Utopia, you are standing in it!

Eric Hobsbawm (1917 to 2012) was one of Britain’s leading Marxist historians. Of Jewish parentage he spent his boyhood in Vienna and Berlin during the rise of the Nazis. With Hitler’s accession to power in 1933, the family moved to Britain in 1933, although his Wikipedia page is at pains to point out that, because his father was originally from London’s East End, he had always had British citizenship. Hobsbawm excelled at school and went to Cambridge where he joined the communist party in 1936.

Twenty-two when the Second World War broke out, Hobsbawm served in the Royal Engineers and the Army Educational Corps, though he was prevented from serving overseas due to his communist beliefs. In 1947 he got his first job as a lecturer in history at Birkbeck College, University of London, the start of a long and very successful career as a historian, which included stints teaching…

A superb interview of Daron Acemoglu of MIT. He picks 5 books on the subject (4 books and one paper actually).

His first pick is a book called  The Race between Education and Technology By Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz. The books explains how does inequality arise:

From the Emperor’s Desk: I have deleted my original blog entry for the origins of the Holy Roman Empire and will expand on it as a series.

Shortly after the Battle of Austerlitz where the French Army of Emperor Napoleon defeated Austria and Russia, 16 German states joined together in a confederation on July 26, 1806, with the signing the Treaty of the Confederation of the Rhine. The founding members of the confederation were German princes of the Holy Roman Empire. They were later joined by 19 others states, altogether ruling a total of over 15 million subjects.

This Confederation granted a significant strategic advantage to the French Empire on its eastern frontier by providing a separation between France and the two largest German states, Prussia and Austria (which also controlled substantial amounts of non-German lands).

The “Protector of the Confederation” was a hereditary office held by Napoleon, the Emperor…

“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue.
Even if the theory of global warming is wrong,
we will be doing the right thing in terms of
economic and environmental policy.“
–TimothyWirth
Fmr President of the UN Foundation

“The urge to save humanity is almost always a
false-front for the urge to rule it.”
–H.L. Mencken

•

No, it is not “code-red for humanity”.

Ergo, ‘DON’T PANIC’!

There’s no need to if you choose to follow known data, and not alarmist UN climate models that drive manufactured global-warming-hysteria.

In fact, the opposite of ‘hysteria’ is true if one is willing to acknowledge that thanks to technology (fossil fuels) and human ingenuity, we are ~99% less likely, now, to die from a climate related event than we were ~100 years ago.

Via Bjorn Lomborg:

BBC staffers were recently taught how best to push messages about climate doom. So much for impartiality. Licence payers never agreed to this condescending nonsense.
– – –
Climate change is once again dominating the news agenda, says The Spectator (via Climate Change Dispatch).

A report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that even if emissions are cut rapidly, the effects of global warming will be felt across the world.

The report – which Boris Johnson has declared sobering reading – leads the news today, with the BBC dedicating seven stories on its homepage today to climate change.

The true cost of chaotically intermittent wind power is staggering; the cost of offshore wind power is astronomical.

The capital cost of spearing these things offshore is multiples greater than doing so and some dimwitted farmer’s back paddock. Recouping that capital cost means that offshore wind power is 25 times more expensive than coal, gas or nuclear.

Jonathan Lesser runs the numbers below, in relation to a herd of colossal white elephants just waiting to be let loose along America’s Atlantic coast.

Offshore wind power vast boondoggle that New York can no longer afford
New York Post
Jonathan Lesser
30 July 2020

Offshore wind is the renewable-energy industry’s shiny new toy. Led by New York, seven Atlantic-coast states have now imposed mandates to expand offshore wind use over the next decade, with the Empire State last week soliciting bids for an additional 2,500 megawatts of offshore power, on…