Utopia, you are standing in it!

Having taken their long summer break – not heard from since 11 November – the Reserve Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee will be out with their Monetary Policy Statement on Wednesday. Much has changed in the economic data and indicators, here and abroad, since then, and it will be interesting to see what the Governor and has committee have made of it all. There are some genuine surprises and puzzles that the Committee should have been grappling with – and most other macro economists and commentators too, but the rest of us don’t get to set monetary policy. And if the strength of the economic rebound is a surprise – and it would appear to have been to the Bank too – how resilient is that rebound likely to prove, and under what conditions?

I’m somewhat sceptical of the idea of a resilient rebound this year – and with more than…

Photosynthesis: nature requires carbon dioxide
Tackle – or generate? Carbon dioxide being a benefit to plants – which it clearly is – will be deemed false if it’s ‘excess’, according to this report. Anything that might cast doubt on climate catastrophism is likely to get the label treatment.
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Labels to be attached to posts directing users to Facebook’s Climate Science Information Center, reports The Guardian.

A new section of the Climate Science Information Center, launching alongside the labelling trial, debunks common myths such as the false claim that polar bear populations are not suffering due to global heating, or the widespread belief that excess carbon emissions help plant life.

Facebook is working with climate communication experts from around the world, including at the University of Cambridge, to produce the content.

Dr Sander van der Linden, a Cambridge academic who has worked with Facebook on the centre…

Conflating the Caretaker Convention with The Doctrine of Necessity

I remain transfixed by the spectacle unfolding in Newfoundland and Labrador and will have to report back once Elections Newfoundland and Labrador counts the ballots cast in this illegitimate election.

Last week, Ed Hollett, a political historian based in St. John’s, accused me and Lyle Skinner of construing the Elections Act of Newfoundland and Labrador too narrowly. “You need to look at the Act again as a whole document, not just a list of rules. I think there’s an element of that limited approach in Bowden’s commentary as well,” he insisted. By “limited,” he means “factually correct,” because the words in statutes must mean something. “Looking at an act as a whole” does not substitute for the absence of specific provisions that would need to exist in order for your argument to be true.

As the year 1917 drew to its close, the Allied war effort rested almost solely on the shoulders of the United Kingdom and its empire — a situation serious enough to persuade the British prime minister to once again address the question of peace negotiations. His speech to the British Trade Union Congress of 5 January 1918 followed a peace feeler by the German secretary of state, Richard Kühlmann. Under what came to be known as the ‘Kühlmann Peace Kite’, the Berlin government was willing to accept terms favourable to Britain. Belgium and Serbia were to be restored, Alsace-Lorraine to be returned to France, and there would be colonial concessions to Britain. As there was no reference to Russia, the Germans obviously expected compensation at Russia’s expense. The Kühlmann Peace Kite soon turned out to be another diversionary manoeuvre, like the German peace talk a year earlier, but the possibility…