Utopia, you are standing in it!

In a recent post, John Cochrane, responding to an earlier post by Nick Rowe about Neo-Fisherism, has tried to explain why raising interest rates could plausibly cause inflation to rise and reducing interest rates could plausibly cause inflation to fall, even though almost everyone, including central bankers, seems to think that when central banks raise interest rates, inflation falls, and when they reduce interest rates, inflation goes up.

In his explanation, Cochrane concedes that there is an immediate short-term tendency for increased interest rates to reduce inflation and for reduced interest rates to raise inflation, but he also argues that these effects (liquidity effects in Keynesian terminology) are transitory and would be dominated by the Fisher effects if the central bank committed itself to a permanent change in its interest-rate target. Of course, the proviso that the central bank commit itself to a permanent interest-rate peg is a pretty…

The week before last, Noah Smith wrote a post “The Neo-Fisherite Rebellion” discussing, rather sympathetically I thought, the contrarian school of monetary thought emerging from the Great American Heartland, according to which, notwithstanding everything monetary economists since Henry Thornton have taught, high interest rates are inflationary and low interest rates deflationary. This view of the relationship between interest rates and inflation was advanced (but later retracted) by Narayana Kocherlakota, President of the Minneapolis Fed in a 2010 lecture, and was embraced and expounded with increased steadfastness by Stephen Williamson of Washington University in St. Louis and the St. Louis Fed in at least one working paper and in a series of posts over the past five or six months (e.g. here, here and here). And John Cochrane of the University of Chicago has picked up on the idea as well in two recent blog posts (here

“Modern Monetary Theory,” a doctrine about fiat money, has captured the attention of some reformers and progressives. This doctrine – a set of propositions contrary to logic and evidence – purports to explain why the US and other economies are ailing, but is beset by contradictions with the historic facts and within the doctrine.

For example, The New Inquiry on 11 April 2014 featured an article by Rebecca Rojer on “The World According to Modern Monetary Theory.” The author regards it as a revelation of MMT that the “rules of money are not immutable laws of nature.” Since the science of economics explains the effects of incentives and decisions, evidently these money “rules” are the outcomes of private and governmental decisions, and since the effects are not immutable laws, people can arbitrarily create whatever outcomes they wish. That would indeed be wonderful, to just print money are thereby eliminate unemployment…

Sydney Harbour Sea Levels 1886-2018 | CLIMATISM

“CLIMATE alarmism is a gigantic fraud:
it only survives by suppressing dissent and by spending
tens of billions of dollars of public money
every year on pseudo-scientific propaganda.”
– Leo Goldstein

***

SEA-LEVEL RISE alarmism is just one in a long line of propaganda tools used by the Climate Crisis Industry to promote the narrative that human CO2 emissions are causing dangerous global warming climate change.

VERY little of the carefully orchestrated fear-mongering is based on observed reality and empirical evidence, rather, worst-case climate model scenarios pushed into the unaccountable future, designed to scare you and policy makers into (costly) “climate action now!”.

SEA level alarmism holds significant implications for the public who bear the burden of carbon-dioxide related taxes. Those living within coastal areas, constrained by further punitive imposts as insurance companies exploit the climate of fear for their own profit.

SEA…

STT will keep smashing the line about giant batteries overcoming the chaotic delivery of wind and solar, while RE zealots keep pushing it.

Over recent posts we focused on the insane cost and limited capacity of giant lithium-ion batteries of the kind peddled by reefer-smoking Californian carpetbagger, Elon Musk (see above and our post here).

In this post, we hand over to Jack Ponton for a dissertation on the whole range of purported storage methods claimed by those peddling wind and solar as solutions to the hopeless intermittency of wind and solar.

Jack Ponton is Emeritus Professor of Engineering at the University of Edinburgh, a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and of the Institution of Chemical Engineers (of which he is a past vice-president). His main research work was in mathematical modelling of complex engineering phenomena and software development. He has also worked in and with the chemical industry on a…

What could be more timely, than a review of this book?  The good professor takes us through a brief explanation of the Austrian theory of the business cycle and then examines the Great Depression of 1929.  The particular focus of this work is 1929 and Hoover’s response to the Depression.  In brief the thesis is:

Henry VII was the King of England and Lord of Ireland from his seizure of the crown on August 22, 1485 to his death on April 21, 1509. He was the first monarch of the House of Tudor. Henry VII was born at Pembroke Castle on January 28, 1457 to Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond, and Edmund Tudor, 1st Earl of Richmond, who died three months before his birth. Henry inherited his father’s title at birth and became the 2nd Earl of Richmond.

Henry VII, King of England, Lord of Ireland

When Henry Tudor won the crown in August 22, 1485 by defeating Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field his right or claim to the throne was tenuous at best and at its worst his claim was nonexistent.

His descent from John of Gaunt gave Henry Tudor a weak claim to the throne. This claim was through John…

Over the past three years I’ve written about research, mostly by Tim Caro’s group, dealing with the perpetual question: “Why do zebras have stripes?” (See earlier posts here, here, and here.) There used to be lots of hypotheses, including confusing predators like lions, aiding thermoregulation, camouflaging these equids, keeping groups together, and so on, but research has demolished these hypotheses one by one (for example, striped animals are no more camouflaged to predators than are solid-colored animals.)

Rather, evidence has been accumulating that stripes help deter biting flies, particularly tabanid flies (horseflies) and tsetse flies that not only draw blood but, more dangerously, carry disease that can kill zebras. It’s been shown, for instance, that the ranges of striped equids all fall within the ranges of biting flies, and that these flies can carry diseases like equine influenza, African horse sickness, equine infectious anaemia, and trypanosomiasis, all…

The name Johann Reichhart might not be one synonymous with Nazi Germany but his ruthless killing streak made him one of the most feared members of the regime.

Reichhart was born into a line of German executioners dating back eight generations. He got his start as a judicial executioner in 1928.

Johann Reichhart took 3,165 lives during his time as Germany’s chief executioner. Ironically, after the collapse of the Third Reich , he would hang some of those he once served, Nazi war criminals, on behalf of the victorious Allies.

The beheadings of Sophie Scholl, her brother Hans and a third member of The White Rose, their student resistance group, were among 2,873 executions he carried out in the Second World War.

His career in killing began in earnest with the execution by guillotine of Rupert Fischer and Andreas Hutterer for murder.

The administration promised him 150 Goldmarks for each execution, and announced:…

Brexit is a major constitutional change. It creates considerable constitutional uncertainty, but also opportunity. It could prove Britain’s constitutional moment. Vernon Bogdanor argues that just as joining the EU fundamentally altered the UK constitution, so Brexit could, by exposing the very nakedness of Britain’s uncodified arrangements, prove a catalyst for a written constitution.

During the period of membership of the European Communities/European Union, the UK was subject to a written or codified constitution, which was entrenched. Brexit is a process rare if not unique in the modern world, involving as it does disengagement from a codified to an uncodified system. It is just possible indeed that Brexit will lead to a codified constitution for the United Kingdom that would bring us into line with virtually every other democracy in the modern world.

At a seminar at King’s College, London shortly after the 2016 EU referendum, Takis Tridimas, a professor of…

The idea that one day soon we’ll all be powered by sunshine and breezes is infantile nonsense. No modern economy has ever powered itself entirely with wind and solar power. Still, we’re continually berated with the notion that our ‘transition’ to all wind and sun powered future is ‘inevitable’.

Step back for a moment and consider that the wind and solar industries have received hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies over the last 30 years, and yet their combined output amounts to little more than an accounting rounding error.

While wind and solar output at a global level is trivial, the cost of propping up this pathetic pair is far from it.

In Australia alone, the subsidies to wind and solar under the Federal government’s Large-Scale RET will exceed more than $60 billion by the time that scam expires in 2030. Subsidies to domestic rooftop solar will add another…