Utopia, you are standing in it!

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…

Michael Baume writes at Spectator Climate change policy: a greater risk than climate change?.  Excerpts in italics with my bold. H/T John Ray

Pragmatism is belatedly beating carbon purity as the West seeks to survive the economic consequences of Russia’s monstrous Ukraine war. Only months after its Glasgow swearing of allegiance to the climate catechism that requires faith in scientifically untested computer-programmed prophesies, the West has seen the light – and the energy needed to power it.

• • By grabbing at the vilified, carbon-emitting economic lifeline of fossil fuels,
  • By rediscovering the energizing virtues of the spurned coal,
  • By embracing the scorned fracking in a desperate search for gas,
  • By re-opening the closed off-shore petroleum leases to keep industry working, and
  • By preferring ‘dangerous’ nuclear power to winters of freezing in the dark,

A severe dose of reality has slowed the West’s race to economic destruction. The

I don’t want to comment extensively on yesterday’s Reserve Bank announcement. It may prove to be the right call (or not), but in the data hiatus – 2.5 months since the last CPI, two months since the latest HLFS – they are to some extent flying blind (New Zealand really needs more frequent and timely key official macro data), and it would have been better to have rescheduled the announcements (adding one) as suggested in my post the other day. And the very brief, almost passing, mention of having considered a 75 basis point increase – which would have made a lot of sense this time last year – highlights again just how non-transparent and non-accountable New Zealand’s MPC is, We don’t know whether, in the end, any of the members actually favoured a 75 basis point increase, or did the Committee just toy with the idea briefly so that…

The recently appointed new CEO of the Essendon Football Club in Victoria, Andrew Thorburn, has been pushed out of his job on account of views expressed by the church he belongs to and on whose board of management he sits. Those views, which even the club itself accepts were not stated personally by Mr Thorburn and which had to be found by scouring a database of sermons back to 2013, represent views on moral issues that have been shared by Christians, Muslims, Jews and many other religious believers for a long time. They are not “radical” or “hateful” or “bigoted”. It is arguable that the Club has breached Victorian anti-discrimination law.

Today marks the 60th anniversary of the release of the first James Bond movie, Dr No. Although it was the 1st movie, it was the sixth of Fleming’s series, beginning with Casino Royale.

I am not going too much into the movie as such ,but more into some of the unknow aspects of Dr. No.

Ursula Andress’ dialogue was dubbed by voice artist Nikki Van der Zyl, who later dubbed her again in The Blue Max (1966), She (1965), and Casino Royale (1967). It was her task to re-create Andress’ voice, but give it only a mild accent. Andress’ singing voice is sometimes credited to Diana Coupland, but this was also Nikki. This confusion mainly arises because Ms. Coupland’s recording of the song was included on the original 1962 soundtrack album release for this movie. Andress and Eunice Gayson were dubbed by the same actress. Gayson’s real voice can be…

TheLord Advocate’s Referenceto the Supreme Court asks if the proposedScottish Independence Referendum Billrelates to reserved matters under the Scotland Act 1998. Core to the Lord Advocate’s case is the claim that thereferendum proposed by the draft bill would be ‘advisory’, ‘consultative’ or ‘non-binding’. If this is the case then it can be argued that the Draft Bill and the referendum it proposes to authorise would not ‘relate to’ the reserved matters of the Union and Parliament by virtue of having ‘no effect in all the circumstances’ – the test set by Scotland Act 1998 s.29(3).

In anearlier postI queried whether the referendum proposed by the Scottish Government could be said to have no ‘effect’ within the context of the United Kingdom constitution where constitutional conventions now seem to attach both to the holding of referendums and the implementation of their results. In this post…