Utopia, you are standing in it!

Now a few days ago ACT MP David Seymour was vilified on social media

Supposedly Seymour was responsible for Ms Ghahraman needing a security guard. Seymour wrote

“Let it be known, the public beating has not gone out of fashion.” So goes the quote from the movie Thank You for Smoking, as politicians attack the wildly unpopular protagonist, a tobacco lobbyist.
 
I’ve found those words to be true over the past week and it has strengthened my belief in the importance of freedom of expression.
 
To recap, I was asked about Green MP Golriz Ghahraman’s stance on free speech. In her own words “it is vital that the public is involved in a conversation about what speech meets the threshold for being regulated, and what mix of enforcement tools should be used.”
 
I believe that such an idea, and by extension politicians who promote it, is a…

When the Wall Street Journal starts to question the inevitability of our ‘transition’ to an all wind and sun powered future, you know the gig is up.

Until now, the WSJ has been a champion for the wind and solar ‘industries’ in the US. Playing to the myth that the wind and sun are ‘free’, and that wind and solar power are both cheap and reliable, the Wall Street Journal has hitherto rarely fired an angry shot in the direction of the greatest State-sponsored fraud, in history.

So, when Mark Mills penned the piece below, we expect he also drew up his resignation notice, at the same time.

Mills expresses serious doubt, where perfect certainty once ruled the day. You see, amongst the intelligentsia, the future is already written, and its pages spell out the doom of conventional power generation – fossil fuels and nuclear power are already ‘dead-men-walking’, apparently…

by Alex Wakelam (University of Cambridge)

Wood Street Compter, 1793. Image extracted from page 384 of volume 1 of Old and New London, Illustrated, by Walter Thornbury. Available at Wikimedia Commons. 

While it is often assumed that debtors’ prisons were illogical and ineffective, my research demonstrates that they were extremely economically effective for creditors though they could ruin the lives of debtors.

The debtors’ prison is a frequent historical bogeyman, a Dickensian symptom of the illogical cruelty of the past that disappeared with enlightened capitalism. As imprisoning someone who could not afford to pay their debts, keeping them away from work and family, seems futile it is assumed creditors were doing so to satisfy petty revenge.

But they were a feature of most of English history from 1283, and though their power was curbed in 1869, there were still debtors imprisoned in the 1920s. The reason they persisted, as my…

Worst-case scenarios mislead far more than they enlighten.

RONALD BAILEY | 6.5.2019 Reason

Man-made climate change (now dubbed “climate crisis” by The Guardian‘s editors) poses potentially serious risks for humanity in this century. But acknowledging the hazard is not enough for a growing claque of meteorological apocalypse porn peddlers who insist that if their prescriptions for solving the problem are not followed then civilization will momentarily come to an end.

Recent hawkers of fast approaching climate doom include David Wallace-Wells in his book The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, Cumbria University professor Jem Bendell’s“Deep Adaptation” paper, and environmental activist Bill McKibben’sFalter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? (my review is forthcoming).

Now comes a policy paper, Existential climate-related security risk: A scenario approach, from an Australian climate action advocacy group the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration. The headline over at

Finally, Huron County farmers driven nuts by incessant wind turbine noise have forced the shut down of their giant industrial tormentors.

Ontario’s government has been in bed with the wind industry from the beginning, ignoring, bullying and berating wind farm neighbours with the temerity to complain about the grinding, thumping cacophony dished up by these things on a daily basis. Now, finally, after years of fighting simply to be heard, Ontario’s farmers are getting a taste of what representative and responsible government might look like.

In a result that couldn’t come soon enough for the Huron County farming families forced to live with it, an Order has just been made shutting down 140 turbines near Ashfield-Colborne-Wawanosh. The order was made simply because their operator, K2 Wind can’t comply with the conditions of its planning permit or even Ontario’s (extremely lax) noise regulations. Needless to say, the local farmers’ delight is…

David Kynaston (b.1951) has written about 16 history books on broadly three topics: cricket, the City of London, and Britain after the Second World War. His post-war histories have been published as three volumes, each of which – rather confusingly – contained two books:

• Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (2007) containing:
  • A World to Build, 1945–48
  • Smoke in the Valley, 1948–51
• Family Britain, 1951–57 (2009)
  • The Certainties of Place, 1951-5
  • A Thicker Cut, 1955-57
• Modernity Britain, 1957–62 (2014) which contained:
  • Opening the Box, 1957–59
  • A Shake of the Dice, 1959–62

This is a review, or notes on, book two of volume one, Austerity Britain: Smoke in The Valley, which covers the years 1948 to 1951 i.e. from the inauguration of the National Health Service on 5 July 1948 to Labour’s defeat in the October 1951 general election.

In 1940 Somerset Maugham published a collection of short stories titled The Mixture As…