Friday Morning Ramble

Things from around the place that caught my eye this week …

“"The building is simultaneously monumental and irreverent, equal parts pop and pomp." And it’s probably worth visiting New Plymouth to see it.
Zizz and zing: Editor Jeremy Hansen visits New Plymouth's sensational new Len Lye Centre – HOME

“When politicians propose a new policy, such as Barack Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s plans to outlaw one third of US CO2 emissions in the next 15 years, it is always worth asking: Has this been tried before? And what happened when it was?
    “The answer is: a much, much milder version of the Obama-Clinton plan has been tried in Germany—and it has already impoverished millions.
    “Over the last decade, Germany has pursued the popular ideal of replacing reliable fossil-fuel energy with unreliable energy from solar and wind. Since unreliable energy can’t be relied upon—as Germany’s own data show below—they have to be propped up by reliable energy.”
The Obama-Clinton One-Two Blackout – Alex Epstein, FORBES
NZ coal power generation gone by 2018 - Element magazine – NZ HERALD
Germany gets only 3.3% of its energy consumption from wind and solar. Ignore the headlines – CARBON COUNTER

“The metaphor is funny but befuddled. In strip poker, you win by getting naked last. In trade deals, the best outcome for each party is everyone getting naked together: that is, all countries eliminating all tariffs and subsidies.
    “But here is what most commentators seem to misunderstand about trade poker: even if the others keep their clothes on, you are still better off getting naked.”
The naked truth about barriers to foreign trade – Jamie Whyte, NZ HERALD
The Economist: The TPP is dead – MACRO BUSINESS
TPP and self-delusion – DIM POST

“More Monty Python-esqe scorn and disrespect being shown by a too complacent National Party.”
Euthanasia Debate (NZ): There’s a Seminary Trained Catholic Chairing the Committee - Truly. – Mark Hubbard, LIFE BEHIND THE IRON DRAPE

“This is why we have a mislead, resentment-fueled populace - or segment of. Lies. From Paul Little in the Herald on Sunday …”
Lies – LINDSAY MITCHELL

Sad news.
Graham Brazier suffers heart attack – NZ HERALD

Happy news. “When the house resumes next Tuesday, David Seymour will table a bill for pubs to open early and show the Rugby World Cup.
    “Is this needed? Not strictly. Humans got on for 100,000 years without pubs or international sports tournaments. The point is, though, that responsible adults should be able to get together for a community gathering over a pint, coffee, or breakfast to cheer on their team.”
Free Press - Rugby games and sea change – ACT.ORG.NZ

“Some sharks shouldn't be jumped. This may be one.”
Reputational spill-overs: semen beer edition – Eric Crampton, OFFSETTING BEHAVIOUR

“A well-reasoned response to Cecil frenzy.”
In Zimbabwe, We Don’t Cry for Lions – Goodwell, Nzou, NY TIMES
From Gamergate to Cecil the lion: internet mob justice is out of control – VOX

Possibly the single-worst thing about Australians. That this wins votes.
Sacrificing refugees to win the election – INDEPENDENT AUSTRALIA

“"The populist notion that these migrants want simply to parasitise the welfare state is mistaken."
Work prospects attract ‘Channel migrants’ to Britain – Theodore Dalrymple, THE AUSTRALIAN

“Just concrete over it. We’d rather have the chance to get off the renting treadmill than the chance to occasionally eat a blackberry.”
Why Generation Rent doesn’t care about your precious green belt – Joel Golby, GUARDIAN

"You have one life, and it should be precious. It should be an end in
itself, not merely a means to the ends of others. You should not be
obligated to sacrifice yourself to the wishes and needs of others. Your
life is yours--and you ought to have a moral right to live it."
- Peter Schwartz, ‘Reconceiving the Idea of Selfishness,’ HUFFINGTON POST

"However, Lieb notes, that the U.S. is only seeing 350 new general surgeons a year. That is not even a replacement rate, she observed. Lieb professed that being taxed to death and having to send so much money to the government is a disincentive for doctors to work at full capacity.  “Our young people are not trained as well as we were,” she continued."
U.S. Doctor Shortage Looms – Steven Branch, LINKED IN

“The real-world Gravity Payments sounds a lot like the fictional Twentieth Century Motor Company from Ayn Rand’s novel, Atlas Shrugged, and while the quotations from the real-world employees who left Gravity Payments do not sound quite as passionate as the fictional John Galt, the message is the same.”
Atlas Shrugs - Randall Holcombe, MISES WIRE

“ABSTRACT” … Contrary to standard assumptions, there is little evidence that these markets experienced reduced or delayed innovation or output despite intensive levels of patent issuance and litigation.”
The Myth of the Patent Anti-Commmons – ORGANIZATIONS & MARKETS

“As another famous dead person is accused of child abuse, read Brendan O'Neill on Britain's sick obsession with paedos: ‘This is why every element of the elite, from the political class to all sections of the media to the charity world, has devoted itself to panicking about and posturing against paedophiles: they need these devils, wherever they might be found, to try to magic up a new morality in a post-moral era’.”
Our need for paedos: why society obsesses over child abuse – Brendan O’Neill, SPIKED
The Edward Heath witch hunt is the stuff of Hitler's dreams – TELEGRAPH

Is the Pope Catholic?
Are fascists socialists? Are socialists fascists? – AGAINST CRONY CAPITALISM

Comments show Malaysians more rational than their religion.
Gymnast shamed for ‘showing vagina’ – NEWS.COM.AU

Robert Conquest, who has died at the age of 98, was one of the most important historians of the 20th century.
    At a time when many on "the left" wished to ignore or whitewash the reality of "socialism-in-practice" in the Soviet Union, when many were were apologists for the Soviet Union and Stalin, Conquest would have none of it. His work told the truth about Stalin's mass murder of innocents and his own colleagues, about mind manipulation and terror to get phony confessions used at high profile show trials; about the forced collectivisation of the land that used torture, exile, and manufactured famines to wrest away private farms from Russian and Ukrainian peasants—killing between nine and twelve million people, about whom other historians were silent. 
    Conquest's work helped put an end to that.
Robert Conquest, Historian Who Documented Soviet Horrors, Dies at 98 – N.Y. TIMES
RIP Robert Conquest: “The first historian to document the extent of the barbarity of Stalin’s regime.” – AGAINST CRONY CAPITALISM
Robert Conquest – historian, victorious Cold Warrior, poet and lover of the limerick – Daniel Hannan, CONSERVATIVE HOME
Robert Conquest: Cold Warrior who revealed Stalin's brutality – Tom Switzer, I.P.A.

“One lesson in particular comes from the late Professor Conquest, who did perhaps more than any other historian to disabuse some of the soft left of their romantic views about the Soviet Union. Western politicians in secularised countries scramble around trying to understand the appeal of Islamic State to young, European Muslims. The parallels with the Soviet Union are obvious, and a useful frame of reference."
We need a Robert Conquest figure to demolish the pro-Islamist left – NATIONAL SECULAR SOCIETY

“Education is changing very rapidly, and it’s the developing world which is leading the way.”
Low-Cost Private Schools Are Leaping Ahead in the Developing World - Alex Tabarrok, FEE.

“Self direction is a key outcome of a Montessori education. How do we, as adults, facilitate it?”
The Self-directed Child – MARIA MONTESSORI

“A great summary of Montessori for 3-6 year olds.”
Montessori 3-6 – A.M.I. MONTESSORI

“Why are children in Montessori classrooms organised into three-year age groupings? Its all about fostering peer learning, and social development and supporting the deepening of skills and understanding. This article from our website explains more.”
Three-Year Age Grouping – MONTESSORI AUSTRALIA

“"In 1985, Obama’s science advisor John Holdren predicted that by now we’d be approaching a billion CO2-related deaths from famine." Thought you’d like to know.
The Obama-Clinton One-Two Blackout – Alex Epstein, FORBES

“"DENIERS" is a term to describe alarmists. That is all.
The real 'deniers' in the climate change debate are the warmists – TELEGRAPH

“A lot people think that rising human population poses a threat to society because, logically, there is a limited amount of dry land on earth, and so living space and farmland must “run out” eventually… Obvious, intuitive, and wrong. It’s wrong because, while it’s true that Earth is not growing, the supply of land is not fixed...  Resources are an economic, not a physical, phenomenon”
The World Is Bigger than You Think – Daniel Bier, F.E.E.

“Water as a crop: How water markets could help solve the West's water crisis.”
Fixing the imbalance in access to water – Abraham Lustgarten,L.A. TIMES

Get to know your oil protestor:

Seventy years ago this week, the first atom bomb was dropped on a city at war. “The bombs on Japan is not the story of evil weapons, but of what totalitarian death cult can do to a civilisation.” – Kassandra Troy
70 years after the atomic bombs: Hiroshima and Nagasaki then and now  - TELEGRAPH

”Bill Whittle of PJTV annihilates the leftist fantasy, most recently espoused by Jon Stewart, that the atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was ‘immoral,’ and that Harry Truman was a ‘war criminal’.”
From the Archives: Jon Stewart's Stupid Nuclear Commentary – Bill Whittle, PJTV
”For those Japanese who wished for an end to the bloodbath, what fell out of the sky on those two days in 1945 were, in the words of Japanese Navy Minister Yonai Misumasa, ‘gifts from heaven.’ Hisatsune Sakomizu, chief cabinet secretary of Japan, said after the war: ‘The atomic bomb was a golden opportunity given by Heaven for Japan to end the war’.”
“Gifts from Heaven”: The Meaning of the American Victory over Japan, 1945 – John Lewis, OBJECTIVE STANDARD

“So far, Piketty’s critics have offered only technical objections to his number crunching without contesting his apocalyptic political thesis, which is clearly wrong. I know this because over the last years my teams conducted research in the field exploring countries where misery, violence and wars are rampant in the 21st century. What we discovered was that most people actually want more rather than less capital, and they want their capital to be real and not fictitious.”
Hernando De Soto dissects Thomas Piketty’s apocalyptic political thesis – Hernando De Soto, MIAMI HERALD
How Piketty Misses the Point – Deirdre McCloskey, CATO
Piketty and the Shoe Event Horizon – Perry Metzger, SAMIZDATA

“So many economists today spend more and more time mastering
higher-level mathematics and econometric techniques
that they simply never master basic microeconomics…
From my reading of him, I judge Piketty to be among them”
~ Don Boudreaux, Cafe Hayek, McCloskey On Piketty Again

"Economics departments are dominated by Marxism, which
is taken straight or on the rocks, in the form of Keynesianism."
~ Ayn Rand in Philosophy: Who Needs it

“Trying an experimental therapy is not worse than certain death. If you think it is, then I would submit that you are part of the problem.”
New Proposal Gives Hope to Terminally Ill Patients – ANH-USA

Hope.
Melanoma cure may be within reach, Tel Aviv U study shows – TIMES OF ISRAEL

“Abortion rights advocates should not cede the terms "pro-life" and "right to life" to the anti-abortionists. It is a woman's right to her life that gives her the right to terminate her pregnancy. Nor should abortion-rights advocates keep hiding behind the phrase "a woman's right to choose." Does she have the right to choose murder? That's what abortion would be, if the fetus were a person…”
Abortion Rights Are Pro-life – Leonard Peikoff, HUFFINGTON POST

“The Logical Leap uses the history of physics to illustrate the scientific methodology that overcomes David Hume’s confusion.”
Is Science Valid or Just as Arbitrary as any Religion? – Dale Halling, SAVVY STREET

“What makes a city habitable for centuries, even millennia? This list of the twelve longest-inhabited cities unsurprisingly points toward temperate climate, relatively stable water supply, and a certain intangible tenacity on the part of its human inhabitants…”
11,000 year lease: the world's oldest continuously inhabited cities – ARCHINECT NEWS

Don’t tell me this his & hers duvet idea isn’t accurate.

To hell with other cultures!
Researchers find romantic kissing is not the norm in most cultures – SCIENCE DAILY

For your next dinner party...
How to turn small talk into smart conversation – IDEAS.TED.COM

Disgraceful wowserism from modern students.
The average college student spends $900 on alcohol per year – FORBES

Americans. Only just discovering roundabouts.
As Americans Figure Out the Roundabout, It Spreads Across the U.S. – N.Y. TIMES

Ha.
Your underwhelming UK holiday photographs – GUARDIAN

Nice picture of the scoreboard at Trent Bridge pic.twitter.com/5xr7EryBfM

— Tom Phillips (@flashboy) August 6, 2015

 

It's been labelled Australia's worst day in test cricket. Can’t you just watch it over and over …

 

 

Another one to enjoy over the weekend:

And finally …

Bu Adam Çıldırmış Olmalı.

Bu Adam Çıldırmış Olmalı... :D

Posted by haberinbizden.com on Sunday, July 26, 2015

Thanks for reading.
Have a great weekend.
PC

[Hat tips and quips: Felix Mueller, Hilton Wayne Holder, Econlib, Xiaoyu Chen, Jim Rose, Phil Oliver, Monica Beth, I Love Fossil Fuels, Diana Brickell, Steve Wrathall, Gena Davidovich, Scott DeSalvo, Doug Tozzoli, Wladimir Kraus, Hello Sailor, Alex Epstein, s Fabia Claridge-Chang, Helen Simpson, Paul McKeever, Stephen Hicks, Carbon Dioxide, Vinay Kolhatkar, Jim Matzger, Secularism UK, Philip Cunliffe, MustBeRead ‏, Trisha Jha, PERC]