Utopia, you are standing in it!

William III-II (William Henry; Dutch: Willem Hendrik; November 4, 1650 – March 8, 1702), also widely known as William of Orange, was the sovereign Prince of Orange from birth, Stadtholder of Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Guelders, and Overijssel in the Dutch Republic from the 1670s, and King of England, Ireland, and Scotland from 1689 until his death in 1702.

William III-II was born in The Hague in the Dutch Republic on 4 November 4, 1650. Baptised William Henry (Dutch: Willem Hendrik), he was the only child of Mary, Princess Royal, and stadtholder Willem II, Prince of Orange. His mother was the eldest daughter of King Charles I of England, Scotland and Ireland and Princess Henrietta Marie de Bourbon of France. The Princess Royal was also the sister of King Charles II and King James II-VII.

Willem II, Prince of Orange and Mary, Princess Royal of England

Eight days before William was…

From the Emperor’s Desk:

Ever since the accession of King Charles III on the British throne the question of the titles of the children of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex has been raised. The question wasn’t what their titles would be, the question was did they even have titles?

Prior to the accession of the King, the children of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex were not eligible to have the style of His or Her Royal Highness and the title of Prince or Princess of the United Kingdom because according to the Letters Patent of 1917 issued by King George V, which stipulated that only grandchildren of the sovereign in the male line were eligible for these styles and titles.

From their birth until the accession of the King, when Queen Elizabeth II was the reigning monarch, the Sussex children were ineligible for the titles and styles…

That Greta Thunberg has decided to help Stop These Things is noteworthy, in itself. And getting arrested (twice) for her trouble is all in a day’s work for a modern-day Joan of Arc, like Greta.

Now, don’t get us wrong, the antsy young Swede has plenty of enviro-babble baggage, but we can’t complain about her latest efforts, joining the reindeer herders of Europe’s frozen North in their fight to permanently eradicate these things from their rangelands.

As Greta now seems to understand, rural communities are sick and tired of becoming roadkill for the wind industry, and that includes the nomadic Sami – who graze and herd reindeer across northern Europe’s frozen tundra, ranging across the north of Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Kola Peninsula.

What Greta might not notice is the fact that chaotically intermittent wind power can’t be delivered as and when power consumers need, which means the wanton…

Meat under attack [image credit: farminguk.com]
Phys.org pounces on another supposed climate alarm. Once again magical powers are assigned to trace gases with no evidence offered.
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The global food system’s greenhouse gas emissions will add nearly one degree Celsius to Earth’s surface temperatures by 2100 on current trends, obliterating Paris Agreement climate goals, scientists warned Monday.

A major overhaul of the sector—from production to distribution to consumption—could reduce those emissions by more than half even as global population increases, they reported in Nature Climate Change.

Earth’s surface has warmed 1.2 C since the late 1800s, leaving only a narrow margin for staying under the 2015 treaty’s core goal of capping warming at “well under” 2 C.

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) is a club of central banks. That isn’t a pejorative label, just a straight factual description. 63 central banks (including the RBNZ) are the shareholders and the institution exists primarily to generate material for, and host meetings of, central bankers. They collate statistics and generate research with a central banking focus. They still provide some financial services to central banks. The chief executive (“General Manager”) is chosen from the ranks of highly-regarded senior central bankers (the current incumbent, Agustin Carstens was (among other things) formerly Governor of the Bank of Mexico and Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund).

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, Adrian Orr had been citing material published recently by the BIS in defence of his suggestion that central bank losses from discretionary interventions really don’t matter and are more of an “accounting issue” than an economic one. When…

Last Friday the Reserve Bank Governor, Adrian Orr, gave a keynote address to the Waikato Economics Forum. This event seems to have become part of the annual economic policy calendar, with Waikato University boasting that

The forum will bring together an outstanding lineup of top economists, business leaders and public sector officials, who will share their expertise on how we can address the major challenges facing our country today.

Sold that way, you might have thought that when a really senior and powerful public official turns up for a keynote address to an assembled economically literate audience he’d have delivered some fresh and interesting insights, going rather deeper than he might to, say, a provincial Rotary Club. Doubly so when in that official’s area of policy responsibility things have proved so challenging in the last few years, when so much taxpayers’ money has been lost, and when core inflation…

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…