Utopia, you are standing in it!

Some of America’s biggest planned offshore wind projects have recently been axed, with more to follow. Deemed ‘uneconomic’, potential investors and financiers are running a mile from what portend to be enormous white elephants.

Where the true cost of onshore wind power is phenomenal, the cost of the offshore stuff is astronomical.

Going offshore brings with it exorbitant maintenance costs (think operating any metal-based machinery in a salt-laden marine environment), as well as the repair and maintenance of hundreds of kilometres of undersea cable, the cost of which often runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars for each operating project, over time.

Let’s face it, apart from the subsidies it attracts, there is no economic basis for wind power, anytime, anywhere, ever.

As Warren Buffet put it: “We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They…

Checks and balances are fundamental elements of constitutional democracy that prevent the unconstrained exercise of power, improve the quality of decision-making and ensure that mechanisms exist for preventing or penalising unethical behaviour.Lisa James, Alan Renwick and Meg Russell argue that they therefore play a vital role in maintaining public confidence in the political system and the government has a particular responsibility to uphold them.

Background

The importance of checks and balances is often cited in debates about the health of democracy, and their erosion is widely considered a sign of democratic backsliding. But what are they, and why are they important?

Checks and balances are the mechanisms which distribute power throughout a political system – preventing any one institution or individual from exercising total control. The words ‘checks’ and ‘balances’ are typically used together, but can be thought of as referring to subtly different (though overlapping) things…

Richard of York, 3rd Duke of York (September 21, 1411 – December 30, 1460), also named Richard Plantagenet, was a leading English magnate and claimant to the throne during the Wars of the Roses. He was a member of the ruling House of Plantagenet by virtue of being a direct male-line descendant of Edmund of Langley, King Edward III’s fourth surviving son.

Richard of York was born on September 22, 1411, the son of Richard, 3rd Earl of Cambridge (1385–1415), and his wife Anne Mortimer (1388–1411). Both his parents were descended from King Edward III of England (1312–1377): his father was son of Edmund, 1st Duke of York (founder of the House of York), fourth surviving son of Edward III, whereas his mother Anne Mortimer was a great-granddaughter of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, Edward’s second son.

After the death in 1425 of Anne’s childless brother Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March…

No country in the world is running on wind and solar power alone; no country ever will.

Calm weather and sunset guarantee it.

Every routine collapse in wind and solar power output (for the reasons above) requires the total capacity lost in consequence to come from somewhere, and that ‘somewhere’ is going to be a plant running on nuclear, coal or gas or, in certain places, hydro plant.

Every single MW of wind or solar is to be matched by another MW of the aforementioned dispatchable power sources. The alternative (ie the world without coal, gas and nuclear power) is no power at all, every time the wind drops and the sun sets.

Ah, the wind and solar cult retort, ‘you’ve said nothing about battery ‘storage’.

Well, in truth there’s not really much to say.

At this point in time the so-called giant batteries – ordinarily a bank of lithium-ion…

After weeks of speculation, the Secretary of State for Scotland, Alister Jack, has blocked the Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill from receiving Royal Assent. The law seeks to simplify the process of changing one’s legal gender in Scotland,[1] and Jack has justified his actions on the grounds that the Bill would have an adverse impact on matters reserved to Westminster.[2]

Unlike at Westminster, where Royal Assent is essentially automatic,[3] the Scotland Act 1998 created a formal mechanism for withholding Royal Assent to Scottish legislation. Strictly speaking, it’s not a veto: the Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament simply doesn’t submit the Bill to the King. There are several situations in which Assent might be withheld, such as when the UK Supreme Court rules that legislation is ultra vires.[4]

However, this case involves section 35 of the Scotland Act. It allows the Scottish Secretary to block…

From Trump that is, I think according to the Washington Post?

They ran a FACT CHECKING scam on Trump for four years in order to keep their click-bait TDS fans engaged to a degree that Mark Zuckerberg could only dream of with Facebook.

And then they dumped it all when Biden replaced Trump, the argument being that since nobody lied as much as Trump – it being implied that Biden was only a standard political liar like the rest of them, and therefore not worthy of their time.

One farcical aspect of it was that often it was not a “lie” or a “fact-check” but simply an alternative argument. You were supposed to sit there and say, “Well of course the fact checker is correct and Trump lied”. Pure click-bait for the internet age.

But not as farcical as the idea that Biden was less of a liar, either…

Remember the class clown? The idiot who couldn’t help himself, always in trouble and too witless to know why. Well, he’s now firmly in charge of energy policy, which in its design and implementation resembles the chaos of a mismanaged three-ringed circus.

As the adage goes, don’t put down to conspiracy what can be chalked up to incompetence.

Although, with all of the evidence available, the fact that the likes of Australia’s Hapless Energy Minister, Chris Bowen (presumably a former class clown?) are completely oblivious to the subsidised wind and solar-fuelled energy disasters playing out in Germany, Britain and elsewhere makes it hard not to consider planned and deliberate action, rather than good old-fashioned bungling.

While Peter Smith works his way through the idiot factor in the piece below – in an attempt to explain our thoroughly inexplicable energy policy – he appears to plump for something like a grand…

On February 4  1974, 19-year-old newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst was abducted from the apartment she shared with her fiancée in Berkeley, California.

Stephen Weed, Hearst’s fiance, was beaten unconscious by the two abductors. Soon, a ransom demand came from the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a radical activist group led by Donald DeFreeze.. But a few short months later, Patty Hearst appeared to be on their side.

On March 5, 1973, Donald DeFreeze escaped from prison. Radical penal activists and future SLA members Russell Little and William Wolfe took DeFreeze to Patricia Soltysik’s house.The SLA was led by DeFreeze, who, after a prison acquaintance named Wheeler left, was the only African American in the group. By the time the group became active, most of the members of the tiny group were women, some of whom have, like Soltysik and her roommate Nancy Ling Perry, been described as in lesbian relationships. The members included William and Emily Harris and…

Europe used to be a continent with a great number of currencies. Most European countries now have the Euro as the their currency.

But where did it all begin?

Stockholms Banco (also known as the Palmstruch’s Bank, Swedish: Palmstruchska banken) was the first European bank to print banknotes. It was founded in 1657 by Johan Palmstruch in Stockholm, began printing banknotes in 1661. On July 16,1661 to be precise.The bank ran into financial difficulties though and was liquidated in 1667. Stockholms Banco was the immediate precursor to the central bank of Sweden, founded in 1668 as Riksens Stnders Bank and renamed in 1866 as Sveriges Riksbank, which is the world’s oldest surviving central bank.

Eventually the banknotes caused more problems than they were worth – so many people used the notes and lent them that the bank was unable to honour requests for the credit to be transferred into metal…

Maine, which became in 2018 the first state in the U.S. to adopt Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) for federal elections, was joined last year by Alaska, where RCV was rolled out as well for state elections. Moreover, in 2022 RCV tabulations were carried out in both states for races in which no candidate won an absolute majority of first preferences (no RCV counts took place in 2020, as all federal races in Maine were decided on the first count). However, the Alaskan implementation of RCV, while broadly similar to that of Maine, has a number of differences which influenced the outcome of the election in the former.

Maine

In many respects, the U.S. House of Representatives election in Maine’s CD-2 was a rerun of the 2018 race. Congressman Jared Golden ran again as the Democratic nominee in the district, while Republicans nominated Bruce Poliquin, who had represented the district from…

The fact that consumers want power as and when they need it, at prices they can afford, has scuttled Germany’s grand wind and solar ‘transition’.

This is one of the stories that the MSM has been running away from for years; since February 22, they’ve been running the meme that it’s all Vlad Putin’s fault. Ignoring the fact that the rot had well and truly set in years before.

Back in October last year, the decision was made to scrap a fleet of wind turbines to allow for the expansion of an open-cut coal mine at Garzweiler in the western German state of North Rhine-Westphalia (see above). Another example of just how shallow are claims that we’re well on our way to an all-wind and sun-powered future.

The future for coal-fired power in Germany has never looked better.

Likewise, Germany’s so-called ‘Greens’ have been forced to backflip on long-held policy…

Remembering that natural gas is a fossil fuel, there must be more than meets the eye in the media firestorm over banning gas stoves for safety reasons.  Could it be that the regime along with the media are gaslighting us regarding this maneuver?  Kit Knightly thinks so and explains the gambit in his off-guardian article What is the US “Gas Stove Ban” REALLY about?  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.  H/Y Tyler Durden

What sounds like overreach in itself, is actually a cover
for something potentially far, far worse.

The Biden administration is apparently looking to ban gas stoves, calling them a “hidden danger”. But while that sounds bad enough, a deeper dive shows – as usual – it’s not really about what they say it’s about.

Talk of banning gas stoves and “unregulated indoor air quality” could be a Trojan horse designed to get even more…