Utopia, you are standing in it!

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…

Giant lithium-ion batteries are touted as planet saviours, but make sure you’re on the other side of town when they explode into toxic fireballs that firefighters simply can’t extinguish.

On the large-scale, it’s the kind of terrifying Tesla moment experienced by locals in Victoria when one of these lithium-ion wonders went up in flames and literally burned for days, because firefighters are unable to extinguish lithium battery fires – see above and our post here.

At the micro-level, these exciting moments in cutting-edge battery technology are being enjoyed by the owners of all kinds of Electric Vehicles, large and small.

Here’s the team from Jo Nova with a round-up of recent battery meltdowns.

The clean green future where you’re locked indoors due to toxic electrical battery smoke
Jo Nova Blog
Jo Nova
22 September 2022

Just another day saving the Earth from pollution..

Highways were shut for 12 hours…

In a post a couple of weeks ago I outlined some reasons for scepticism about the case for increasing the OCR by 50 basis points specifically at the then-forthcoming OCR review. My point was mostly about the data hiatus – the OCR decision would be taking place almost 3 months after the most recent CPI data and more than 2 months since the last main labour market data. It seemed (and seems) foolish for the MPC to stick to its schedule of review dates, including the long summer holiday it will give itself after next month’s MPS. It remains highly problematic that New Zealand governments have penny-pinched on core statistics and as a result we have such slow and infrequent macro data (we got the September quarter CPI inflation data yesterday, Switzerland by contrast released September month data on 3 October).

But there were also some considerations in the macroeconomics

Crushing power costs and power rationing follow wind and solar reliance, like night follows day. Texas is no exception.

Bullying power consumers to stop consuming power is par for the course; chiselling taxpayers to cover the exorbitant cost of making up for power shortfalls when the wind stops blowing and/or the sun sets, is grist for the mill.

Bill Peacock explains it all below.

Texas Grid Reliability: Gone With the Wind (and solar)
Master Resource
Bill Peacock
14 September 2022

“The solution to keeping the lights on in Texas is … to stop politicians and regulators from micromanaging the Texas energy market. Texas politicians could do this by ending renewable energy subsidies in the state and making renewable companies pay for the costs they impose on the rest of us from their federal subsidies.”

As everyone knows, Texas had the worst blackout in its history during the winter of 2021…

October is Black History Month in the UK, as institutions like the History of Parliament attempt to re-insert and highlight the Black experience into fields of history previously overlooking this. Here, we hear from Helen Wilson, PhD candidate with the History of Parliament and Open University, who is researching the Black and Mixed Ethnicity Presence in British Politics, 1750-1850. As Helen explains, despite significant barriers to their inclusion, there are some active and engaged Black voters to be seen in this period…

There has been a marked change in the research into Black political participation in the eighteenth century; a topic now proving as rich an area of study as that of the participation of women. In the wake of modern scandals like the Windrush scandal the push for a more inclusive British political and social history is clear to see. In the last 20 years significant scholarship into Black…

Marlo Thomas explains in his Real Clear Energy article Expensive Energy Is a Core Feature, Not a Bug, of Biden’s Climate Agenda.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises was being generous by describing interventionism’s nasty side-effects as “unintended.” Some younger interventionists are naïve, and know not what they do, but the older, street-smart captains of progressive politics understand the harms their policies entail. For them, the adverse consequences are features, not bugs.

The only downside is the risk of political retribution at the polls.

That’s the predicament in which the Biden administration now finds itself. It is also the theme of “Energy Inflation Was by Design,” a new report by supply-chain consultant Joseph Toomey.
[Synopsis is in previous post Energy Inflation Playbook]

President Biden and congressional Democrats want to replace fossil fuels with a “zero-carbon” energy system. Their

One aspect of the British Monarchy is hereditary succession. However, that is not the only rule governing the succession to the crown. There are laws controlling who can legally inherit the throne.

I often will see people claim that some descendant of either a King of England or a scion of the royal family is the rightful monarch of England or the United Kingdom due to hereditary succession. These claims mistakenly believe that hereditary descent is the main issue controlling the succession to the crown.

His Majesty, the King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

In the beginning of the monarchy, in the times of the Anglo-Saxon period prior to the Norman Conquest, the throne was elective. Succession was governed by the Witan.

The Witan (lit. ’wise men’) was the king’s council in Anglo-Saxon England from before the seventh century until the 11th century. It was composed…