Utopia, you are standing in it!

Joel Fitzgibbon: Labor’s lonely voice for industry and workers’ jobs.

Australia’s Labor Party was started in 1891 by QLD sheepshearers on strike, fighting for better wages and conditions; over a Century it became the party of ideas. Nowadays, it is unrecognizable, on either score.

A hard-green left intelligentsia hijacked the party, long ago; pushing nonsensical CO2 emissions and renewable energy targets, and an anti-mining agenda that have cost it dearly. Not least the unloseable Federal election in May 2019, when it was shellacked in the regions which depend upon reliable and affordable energy, such as mining and mineral processing.

The modern ALP treats its former base with derision and contempt. Characters like shadow energy spokesman, Mark Butler, function in a parallel universe; his perverse obsession with wind and solar and carbon dioxide gas emissions has helped drive a wedge between those ALP MPs safely ensconced in inner-city seats, plagued with…

For Whom The Bell Tolls is the novel that was supposed to win Ernest Hemingway his first Pulitzer Prize in 1941. However, like Sinclair Lewis before him, Hemingway was denied the prize by the President of Columbia University. As the story goes, the 1941 Novel Jury recommended several books for the Pulitzer Prize including, but not primarily, For Whom The Bell Tolls, but the Pulitzer Advisory Board overrode their other recommendations in favor of the critic’s choice, For Whom The Bell Tolls. Before the Board could complete the vote they were blocked by one man: the President of Columbia University, Nicholas Butler Murray. He was ex-officio Chairman of the Pulitzer also Advisory Board and he objected to the ‘lascivious’ content in the novel (Sound familiar? Nicholas Butler Murray also blocked the Pulitzer Prize from being bestowed upon Sinclair Lewis in 1921 for his novel Main Street. Instead…

by Judith Curry

“Avoid unwarranted certainty, neat narratives and partisan presentation; strive to inform, not persuade.”

Piper delivers lament for Scotland.

Scotland’s wind power scam is positively criminal: foreign-owned wind power outfits have pocket tens of £billions in subsidies; working-class Scots struggle to pay crippling power bills – plenty of them have no hope of powering their homes ever again.

A further obscenity is the fact that wind farms in Scotland are routinely paid hundreds of £millions each year to NOT produce any electricity, at all: World’s Biggest Scams: Scotland’s Wind Farms Paid £650,000,000 To NOT Produce Power

The cost of wind power subsidies to Scottish power consumers is staggering, and it continues to mount. As Gareth Rose outlines below.

It’s the SNP’s green dream, yet firms are handed millions every year to run Scotland’s wind farms… and YOU are paying for it
The Scottish Mail on Sunday
Gareth Rose
1 November 2020

Wind farms are being handed record subsidies in a move that is driving up…

A Bronx Zoo elephant named Happy was the center of attention in court Thursday when a New York appellate court deliberated granting the mammal personhood.

According to UPI, the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) asked the Appellate Division of New York State Supreme Court to grant the mammal personhood rights alleging Happy is living in solitary confinement since being placed there 14 years ago. Once done, Happy would to be transferred to an animal sanctuary so as to allegedly avoid the coming New York winter weather.

The appeals court took up the case after the NhRP lost their initial attempt in the Bronx Supreme Court. While the Bronx judge in the group’s first court challenge found the NhRP’s arguments persuasive, the New York Post states appellate court judges seemed skeptical.

Animal rights philosophy is based on an erroneous assumption made by French philosopher Rene Descartes’ that says: I feel…

by Ori Katz (Tel Aviv University)

Wiki Commons. Market scene by Pieter Aertsen, c.1550

The largest economic mystery is the modern prosperity of humankind. For thousands of years since the Neolithic revolution, most humans lived in small communities, working as farmers, and their average standard of living did not change much.

But in the nineteenth century, things changed: large parts of the world become industrialised. In those parts, people moved to live in huge cities, where they worked in manufacturing and commerce, had fewer children, invested more in schooling, and their standard of living began to rise, and then to rise dramatically, and it has never stopped since. Whether you look at life expectancy, birth fatality, income per person or any other measure, the trend is the same. And we don’t really know why.

We have a lot of theories. Some believe that this dramatic change has something to do…