Utopia, you are standing in it!

Image credit: thecount.com
The appearance in the media of articles like this is a warning sign in itself. The old days of plentiful coal stockpiles next to power stations are almost over, thanks to futile climate obsessions leading to bad energy policy.
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The National Grid’s warning that three-hour planned blackouts may have to be implemented this winter has left many feeling anxious, says Sky News.

People use more energy to keep warm in winter.

And while Britain has a considerable gas supply in the North Sea, we lack space to store it, which means we have to import around 30% from Europe during periods of increased demand.

I’m going to put this post up even though I have absolutely no faith that it will have any effect on the likes of TV1 or the rest of the NZ media.

They are who I’ve always known them to be. Shills for the Left in general and now, with $105 million of government money in their pockets, whores for the Labour government.

However, since it is a blog that broke this story, and since I’ve always argued that blogs are needed as a counter to the MSM, this is worth supporting.

The story belongs to Cameron Slater at his blog, the BFD, New Zealander of the Year Siouxsie Wiles – Unmasked:

For those who don’t think that they can align perfectly and turn into control freakdom, I present to you the Pink Horror of the Great Chinese Snot Pandemic

Feeling the love yet Siouxsie? Will another bout of TV spots in another pandemic make you feel better, you attention-seeking, panic-spreading British Fauci? Any chance you’ll be drastically reducing your carbon footprint by staying off planes and cars? Our Planet is crying for you to eat less, Siouxsie.

Let me be clear: Wayne Brown is 80 years old and shows similar cognitive problems to that of Biden, though no where near as bad. I suspect that he’ll be as useless as he was when Far North Mayor back in the late 2000’s – while hoping against hope that he isn’t. And of course even if he was a dynamo he’d still only be one voice on the Council – and then…

Because of my libertarian proclivities, I don’t like when people assert that the United States should have European-sized government.

But this is not merely a question of ideology.

I’ve repeatedly pointed out that there is a relationship between national prosperity and economic liberty. And I’ve shared plenty of data showing that ordinary Americans have significantly higher living standards that their counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

So why “catch up” with countries that are lagging behind?

One of my favorite ways of illustrating the gap is the “actual individual consumption” data from the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Here are the latest numbers, with show that the United States is more than 50 percent above the average for OECD nations.

I’m not surprised that Luxembourg ranks second since it is a tax haven. And it’s also not surprising that

Tales of Japanese soldiers who refused to surrender at the end of World War II long ago entered the realm of legend, and even became a punchline as the decades passed and the myth of the “fanatics” still holding out in the Philippines approached the realm of the ridiculous.

But every so often a new “survivor” turned up, on into the 1970s, giving this bizarre, almost laughable “devotion to duty” a moment in the spotlight of cold, hard reality.

“Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle” is an epic-length story of one of the last holdouts. This French production is slightly sentimentalized, perhaps for the Japanese marketplace, but grimly realistic in its depiction of the moral dilemma such men faced as evidence grew that they were fighting a war that was over. And that they were “fighting” against civilians they were robbing, terrorizing and even murdering.

“Onoda” is framed in the…

Zealots tout Germany as the benchmark for the ‘inevitable transition’ to wind and solar, but its energy system is a complete debacle; power rationing is the new normal and prices are through the roof.

Indeed, any country that got serious about subsidising wind and solar is finding itself in serious trouble.

Disastrous examples such as Germany, Britain, California, Denmark and South Australia have provided ample evidence from anyone who cares to understand why wind and solar can’t power us, and never will.

Mark P Mills has been trawling over that evidence for years now.

Mark is a Manhattan Institute senior fellow, a faculty fellow at Northwestern University’s engineering school, and a partner in Montrose Lane, an energy-tech venture fund. He is author of the book The Cloud Revolution: How the Convergence of New Technologies Will Unleash the Next Economic Boom and a Roaring 2020s (2021), and previously: Digital Cathedrals (2020)…

Stardate: 4211.4 (2268)
Original Air Date: Feb 2, 1968
Writer: Donald G. Ingalls (pseudonym of “Jud Crucis”) and Gene Roddenberry
Director: Marc Daniels

“A balance of power. The trickiest, most difficult, dirtiest game of them all,
but the only one that preserves both sides.”

Several crew members are admiring the “interesting organic compounds” on a planet informally known as Neural (the name is never actually mentioned in the episode, only in the script). Spock notes it is a Class-M planet in every respect. Thirteen years earlier, Kirk was part of a surveying mission on Neural which allowed him to better understand the planet’s Edenic qualities –it is filled with fascinating flora, as well as apelike carnivorous horned creatures known as Mugatos. There are also two groups of primitive people living on Neural –villagers and hill people. Both are peace-loving compassionate people. Any use of phasers here is…

Dr Eric Crampton  writes:

The Crown Accounts are in better shape than had been expected when the Budget was set.

That’s the good news.

But the Reserve Bank this week warned, while increasing interest rates by 0.5 percentage points, that “overall spending continues to outstrip the capacity to supply goods and services.”

The deficit still stands at $9.7 billion dollars. Core crown expenses, in 2022, were some $17 billion higher than they were in 2020 and 2021, when lockdowns and wage subsidies warranted substantial fiscal support.

Fiscal policy continues to provide too much stimulus in an overheated economy.

Its Nobel Prize season- the economics prize will be announced Monday, while most prizes are announced this week. My favorite so far is the Medicine prize being awarded to Svante Pääbo “for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution”. He figured out how to sequence DNA from Neanderthal remains despite the fact that they were 40,000 years old.

As recently as 2010 it was controversial to suggest that Neanderthals might have mixed with humans, until Pääbo’s DNA definitively settled the debate, showing that “Neanderthals and Homo sapiens interbred during their millennia of coexistence. In modern day humans with European or Asian descent, approximately 1-4% of the genome originates from the Neanderthals”

While the Neanderthal genome settled an existing controversy, Pääbo’s other big discovery came entirely unlooked for. The Nobel Foundation explains:

In 2008, a 40,000-year-old fragment from a finger bone was discovered in the Denisova cave in…

Wonder Land: Democrats have wrecked the cities and the border. Why would climate policy be any different? Images: Zuma Press/Getty Images Composite: Mark Kelly  Link to video is below

https://video-api.wsj.com/api-video/player/v3/iframe.html?guid=5D0A20A9-75C5-4506-B1B1-9EC96ABBBEE9

Jason De Sena Trennert writes at WSJ Opinion Climate-Change ‘Solutions’ That Are Worse Than the Problem.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images H/T John Ray (here)

The political assault on fossil fuels comes at the expense
of the poor, peace, and the environment.

If you can afford a Tesla, you probably find it hard to imagine that there are some 3.5 billion people on Earth who have no reasonably reliable access to electricity. Even less obvious may be the way rich countries’ pursuit of carbon neutrality at almost any cost limits economic opportunities for the world’s poor and poses serious geopolitical risks to the West.

Anyone on an investment committee has likely spent untold…