Utopia, you are standing in it!

Last week Houston McCulloch, one of the leading monetary economists of my generation, posted an  insightful and thoughtful discussion of the causes of the Great Depression with which I largely, though not entirely, agree. Although Scott Sumner has already commented on Hu’s discussion, I also wanted to weigh in with some of my comments. Here is how McCulloch sets up his discussion.

Understanding what caused the Great Depression of 1929-39 and why it persisted so long has been fairly characterized by Ben Bernanke as the “Holy Grail of Macroeconomics.” The fear that the financial crisis of 2008 would lead to a similar Depression induced the Fed to use its emergency powers to bail out failing firms and to more than quadruple the monetary base, while Congress authorized additional bailouts and doubled the national debt. Could the Great Recession have taken a similar turn had these extreme measures not been taken?

On August 28^th a filmed report titled “Bullet shatters Palestinian cyclist’s Asian Games dream” was posted on the BBC News website’s ‘Middle East’ page.

“The Asian Games continues in the Indonesian capital Jakarta until 2 September, with 18,000 athletes participating.

One Palestinian cyclist could not fulfil his dream of competing after he was shot during a Gaza strip demonstration, which has left Alaa Al-Daly with one leg. But he is determined to not let it stop him cycling.”

Together with the interviewee’s unconfirmed and unquestioned account of his story, viewers see statements from the BBC itself which once again reinforce its chosen narrative concerning the ‘Great Return March’.

“Alaa’s dream was to represent Palestine at the Asian Games. But an Israeli bullet put an end to his dream.

On 30 March, Alaa was taking part in what has been called “The Great March of Return” at…

The headline of a Guardianop-ed by Ahmad Samih Khalidi (Siding with the Palestinian struggle is not antisemitic), extracted from text, is of course a straw man, as nobody claims that merely “siding with the Palestinians” is antisemitic.  Khalidi, a former adviser to both Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas, has a broader goal, to defend those who object to the continued existence of a Jewish state, based on the “profound injustice” at the root of Zionism.

In an effort to legitimise his anti-Zionism, Khalididi grossly misleads by claiming that “Jewish opposition to Zionism has a long and distinguished history”.  In fact, whilst there was a lively debate before Israel declared independence on the question of Zionism, today, Jewish opposition to the living, breathing state of Israel represents a minuscule, politically irrelevant fringe.

Khalidi further charges that the “insidious goal of the ‘anti-anti-Zionist’ campaign is to silence the Palestinians and their supporters”, which…

A nine-year-old knows the sun sets and the wind stops blowing, but a cohort remain convinced that that an all RE future is upon us.

Which begs the question: which is dumber? Wind and solar power? Or those that believe they constitute meaningful power generation sources?

Norman Rogers provides a helpful analysis below for those struggling with that tricky conundrum. Rogers also has a book on the subject: Dumb Energy: A Critique of Wind and Solar Energy. And he runs a couple of websites, as well: DumbEnergy.com and ClimateViews.com.

Wind and Solar Energy: Good for Nothing
American Thinker
Norman Rogers
11 August 2018

The defenders of wind and solar claim that subsidies are a minor help to get a new industry going.  These defenders counter critics with the fallacious claim that fossil fuels receive huge subsidies. Actually, the fossil fuel industry pays huge taxes.

Focusing on explicit subsidies…

h/t GB

Earlier this month we noted that:

“In addition to holding the remains of two Israeli soldiers killed in 2014 – Hadar Goldin and Oron Shaul – the Hamas terror group is also keeping prisoner at least two Israeli civilians – Avera Mengistu and Hisham al Sayed – who have not been the topic of any BBC reporting in the three years that their imprisonment has been publicly known.”

Listeners to BBC Radio 4’s ‘Today‘ programme on the morning of August 27^th would therefore have been unlikely to understand what Yolande Knell was talking about when she briefly referred to “two Israelis jailed in Gaza or two soldiers’ remains”.

Presenter Justin Webb introduced that item (from 02:42:00 here) with a reference to another story about which BBC audiences had previously heard nothing: the partial closure last week of the Erez Crossing in response to…