Utopia, you are standing in it!

By Paul Homewood

Statistician Dr. Matt Briggs on IPCC report: “You can never be fired for being wrong in the right direction. The Experts making statements about how dire the climate is have been wrong for decades, and they are still wrong in their sparkling new IPCC Climate Assessment Report 6 released Monday. Now, as then, they warn that “extremes” are on their way. They haven’t got here yet, but they’re coming. They’re always coming.” … Or they have got here, but you need to have the kind of specialized training mentioned above to recognize them.

The difference between AR6, and ARs 1-5, is not so much in the kind of errors made, for these haven’t changed at all, but in the certainty expressed in them. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that somebody did a “Find & Replace” of every instance of “very likely” in AR5 and changed…

Phurichai Rungcharoenkitkul of BIS in this paper gives an assessment:

This article provides an interim assessment of the macroeconomic consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic. Estimates suggest a median output loss of about 6.5% in 2020, a gap that is expected to narrow to around 4% of the pre-pandemic trend by the end of 2021. There is however a high dispersion of economic losses across economies, reflecting varying exposures to the pandemic and societies’ responses. High-frequency indicators and epidemiological models provide some insights into the interactions between the evolution of the pandemic and societies’ strategies for combating it, including the role of vaccination. The article draws lessons from experiences thus far and discusses challenges ahead.

In a related voxeu piece, Jean-Charles Bricongne and Baptiste Meunier point to five best policies to fight the pandemic

Greenpeace recently objected to the Philippine government’s recent approval for the country’s farmers to grow genetically modified golden rice. The rice variant will contain enough Vitamin A and beta-carotene that can feed andmnourish starving children in poverty that lack those vital nutrients.

Greenpeace, on the other hand, has long been involved in campaigns to demonize and slander any form of genetically modified foods. Consequently, people starve or even die because of the group’s opposition to GMO foods that give people the food they need to live. This PBS Newshour report from 2014 gives a very good overview of the controversy.

PHOTO CREDIT: Golden rice as compared to white rice. By International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) – https://www.flickr.com/photos/ricephotos/5516789000/in/set-72157626241604366, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14908001

I have seen the following figures at three different places this morning under three different posters and while it is very definitely possible that they all stem from the same source – in fact I know they do because these figures are said to be Labour internal polling – they are well worth further publication. Date of the poll is not known but I think I read somewhere that the main parties poll weekly so they are probably fairly current and later than the last Roy Morgan and Reid polls.

Labour 38

National 31

ACT 13

Green 8

NZ First 4 – Lazarus stirs again.

No mention of any other parties.

The removal of Winston Churchill from the public area of Parliament Buildings and Mallard sounding off about the Hurricanes owner can only help a worthy cause.

I bet the language on the 9th floor is colourful and I cannot…

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: