Utopia, you are standing in it!

Some welcome news from The Wall Street Journal that US recycling programs maybe on the verge of collapse. As it turns out, scrap paper and plastic prices have dropped resulting in municipalities to charge residents more to collect material for recycling since to do so recycliong is no longer profitable and the costs continue to climb.

U.S. recycling programs took off in the 1990s as calls to bury less trash in landfills coincided with China’s demand for materials such as corrugated cardboard to feed its economic boom. Shipping lines eagerly filled containers that had brought manufactured goods to the U.S. with paper, scrap metal and plastic bottles for the return trip to China.

As cities aggressively expanded recycling programs to keep more discarded household items out of landfills, the purity of U.S. scrap deteriorated as more trash infiltrated the recyclables. Discarded food, liquid-soaked paper and other contaminants recently accounted…

An excellent film of Raymond Chandler’s novel with a good cast.

I’ve periodically featured folks on the left who have rejected gun control.

• In 2012, Jeffrey Goldberg admitted gun ownership reduces crime.
• In 2013, Justin Cronin explained how he became a left-wing supporter of gun rights.
• In 2015, Jamelle Bouie poured cold water on Obama’s gun control agenda.
• Last year, Leah Libresco confessed that gun control simply doesn’t work.

Now it’s time to look at another person who has changed his mind.

Here are some excerpts from a column in the Des Moines Register written by a long-time supporter of gun control.

I was 14 years old when John Lennon was killed — it affected me deeply and it was the biggest event that led to my anti-gun feelings. As I got older, my heroes were JFK, RFK and MLK, which furthered my anti-gun sentiments. …I thought the Second Amendment was not relevant to our modern-day society and it should be repealed…

California Regulators Want To Add $10,000 To The Price Of A New Home With a Solar Panel Mandate, at reason.com. Just another example of central planners in government forcing their idea of morality on everybody.

New York Times Editorial Board Thinks Uber Is Too Popular, Demands Price Floors, at reason.com. Leftists in the media don’t understand that Uber and other ride sharing apps are successful because NY city government limits the number of taxis available to the people of NY. This means the price has to rise to ration the scarce resource.  Read more about Uber vs Taxis in my post titled: “CAR WARS’ Return Of The Jitneys.

Confronted By Reality, A Leftist Changes His Mind On Gun Rights, at danieljmitchell.wordpress.com. Reality has a way of clearing up foggy thinking.

“10% Of Berkeley Students Are Homeless, at ecocnomicpolicyournal.com. Here is an example of the media using statistics…

There is a novel criminal charge in Los Angeles where Paul Gonzales has been accused of being the so-called “Dine-and-Dash Dater.”  He allegedly would take women to expensive restaurants and then bolt after the meal —  leaving several women with restaurant bills.  He arranged the dinners through dating apps.  He is already facing allegations of petty theft.

Local media has been broadcasting his image to warn women about Gonzales and his alleged eat-and-bolt technique.

As part of our project, we are looking at the surveillance of the Irish communities in Australia and Britain during the twentieth century. Although there has been a significant amount of literature on the monitoring of Irish Republicans in the 1910s-20s in Australia, there has not been much on the era of the ‘Troubles’. This is part of a paper that Evan Smith and Anastasia Dukova are writing on ASIO’s surveillance of Irish Republicans in the 1960s and 1970s that will be presented at the AHA Conference at ANU in July.

The ASIO files are very sporadic on the surveillance of Irish Republicans until 1971, even though the ‘Troubles’ began in 1969. Like other social movements in Australia in the early 1970s, surveillance of Irish Republicans was often an extension of the monitoring of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) and other left-wing groups, such as the Socialist Youth…

The Young Ones debuted on British television in November 1982, just over a year after the large scale inner-city riots that swept across Britain. The 1981 riots resulted in some of the biggest examples of urban unrest on the British mainland in the post-war period and resulted in millions of pounds in damage and several hundred arrests. The riots were a reaction to the socio-economic policies of the Thatcherite government, but at the same time, were the product of years of police harassment experienced by Britain’s ethnic communities. The riots have been characterised as a rebellion by African-Caribbean and Asian youth to the racism of the authorities, the criminal justice system and the far right that was a day-to-day occurrence for them. But it was not just African-Caribbean and Asian youth involved in the riots, with many scholars pointing out that 60% of those arrested were white. Hatred of the…

The BBC’s Adam Fleming reported today that the EU’s trade commissioner hasn’t yet started preparing for trade negotiations:

EU Trade Commissioner @MalmstromEU says “presumably” DG Trade will negotiate a post-Brexit Free Trade Agreement with the UK but her department has done no preparatory work because it hasn’t received a mandate from the European Council.

— Adam Fleming (@adamfleming) April 18, 2018

Katya Adler said something similar yesterday:

[T]his is another reason for the rather laid-back atmosphere in Brussels Brexit circles right now – EU insiders think much of the detail and substance governing EU-UK future relations will actually be worked out after the UK leaves the bloc in March next year.

Perhaps the clue to this is in the report by Institute for Government last month on the views of the EU 27:

[T]he other member states…

Let eco-zealots get control of your country’s power generation system, and rocketing power prices follow as night follows day.

Those countries whose energy policies have been hijacked by renewable energy rent seekers – pumping heavily subsidised, utterly unreliable and completely chaotic wind and solar – have watched their power prices double in a veritable heartbeat. The circus really only got started around 2000 (as an incident of countries signing up to the economic suicide pact aka the Kyoto protocol), but, like a runaway train, the destruction wrought continues to gather momentum.

Part of the problem has been that mainstream journos took their eye off the ball. Sure, there were plenty of hacks who drank the Kool-Aid early – ritually polishing up and regurgitating the propaganda faithfully delivered to them by wind and solar power outfits and/or their lobbyists on a daily basis – a few diehards still do – but…

Much more than The New York Times, the Washington Post is becoming the most visible left-wing media site that sticks up for free speech, and by that I mean it will defend purveyors of so-called hate speech  against repeated deplatformings and disruptions by the Authoritarian Left.

To see this, you might want to first read the report of Chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley’s “Commission on Free Speech” issued two days ago (full report here). The commission, consisting of various members of Berkeley’s administration, faculty, and even a few students, was convened to prepare a response to recent incidents of violence or threats of violence occasioned by upcoming speeches by Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter (neither speech occurred, but Yiannopoulos’s speech, which was canceled, provoked outbreaks of rioting and violence). They were also to make suggestions to make the campus climate more amenable to free speech.