Utopia, you are standing in it!

The wind industry is like the partying college students that trash their parent’s house, never sparing a thought about cleaning up the mess afterwards.

With subsidies being slashed across the globe, the great wind industry ‘party’ will inevitably draw to a close. And the adults will need to raise the tricky issue about who cleans up the mess? And who pays?

Giant industrial wind turbines have an economic lifespan around 15 years, after which the chances are that they’ll be left to rust in some idiot’s back paddock.

Decommissioning these things properly at a sizeable wind farm would run into the hundreds of millions. Then there’s the toxic waste.

Already, thousands of 45-70m blades are being ground up and mixed with concrete used in the bases of other turbines erected later or simply dumped in landfill. Which should worry locals: the plastics in the blades are highly toxic, and…

The title of this post refers to F.A. Hayek’s essay ‘Why I am Not a Conservative’, which can be found as an appendix to his 1960 book The Constitution of Liberty. What this post is really about is the deficiencies of American conservatism and the general idea of liberal conservatism or a natural alliance between classical liberals and conservatives. However, first a few words about Hayek’s essay as Hayek is an important figure for liberty advocates. The essay in question is well known and particularly easy to find online.

Hayek’s criticism of conservatism overestimates the extent to which it is just a limiting position, slowing down change. The relation of conservatism to tradition is seem too much as conservatism being too slow to accept changes to tradition. Traditionalist conservatism, however, has been a much more active and dangerous force than that. ‘Traditionalism’ as far as I know…

This is the second post inspired by a short essay in the New York Times, “When beliefs and facts collide,” by Brendan Nyhan, whose essay itself discusses a 49-page paper by Dan M. Kahan that’s in press in Advances in Political Psychology. Kahan is a professor of law and psychology at Yale. (Kahan’s paper, in advance form, can be downloaded free at the link at bottom). All the figures and quotes in this post, save for one at the end, come from the longer paper.

The subject of both pieces is why so many Americans deny palpably true science, in particular evolution and human-caused global warming. Both of these “theories” are supported by mountains of evidence (no rational scientist would deny evolution, and something like 97% of climate scientists also accept that human activities are making the Earth warmer). My previous post, a few days ago, was on evolution…

(Stalin and Svetlana during her early teens)

When one thinks about the demonic characters that dominated the twentieth century most people do not focus on the impact their lives have had on their offspring.  But with Rosemary Sullivan’s remarkable new biography, STALIN’S DAUGHTER: THE EXTRAORDINARY AND TUMULTUOUS LIFE OF SVETLANA ALLILUYEVA we have just such a book.  Sullivan’s narrative and analysis is thoughtful and reasoned and by the conclusion of her 623 page effort the reader will feel they have entered a surreal world that explored not only Stalin’s child, but the author of the cult of personality that dominated Russian history from 1924 until his death in 1953.  What emerges is a portrait of a child who is raised in the ultimate dysfunctional family.  Svetlana had to endure the suicide of her mother, Nadya in 1932, the erratic emotional roll a coaster that was her father, and the demands…

(Soviet leader Joseph Stalin)

In her first book, THE SPY WHO CHANGED HISTORY: THE UNTOLD STORY OF HOW THE SOVIET UNION WON THE RACE FOR AMERICA’S TOP SECRETS Svetlana Lokhova argues that in the early 1930s Joseph Stalin came to the realization that if the Soviet Union was to survive drastic measures needed to be taken to improve the state of Soviet technology visa vie the west.  The Russian dictator stated that “We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries.  We must catch up in ten years.  Either we do it, or they will crush us.”  Stalin feared that large numbers of enemy aircraft could easily release poisonous gases over Soviet territory resulting in the death of millions.  The Soviet dictator’s solution was multifaceted; starve millions of peasants to death through collectivization to acquire hard currency to assist in Russia’s industrialization, show trials/purges/murder of those who opposed…

If you like quizzes, you might want to see this one at the New York Times, though it’s pretty lame. It’s not one that you can get graded on, but a series of 35 question (with clicks for the “reveals”), asking how much you know about the primaries, the caucuses, how and when you should vote, who’s ahead, and, at the end—where it gets really lame)—”Are we going to be o.k.?” and “When is this all over?”. Sure, maybe those are lighthearted questions, but they’re dumb. Click below if you want to inflict more politics on your beleaguered carcass:

Here’s question 11 with the reveal, though of course it’s way early in the election to prognosticate about winners:

At least it’s an interesting race, with a centrist in a narrow lead, followed by a socialist and then a progressive, with all the rest bunching up below 10%. When I…