CBS Climate Fright Night
19 Oct 2020 Leave a comment
The pandemic has sucked the air out of the climatism scare, so the usual suspects are stirring the pot this Halloween season. Of course many are joining to make up this witches brew, but take for example this CBS News report today: For many climate change finally hits home. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.
2020 has been a year of nonstop crises. For a while there, it was almost possible to forget an ongoing crisis that used to have our attention: climate change. But Nature found a way to remind us.
In the Midwest, punishing 100-mile-per-hour winds. In the Southwest, a brutal succession of floods and droughts. On the coasts: a freakish number of devastating hurricanes.
And in our Western states, historic mega-fires that sent a plume of ash and smoke all the way to the East Coast. More than four million acres have burned in California alone…
View original post 2,740 more words
Quote of the month: Bertrand Russell on why we shouldn’t believe in fictions that supposedly make us behave better
19 Oct 2020 Leave a comment
Most of you have heard of Russell’s Teapot, the hypothetical but undetectable orbiting object that Bertrand Russell used to show why we shouldn’t believe things for which there is no evidence (i.e., “religion”). But perhaps you don’t know where that simile came from. While futzing around on the Internet, I came across Russell’s essay “Is there a God?“, which is described as “commissioned by, but never published in, Illustrated Magazine, in 1952.” It’s apparently been published in his collected papers, though, and I give that reference at the bottom. And it’s the first mention of the fabled Teapot.
A lot of the stuff in this essay was taken from Russell’s famous and earlier piece, “Why I am Not a Christian“, first published as a pamphlet in 1927. If you think that the hallmark of New Atheism is its vociferous, in-your-face anti-theism, think again, for people…
View original post 1,541 more words
Prof John Gibson – Hard but not early – the real cost of NZ’s lockdown
19 Oct 2020 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, comparative institutional analysis, health economics, politics - New Zealand Tags: economics of pandemics
ROLLING STONES “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” on The Ed Sullivan Show
19 Oct 2020 Leave a comment
in Music, television
Lost on the woke
19 Oct 2020 Leave a comment
in discrimination, economics of education, gender, human capital, labour economics, labour supply, minimum wage, occupational choice, politics - Australia, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA, poverty and inequality, unemployment, welfare reform Tags: child poverty, family poverty, regressive left
Panic in Moscow! The Germans are here! – WW2 – 112 – October 17, 1941
18 Oct 2020 Leave a comment
in defence economics, war and peace Tags: World War II
More blasphemy
18 Oct 2020 Leave a comment
in discrimination, economics of crime, economics of religion, law and economics, politics - Australia, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA Tags: free speech, Freedom of religion, political correctness, regressive left
Bertrand Russell on faith versus fact
18 Oct 2020 Leave a comment
I was shocked when a reader mentioned, in a recent comment, that the famous philosopher, logician, mathematician and vociferous atheist Bertrand Russell had written a book about the conflict between religion and science. How could I have missed it when I wrote a book about the same issue in 2015, and spent two years reading before I wrote it? I was chagrined, and of course nothing would do but for me to get the book, which was published in 1935.
Fortunately, our library had it, and I got it and devoured it within a few days. I was happy to once again read Russell’s clear prose and dry wit, but also to see that while his topic was nominally the same as mine, there isn’t much overlap between our books. I’ll just highlight a few points of similarity and difference, and mention a few of Russell’s ideas that we still…
View original post 1,249 more words
#globalwarming #climateemergency @Greenpeace @Greens @AOC @NZGreens @BernieSanders
18 Oct 2020 Leave a comment
in development economics, discrimination, economic history, economics of bureaucracy, economics of crime, economics of regulation, energy economics, entrepreneurship, environmental economics, financial economics, gender, global warming, growth miracles, human capital, income redistribution, labour economics, labour supply, law and economics, liberalism, libertarianism, Marxist economics, minimum wage, occupational choice, occupational regulation, politics - Australia, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA, poverty and inequality, Public Choice, rentseeking, unemployment, unions, welfare reform Tags: The fatal conceit
Recent Comments