer and eventually be elected a Senator from California.

That’s the power a Supreme Court Justice holds.

In political jargon, that’s called “playing the race card”, but personal experience makes it even more important. The Gateway Pundit clears the air a little, explaining that Kamala’s parents were successful professionals. Kamala went to school in Berkeley for only 2 years. She moved with her mother to Canada at age 7, where she completed grade school and high school.

Then a little checking confirms that…

This Spring I taught a history of recent economics course to undergraduate students majoring in mathematics and economics. The syllabus is here. I have reproduced the reading list with some links to papers and twitter summaries of my lectures below. Here are also a few comments on what I wanted to do with this type of course, what worked and what did not. Comments and suggestions to improve the course and set up new debates are much welcomed.

Course narrative and organization 

Though the course is tailored to a specific audience, I believe how the general narrative is conveyed through re-enacting landmark controversies in the history of economics can  appeal to many types of students. My goal was to highlight several characteristics of economics as a discipline:

(1) a contested science: economics is often perceived as contested from the inside (economists constantly arguing with each other)  as well as…

Digital Trends reports that Google, Facebook, and Twitter are attempting to crack down on misinformation on vaccines and other claims about cancer cures, weight loss, etc. In my view, this is a mistake.

I realize there is a propensity to seek to stop or prevent what is viewed as disinformation. However, restricting or outright prohibiting such information or speech can actually backfire. The voices silenced by such policies can make them actually stronger by allowing the transmitters of such speech to make the case to their followers that they are being targeted as part of the conspiracy they claim is occurring. This, in turn, wins over or even converts people who may or may not have sympathized with people, such as Alex Jones of Infowars or Mike Adams of Natural News, to support them because they will be perceived as victims.

The answer to misinformation is more speech because, in…

Chancellor Kurz addresses the Austrian National Council just before losing its confidence.

Introduction

A series of strange events has recently befallen Austria. It began with political scandal and the collapse of the coalition government between Sebastian Kurz’s People’s Party and Heinz-Christian Strache’s Freedom Party and ended a few weeks later with the President of Austria appointing a “technocratic provisional government” composed of judges and civil servants, who will now steer the ship of state as a caretaker cabinet until early elections in September. The details of what precipitated the coalition government’s collapse would have seemed outlandish prior to, say, 2016, but now seem both depressingly believable and yet still absurd. The final outcome of the political scandal has taken the caretaker convention to its logical extreme because of the peculiarities of Austria’s constitution and its provisions surrounding non-confidence, early dissolution, and government formation.

At the end of my long post yesterday on the Reserve Bank’s latest efforts to spin the Governor’s plans to increase very markedly minimum capital ratios for locally-incorporated banks, I noted

PS.  As Martien Lubberink at Victoria has pointed out there is another international agency paper out just recently that really doesn’t help the Bank’s case much if at all. I might touch on that tomorrow.

His post is here (complete with the sly –  if obscure, presumably deliberately so, to readers –  dig at the Governor in the final paragraph).

The paper he was referring was recently published by the Bank for International Settlements as a Working Paper of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, with the title “The costs and benefits of bank capital – a review of the literature”.   The paper was released only a couple of weeks ago, and it should be studied carefully…

One of the classic academic studies of the effects of immigration on low-skilled Americans is that of David Card, concerning the Mariel Boatlift. Card found that the sudden Cuban influx had little or no adverse work impact on native African-Americans. Lately George Borjas, one of my favorite economists, has disputed Card’s findings, only to find my UC Davis colleague Giovanni Peri disagreeing. Needless to say, Borjas has been responding to Peri. And today I was taken aback to find that another of my favorite economists, Jennifer Hunt, also disagrees with Borjas.

I have been quite open in pointing out that Peri, while very sharp and by the way very personable, generally does not cite work by those taking views opposite his — a grievous academic transgression — and is prone to contradicting his own work, as I have explained before and is also seen in the first link…

PQC: We all will be gone! Justin, you lived your life as you wished, you made your mark and your point in this earth. My appreciation.

I have the sinking feeling we’ll be seeing a lot more of this American horror show, while – under the pretext of “fighting terrorism” – we act out our sadistic fantasies all over the world. As these outrages against human decency and morality provoke worldwide revulsion at the perpetrators, perhaps one day we’ll go looking for “terrorists” in the vicinity of a mirror – and see ourselves for what we’ve become. Justin Raimondo “Who Are the Terrorists?”

Justin Raimondo, RIP (1951-2019)

by Antiwar Staff Posted on June 27, 2019

Justin
Raimondo, former editorial director and co-founder of Antiwar.com, is
dead at 67. He died at his home in Sebastopol, California, with his
husband, Yoshinori Abe, by his side. He had been diagnosed with 4th