Utopia, you are standing in it!

Photosynthesis: nature requires carbon dioxide
Still claiming a minor trace gas essential to nature causes ‘huge climate impacts’. Unbelievable.
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A historic deal has been struck at the UN’s COP27 summit that will see rich nations pay poorer countries for damage and economic losses caused by climate change, claims BBC News.

It ends almost 30 years of waiting by nations facing huge climate impacts.

But developed nations left dissatisfied over progress on cutting fossil fuels.

“A clear commitment to phase-out all fossil fuels? Not in this text,” said the UK’s Alok Sharma, who was president of the previous COP summit in Glasgow.

Bjorn Lomborg and Jordan Peterson wrote in The Telegraph Pushing the same old climate policies at COP27 is simply insane.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

After decades of failure to curb emissions, let’s accept that capitalist investment is not the problem: it’s the solution

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” This famous quote – often misattributed to Albert Einstein – might very well become the unofficial motto of the UN Climate Change Conference in Egypt, the 27th session of the Conference of the Parties (Cop27).

Global CO₂ emissions have kept increasing since the world’s nations first committed to rein in climate change at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 – despite dozens of climate summits and the global climate agreements struck in Kyoto and Paris. This is the case, once again, in 2022, when…

The Reserve Bank’sMonetary Policy Committee has its final meeting for the year on Wednesday, and then they shut up shop. For a long time. The next scheduled announcement is not until 22 February, a full 13 weeks (3 months) away. Nice job if you can get it, and although I’m sure management and staff will still be working for much of the intervening period, the same is unlikely to be said for the three non-executive members, who are generously remunerated by the taxpayer, utterly invisible, and only need to show up when meetings are scheduled.

This strange schedule has been in place for quite a few years now, having been adopted at a time when the OCR wasn’t being moved much at all (and when the Bank was raising the OCR, it often proved to have been a mistake). But having been in place for a while does not…

Germans soon recognised the importance of their coal-fired power plants, forced to reopen them days after shutting them down in January 2021 because, surprise, surprise, the wind stopped blowing. And that big backpedal occurred long before Vlad Putin began putting the squeeze on the gas supplies needed to prop up those occasions when Germany’s 30,000 wind turbines decide to down tools.

In Dan Andrew’s People’s Republic of Victoria, a similar plotline has been laid out, where ideologues have managed to hijack its coal-fired power supply, with a view to shutting down its remaining plants in the very near future.

History may not repeat, but it often rhymes, which leads STT to predict that the Victorians, just like the Germans, will be forced into an embarrassing retreat if they truly are as foolish as they appear to be.

Daniel Wild from the Institute of Public Affairs takes a look at another moment…

I was certain that this Labour Government was going to foist Hate Speech laws on us. There were six specific proposals:

1. Increase the number groups protected under the Human Rights Act, from the status quo protect groups based on their “colour, race or ethnic or national origins” to also include “sex, gender (including gender identity), religious belief, disability or sexual orientation.”
2. Introduce a new offence in the Crimes Act so that hatred is specifically a crime (in place of current laws which forbid intentionally inciting racial disharmony).
3. Make the crime of being a hateful bigot punishable by three years imprisonment or a fine of up to $50,000.
4. If the second proposal was enacted (the criminal offence), at the same time beef up the Human Rights Act so that complaints may be made about hatred under the Human Rights Act (grossly empowering the Human Rights Commission)
5. Make it illegal to…

If you believe that there is a £55 billion ‘black hole’ in the public finances, and if you believe this has to be filled with tax increases and spending cuts in order to reassure the markets, then Jeremy Hunt’s Autumn Statement was a reasonably fair way to go about it. But there are some mighty big ‘if’s in there.

Let’s begin with the positives. First, most of the tax increases and spending cuts do not bite until the later years of the forecast horizon. Spending is actually being increased this year and next, meaning that fiscal policy is providing a little more support to the economy now when it needs it the most.

What’s more, if the economy does better than expected, or other events intervene (including the next General Election), there is still time for the tougher measures to be diluted.

Second, there is more help for the most…

Renewable energy rent seekers and their political enablers keep telling us that wind and solar are free and getting cheaper all the time, but notionally wind-powered Germans, Danes, Californians and South Australians might beg to differ; they already suffer the world’s highest retail power prices, with worse to come.

Nowhere in the world is there a single case where reliance on wind and solar increased and retail power prices fell.

The reality on the ground, suggests that the figures thrown up by the wind and sun cult about the cost of wind and solar power delivered to consumers tend to overlook more than just a few of the more significant items that ought to feature in any fulsome accounting.

William H. Smith, Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Washington University in St Louis (with a PhD from Princeton) is a joint author of a paper ‘Full cost of…

Stardate: 5630.7 (2268)
Original Air Date: October 18, 1968
Writer: Jean Lisette Aroeste
Director: Ralph Senensky

“A madman got us into this and it’s beginning to look as if only a madman can get us out.”

The Enterprise has been assigned to convey the Medusan ambassador to the Federation back to his home planet. The Medusans are unusual alien creatures –their thoughts are said to be the “the most sublime in the galaxy” while their physical appearance is exactly the opposite. They are formless and apparently hideous, causing total madness to any human who simply catches a glimpse. While the Medusans beam aboard the Enterprise, Kirk and the others leave the transporter room as Spock remains behind wearing a unique visor intended to block any maddening effects caused by sight of the Medusan ambassador. A female telepath named Dr. Miranda Jones (Diana Muldaur) beams aboard –she…

Mary was courted by Philipp, Duke of Bavaria, from late 1539, but he was Lutheran and his suit for her hand was unsuccessful. Over 1539, the king’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, negotiated a potential alliance with the Duchy of Cleves.

Suggestions that Mary marry Wilhelm I, Duke of Cleves, who was the same age, came to nothing, but a match between King Henry VIII and the Duke’s sister Anne was agreed. When the king saw Anne for the first time in late December 1539, a week before the scheduled wedding, he found her unattractive but was unable, for diplomatic reasons and without a suitable pretext, to cancel the marriage.

Cromwell fell from favour and was arrested for treason in June 1540; one of the unlikely charges against him was that he had plotted to marry Mary himself. Anne consented to the annulment of the marriage, which had not been consummated…

The contributions of American athletes to the war effort during World War II has been well documented. The experiences of Ted Williams, Bob Feller, Hank Greenberg, Tom Landry, Ed Lummus and hundreds of others have been recognized for their impact in defeating Germany and Japan. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Buzz Bissinger’s latest book, THE MOSQUITO BOWL: A GAME OF LIFE AND DEATH IN WORLD WAR II chronicles events leading up to a game between the 4^th and 29^th Marine Regiments on Guadalcanal in late 1944 and the fate of many who fought at Tarawa, Saipan, and Okinawa. The soldiers were made up of former All-Americans from Brown, Notre Dame and Wisconsin universities twenty of which were drafted by the National Football League. Of the sixty-five men who played in the game, fifteen would die a few months later at Okinawa.

Bissinger, the author of FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS, a…