Econ 101: The Keynesians have it backwards

Its income and savings that drives an economy, not spending and consumption. Watch:

Ontario: Refurbishing its way to prosperity

"Ontario’s plan to pour colossal amounts of money into nuclear, wind and solar could bury the province", so says Lawrence Solomon in the Financial Post (Nov. 27). Ostensibly the McGuinty Liberals in Ontario want cleaner air and greener energy production. McGuinty has bought into the global warming alarmist's view that we must reduce our carbon emissions to save the planet and stop air pollution to eliminate the deaths of Ontarians with respiratory problems. The former is ridiculous and the latter well, lets just say a lot of our pollution comes across our southern border so we would have to persuade our American cousins to do likewise. The fact is our air quality is rather good most of the time, and certainly does not warrant mortgaging the future prosperity of Canada's once richest province.
Mr. Solomon's column describes how McGuinty has decided to refurbish the old and build new nuclear generation facilities even though our previous experience with nuclear power plants has shown them to be extraordinarily uneconomic. 
The temperamental and pricey nukes will be assisted by wind and solar energy "power-plants" (when they are working!). It boggles the mind, but Mr. Solomon offers hope. The final paragraph of the article states: "It isn’t too late to turn things around. Just bury the long-term plan, none of which passes muster, and resurrect the privatization of the power system. Power rates would drop and Ontario’s economy would soar." The emphasis on privatization is mine, and it cannot come soon enough.

Cooling on Warming

We are just days away from the next big global warming conference in Mexico. I'm missing the hype that preceded last years Copenhagen debacle. Things are a bit different now, as I predicted in several earlier postings, the economy is beginning to trump the environment. Some of the European countries that went headlong into Green overspending are now on the brink of bankruptcy, Spain most notably.
An opinion piece in today's National Post nicely sums up the recent changes in attitude and opinion regarding anthropogenic global warming. Its worth a read, because it puts the next conference in Cancun into focus, that is of course if you still think global warming is a problem.

Religion a force for good? Not so much.

As a followup to my Oct. 12th posting, the Munk Debate between Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens took place last night (Nov. 26/10) in Toronto.
The online video of the debate is not available as yet, but the results are in.
Apparently two-thirds of those polled believe that religion is NOT a force for good in the world. The NOT group had a 35% lead pre-debate, and a 37% lead post-debate, so not a significant change I would say.
In a debate of this sort I would have expected the atheists to be more numerous attendees than the believers, and that is what the results indicate if I can be that simplistic about the issue.
The CBC calls this a win for Chris Hitchens, looking at the results I'd say that was a stretch.
At some point when the online version is released, I will post it.