Utopia, you are standing in it!

Untold $billions are being squandered to connect unreliable, intermittent and diffuse, wind and solar to power grids; grids that were working just fine before the unreliables turned up.

The wind and solar industries spear turbines and plaster panels way beyond the back of beyond. Increasingly remote locations for wind and solar generators require serious upgrades to transmission infrastructure, adding hundreds of $millions to transmission costs, that would have otherwise been avoided, had Australia simply stuck with conventional generators and not squandered $60,000,000,000 in subsidies to intermittent wind and solar.

As any first-year physics student will tell you, transmitting electricity over distances results in a mathematically predictable loss of the power transmitted, over any given distance. The greater the distance, the greater the absolute loss.

Just like the value of prime real estate, the most beneficial situation for generating capacity is all about location, location, location.

In the main, conventional…

Alaska had it’s first election with a new voting rule and Tom Cotton is pissed.

I want very badly to be snarky here and make fun of the Senator for being so nakedly Trumpian in an effort to discredit any democratic institution the instant it doesn’t produce exactly the result he prefers. Fun aside, snark at Senator’s expense misses the bigger and more important mechanisms that are in play. I think the current instantiation of the Republican party is afraid of ranked choice voting. The Senator, in his angry little tweet, only lends greater credence to the theory. More broadly, its often worth unpacking when incumbents get upset about legitimate institutions, particularly when that anger is asymmetric across parties and coalitions.

What is ranked choice voting?

Quickly, ranked choice voting is any system where voters…

The communist in this case being the last leader of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, who died a few days ago at the age of 91.

I actually liked the guy for his basic decency and smarts, although that decency did not stop him sending in KGB agents to Eastern block countries to do their usual job of killing “agitators”, until he realised it would also take tanks and troops, as in East Germany in ’53, Hungary in ’56, and Czechoslovakia in ’68, and decided he couldn’t follow in the footsteps of Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev. So yes, I’ll give him credit for not doing the worst he could have – but that’s pretty weak sauce even if it does testify to some basic human decency.

That decency was also attested to here by John Hinderaker at Powerline, based on dealing with him at a US event in 2000:

I am always intrigued in the history of how things come to be. Like who was the first to discover could be turned into a hot beverage. However, as the title suggest this is not a blog about coffee but about my other guilty pleasure, Chocolate.

The history of chocolate is a bit more mysterious then that of coffee.

From Latin America to the modern day, chocolate has come a long way to get to the shops and eventually to you. From where did chocolate originate to how it became the indulgence we cherish and enjoy today.

The history of chocolate began in Mesoamerica. Fermented beverages made from chocolate date back to 1500 BC. The Mexica believed that cacao seeds were the gift of Quetzalcoatl, the god of wisdom, and the seeds once had so much value that they were used as a form of currency. Originally prepared only as…

With Europe’s renewable energy disaster laid bare for all to see, the focus is now on “real energy” – power that’s available 24 x 7, irrespective of the weather and where the Sun sits in the sky.

For fairly obvious reasons, the Small Modular Reactor has captured the imagination of power-starved Europeans, with two key contenders vying for a slice of what will be a very healthy market.

Britain’s Rolls-Royce is well ahead of the curve, with a 470MW unit almost ready to roll.

In the US, NuScale, based in Oregon, has cleared all of the regulatory hurdles and is ready to deliver 924MW reactors to those with the wit and temerity to acquire them.

The wind and solar cult run the line that SMRs are a pipe dream, cooked up by conservative reactionaries, which menas they’re bound to ignore the 200 small nuclear reactors presently powering 160 ships and…

Mornidine advertisement, 1959.
Canadian Medical Association Journal, Vol. 81, No. 1, p. 59.

Now she can cook breakfast again
… when you prescribe new MORNIDINE (brand of pipamazine)
A new drug with specific effectiveness in nausea and vomiting of pregnancy, Mornidine eliminates the ordeal of morning sickness.
With its selective action on the vomiting center, or the medullary chemoreceptor “trigger zone,” Mornidine possesses the advantages of the phenothiazine drugs without unwanted tranquilizing activity.
Doses of 5 to 10 mg., repeated at intervals of six to eight hours, provide excellent relief all day. In patients who are unable to retain oral medication when first seen, Mornidine may be administered intramuscularly in doses of 5 mg. (1 cc.).
Mornidine is supplied as tablets of 5 mg. and as ampuls of 5 mg. (1 cc.).
G. D. Searle & Co. of Canada Ltd. 247 Queen St., E., Brampton, Ont.

• * *
  Historical footnote:

‘The Lamps Are Going Out All Over Europe’

Germans have never struck me as being stupid people. It may be cliched to picture them as sober, serious, stolid citizens who make machines and systems that work, but that’s because cliches often derive from basic truths.

But there is that whole German Political Party That Must Not Be Named thing, which often seemed to be both led and run by hysterics, so perhaps there’s some flaw in the German national character that just bursts out from time to time.

Begging also does not seem to be them either.

Oh dear:

German Chancellor…

Apparently, Germans are not looking forward to a winter sitting freezing in the dark when the sun sets and/or calm weather sets in. One ‘plan’ is to encourage energy-starved Germans to bunch up in commonly heated exhibition halls to prevent them from freezing to death when temperatures plummet.

The (hopeful) German power consumer is, quite rightly, unamused.

The nonsense of attempting to run on weather-dependent wind and solar has been revealed. As has the insanity of mothballing coal-fired power plants and the idiocy of axing Germany’s enviable fleet of nuclear power plants.

As to the latter, much to the horror of the anti-progress, anti-human Greens, Germans are becoming increasingly vocal in their demands to undo Germany’s suicidal anti-nuclear policies.

Amazing what the reality of not having power, as and when you need it, can do to improve the powers of applied critical thinking.

Melanie Amann gives us an insight on…

Let’s revisit the issues of Bidenomics.

Previous editions of this series have focused on Biden’s dismal record with regards to subsidies, inflation, protectionism, household income, fiscal policy, and red tape.

The assessment has not been positive, which shouldn’t be very surprising since Biden is basically a slow-motion version of Bernie Sanders.

Today, we’re going to look at Biden’s record on jobs…and that’s not going to improve the assessment.

The problem is employment rather than unemployment.

In a column for the Wall Street Journal, Nicholas Eberstadt writes about the millions of Americans who have disappeared from the labor force.

Never has work been so readily available in modern America; never have so many been uninterested in taking it. …For every unemployed person in the U.S. today, there are nearly two open jobs, and the labor shortage affects every region of the country. …Why…

Landfills are the final destination for millions of worn-out wind turbine blades, where their toxic plastics will be left to rot for the ‘benefit’ of generations to come. These 10-20 tonne, 40-60m long chunks of plastic, fibreglass, balsa wood and resins can’t be recycled, so the wind industry has been dumping them quietly for years now; often illegally (see above).

Even before they hit the dump, wind turbine blades are shedding their toxic plastic residues far and wide.

That the plastics in the blades are toxic is without doubt. With a few images added by STT, Dr Eric Blondeel provides a timely (and frightening) analysis of what the wind industry has in store for you and yours.

Will Bisphenol A be the PFOS of Wind Energy?
Great Lakes Wind Truth
Dr Eric Blondeel
18 August 2022

PFOS
Poly- and perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are chemicals that are man-made. They do not…

The Herald’s Jenée Tibshraeny had a follow-up piece this morning on the Reserve Bank Board, with some interesting new information and (what appears to be) some ministerial spin and simply avoiding straight answers.

First we learn that Byron Pepper, appointed to the Board in late June, has now stepped down from his position as a director of an insurance company (Ando) that – by the vagaries of the details of the insurance legislation – is not an institution regulated by the Reserve Bank but is nonetheless substantially owned by another insurance company which is regulated, and which provides insurance on behalf of that regulated company. Again, it wasn’t illegal for Pepper to have held those two roles simultaneously, but it was quite improper, and it reflects poorly on him, on The Treasury (which made the appointment recommendations), on the Bank (Governor and key Board members), and on the Minister of…

This post is part ofFifty Shades of Republic, a series of overviews of US political institutions at the state level

While the Federal Constitution is arguably the world’s oldest national constitution, the states were the ones that began the practice of having ‘written’ constitutions – entrenched laws with a higher status than regular laws, establishing the main features of the system of government. Since I’ve been doing some work on constitution amendment rules (of both national and US state constitutions) for my dissertation, I thought I’d do this topic next (it is also closely related to the topic of a podcast I am currently preparing for Leviathan’s Couch).

The amendment procedure has far-reaching effects. John Burgess, one of the 19^th century pioneers of political science, argued it to be the most important part of a constitution. Constitutional amendment procedures entrench written constitutions, making them harder (or…

Liz Truss is apparently mulling the ‘nuclear’ option of cutting the standard rate of VAT by five percentage points to support the economy. This has triggered a predictable backlash from my fellow policy wonks, led by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS). However, in these extraordinary times, every lever may have to be pulled.

The case for a temporary cut in VAT is straightforward. The UK is on the brink of a massive economic and social crisis. Lowering VAT would be a simple and quick way to boost spending power. The annual saving would average out at around £1,300 per household, returning some of the extra tax that people are paying as a result of higher nominal incomes and prices.

Headline inflation would also be lower as a result, albeit just for one year. And even if the VAT cut is not passed on in full to customers, struggling businesses…