Utopia, you are standing in it!

Environmental Economist Bjorn Lomborg was interviewed last year on Fox Business Network about Al Gore’s prediction that 75 percent of the Arctic’s ice will be gone due to global warming.

Recently, courts at both the federal and state level have been forced to get involved in the process of defining electoral borders in the US, as organisations across the country have started legal claims designed to overturn what they see as unfair electoral maps. Richard Briffault explains what is meant by gerrymandering, how it has been challenged in the past and what the Supreme Court is currently being asked to decide.

Identifying the problem

Gerrymandering refers to the practice of manipulating the boundaries of electoral districts to favour particular candidates, parties or interest groups. It arises out of –and has become increasingly significant in American politics because of – five factors.

First, members of the United States House of Representatives and of the chambers of both houses of all state legislatures are elected from single-member districts with the winner selected on a first-past-the-post basis. In other words, there is no proportional…

We have previously discussed flights delayed by Jewish ultra-Orthodox who refuse to sit next to women.  Rather than remove these men for delaying a flight, airlines bizarrely coerce women to yield to their demands in moving their seats.  Just a week ago, an El Al flight was delayed by ultra-Orthodox men refusing to take their seats.  Now, an Austrian Airlines plane was delayed at Ben Gurion Airport for 40 minutes late due to the refusal of 26 ultra-Orthodox men to be seated by women.  Again, there is no consideration for the other passengers, particularly the women who are singled out for requests to move to other seats to accommodate these men. Worse yet, because Austrian Airlines decided to accommodate the demands of these men, other passengers missed their connecting flights.  

As elections become more prevalent as the stated method of choosing who governs, is the world actually becoming less democratic? In their new book, How to Rig an Election, Nic Cheeseman and Brian Klaas argue that the increase in voting has not led to a corresponding rise in the embracing of democratic norms, with voter intimidation, strategic misinformation, and ballot-rigging common in many countries that describe themselves as democratic.

The greatest political paradox of our time is this: there are more elections than ever before, but the world is becoming less democratic.

Nowadays, elections are held almost everywhere. The vast majority of governments at least go through the motions of election campaigns, and are rhetorically committed to allowing citizens to cast ballots to choose the leaders who will govern them. However, in many places, that choice is little more than an illusion: the contest is rigged from the start.

California’s Climate Extremism
Joel Kotkin reports from the Golden State. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

The pursuit of environmental purity in the Golden State does nothing to reverse global warming—but it’s costing the poor and middle class dearly.

Environmental extremism increasingly dominates California. The state is making a concerted attack on energy companies in the courts; a bill is pending in the legislature to fine waiters $1,000—or jail them—if they offer people plastic straws; and UCLA issued a report describing pets as a climate threat. The state has taken upon itself the mission of limiting the flatulence of cows and other farm animals. As the self-described capital of the anti-Trump resistance, California presents itself as the herald of a green, more socially and racially just society. That view has been utterly devastated by a new report from Chapman University, in which coauthors David Friedman…

On Sunday, by a vote of 8-0 (Gorsuch didn’t rule), the U.S. Supreme Court decided the case of Matal v. Tam,  which involved a patent application to trademark the name “The Slants,” an Asian band of which Simon Tam was a member. Tam’s attempt to patent trademark the band’s name was rejected by the trademark office, but a federal appeals court ruled that that rejection was illegal because the U.S.’s Lanham Act (1946), under which the application was rejected, was unconstitutional. That Act is the U.S.’s main trademark law, and prohibits trademarks that disparage individuals or groups. The initial rejection was, I think, based on the fact that “slant” is a slur on Asians, referring to their eye shape (they have an epicanthal fold), and thus that the name disparages an ethnic group.  The Slants comprise four Asian-Americans, but that doesn’t matter:

The Slants

The appeals…

My title may be exaggerated a tad, but not that much, for the point of Adam Liptak’s article (click on screenshot below) is that conservatives are starting to use the First Amendment to defend or buttress legal decisions that liberals don’t like, and therefore the First Amendment is outdated or should be reexamined. The title of the piece comes from Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, a liberal who decried her courts’ recent decisions against public unions and in favor of religious abortion “crisis centers” on freedom-of-speech grounds. Further, the Citizens United case, in which corporations were allowed unlimited spending on political campaigns, was also deemed by the Court to be a free speech issue. (Here I disagree on the grounds that corporations are not individuals.)

Liptak is a New York Times reporter whose beat is the US Supreme Court; he also writes the legal column “Sidebar” for the paper. Have…

by Ross McKitrick and John Christy

Note: this is a revised version to correct the statement about CFCs and methane in Scenario B.

How accurate were James Hansen’s 1988 testimony and subsequent JGR article forecasts of global warming? According to a laudatory article by AP’s Seth Borenstein, they “pretty much” came true, with other scientists claiming their accuracy was “astounding” and “incredible.”  Pat Michaels and Ryan Maue in the Wall Street Journal, and Calvin Beisner in the Daily Caller, disputed this.

Ringhals nuclear power site, Sweden [image credit: Vattenfall]
Another example of the obvious inadequacy of part-time unpredictable wind power, and its consequencies for countries that insist on pursuing it. Relying on imports to avoid power shortages can’t be ideal for any country.
H/T The GWPF/Reuters

Sweden will have to import more electricity during winter as the country, a net power exporter to the rest of Europe, shifts from nuclear to wind, its grid operator said.

Ministers in charge of science funding and Maori development have sent out a confusing signal which – at first blush – suggests they harbour doubts about the efficacy of their Govt’s climate change policies.

Those policies, including net-zero-emission targets, presumably are intended to slow – if not halt – climate warming.

But the Ministers of whom we write have doled out money for a banana-growing industry.

Some may muse that this is to prepare the way for climate change effects which allow horticulturalists to abundantly grow tropical fruits.

Not necessarily.

The Washington Post has an article on cultural appropriation of food (click on screenshot to read it) in which people agonize about whether it’s okay for people of one ethnicity to sell the food of other ethnic groups, or write cookbooks about it. (The title refers to the shutting down of a Portland food cart in which two white women sold burritos from recipes they’d garnered in Mexico. They were faulted for not compensating the Mexican women whose recipes they’d adapted.)

In general I agree with author Tim Carman, who thinks that cultural appropriation of food is okay so long as a modicum of cultural sensitivity is exercised. There’s not much new here, including what Carman see as “The Problem”:

The problem, of course, is not that a white diner falls in love with an immigrant cuisine. It’s that a white person profits from the cuisine or, more troublesome for…

A grave, steady man (Boswell, quoted page 342)

I’ve covered a lot of the detail of the three epic voyages of discovery carried out by Captain James Cook in my review of the current exhibition about them being held at the British Library in London.

That review includes detail of the routes, the places ‘discovered’ and first mapped by Europeans (Tahiti, New Zealand, Hawaii, among many others) and the baleful impact which First Contact with white men had on the native peoples of those places.

Having put all that factual information, and discussion of the attendant cultural controversy, down in another place, this in a sense frees me up to enjoy Hough’s rather old-fashioned biography as a straightforward narrative of derring-do and adventure.

Space and detail

Hough (pronounced How) takes us deep into the day-to-day experience of being an officer or ordinary sailor or one of the scientific passengers, on…