Utopia, you are standing in it!

Stardate: 5027.3 (2268)
Original Air Date: September 27, 1968
Writer: D.C. Fontana
Director: John Meredyth Lucas

“It is not a lie to keep the truth to oneself.”

Dr. McCoy records something unusual in his medical log (a rare log entry from the good doctor) –Captain Kirk has been unusually irritable lately. Is it because the Enterprise has spent too much time on patrol? Or is something else agitating the captain? Kirk makes a seemingly erratic order for the Enterprise to enter the Romulan Neutral Zone. In “Balance of Terror” we learned what a volatile situation this can lead to. Suddenly, three Romulan ships de-cloak and surround the Enterprise as it sits in forbidden territory (apparently, the Romulans are now using technology borrowed from the Klingons).

Subcommander Tal of the Romulan fleet (Jack Donner) appears onscreen and demands the immediate surrender of the Enterprise. He gives…

In my post last Friday I highlighted how the Governor of the Reserve Bank had just been making up stuff, and apparently knowingly misleading Parliament, to distract from the Bank’s own responsibility for New Zealand’s current very high core inflation. There may well be a case to be made that central banks did about as well as could reasonably be expected over the last couple of years – “reasonably be expected” here set by reference to the general views at the time of other expert observers (none of whom, admittedly, had chosen to take on statutory responsibility for inflation) but simply making stuff up blaming the Moscow bogeyman helps no one, and detracts from any serious conversation about what went on with inflation – core and headline – and why. To put my own cards on the table, there are many reasons why Adrian Orr should not be reappointed, but…

The misanthropes who glue themselves to roads and berate us about the ‘horrors’ of nuclear, coal and gas-fired power aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed, to be sure.

Living in a fact and consequence free zone, they’ve never stopped to think for a moment what life would be like without light, heat and power.

There are plenty of factors at play; an education system gutted of any rigourous content and filled with resentment-filled emotional claptrap; a mainstream media that simply parrots whatever crony capitalists tell them to write and say; cynical elites profiting from collective fear and ignorance generated by the press; and a political class who seem to think (with some justification) that the proles are simply too stupid to know or care.

But, leave hundreds of thousands freezing or boiling in the dark, and/or keep presenting them with power bills that they simply can’t afford, and the…

Despite Europe spending €1.2 Trillion on large-scale wind and solar generation, the amount of power being actually delivered in return is risible.

Which is precisely what you’d expect from power generation sources which can only deliver anything like their nameplate capacity when the sun is up, in a cloudless sky, and the wind is blowing at wind speeds greater than 6m/s. Drop the sun drops the wind speed and the whole lot drops off the radar.

For the uninitiated, Ed Hoskins tells the story in pictures below.

A Few Graphs Say It All for Weather-Dependent “Renewables”
Watts Up With That?
Ed Hoskins
5 October 2022

A few graphs say it all for Wind and Solar power

This is the 10-year productivity record for European Weather-Dependent “Renewables”: that is the annual power output divided by the nominal installation rating of the Weather-Dependent “Renewables” installations over the last decade.  The data is…

Many people have been baffled by the Bank of England’s decision to raise interest rates by a historically large three-quarters of a point this week, despite forecasting that the UK economy is sliding into recession. I understand this confusion, but there are three reasons why rates had to be increased.

First, the job of the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) is to worry about inflation, not growth. Some might like to change the MPC’s mandate, but for now it is tasked with keeping inflation at 2%. Currently inflation is over 10%, and forecast to remain high. With inflation now having spread well beyond food and energy prices, the MPC needed to act to prevent a temporary inflation shock from becoming permanent.

Second, the starting point is important. Even after the latest increase, UK interest rates of 3% remain historically low, and are firmly negative in real terms (after allowing for inflation)…

Israel has had five elections in just three years.

It’s this sort of thing that has often led dictators and mere authoritarians to sneer at democracy because it’s so unstable and messy.

Moreover, this involved a candidate for Prime Minister who is currently facing trial on charges of “corruption,” former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

And he’s won – again – and unlike the previous four elections it seems this one was decisive:

A resounding victory for opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu and his bloc of right-wing, far-right and religious parties, a result that would end a political crisis that has seen five general elections held in under four years.
…
Israel has been rocked by political turmoil since a Netanyahu-led government fell apart in late 2018. Two rounds of elections, in April 2019 and September 2019, failed to yield a winner, and a short-lived unity government formed after the…

Rent-seekers and the MSM keep telling us the transition to an all-wind and sun-powered future is not only inevitable, it’s a cinch.

The power pricing and supply calamity playing out in renewables-obsessed Germany and Britain stands as a pretty fair counterpoint, to that nonsense.

Then, we’re told, it can all be done, provided it’s “done right”; which, in doublespeak, means more of precisely the same; even more $billions in subsidies gifted to crony capitalists, offering nothing but even more hopelessly intermittent wind and solar, in return.

Call it scaling up on an avoidable calamity, or doubling down on an inevitable disaster.

What’s overlooked in their starry-eyed and far-reaching promises about a ‘green’ Utopia, is the volume of mineral and other resources required to get there.

Every wind turbine and solar panel is the product of scarce resources, and not just the rare stuff mined by 9-year-olds in the Congo.

As…

The Laffer Curve is a very straightforward concept.

It graphically illustrates why politicians are wrong if they think you can double tax revenue by doubling tax rates (or that revenues will drop by 50 percent if tax rates are cut in half).

Simply stated, you also have to look at what happens to taxable income.

In cases where taxpayers have a lot of control over the timing, level, and composition of their income, changes in tax rates may cause big changes in taxable income (or “tax base” in the jargon of economists).

None of this should be controversial. Even Paul Krugman agrees that the Laffer Curve exists.

Today, we are going to see that the pro-tax International Monetary Fund also admits there is a Laffer Curve.

Indeed, a new study authored by David Amaglobeli, Valerio Crispolti, and Xuguang Simon Sheng openly states that politicians should be…

Buzz from the Beehive

Uh, oh.  Earlier this afternoon there was nothing doing in the Beehive.  Or rather, there was nothing doing that they wanted to tell us about.

We therefore drew a blank when we checked the Beehive website to find what our servants are up to.

Nor (when we checked with Scoop) could we find anything new from the Nats or the Greens, although the Nats since then have posted a statement on the rising expense of hiring government  consultants.

ACT was given a free kick,  in effect, and scored with three statements.

First, ACT’s Firearms Reform spokesperson Nicole McKee was braying that relentless pressure from her party has resulted in the Government making much-needed changes to firearms licensing.

Another moral panic against the Notwithstanding Clause has broken out and gripped the salons and cafes of Toronto in a repeat of the previous Panic of 2018;  Andrew Coyne outed himself yesterday as the Geraldo Rivera of this second wave.

Introduction

The constitution cannot be unconstitutional. It follows therefore that one part of the constitution cannot be used to strike down or nullify another part of the constitution. This tautology, fittingly, sounds very obvious and simple – yet it still bears repeating with respect to the Constitution of Canada, a confounding Cherub (like that in the Book of Ezekiel) composed of disparate, even contradictory, parts that ought not fit together yet must fit together and reconcile with one another.

On 10 September 2018, Justice Belobaba of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice struck down the provisions of the Better Local Government Act reducing the size of Toronto City Council by half and using the federal and provincial electoral districts as the basis for the City of Toronto’s new wards, as unconstitutional; Premier Ford, in turn, announced that the government will introduce a bill re-acting these provisions under the Notwithstanding Clause…

The insane cost of the wind and solar ‘transition’ is starting to bite; the wind and sun cult are struggling to shift the blame. While Vlad Putin may be a seriously thuggish dictator, he can’t seriously be held responsible for rocketing power prices in the UK, Europe and Australia, where power prices have been surging northwards for years, and long before the Russians stormed their way across Ukraine.

No, the answer in each case lies much closer to home and rests with the lunacy of attempting to run first world economies on sunshine and breezes.

The Australian’s Nick Cater is, as usual, on the money with this article, albeit that he confuses efficient to operate combined cycle gas turbines with highly inefficient open cycle gas turbines, a minor error that we resolve below.

Labor could pay the ultimate price from electricity shock
The Australian
Nick Cater
30 October 2022

The…

Yes, the headline is a rhetorical question. Because if there’s one thing the 50+ years since “Bullitt” has proven, it’s that most every big screen cop thriller has been in many if not most ways a remake of this Steve McQueen/Peter Yates classic.

We’ve had half a century of the “renegade” “outsider,” “goes his own way” cops, hunting for justice in a broken and/or corrupt system. There have been hundreds of films in which the cop hero drove a “car with character,” and any car buff or film fan knows what you mean when you say “Bullitt Mustang.” The “GT” is understood, the image iconic.

But let’s take that headline literally, shall we? Watching the film again for the umpteenth time last night, I gave it a hard, unsentimental pass for the first time in years.

The story — Lt. Frank Bullitt (McQueen) is tasked by his boss (the…

The votes are not yet final from the 1 November 2022 Israeli general election, but the outcome is quite clear. The right-wing bloc of parties supporting current opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu will have won a manufactured majority.Media are calculating the bloc’s combined seats at 65 out of 120. Yet the bloc currently has just 48.1% of the votes. That is actually lower than the clear majority of the vote they got in April, 2019, yet at that election the result was deadlock while this one will produce a majority coalition government. What explains the difference? Coordination.

The reason for the manufactured majority in this election, despite a nationwide proportional representation electoral system, is coordination failure. The strategic choices of political leaders and voters in both the left and the Arab political camps have made Netanyahu’s impending return to government possible. On the left, Labor has barely cleared the…

If you believe thesmoke signals from the Treasury– and you probably should – the Budget on 17 November will have to include big increases in tax in order to plug a ‘black hole’ in the public finances. But is it inevitable that taxes will have to rise and, if so, what’s the best way to do it?

The obvious starting point is the ‘black hole’ itself. Different numbers are regularly tossed about here, with recent estimates ranging from around £30 billion to more than £70 billion. However, few people understand what these mean. The size of the ‘black hole’ depends on two main factors.

The first is the set of fiscal rules against which the public finances are assessed. The ‘black hole’ is the difference between the forecast path for public sector borrowing on current policies and where borrowing needs to be to hit the government’s targets. The…