Utopia, you are standing in it!

Economist Bryan Caplan debated another socialist recently on capitalism vs. socialism. He posted his opening statement here. In that blog post he linked to his previous debates on socialism and I noticed he debated Elizabeth Bruenig two years ago. That name is familiar to me (or actually not that familiar because she got married and changed her last name) because years ago I engaged her in a debate in the comments section of her blog (if I recall correctly). Unfortunately, she blocked me ¯_(ツ)_/¯. She was coming at socialism from a Christian perspective and it lead me to write this blog post: Was Jesus A Socialist?

It didn’t take them long. The climate cult has hijacked the COVID-19 crisis, demanding more subsidies for wind and solar. Apparently, more windmills and solar panels will operate like some kind of collective vaccine against the coronavirus.

Never mind that the worst affected COVID-19 victims need to be admitted to ICUs and hooked up to ventilators, which require electricity delivered 24 x 7, irrespective of the weather and time of day.

Hiding behind the pasty faced weather-worriers are a band of cynical and opportunistic renewable energy rent seekers who have turned night into day, with demands for more taxpayer support for already heavily subsidised and forever chaotically intermittent wind and solar.

‘Audacity’ doesn’t really cover it, as Alan Moran reports below.

Green Snouts Sniff a COVID Windfall
Quadrant
Alan Moran
16 April 2020

The Pope, deprived of the counsel of Cardinal Pell, the Church’s most astute voice, foolishly called coronavirus…

Lost Viking ‘highway’ revealed by melting ice | Nat Geo

 “What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know,
it’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”
– Mark Twain

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H/t @WEschenbach

THE post title is obviously a parody. However, it happens to be a factual one, albeit politically incorrect.

OUR very ‘warm’ friends at National Geographic have inadvertently proven the Medieval Warm Period that existed a mere ~1000 years ago. An inconvenient period known as a “climate optimum” that ClimateChange™️ and National Geographic have spent so much currency, propaganda and magazine paper, ‘denying’.

Climate Change Myths: Sorting Fact from Fiction | Nat Geo

Climate Change Myths: Sorting Fact from Fiction | Nat Geo

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*Nat Geo has deleted the “continue reading this myth” link. So, you will have to imagine what they would have gone on to say. Not hard…

As  the world  awaits  the  development of  a  vaccine  for  the  novel coronavirus causing Covid-19,  reports   in the past week   of  successful  treatment of severely ill patients at  a Chicago  hospital  with the antiviral  medicine  Remdesivir   were headlined in the US  and  caused a bounce on global sharemarkets.

Remdesivir was one of the first medicines identified  in lab tests as having the potential to impact SARS-CoV-2.  Results from US  biotechnology firm Gilead  Science’s  clinical trials  have been  eagerly  expected  as the  world looks for  positive outcomes which could  lead to fast approvals by the Food and Drug Administration and other regulatory agencies.

If safe and effective, it could become the first approved treatment against the disease.

The University of Chicago Medicine recruited 125 people with Covid-19 into Gilead’s two Phase 3 clinical trials.  Of those people, 113 had severe disease.

All the patients have been treated with daily infusions of…

This post is not about WuHanFlu, but about New York’s insane decision to close nuclear power plants in favor of wind farms.  Robert Bryce writes at Forbes New York Has 1,300 Reasons Not To Close Indian Point. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

At the end of this month, the Unit 2 reactor at the Indian Point Energy Center in Buchanan, New York will be permanently shut down. Next April, the final reactor at the site, Unit 3, will also be shuttered.

TOMKINS COVE , NY – MAY 11: The Indian Point nuclear power plant is seen from Tomkins Cove, New York … [+] CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES But the premature closure of the 2,069-megawatt nuclear plant is even worse land-use policy. Here’s why: replacing the 16 terawatt-hours of carbon-free electricity that is now being produced by the twin-reactor plant with wind turbines will require 1,300 times as much…

Finance Minister Grant Robertson trots out the phrase “go hard, go early”  in the battle against  Covid-19,  as  often as he used to declare  the  underlying fundamentals of  the  NZ  economy  are  “strong”.

Meanwhile   Health Minister  David  Clark   says   responding to  Covid-19   is a  “marathon,  not a  sprint”.

But  New Zealand  didn’t  “goearly”.   The  Ministry  of   Health  on  January  24,  the  day after China  locked down  the  huge  city of  Wuhan because of the  outbreak of the disease,  said the  likelihood of a  sustained outbreak in  NZ  is  “low”.

It maintained that  line for  a month.  There was no  visible sign of the  ministry calling on ministers to scale up  stocks of relevant equipment, take precautions in retirement  homes,   or   increase the  number of Intensive Care Unit beds  and ventilators.