Utopia, you are standing in it!

There are proposals afoot in Italy to depart from the parliamentary form of government, most likely replacing it with some type of semi-presidentialism. In addition, there is discussion of adopting a “constructive” vote of no confidence. (In Italian, see Repubblica, Libre Quotidiano).

Under a semi-presidential executive structure, the head of state (president) is elected popularly, and there is also a prime minister as head of government. The prime minister and cabinet are collectively responsible to the assembly majority. Under a constructive vote of no confidence, the majority that votes no confidence must also name a replacement prime minister. The two provisions are not often combined, although Poland has a semi-presidential system with a constructive vote (see Art. 158 of the Polish constitution).

The Brothers of Italy, party of the current prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, had in their manifesto for the last election a pledge to change to…

Speculation that Liz Truss is about to make to return to frontline politics has prompted a flurry of dodgy claims and daft statistics about the economic cost of last September’s mini-Budget. Here’s a quick debunking of the most common.

I’ll start with the biggest number: £74 billion (sometimes cited as £73 billion).

This appears to have been lifted from a headline in the Daily Express (26^th October) which claimed that ‘Kwasi Kwarteng’s budget blunder cost UK an eye-watering £74 billion, finance chief reveals’.

Digging deeper, this was the Debt Management Office (DMO’s) estimate of the increase in the Net Financing Requirement for the fiscal year 2022-23 between April and September (actually £72.4 billion, but near enough).

This figure was included in the Growth Plan published on 23^rd September, so was not news. In short, this was the extra money that the DMO expected to have to…

H/T David Wojick and CFACT

Doctors for Disaster Preparedness are concerned to be ready for real disasters and not be distracted by irrational fears like global warming/climate change. They have provided a useful resource for people to test and deepen their knowledge of an issue distorted for many people by loads of misinformation and exaggerations.

From David Wojick:

A new lesson set called the Climate Change IQ (CCIQ) provides a good skeptical critique of ten top alarmist claims. The format is succinct and non-technical. Each alarmist claim is posed as a question, followed by a short skeptical answer, which is highlighted with a single telling graphic.

Then there is a link to a somewhat longer answer, which in turn includes links to a few online sources of more information. Each lesson is also available in a printable PDF version, suitable for classroom use. This compact format is potentially…

Listen to an ideologue, and you’d think the transition to an all wind and sun powered future is simply inevitable. Listen to an engineer, and you’ll soon understand that it is simply impossible.

Reliable, dependable and affordable power supplies were the product of logic and reason – the discipline of methodical and ordered thinking, conceived during the Age of Enlightenment and which gave rise to the Industrial Revolution and its raft of engineering feats of marvels, including the generation and useful application of electric power.

Silly superstitions about the weather and other natural phenomenon were put to bed. The hard sciences flourished and so did civilisation, with unheralded improvements in living standards and incomes.

Now, however, narcissistic virtue signallers are determined to wreck it all around the delusional notion that first-world economies can find all the power they need from the sun and wind. And in doing so, we will…

If you spend much time on Twitter, you may have seen the following cartoon or something like it:

The implication here is that many of the social beliefs we hold today are very different from what people held 50 years ago, and (possibly, therefore) it’s not radical to still hold those beliefs today. The Tweet above doesn’t specify exactly what those beliefs are, but we can use survey data to dig into what those might be. Thankfully, one of the greatest social surveys out there was first conducted in 1972, exactly 50 years ago: the General Social Survey.

What exactly did a normal person believe around 1972, according to the GSS?

The wind industry is the Grand Master of green hypocrisy; leaving a wake of environmental destruction, wherever it plies its subsidy-soaked trade.

In the Scottish Highlands, so far, they’ve wiped out over 14 million trees, spread over more than 17,000 acres to clear the way for thousands of these industrial monstrosities; and, no, they don’t replant them – any sizeable tree is an impediment to ‘productivity’, as it interferes with airflow and reduces wind speeds, and therefore wind power output. So, once they’re gone, they’re gone for good.

Germany’s Black Forest has been overrun, with chainsaws, bulldozers and blazing torches paving the way for our so-called ‘green’ energy transition.

And hundreds of ancient oaks in its thousand-year-old Fairytale Forest, the Reinhardswald, are under threat of being felled and shredded, for the same reason.

Once upon a time, environmentalists were known as ‘tree huggers’, these days the new ‘green’…

Credit: coolantarctica.com
Glaciers advance and retreat. Repeating cycles of natural climate variation exposed.
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Receding glaciers in the northern Antarctic Peninsula are uncovering and reexposing black moss that provides radiocarbon kill dates for the vegetation, a key clue to understanding the timing of past glacier advances in that region, says Phys.org.

A University of Wyoming researcher led a study that determined the black moss kill dates coincide with evidence of glacier advances from other studies that found such events occurred 1,300, 800 and 200 calibrated years prior to 1950.

“We used radiocarbon ages, or kill dates, of previously ice-entombed dead black mosses to reveal that glaciers advanced during three distinct phases in the northern Antarctic Peninsula over the past 1,500 years,” says Dulcinea Groff, a postdoctoral research associate in the UW Department of Geology and Geophysics.

The Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) increased UK interest rates by another half point today, as most had expected, taking them to 4%. But it also hinted that rates may not rise much further, if at all. I think the MPC has got this about right.

The decision to raise interest rates was still controversial. Indeed, two of the nine MPC members (Swati Dhingra and Silvana Tenreyro) voted for ‘no change’ this week.

Many argue that the current high levels of UK inflation (10.5% in December) are largely caused by external factors outside the Bank’s control, notably the fallout from the war in Ukraine on global food and energy prices. Higher interest rates could simply exacerbate the recession.

However, ‘core’ inflation (excluding food and energy) is now over 6%, so it can no longer be dismissed as ‘largely imported’. The shallow recession that the Bank is…