Utopia, you are standing in it!

For just over six months now I’ve been on the trail of questionable appointments to the new Reserve Bank Board. Most of the Board members aren’t really fit for office in anything other than ornamental roles – this in the midst of the worst monetary policy failure in decades and the Board being responsible for key appointments and for holding the MPC to account. But my main focus has been on the appointment last October of Rodger Finlay, while he was chair of the majority owner of Kiwibank, with a lesser focus on Byron Pepper, appointed in June this year while also serving as a a director of an insurance company operating in New Zealand (the largest shareholder in which was another insurance company subject to prudential regulation by the Reserve Bank.

The Reserve Bank has spent months trying to avoid/delay answering questions about these appointments. For any first time…

While discovering electricity was part insight, superstition and serendipity, harnessing it for good came down to the laws of physics and sound engineering.

Exciting as it might be, feeling your hair stand up during an electrical storm was never going to alter the course of human affairs. Whereas the ability to generate and then deliver electrical power at a given frequency and voltage over time and on demand was an inevitable game changer.

Once thermal energy was used for that purpose, wind power was then and thereafter utterly redundant. Productive work could then be carried out at any time and without the need for a favourable weather forecast in advance.

The dismal history of early efforts to use windmills to generate electricity ought to have provided sufficient evidence to future generations attempting to do likewise. But, as they say, those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.

Parker Gallant…

Stardate: 5784.2 (2268)
Original Air Date: November 22, 1968
Writer: Meyer Dolinsky
Director: David Alexander

“Plato wanted truth and beauty and above all, justice.”

In response to “desperate distress calls from an unknown planet,” Enterprise crewmen Kirk, Spock, and Bones beams down to a planet rich in kironide deposits, a high-energy substance. Supposedly, the Enterprise scanners show no life forms on the planet. However, they find towering columns and statues a la ancient Greece and the crewmen are quickly greeted by a small-sized court jester named Alexander (Michael Dunn). He explains that there are beings on this planet. The sun near their home planet Sahndara went super-nova a millennia ago. They had instituted a a mass eugenics program focused on longevity (they are each over 2,000 years old). They transported themselves to ancient Greece on earth to study under Plato. After Plato died, they traveled to this new…

In a couple of weeks it will be 2023. And then in a couple of years it will be 2025.

Those with longish geeky memories may recall that there was once talk of closing the gap between New Zealand and Australian incomes/productivity by 2025. Without any great enthusiasm no doubt, the incoming National government led by John Key agreed to ACT’s request for a (time and resource-limited) official 2025 Taskforce that would offer some analysis and advice on what it would take to achieve such a goal. The Taskforce’s first report had been dismissed by the Prime Minister before it was even released and after the second report the Taskforce was quietly disbanded. I held the pen on the first report and had some input on the second one (itself written by the current chair of the Reserve Bank Board), and since the reports were written when my kids were…

G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of
the American Century
by Beverly Gage
864 pages
Viking (Penguin Random House)
Published: Nov 2022

One of 2022’s most notable new biographies is Beverly Gage’s long-awaited “G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century.” Gage is a professor of American history at Yale University and the author of The Day Wall Street Exploded.

J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972) is an intriguing biographical subject; he spent 48 years as Director of the FBI and was arguably the most powerful unelected public official in the country at the time.  But any survey of his career also provides unique insight into the lives of the public figures who operated within his sphere. And during his nearly half-century at the FBI he worked with every president from Calvin Coolidge to Richard Nixon.

One might assume that Hoover’s life has been fully…

Ralph Schoellhammer writes from Vienna at Spiked Renewables won’t keep us warm this winter.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The cold snap is exposing the limits of wind and solar – and the insanity of the green agenda.

There are already many German loan words in the English language, but the latest addition should surely be the term ‘Dunkelflaute’. It describes a period of time in which virtually no energy can be generated using wind and solar power. It is a word that captures the grave problem that both Britain and Germany are facing today – namely, that you cannot run a modern economy on renewable energy. Especially during a windless and dark winter.

As real-time data from Electricity Maps shows, electricity production from renewables in Germany and the UK over the past few days has been abysmal. In Germany it is coal that…

When Pope Paul III excommunicated King Henry VIII of England on December 17 this was the second time the King had been excommunicated. I will begin by giving some background information on Pope Clement VII and the first excommunication of the King.

King Henry VIII of England and Lord of Ireland

Pope Clement VII (May 26, 1478 – September 25, 1534) was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 19 November 1523 to his death on 25 September 1534.

Born Giulio de’ Medici, his life began under tragic circumstances. On April 26, 1478—exactly one month before his birth—his father, Giuliano de Medici (brother of Lorenzo the Magnificent) was murdered in the Florence Cathedral by enemies of his family, in what is now known as “The Pazzi Conspiracy”.

The future Pope was born illegitimately on May 26, 1478, in Florence; the exact identity of his mother…

It’s ‘study suggests’ time again. NZW: They say (p 4283) it’s a credible hypothesis that global temperature trend changes since 2000 could be “arising largely from internal variability.”
— These results definitely won’t please the climate obsessive tendency.
– – –
A new study by a team of leading climate scientists suggests that the effect of carbon dioxide this century might be small when compared to natural climate variability, says Net Zero Watch.

Global surface temperature is, and always has been, the key climate parameter.

Whatever is happening to the Earth’s climate balance, it must, sooner or later, be reflected in the global annual average temperature, and not just in regional variations.

But therein lies what is to some an inconvenience, as the changes in the global temperature this century is open to differing interpretations including the suggestion that increases in anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are not needed to…

Windfarm in the California desert
They plan to keep increasing electricity demand by (for example) mandating EVs, while reducing reliable supply in pursuit of climate obsessions. How long can US States go on ignoring the obvious?
– – –
California and parts of the Midwest are at a high risk of electricity shortages in the coming years amid the transformation of their grid from one reliant on fossil fuels to one reliant on other sources of energy such as wind and solar, says OilPrice.com.

The warning comes from the latest annual assessment of the grid by the North American Reliability Corporation, as cited by CNBC.

According to the assessment, the Midwest and Ontario in Canada risk power shortages because they are retiring more generation capacity than they are adding.

The Labour Party’s Commission on the UK’s Future has published a report making some bold proposals for constitutional reform.  The most striking proposal in A New Britain: Renewing our Democracy and Rebuilding our Economy is to change the UK’s constitutional model in a way which introduces a form of entrenchment into our legal and political system.  In essence, this mechanism would protect certain constitutional arrangements or principles from being repealed or amended in the same way as ordinary legislation – the entrenched provisions might include a new statement of purposes for the UK, the autonomy of local government, a new set of social rights, a legalised version of the Sewel convention (constraining the law-making power of the UK Parliament in relation to devolution), and a series of other ‘protected constitutional statutes’.  Entrenchment of these provisions would be achieved through a new Assembly of the Nations and Regions, which would have a veto…

Munich street [image credit: muenchen.de]
The Daily Mail headlines it: ‘Eco-mob’s global warming protest fails…because it is too COLD!’ — Climate obsession can do strange things to some people. Does the phrase ‘sub-zero temperatures’ mean anything to them?
– – –
The orders were simple: Run out onto the road, glue yourself to the tarmac and stop drivers from getting through, says the Daily Mail.

But for two climate activists in Germany, that plan didn’t work out quite as they’d hoped because sub-zero temperatures stopped the glue from working properly in an embarrassing lack of foresight.

The ‘Last Generation’ activists, who were protesting against global warming, desperately poured a bucket of glue over each other before sitting stone-faced in the middle of the road in Munich this morning.

But the freezing temperature scuppered their plans and instead of being stuck to the road, the pair of protesters sat glumly…

Spreading millions of solar panels and spearing thousands of wind turbines far and wide doesn’t make sense, at any level.

Intermittent and diffuse energy sources do not represent progress in the state of human affairs; that was the way of the world pre-Industrial Revolution – science, enterprise and engineering made all that a part of our miserable history.

True it is that the developing world has a way to go, but finance and meddling climate cult elites aside, the path has already been laid out and is well trodden.

At the heart of the wind and sun cult’s bleating about saving the planet is the myth that wind and solar power are actually good for the planet and the environment that we live in.

Unfortunately for the myth makers, the evidence all runs in the other direction.

Viv Forbes explains precisely what we mean. On the ball, as usual, Viv…

We never pay enough attention to Latin America – which includes the nations of Central and South America – except when something is in crisis, like Argentina and the Falklands War, or revolutions and military coups.

As just a small example, I’m only now adding a category for “Latin America” for posts such as this.

There are probably any number of reasons for this neglect: a non-English-speaking world; only minor involvement in two world wars and the Cold War; not big economic players in the world (yet); not a big cultural influence (what influence has occurred has been via the American entertainment industry and translations of novelists like Isabel Allende and Gabriel Garcia Marquez); a continent fractured in exactly the way North America is not.

Admittedly Africa is even more neglected in everyday Western thought and for much the same reasons, but at least there one also can point the…