Utopia, you are standing in it!

When I got to page 7 in this morning’s Dominion-Post I wasn’t sure at first that my eyes weren’t deceiving me.    I read it again, and even then wondered if what I was reading was a typo.  But these people seemed to be deadly serious.

Their demand is there in bold: that the government take steps to reduce (net) greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2025.  Their demand doesn’t appear to be conditional on other countries doing anything.  It is simply flagellation –  but not self-flagellation (in which these individuals themselves commit to reducing all direct and indirect emissions associated with their own consumption and production to zero by 2025)  but a brutal whipping delivered to everyone.   Not even our government, evincing no concern for productivity or for lifting the performance of the underperforming New Zealand economy, would be that stupid or (electorally) suicidal.  (In fact, that left…

I’m going to write about the Perfidies of the University Woke today, so please do not fault me for neglecting the Mueller report, as I have nothing to say about it that you can’t read in the mainstream media.

On the other hand, American colleges and universities are slowly but surely become bastions of censorship and ideological policing, hemorrhaging their brain-dead Zombies of Wokeness into mainstream culture; and nobody reports on that save the rightwing media. (Believe me, I check on their reports). Places like the New York Times and the New York Review of Books don’t report on things like this case of language and brain policing, because, in truth, they want America to become like Amherst College.

What did Amherst College do? You can read about it on the right-wing college monitoring site The College Fix, but what they say is confirmed by Amherst itself. Amherst College

Jakobshavn glacier, West Greenland [image credit: Wikipedia]
Without jumping to hasty conclusions, this is an interesting development not predicted by the IPCC’s supposed experts. Natural ocean/climate oscillations are implicated. Against assumptions, rising carbon dioxide levels cannot explain these latest observations.

A new NASA study finds a major Greenland glacier that was one of the fastest shrinking ice and snow masses on Earth is growing again, reports The GWPF.

The scientists were so shocked to find the change, Khazendar said: “At first we didn’t believe it.

“We had pretty much assumed that Jakobshavn would just keep going on as it had over the last 20 years.”

An article posted on the Stuff website is headed Transgender rights debate: Separating the facts from the fiction

The writer, one Cecile Meier, might usefully have consulted a recent Point of Order report before deciding she had put the misunderstandings to rights – at least on the political process.

Her article rightly says transgender people have to go through a long and costly process to change the sex on their birth certificate.  This involves an application to the Family Court providing proof they’ve had medical treatment to transition.

The process for changing a New Zealand licence or passport is much simpler: people need only make a statutory declaration, which involves an authorised witness or justice of the peace.

At issue is whether birth certificates should be changed as easily a driving licence or passport.

(Long and fairly geeky)

That’s the claim emblazoned on the cover of US academic George Selgin’s 2018 book Floored.   It is a big claim by a smart author, who has written many years (often quite sceptically, to say the least) about aspects of central banking.  And, for once, I won’t bury my conclusion: I wasn’t convinced.

The “experiment” Selgin is writing about is the decision, implemented at the start of October 2008, to pay (effectively a full market) interest rate on excess reserves (over and above the regulatory minimum the Fed persists in requiring) held by banks in their accounts at the Federal Reserve.    The Fed was late to the business of paying interest on these deposit balances (other countries, including New Zealand, had done so earlier).  It required Congressional authorisation –  itself a somewhat unusual feature –  and even having obtained that approval the new regime…

There is so much history, so many horrible examples. How could anyone be so ill-informed? It probably starts with Republican tax cuts. The Democrats always sneer  “tax cuts for the rich!” and the rich do get tax cuts, and so does everyone else. The cuts for the poorer people are indeed smaller because they pay less taxes in the first place.The top 20% of earners pay 94% of all taxes paid. Of course they get a bigger percentage cut than the rest of us.

Boggles the mind to see how many people complain about the government, and then want to turn over to the government, all those unelected bureaucrats, our businesses, our worldly goods, and our way of earning a living. We cannot make even the simplest decisions about our lives, but have to leave it up to the government? It’s far worse than no toilet paper and no food…

Wellington’s whirling wonders: lazy as bro!

Never there when you need it, often there when you don’t, wind power is, at best, an infantile joke. Promised output figures are rarely realised.

What’s referred to as the “capacity factor” of any given wind farm is said to represent a proportional, and meaningful, contribution to electricity demand.

Except, instead of powering the putative hundreds of thousands of homes, the vast majority of the time, wind farms are powering absolutely nothing.

Instead, they’re consuming electricity from the grid to maintain their on-board systems, such as heating, cooling and braking – in order to prevent ‘component liberation’ – eg:

Not that you’ll read any of this in the mainstream press, nor are the wind industry’s spin doctors likely to eagerly reveal just how pathetic the actual (and completely chaotic) output from their beloved wind turbines, really is.

New Zealand, like plenty of others, has…

A couple of my goals for 2018 are to save a substantial emergency money fund AND to lose a very achievable 60 lbs in weight. The two things that concern me right now are financial safety and health safety.

One area to save on expenses would of course be eating food that doesn’t cost so much but still is healthy. Following a ration book diet, although it sounds austere and boring, could be a perfectly doable way to save money and lose weight in the short term, its certainly worth giving it a go for a month or two…

So out of curiosity I’ve broken down first the guaranteed weekly/monthly ration for an adult into how much each item would cost per person and in addition I’ve also added in the cost of extra staples that a person may typically purchase during the week/month such as bread, oats, pulses etc.

I don’t know about you all, but I’m getting rather bored of the I-love-my-hijab sentiments now. It means, unfortunately, you have to put up with my lengthy rants.

The Guardian (who else) recently posted a video in which Hanna Yusuf asks, in a tone usually reserved for naughty schoolchildren, “why a simple piece of clothing is seen as the very epitome of oppression.”

She goes on to say that “many women find empowerment in rejecting the idea that women can be reduced to their sexual allure – and we should not assume that every women who wears the hijab has been forced into it.”

I was not aware there was so much outrage against the hijab. In this country, where the (visible) Muslim population has grown, the headscarf is not really that controversial, as opposed to the full face veil – niqab – which is seen even by many Muslims…

Time for a confession.

I don’t particularly enjoy writing columns about the minimum wage because it’s such a slam-dunk issue. Simply stated, it is cruel and illogical when politicians mandate wage levels that are higher than the productivity of low-skilled workers.

Yet, at the risk of being repetitive, I periodically share evidence showing that higher minimum wages lead to more unemployment (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here).

The issue also is disturbing because I’ve had several friends on the left privately admit that they understand that jobs are lost when the minimum wage goes up, but they think that’s okay because it’s a good political issue for their side.

How utterly immoral. And racist, at least in outcome if not intent.

Today, though, I’m actually excited to write about the topic because I…

Which language do you think is the most complex? There are a lot of different answers that people will give to this question. Some people are sure that whatever language they struggled with in high school is the most complex. Others are certain that highly influential cultures must have complex languages, so they choose Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, or Chinese. Language buffs might break out a rare one like Tlingit or Lardil. Many people insist it is their own native language that’s the most complex, though oddly, I’ve found that just as many people seem willing to say their own language is terribly simple.

But ask a linguist, and you get a really wet blanket answer: no language is any more complex than any other. Or, put another way, all languages are equally complex. That answer tends to stop conversation dead in the tracks and no one is really satisfied by it, so I’m going to…

In recent days visitors to the BBC News website’s ‘Middle East’ page have found three reports relating to the US president’s announcement of the intention to recognise Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

One of those reports was written by the BBC’s State Department correspondent Barbara Plett Usher and the other two included inserts of her analysis. All three promoted specific messaging on the topic of international law.

1) Trump: Time to recognise Golan Heights as Israeli territoryMarch 21^st:

“Richard Haass, a former senior US state department official who is now president of the Council on Foreign Relations think-tank, said he “strongly disagreed” with Mr Trump. He said such recognising Israeli sovereignty would violate a UN Security Council resolution, “which rules out acquiring territory by war”. […]

So critics have concluded this was a blatant attempt to give Mr Netanyahu a boost in a hotly-contested election.

If…

In 2012 at the legal blog Popehat, Ken White, a criminal defense lawyer and free-speech maven, deconstructed the famous phrase uttered by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in an opinion about “free speech” in wartime. In 1919 there was a series of three Supreme Court decisions against men (socialists, foreigners, and anarchists) who spoke and published pamphlets against America’s participation in World War I—as well as against conscription (the draft). In all three cases, Holmes and the Court upheld the convictions, and each person was sentenced to ten years in prison for producing what today would be considered free speech.

Although White’s post, “Three generations of a hackneyed apologia for censorship are enough“, is a bit long, it’s well worth reading, for it shows how increasing tolerance for speech has evolved, as well as how Holmes’s famous statement has been misused to advocate continuing censorship…