Utopia, you are standing in it!

Zhou Enlai’s famous quote, made during Nixon’s groundbreaking visit to China in 1972, in response to a question about French revolts, was actually not referring to the French Revolution of 1789 but the revolts of 1968.

I was reminded of this while watching the following scenes of people fleeing Paris just the other day before the commencement of a new curfew and lockdown process in response to a second wave of Chinese Lung Rot cases and deaths.

The reason is contained in this graph.

That chart is more than a month old and things have not improved since then…

Here’s a 10½-minute video produced by an extraordinarily courageous woman bucking the wokeness of her employer, Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.  This is the first of several videos promised by staff member Jodie Shaw, an alum who works as a student support coordinator. Her picture has disappeared from the staff page—only the first step in the inevitable demonization that will happen to her. She is toast: after just this video—the first one—she will be shunned, harassed, and, ultimately, will have to resign because she’ll have nothing to do (they can’t fire her).  She’ll never be able to get a job at another college.

Shaw doesn’t try to hide her name or her background, and she’s suffering from a common malaise: race exhaustion. Smith is one of the wokest American colleges, something that seems to correlate positively with the prestige and priciness of a college. (Smith is very prestigious and…

For members of my generation the name Henry Kissinger produces a number of reactions.  First and foremost is his “ego,” which based on his career in public service, academia, and his role as a dominant political and social figure makes him a very consequential figure in American diplomatic history.  Second, he fosters extreme responses whether your views are negative seeing him as a power hungry practitioner of Bismarckian realpolitik who would do anything from wiretapping his staff to the 1972 Christmas bombing of North Vietnam; or positive as in the case of “shuttle diplomacy” to bring about disengagement agreements between Israel and Egypt, and Israel and Syria following the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the use of linkage or triangular diplomacy pitting China and the Soviet Union against each other.  No matter one’s opinion Thomas A. Schwartz’s new book, HENRY KISSINGER AND AMERICAN POWER: A POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY…

The Spectator has published a SAGE paper outlining a ‘reasonable worst case’ scenario leading to an additional 85,000 Covid deaths in the UK, even with some partial mitigation. It’s hard to know what to make of this figure without a better understanding of what would happen if the government did nothing. (The paper assumed that ‘policy measures are put in place to reduce non-household contacts to half of their normal … levels’, which sounds pretty draconian to me.) But on the basis of what we do know, it is also hard to justify tightening restrictions any further, especially if this means another full national lockdown.

There have already been several independent attempts at a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of prolonged Covid lockdowns. I think it fair to say there is an emerging consensus that the welfare costs – not just the economic damage but also other social harms –…

Patrizia Baudino, Diarmuid Murphy and Jean-Philippe Svoronos in this BIS WP:

This paper covers the banking crisis in Ireland that started in 2008, which stemmed from a combination of macroeconomic developments, risky bank practices and unsustainable fiscal policies. In line with the scope of this series, the paper focuses on the policy response. This involved the restructuring of the banking sector, requiring measures to restore bank capital, address asset quality issues and ensure the provision of funding.

Several rounds of stress tests, deleveraging plans and the provision of central bank liquidity, as well as the creation of an asset management company, were among the key measures put in place.

The Irish banking crisis offers important lessons. One is the need to recognise the limits of emergency liquidity assistance and the boundary between such assistance and fiscal support. Others concern bank restructuring and the best modalities for it. Finally, some…

Plans to erect thousands more of these things around Britain’s coasts, spell the death knell for millions of seabirds, with several species under threat.

While Greta frets about global incineration and mass extinctions, the wind industry is doing a very fine job of extinguishing millions of birds and bats, every year. Indeed, entire species are under threat, including Europe’s Red Kite and Tasmania’s Wedge Tailed Eagle.

More generally, there’s a wave of avian carnage wherever the wind industry plies it subsidy-soaked trade; and offshore is no exception.

The offshore wind industry is already exacting a phenomenal toll on a whole range of seabirds in the waters surrounding Britain. However, if Boris Johnson’s plans to carpet Britain’s coasts with more of these things come to fruition, then expect to see the wholesale wipeout of entire species, including the iconic puffin.

Puffins and other seabirds will be driven to extinction by Boris…