Utopia, you are standing in it!

Fred Laza writes at Financial Post Climate fantasies hit brick wall of U.S. politics.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The reality of the energy transition could be ugly for politicians

The Biden administration’s attempt to lower gasoline prices before the November mid-terms has been both amusing and disappointing. First the president attributed the run-up in oil and gas prices to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Then his government drained about a million barrels a day from the strategic oil reserve. After six months of that and with gasoline prices creeping up again, Mr. Biden went to Saudi Arabia to ask Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for his help in keeping oil prices from rising at least through to the mid-term elections.

The prince said no, which was totally predictable. It appears none of the foreign policy experts advising the president understands basic human relations, let…

Before the accession of King Charles III, the Unit published two reports related to the accession of the new King: one on the accession and coronation oaths, and another on the coronation ceremony. Today the Unit has published revised versions of these reports. In this post, co-author Robert Hazell outlines the reports’ conclusions and discusses how the coming coronation will be on a much smaller scale than the previous one, in a UK that is radically different from the Britain of 1953.

Five years ago Bob Morris and I conducted a study of the accession and coronation oaths. These are three religious oaths which the new monarch is required by law to take at or soon after his accession. King Charles has already taken one, the Scottish oath, at the inaugural meeting of his Privy Council. He swore to uphold the Presbyterian church in Scotland in the following…

THE Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister has been braying about the Government lifting “about 66,000 kids out of poverty in the past few years …” 

In its latest annual report the Ministry for Social Development takes pride in its focus on getting people jobs resulting in 226,836 clients moving off benefit into work in the last two years (“our highest recorded result”).

But social commentator LINDSAY MITCHELL points out that 415,266 benefits were granted in the past two years, when more benefits were granted than cancelled.  She writes: –  

• Our leaders need to join the right dots

The Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister says:

“We’ve lifted about 66,000 kids out of poverty in the past few years …”

What he neglects to add is they have also consigned about 37,000 more to life on a benefit bringing the total to over 209,000.

Matthew Hooton joins the chorus pointing out the government’s stupidity:

. . .If her positioning of the new taxes as a world first was designed to prop up her base, it underlined to everyone else the complete idiocy of her move. New Zealand dairy farmers have the lowest GHG emissions per unit of production of any in the world. The same is broadly true of sheep and beef farmers.

Their climate efficiency is such that a block of New Zealand butter sold in London has a smaller climate footprint than one produced in the UK. Every time a Chinese consumer buys New Zealand milk powder over an American, European or Australian equivalent, the climate is theoretically better off.

Yet, right now, government policies mean our dairy herd is declining while the US herd is growing. Every time there is one less cow in New Zealand and one more…

As we all now know there are “good” protests and “bad” protests. The recent Van Gogh protest was so “good” that it was actually enabled by the museum, who did nothing to stop these vandals.

The litmus test is whether the protest is against something that the TPTB support (bad) or in favour of (“good”), and while the former got lots of MSM support from the 1960’s to about the 2000’s, it’s notable that with the demise of the old, square, conservative world and its replacement by the Counter-Culture, the MSM continues to align with the latter and no longer afflicts the comfortable or speaks truth to power – and all those other Nineteen Eighty Four’ish slogans that were chanted by the Left.

The latest is seen in the picture opposite and naturally receives the high praise of none other than one…

The things some people will go to avoid watching the damned Yankees.

Stumbling across “Eight Men Out” last night brought back memories of the film, what it represented — a turn towards mainstream by indie film icon John Sayles — and how it came off in an era when “Bull Durham,” “Field of Dreams” and “The Natural” put America’s game on the screen as a backdrop for all manner of screen stories.

I remember thinking at the time that the play of the cast was about two thirds to three-quarters the speed of “real” big leaguers. It’s generally a mistake to assume athletes of the past were wholly inferior — conditioning standards notwithstanding — to their modern counterparts. But that seems to matter less, seeing it now.

Sayles found an excellent “Shoeless Joe” Jackson for this account of the 1919 World Series-fixed by gamblers crime that came to be called

“Climate Activism is a Religion” – Marian Tupy.  H/T Raymond.  Excerpted transcript below in italics with my bolds and added images.

“The planet is infected with us we’re all gonna die. Isn’t that all true and and correct?

It’s certainly not true and actually the history of the relationship between population growth and abundance of Natural Resources is much more complex than people realize. It’s very interesting to see how extreme environmentalism maps onto Christian theology. On the one hand you’ve got your Garden of Eden: that’s the world before industrialization. You have your Devils: fossil fuel CEOs and people like that. You have your Saints, Greta Thunberg. Your Priesthood is the IPCC scientists. And of course you even have indulgences like back in the days before Reformation. Where you are allowed to fly around the world on a private jet, so long as you give…

In demand
Soothing words about electricity supplies from power bosses and politicians are not fooling the public. If the wind doesn’t blow on a cold winter evening they need to be prepared. Net zero ideology matters more than people’s well-being it seems.
– – –
Britons are snapping up large batteries costing up to £1,400, as concerns grow over winter power cuts, reports The Telegraph.

A large manufacturer of portable batteries, Anker Innovations Technology, has said that sales were up to three times higher in October than in the previous month.

Normally, it sells power station products to the US where power cuts are more common, while UK customers have traditionally only bought them for camping.

But Britons who worry about blackouts this winter are now stocking up, PR manager Lorna Smith told Bloomberg.

The 757 Powerhouse model, which costs around £1400 and can recharge a portable fridge for…

Morgenthau: Power, Privilege, and the Rise
of an American Dynasty
by Andrew Meier
1,072 pages
Random House
Published: Oct 2022

Andrew Meier’s long-awaited biography of the Morgenthau dynasty was released October 11.  Meier was a journalist for two decades and is the author of “The Lost Spy: An American in Stalin’s Secret Service” and “Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall.”

Covering four generations of the Morgenthau family, and spanning more than 150 years of consequential world history, Meier’s magisterial biography is epic in scale, impressive in scope and remarkably engrossing.

More than a decade of research underpins the 892-page narrative; the book’s notes and bibliography total nearly 100 pages. Meier interviewed more than four-hundred people and that list often reads like a Who’s Who of historians, politicians, former judges and prosecutors and, of course, Morgenthau family members, friends and colleagues. In addition, Meier…

If the wind industry gets its way, it’s curtains for the already endangered Atlantic Right Whale. Taking giant industrial wind turbines offshore threatens whales of all shapes and sizes, including the Atlantic Right Whale.

Whales already have plenty of offshore industrial activity to contend with. However, where oil and gas extraction, international shipping, and commercial fishing have obvious embodied economic benefits, the only economic benefit derived from wind power is the subsidies it attracts. No subsidies. No wind power. It’s that simple.

Which is all the more reason for locals to step in and save the whales.

As this piece from CFACT details below, the Atlantic Right Whale has just won that very kind of support and, up against the bullies, thugs and liars that people the offshore wind industry, let’s call it ‘critical life support’.

CFACT & Public Interest Groups Hire Counsel to Protect Endangered Right Whale from Offshore…

Tom Nelson posted this interview with Ross McKitrick on Big problems with paleoclimate data and land temperature records.  H/T Climate-Science.press.

Ross McKitrick is a Professor of Economics at the University of Guelph where he specializes in environment, energy and climate policy. He has published widely on the economics of pollution, climate change and public policy.  His book Economic Analysis of Environmental Policy was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2010.

His background in applied statistics has also led him to collaborative work across a wide range of topics in the physical sciences including paleoclimate reconstruction, malaria transmission, surface temperature measurement and climate model evaluation.

Professor McKitrick has made many invited academic presentations around the world and has testified before the US Congress and committees of the Canadian House of Commons and Senate.

The discussion is wide-ranging, and I provide below a lightly edited transcript on the main…

Roger Partridge writes:

This week’s third-quarter inflation figure from Statistics NZ underlines what a mess the Minister of Finance and the Reserve Bank have made of monetary policy.

Inflation may have peaked at 7.3%. But talk from Reserve Bank governor Adrian Orr late last month that the bank’s ‘tightening cycle was ‘very mature’ was at best premature.

Tuesday’s announcement of Q3 inflation at 2.2% suggests inflationary expectations are now deeply embedded.

Most economists now predict inflation will remain well above the Reserve Bank’s 1-3% target for the foreseeable future. Kiwi households will endure a lot more pain before it is brought back under control.

In the case of business taxation, the most visually powerful evidence for the Laffer Curve is what happened to corporate tax revenue in Ireland after the corporate tax rate was slashed from 50 percent to 12.5 percent.

Tax revenue increased dramatically. Not just in nominal terms. Not just in inflation-adjusted terms.

Corporate receipts actually climbed as a share of GDP.

And this was during the decades when economic output was rapidly expanding.

In other words, the Irish government got a much bigger slice of a much bigger pie after tax rates were dramatically lowered.

Now let’s look at some evidence from a new study. Three professors from the University of Utah (Jeffrey Coles, Elena Patel, and Nather Seegert), and a Treasury Department economist (Matthew Smith) estimated what happens to taxable income for U.S. companies when there is a change in the corporate tax rate.

In response to a…