Utopia, you are standing in it!

When I got to page 7 in this morning’s Dominion-Post I wasn’t sure at first that my eyes weren’t deceiving me.    I read it again, and even then wondered if what I was reading was a typo.  But these people seemed to be deadly serious.

Their demand is there in bold: that the government take steps to reduce (net) greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2025.  Their demand doesn’t appear to be conditional on other countries doing anything.  It is simply flagellation –  but not self-flagellation (in which these individuals themselves commit to reducing all direct and indirect emissions associated with their own consumption and production to zero by 2025)  but a brutal whipping delivered to everyone.   Not even our government, evincing no concern for productivity or for lifting the performance of the underperforming New Zealand economy, would be that stupid or (electorally) suicidal.  (In fact, that left…

I’m going to write about the Perfidies of the University Woke today, so please do not fault me for neglecting the Mueller report, as I have nothing to say about it that you can’t read in the mainstream media.

On the other hand, American colleges and universities are slowly but surely become bastions of censorship and ideological policing, hemorrhaging their brain-dead Zombies of Wokeness into mainstream culture; and nobody reports on that save the rightwing media. (Believe me, I check on their reports). Places like the New York Times and the New York Review of Books don’t report on things like this case of language and brain policing, because, in truth, they want America to become like Amherst College.

What did Amherst College do? You can read about it on the right-wing college monitoring site The College Fix, but what they say is confirmed by Amherst itself. Amherst College

Jakobshavn glacier, West Greenland [image credit: Wikipedia]
Without jumping to hasty conclusions, this is an interesting development not predicted by the IPCC’s supposed experts. Natural ocean/climate oscillations are implicated. Against assumptions, rising carbon dioxide levels cannot explain these latest observations.

A new NASA study finds a major Greenland glacier that was one of the fastest shrinking ice and snow masses on Earth is growing again, reports The GWPF.

The scientists were so shocked to find the change, Khazendar said: “At first we didn’t believe it.

“We had pretty much assumed that Jakobshavn would just keep going on as it had over the last 20 years.”

An article posted on the Stuff website is headed Transgender rights debate: Separating the facts from the fiction

The writer, one Cecile Meier, might usefully have consulted a recent Point of Order report before deciding she had put the misunderstandings to rights – at least on the political process.

Her article rightly says transgender people have to go through a long and costly process to change the sex on their birth certificate.  This involves an application to the Family Court providing proof they’ve had medical treatment to transition.

The process for changing a New Zealand licence or passport is much simpler: people need only make a statutory declaration, which involves an authorised witness or justice of the peace.

At issue is whether birth certificates should be changed as easily a driving licence or passport.

(Long and fairly geeky)

That’s the claim emblazoned on the cover of US academic George Selgin’s 2018 book Floored.   It is a big claim by a smart author, who has written many years (often quite sceptically, to say the least) about aspects of central banking.  And, for once, I won’t bury my conclusion: I wasn’t convinced.

The “experiment” Selgin is writing about is the decision, implemented at the start of October 2008, to pay (effectively a full market) interest rate on excess reserves (over and above the regulatory minimum the Fed persists in requiring) held by banks in their accounts at the Federal Reserve.    The Fed was late to the business of paying interest on these deposit balances (other countries, including New Zealand, had done so earlier).  It required Congressional authorisation –  itself a somewhat unusual feature –  and even having obtained that approval the new regime…

There is so much history, so many horrible examples. How could anyone be so ill-informed? It probably starts with Republican tax cuts. The Democrats always sneer  “tax cuts for the rich!” and the rich do get tax cuts, and so does everyone else. The cuts for the poorer people are indeed smaller because they pay less taxes in the first place.The top 20% of earners pay 94% of all taxes paid. Of course they get a bigger percentage cut than the rest of us.

Boggles the mind to see how many people complain about the government, and then want to turn over to the government, all those unelected bureaucrats, our businesses, our worldly goods, and our way of earning a living. We cannot make even the simplest decisions about our lives, but have to leave it up to the government? It’s far worse than no toilet paper and no food…