Utopia, you are standing in it!

Not a good look…

I’ve now taught social theory at the undergraduate level for over a decade, and I am now teaching social theory at the graduate level. I am also conversant, but no means an expert, in the history of what is considered canonical social theory. Here is an observation. While non-progressives do actually have fabulous careers in sociology (e.g., Robert Nisbet), their work tends not to “stick.” It doesn’t get remembered or canonized and seems to fade rather quickly.

For example, you might think some of the major figures of late 19th century laissez-faire, such as Herbert Spencer or William Graham Sumner, might be candidates for sociology’s “hall of fame.” Spencer’s evolutionary theory certainly feeds into Durkehim and Sumner was president of the American Sociological Association. Later, you might pick up on someone like Robert Nisbet whose book, The Quest for Community, is considered a touchstone for…

View of Oil Well Pumpjack (Horsehead) at Sunset Oil Industry GETTY

Michael Lynch writes at Forbes The Peak Oil Denier Takes A Victory Lap. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Monday’s New York Times includes a story titled “Flood of Oil Is Coming, Complicating Efforts to Fight Global Warming,” which (presumably unintentionally) mimics the title of my 2016 book, “The Peak Oil Scare and the Coming Oil Flood.” Which provides a good reason to look back at the debate and some of the arguments countering my own.

Although I have spent decades writing about oil supply and the tendency of forecasters to be too pessimistic (see references at end of column), for many it was my 2009 New York Times op-ed, which the paper titled “Peak Oil is a Waste of Energy,” that brought attention to my heretical views. And unleashed a heap of opprobrium. Of…

I’m too busy watching glaciers go by in the Beagle Channel to post much today. The Channel was in fact where Darwin saw his first glacier, and it’s cool to think that I’m seeing the same glaciers that he did.

But on to the opinion of the day. This time it’s a beef about Obama’s recent critique of “cancel culture.” You might remember that the ex-Prez said stuff like this at a meeting of the Obama Foundation in Chicago:

Mr Obama told the audience: “I get a sense among certain young people on social media that the way of making change is to be as judgemental as possible about other people.

“If I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right or used the wrong verb, then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself because ‘Man did you see how woke I was? I called…

The European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill is intended to give effect in the UK to the Withdrawal Agreement (WA) agreed by the UK with the EU-27 on 1 October 2019. The Bill received its second reading on 22 October 2019 and is currently in ‘limbo’ pending the start of the committee stage. If and when it is adopted, the Bill will make significant amendments to (inter alia) the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 (EUWA).

Attempts will naturally be made to amend the Bill as it passes through Parliament. At present, it makes no provision for a further referendum to be held before the WA is ratified. Some may seek to change that. It would, however, be futile for amendments to be sought that would require to be done something that lies outside Parliament’s control, such as creating an EU/UK customs union. This would require the WA to be reopened, which

Australia’s embattled power consumers thought they were about to get a break, then their PM decided to throw another billion dollars in subsidies to wind and solar. And it’s not like taxpayers and power consumers weren’t already on the hook.

The Federal government’s Large-Scale Renewable Energy Target (LRET) is costing all Australian power consumers over $3 billion a year – when the cost of the Small-Scale Renewable Energy Scheme is added – that hidden power tax adds up to almost $5 billion a year. The total cost of both the LRET and SRES will top $60,000,000,000.

On top of that massive stream of subsidies to wind and large-scale solar outfits, and households with panels on their roofs, comes billions in handouts and soft loans from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and the ARENA fund.

The CEFC already had control of $10 billion of taxpayer’s money, ladling that out to…

Let me say at the outset, this is not a book that anyone would read for pleasure.  The Diary of a Gulag Prison Guard is raw and confronting, written by a man struggling to maintain his mental health in an environment designed to brutalise him.  I read it for Vishy’s Red October Russian Reads, and it is indeed a very salutary reminder of the extremes of the Soviet experiment…

It has relevance today because there are, no doubt, similar situations in repressive regimes such as China’s, but also in places like Australia’s detention centres where we know from media reports that it is not just the detainees who suffer mental health problems.  (But we only know this about Australian guards, there are only hostile media reports about PNG local guards and yet it would be surprising if some of them were not also gravely troubled by their work and…