Utopia, you are standing in it!

On 5 March 1933, the Nazi Party won nearly 44 per cent of the vote, which gave them 288 seats in the Reichstag. Hitler formed a coalition with the National Party (8 per cent). The Communist party won 81 seats.

There were 44,685.764 entitled to vote. The voter turnout was 88.74 %. Invalid vote was 0.79%. The total valid votes was 39,343.331. Of those votes 43.9% went tp the NSDAP, the Nazi party. This means that 19,617.022 voted for the Nazis.

The 1933 election followed the previous year’s two elections (July and November) and Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor. In the months before the 1933 election, SA and SS displayed terror, repression and propaganda across Germany,  339  Nazi organizations “monitored” the vote process. In Prussia 50,000 members of the SS, SA and Der Stahlhelm were ordered to monitor the votes by acting Interior Minister Hermann Göring, as auxiliary police.

In spite…

Rocketing power prices and routine blackouts are the inevitable consequence of the ‘inevitable’ wind and solar ‘transition’ – California is no exception.

Indeed, thanks to their deranged leaders’ obsession with chaotically intermittent wind and solar, Californians will be lucky to have power, at all. Putting aside the question of whether all but the elite will be able to pay their bills, as and when power might be delivered.

Notwithstanding the evidence that’s well and truly stacked against their utopian belief that all you need are sunshine and breezes, their Governor, Gavin Newsom is determined to wreck what’s left of his state’s power supply, as Thomas Calenacci details below.

California’s grid faces collapse as leaders push renewables, electric vehicles, experts say
Fox News
Thomas Calenacci
14 February 2023

California’s electric grid faces years of potential blackouts and failure as state leaders continue pushing aggressive measures to transition to renewable energy sources

A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy
by David M. Oshinsky
597 pages
Free Press (Macmillan)
Published: January 1983

“A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy” was published in 1983 and is widely considered to be the definitive biography of McCarthy. Oshinsky is a professor of history at NYU, a director at the NYU School of Medicine and the author of nearly two-dozen books including the 2005 Pulitzer Prize winning “Polio: An American Story.”

Joseph R. McCarthy (1908-1957) is infamous as the most prominent face of America’s anti-communist “Red Scare” movement in the early 1950s.  His actions were so conspicuous and controversial that the term “McCarthyism” was coined early in his rise to notoriety.

Oshinsky’s biography of McCarthy is almost exactly what sophisticated readers expect from a serious political biography: a sober, reflective, dispassionate and interesting exploration of the facts…

Electricity transmission [credit: green lantern electric]
Not a new story, but problems are getting worse thanks to net zero obsessions. Why authorise new capacity in areas where transmission lines are known to be inadequate?
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UK consumers are paying hundreds of millions of pounds to turn wind turbines off because the grid cannot deal with how much electricity they make on the windiest days, says Sky News.

The energy regulator Ofgem has told Sky News it is because the grid is “not yet fit for purpose” as the country transitions to a clean power system by 2035.

The National Grid Electricity System Operator (ESO), which is responsible for keeping the lights on, has forecast that these “constraint costs”, as they are known, may rise to as much as £2.5bn per year by the middle of this decade before the necessary upgrades are made.

The problem has arisen…

London’s Heathrow airport
The four leading alternatives, from biomass to hydrogen, are expensive and/or would require huge imports or swathes of farmland, we’re told. Another fail for climate obsessives it seems. Is Plan B – choking off demand – on the fanatics’ drawing board yet?
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The quest for guilt-free flying may have been knocked off course by a broad study that has concluded there is “no clear or single net zero alternative to jet fuel”, reports Sky News.

The four most viable alternatives “offer some carbon savings but are not ideal”, according to the review by the Royal Society academy of scientists.

Replacing jet fuel with biomass, for example, would require half the UK’s farmland just to sustain current passenger levels.

But the government is planning for levels to soar by 70% by 2050, representing an additional 200 million passengers.

More than a decade ago now, I got interested in the sovereign debt defaults in the 1930s. Debt was in the wind, between the severe economic recession and financial crisis and the Reinhart and Rogoff book. And so it was while I was working at The Treasury that I first became aware of New Zealand’s sovereign default in the 1930s. A couple of years later that story ended up written up here and our (quite limited) default joined the published lists of sovereign defaults.

The biggest defaults globally weren’t, and often still aren’t, in such lists. I wrote here a few years ago about the US government’s abrogation of gold clauses in debt instruments, in effect depriving bondholders of a big chunk of their real purchasing power, all as written up in UCLA economist Sebastian Edwards’s accessible book.

But on a global scale the most important series of defaults in…

In the Sunday Star-Times yesterday there was a double-page spread in which various moderately prominent people (all apparently “leading speakers” at some “annual University of Waikato economic forum” this week were given 100 to 150 words to tell us “How can NZ build back following a string of serious economic and social setbacks”.

Most of the contributions were pretty underwhelming to say the least. To be fair, 150 words isn’t a lot, but real insight tends to shine through and there wasn’t much on offer in this selection. But then, who really cares much what the chief executive of the Criminal Cases Review Commission or the co-founder of an advertising agency think on such issues.

By contrast, Paul Conway is a statutory office-holder in an economic field. He is the (relatively new) chief economist of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand and in that capacity has been appointed by the…

Let’s begin with first principles. We are never going to get a “definitive” documentary that takes in everything, talks to everyone and tells us all we need or could possibly want to know about the inscrutable genius, Stanley Kubrick.

Consider just what’s available for a fan or fanatic’s perusal on Youtube at this writing. There’s “Lost Kubrick,” a pretty good “unfinished films” doc made for TV. A fan has pieced together all the film footage — including childhood home movies, much of it with sound — “All Video Footage of Stanley Kubrick.” Somebody else uploaded a “rare” hour long taped interview with him. There are collections of actors and directors talking about him, “behind the scenes” footage from any number of his films also archived there.

And that’s on top of the many other fine documentaries on him, about him, or deep diving into this or that…