Utopia, you are standing in it!

The August 3^rd edition of the BBC Two television programme ‘Victoria Derbyshire’ included an item concerning what presenter Reeta Chakrabarti euphemistically described as “the problems in the Labour Party”.

Although The BBC has been covering that topic with varying degrees of accuracy and impartiality for well over two years, it was presented to viewers as something that has recently come to light. [emphasis in italics in the original]

Chakrabarti: “It’s been widely assumed that all forms of racism exist within the far right of politics but it’s now being suggested that the Left has issues with antisemitism too. Where has that come from?”

In her second question to guest journalist Jonathan Sacerdoti, Chakrabarti said:

Chakrabarti: “Well I wonder if we can broaden this out a little bit from the Labour party to the sort of ideas of antisemitism – quite where they come from – because there’s often quite…

A very good video report by The New York Times on nuclear power. It points to the Three Mile Island incident that occurred during 1979, and also shows how the entire incident lead to unwarranted hysteria about nuclear energy. It was human ingenuity and technology that helped prevent Three Mile Island from becoming a disaster that could have cost lives.

The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant disaster also might have been a setback but even that area is, essentially, back to normal despite the unwarranted ballyhoo. Both nuclear plant incidents did not result in any loss of life nor was anyone affected by emissions from either facility.

Despite the seemingly inconclusive ending to this Retro Report video, the overall buildup to the conclusion is mostly positive. Nuclear power does have drawbacks like any other energy source, but its benefits far outweigh its negatives.

Below is my column in USA Today on the most recent claim that the tweets of President Donald Trump concerning the Special Counsel are acts of obstruction.  Once again, there is a blind eagerness to claim a prime facie criminal case against Trump. However, the implications of such a charge are enormous. It would mean that a subject or target of an investigation could be criminally charged for publicly denouncing the prosecutors or their investigation.  While it is certainly true that a president is not just any investigatory subject and has powers that do mean a menacing meaning to such tweets, it would radically extend the scope of obstruction into more ambiguous areas.  In the end, this is still the exercise of free speech in this context.

“A new record for solar and wind”. This is stated in a tweet by our Flemish Minister of Energy:

The hashtag “stroomversnelling” (the Dutch word for “rapids” and used in expressions it roughly means “speeding up” or “moving faster”) and he often uses it in relation to his policies. So, do I understand it correctly that he connects the current policies are the reason that this record was broken?

That “new record” was solar and wind producing 45% of the Belgian electricity load on Saturday July 28 at 15:00. My first reaction was: “So what?”. It probably would boil down to a few minutes in the weekend. The Minister has a history of unnuanced and misleading tweets, so I thought it would be a good idea to check what that record is all about. I turns out that this record was even less significant than I expected.

Heather Roy

5 August 2018

Australian journalist and author Natalie Ritchie has written a follow up blogpost (Jacinda Ardern – Busines as Usual for Women?) to her article published in the NZ Herald recently where she asked if the PM would consider working part-time. It may sound like a crazy idea, but whether Ritchie thinks it possible or not, she raises very valid questions about feminism, support for women in the workforce and whether the PM’s choice to come back to an extremely busy full time role after 6 weeks of maternity leave sets up unrealistic expectations for other women.

“If Jacinda is genuinely happy as a full-time PM working traditionally ‘male’ hours, then we can all be happy for her.

However, that doesn’t mean we should be happy for ourselves, or for other women. As Jacinda herself said on her first day back at work on Thursday, she is

Step aside Polar Bear, It’s Turtle Time!

Everyday now, everywhere in the media someone else is lamenting the presence of plastics and proposing ways to end straws and other plastic items.  Terence Corcoran in Financial Post explains how we got here:  How green activists manipulated us into a pointless war on plastic  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

The disruptive Internet mass-persuasion machine controlled by the major corporate tech giants, capable of twisting and manipulating the world’s population into believing concocted stories and fake news, is at it again, this time spooking billions of people into panic over plastic. Except…hold on: Those aren’t big greedy corporations and meddling foreign governments flooding the blue planet with alarming statistics of microplastics in our water and gross videos of turtles with straws stuck up their noses and dead birds with bellies stuffed with plastic waste.

As Earth Day/Week 2018 came to a…

The Zimbabwe election results were finally announced. Presumably to the surprise of few, the incumbent President Mnangagwa of ZANU-PF has “won” and the party will have a two-thirds majority of the assembly (elected by FPTP and with high malapportionment).

Amazingly, Mnangagwa won just enough to not require a runoff! Yes, I am being cynical.

The official results apparently show ZANU-PF getting more votes for assembly than for presidency. That would be unusual for a major party in a presidential system, but here’s assuming that the gap was even greater than officially reported. Either that, or the assembly election was even more rigged than the presidential.

Also unusual–and for me a strong indicator that things were being cooked–is that the assembly result was released days before the presidential. I do not have actual records on these things, but I believe such a sequence is highly unusual. Usually they either come out…

Murray Rothbard was a prolific writer. Thanks to the Mises Institute, much of his work can be found online, but there are still many articles that anarcho-capitalists have never read because only physical copies exist. For one such article, that changes today.

An anonymous ancap sends along this article that he found in the FEE archive. It is from the May 1973 edition of New Libertarian Notes. Click the image below for the PDF.

As long as I’m doing Constitutions and what people believe, here is an oldie but goodie, with the late Milton Friedman explaining the most basic facts of Capitalism to Phil Donahue, who, of course, doesn’t get it at all. Always worth a refresher on what is important.

I particularly like John Steele Gordon’s  An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power, which beautifully describes how Capitalism and a free people who can act on their ideas and dreams have brought forth a powerful and wealthy nation that is the envy of the world.

We just had Prof Milton Friedman’s 106th birthday on 31 July.

I came across this interesting interview of the late Prof which has some interesting discussion on his approach on doing economics.