Utopia, you are standing in it!

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…

Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica
Blinkered climate obsessives, from protesters to governments, need to wise up about their pet topic. Professor Ian Plimer offers some assistance to trace gas worriers.
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For more than 80 percent of the time, Earth has been a warm wet greenhouse planet with no ice, says Ian Plimer at Spectator AU (via Climate Change Dispatch.

We live in unusual times when ice occurs on continents. This did not happen overnight.

The great southern continent, Gondwanaland, formed about 550 million years ago. It occupied 20 percent of the area of our planet and included Antarctica, South America, Australia, South Africa, and the Indian subcontinent.

Gondwanaland was covered by ice when it drifted across the South Pole 360-255 million years ago. Evidence for this ice age is in the black coal districts of Australia, South Africa, and India.

Far from threatening human existence, coal and gas have, once again, literally saved thousands of American lives. A bout of what is now known as ‘extreme weather’ demonstrates how extremely stupid it is to rely upon sunshine and breezes for power.

During December’s Big Freeze, millions of America’s solar panels were carpeted in snow and ice; thousands of its wind turbines were frozen solid  – any that weren’t were shut down to prevent their destruction by gale-force winds.

The same thing happened back in February 2021 – and will keep happening, for as long as lunatics are left in charge of America’s energy policy.

Across Texas and the American Midwest power prices rocketed and power rationing (aka ‘demand management’ – if you call a series of rolling blackouts ‘management’) – saw to it that thousands of households were left freezing in the dark. No doubt modern energy Scrooges would have…

Superb cast and drama

Smiley’s People was a 1982 drama miniseries in six parts, made for the BBC. Directed by Simon Langton, produced by Jonathan Powell, it is the television adaptation of the 1979 spy novel of the same name by John le Carré. Starring Alec Guinness, Michael Byrne, Anthony Bate and Bernard Hepton. It was first shown in the United Kingdom from 20 September to 22 October 1982, and in the United States beginning on 25 October 1982.

Wikipedia

Smiley’s People is a spy novel by John le Carré, published in 1979. Featuring British master-spy George Smiley, it is the third and final novel of the “Karla Trilogy”, following Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Honourable Schoolboy. George Smiley is called out of retirement to investigate the death of one of his old agents: a former Soviet general, the head of an Estonian émigré organisation…

Saturday and Sunday, 21 & 22 January 2023 (9am – 4pm)

Location:Levin Show Grounds, Victoria Street, Levin

ACT will have a stand at the Fair (inside the “Stadium Trade Sites”), so come along and have a chat to ACT MPsNicole McKeeandMark Cameronabout the real issues affecting you.

This should be a fabulous Fair, with typically, over 10,000 people attend over the 2 days.

Apart from our wonderful MPs at the ACT stand, there will also be a spectacle of stock competitions, equestrian events, wood chopping, shearing, dog trials, sideshows, and a range of entertainment on stage for all the family.

For details about ACT’s policy and MP profiles, click herehttps://www.act.org.n

For further details on the AP&I show, please clickhere.

National, NZ First and Labour will also be there. National tell us their tent will be near…

Depriving your economy of reliable and affordable power is the fastest way to wreck it. Which is the very thrust of the policy that has been adopted by every country currently obsessed with subsidised wind and solar.

The rent-seekers behind the greatest economic and environmental scam in history, still contend that there are millions of groovy Green jobs in the offing, if only we keep shovelling billions of dollars’ worth of subsidies in their direction. Although, all the evidence suggests otherwise.

The concept of destroying wealth (and indeed entire functioning cities) to ‘create’ new jobs is known in economics as the ‘broken window fallacy’. The notion being that, if every window in a city were simultaneously smashed, there will be thousands of new jobs for glassmakers and glaziers created by reason of the urgent necessity of their replacement.

Michael Munger details how the same woolly-headed thinking is being applied…

Gough Whitlam died today at the age of 98. His death comes just a few weeks shy of the thirty-ninth anniversary of his dismissal at the hands of the Governor-General. This momentous event was one of the defining moments of Australian politics, but what exactly happened back in November of 1975, and why is it significant?

Whitlam became Prime Minister of Australia in 1972, and although his Australian Labor Party had a small majority in the House of Representatives, the Senate was controlled by the Opposition Coalition.[1] One of the quirks of the Australian constitution is that, unlike most Westminster systems, their upper house has the roughly the same powers as the lower house,[2] and the Coalition was not shy about using its Senate majority to frustrate the Whitlam Government. In 1974, Whitlam sought a double dissolution (i.e., a dissolution of both the Senate and the House of…

Recently, the Queen stated her wish that the Duchess of Cornwall should become ‘Queen Consort’ when the Prince of Wales ascends the throne. But what, exactly, does that mean?

A Queen Consort is distinct from a Queen Regnant. The former is the wife of a King,[1] while the latter is sovereign in her own right.[2] Although she generally doesn’t have any constitutional functions,[3] a Queen Consort is entitled to certain privileges.[4] Most notably, she is often crowned alongside her husband, though this is not a matter of right (George IV infamously barred Caroline of Brunswick from his coronation in 1821).

A Queen Consort has her own Household headed by a Lord Chamberlain, as well as her own Attorney General and Solicitor General. She is also exempt from paying any toll, fine, or amercement, and she is entitled to the tails of whales captured near the coast…

I had to return to Daniel Day Lewis‘ Oscar acceptance speech from the spring of 1990 — God Bless Youtube — to make sure I was remembering it right, that he saluted the Academy for “providing me with the makings of one helluva weekend in Dublin” followed by a tribute to the young actor who played the even-younger Christy Brown in the early scenes of “My Left Foot.”

That Day Lewis, the oft-nominated, three-time Oscar winner who is basically the Brando, DeNiro and Streep of his generation of actors, could transform himself into the memoirist, poet, painter and novelist Christy Brown — born with cerebral palsy — seems like a given today. He’s simply the very best at what he did before he retired and gave the rest of the Screen Actor’s Guild a chance.

But watching the film anew, I was stunned at how good young Hugh O’Conor

Fascinating bed-time reading.

In my post about the problems with the Canadian Succession to the Throne Act 2013, I referred to the Crown’s status as a corporation sole. Since then, I’ve been asked about the nature of corporations sole, so I thought a brief explanation might be in order.

To quote Sir William Blackstone:

Corporations sole consist of one person only and his successors, in some particular station, who are incorporated by law, in order to give them some legal capacities and advantages, particularly that of perpetuity, which in their natural persons they could not have had (Commentaries on the Laws of England, vol. 1, pg. 469).

Because of the Crown’s status as a corporation sole, it is often said that “the king never dies” (rex nunquam moritur). When one monarch dies, their heir immediately succeeds to the throne without any kind of interregnum, and the new…