Utopia, you are standing in it!

On 12 June 2003 a minor constitutional revolution began with the resignation of Lord Irvine as Lord Chancellor and the announcement of a package of reforms including the abolition of his office and the creation of a Supreme Court, later to become the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 (CRA). To commemorate the tenth anniversary of these events, the Judicial Independence Project held a private seminar on 12 June 2013 at which some of those directly involved in the changes spoke about the experience and the effects it has had on constitutional change. A note of the seminar is available here. In part the seminar brought out the drama and the comedy of the day itself. An old friendship ended in acrimony: Irvine had been the Prime Minister’s pupil master and had introduced him to his wife. At the same time the senior judiciary, at an away day with civil servants…

Scottish offshore wind project [image credit : urbanrealm.com]
Electricity bill payers are in effect subsidising work that’s being exported round the world while promises of so-called green jobs for Scottish workers, and the government’s own ’emissions’ policies, are forgotten or ignored. The irony being that the high cost of UK electricity – and rising due to renewables – is part of the problem.
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A trade union has called for a halt to new offshore wind farms until a local supply chain is established, says The National (via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF).

GMB London echoed the growing anger from GMB Scotland after it was announced last week that contracts to supply turbine jackets for SSE’s offshore wind farm, Seagreen, in Angus, were awarded to firms in China and UAE.

The decision meant Scottish firm Burntisland Fabrications (BiFab) was left overlooked in favour of companies based…

German energy policy is a fiasco; the so-called energy transition is a debacle. Germans suffer the highest power prices in Europe, all thanks to an obsession with intermittent wind and solar.

When the sun sets and/or calm weather sets in, Germany is forced to import huge volumes of power from its neighbours, particularly nuclear-powered France and coal-fired Poland.

Then, when the sun’s up and breezes return, awash with power it cannot possibly consume, Germany slashes its prices and dumps the stuff on its neighbours.

The result is power market chaos, as No Tricks Zone reports.

German Electricity Imports Hit New Record, Rise 43.3 Percent in First Half Of 2020!
No Tricks Zone
Pierre Gosselin
16 September 2020

You would think that with all the added wind and solar energy in Germany, along with all the conventional power plants on standby, all totaling up to huge unneeded capacity, there would be…

Reading the latest edition of The Chicago Maroon, our student newspaper, I saw an op-ed about self care by Ada Palmer, an associate professor of History. I’m not going to write about that; her piece is pretty straightforward and empathic towards our students, who will be having a rather stressful semester. Rather, when I looked Palmer up, I saw that she’d written a review two years ago in Harvard Magazine of Steve Pinker’s Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress. Always interested in how my colleagues regard Pinker, in arguments for empiricism and rationality, and intrigued by the title of her piece, I read her piece. You can, too, by clicking on the screenshot below.

It turns out that Dr. Palmer likes Steve’s book, but has two reservations. The first is that Steve argues that humanism, which is a handmaiden of atheism, is the…