Utopia, you are standing in it!

Humorous lessons too! He even looks a bit like Luxon.

Take it away Chief.

Image credit: livescience.com

In their computer model game they use the discredited RCP 8.5 formula that assumes a highly unlikely surface energy increase of 8.5W/m^2 by 2100 (not 2050). What’s the point?
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You may have seen some of our forecasts that look a little further ahead than you would usually expect, says the UK Met Office.

Although they use the same graphics as our normal weather forecasts, we’ve been producing theoretical ‘forecasts’ for 2050 to look at what conditions we could expect to see in the UK if global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise.

One of the greatest challenges with communicating the risks of climate change is how to show, in a relatable way, how changes in our atmosphere could impact the weather we experience on the Earth’s surface.

Dr Andrew Thrush, editor of our Lords 1558-1603 section, discusses the thorny issue that faced Elizabeth I in the wake of the discovery of Mary Queen of Scots’ role in the Babington Plot of 1586…

On 1 February 1587 Sir Francis Walsingham and his fellow Secretary of State, William Davison, wrote on behalf of Elizabeth I to the privy councillor Sir Amias Paulet, one of the gaolers of the deposed Scottish queen, Mary Stuart, who had fled to England more than twenty years earlier and had recently been judged guilty of plotting to overthrow and murder Elizabeth. In this letter – perhaps the most extraordinary ever to have been written at the behest of an English monarch – Paulet was informed that Elizabeth ‘doth note in you a lack of that care and zeal of her service that she looketh for at your hands’. The Queen…

On Friday (1 July) the new Reserve Bank legislation comes fully into effect. The new Reserve Bank Board takes over from the Governor personally as the key governing body of the Bank, on all matters other than the conduct of monetary policy (but even there they have a big influence on the composition of the MPC). A member of the outgoing (advisory) Board told us – he sits on the RB pension fund trustees as, for my sins, do I – that the new Board is having its first meeting on Friday. And yet today is Tuesday and we still don’t know who is being appointed to this (on paper) powerful government board. Every Tuesday for the last couple of months I’ve checked Grant Robertson’s Beehive page, and still there is no announcement.

The Governor is a Board member ex officio. And several months the Bank slid onto their website…

The Bill of Rights Bill is framed by the Government as necessary to ensure ‘meaningful democratic oversight’ of human rights protection in the UK, with Conservative MPs keen to present the Bill as a means to restore sovereignty in the face of interfering judges – both at the level of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and UK courts.

However, as this post will argue, the Bill undermines sovereignty and meaningful democratic oversight of rights protection in at least three ways not acknowledged by the Government and the Bill’s supporters. These are in the Bill’s process, presentation and procedures. That is, sovereignty is undermined by, first, the Bill’s process through Parliament, second, its presentation to Parliament by the Government, and third, via the procedures contained in the Bill that facilitate executive interference with judicial scrutiny of human rights protection. As we will see, while the Government purports…

Buzz from the Beehive

The National Party’s strong objection to plans to overhaul New Zealand’s political donations regime, expressed in submissions on the Government’s proposed sweeping changes to electoral law, were reported in a Stuff report last week.

The changes would include lowering the threshold for political parties to disclose donors from $15,000 to $1500 and require political parties to make public their annual financial statements .

This would have a “chilling effect” on democracy, the Nats contended.

The Ardern government isn’t too fussed about protecting the country’s democratic electoral arrangements nowadays, of course, as has become glaringly obvious over the past year or so (see here,here and here for evidence)

And hey – if the Nats (a) are bleating about an electoral-reform proposal being disagreeable and (b) are warning about its chilling effect on democracy…

Well, let’s get on with it.

And sure enough, Justice Minister Kiri…

A piece of posting that will never be seen by almost each and every one of the vainglorious sycophants who decline in many special ways to inform themselves of the degree dysfunction as an integral part of the current bunch of student level politicians business practice exists.

Eric is a person who should be at or near the top of any list of go to persons for anyone of independent thought seeking enlightenment on almost any topic one might select. Of course for the main stream media such seeking is never an issue as their take on all matters comes from the weekly directives from the now expanded media persons who produce the word salads for those gobbing off from the Odium of struth and the avalanche of press releases that have replaced “Investigative Journalism”.

My first point of call to access Eric’s regular commentary is Offsetting Behaviour where this…

In general I am always careful tp put all the blame on the German when it comes to the Holocaust. There is no denying that the bulk of the responsibility lies with them, but there were many other who enabled them and actively and willingly participated in the mass murder.

I also try not to post pictures that are too graphic because it often has an opposite effect, people are too disturbed to look at them and therefor don’t read the story behind them. I know the picture at the start of the blog is quite graphic, but it comes from a compilation of pictures which has even much more graphic photographs, this one is the least graphic.

The picture are from the The Kovno Garage Massacre, the clubbing to death of Jewish Lithuanians on June 27 1941,by Lithuanian nationalists.

Lithuanian paramilitary fascists murdered sixty-nine Jews by clubbing them with…

Fracking: note the deep shaft
Any decision shouldn’t be based on the preferences of a minority of evidence-light climate squealers or other campaigners seeking to exaggerate minor issues. If the verdict is ‘no’ it should explain why it’s OK to import gas from overseas fracking operations.
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London, 25 June – Net Zero Watch is today launching a campaign to ensure science is put at the heart of the British Geological Survey’s review into shale gas extraction, demanding the Government uses this opportunity to unlock national and local benefits, and enhance Britain’s energy security.

24 prominent parliamentarians including Sir Iain Duncan Smith MP, Esther McVey MP, and the former Minister of State at the Cabinet Office, Lord Frost, have already signed up to the campaign. This is along with the leadership team of the parliamentary Net Zero Scrutiny Group, Craig Mackinlay MP and Steve Baker MP.

Weather-dependent wind and sunshine-dependent solar are the prime cause of Australia’s electricity pricing and supply debacle. So much is obvious to anybody who bothers to go beyond the drivel pitched up by the MSM and the politicos responsible for the disaster.

Over the last decade, STT has laid it out in pictures, such as the one above, made possible by the boys over at Aneroid Energy – the one-stop shop when it comes to understanding where our electricity actually comes from.

In this case, the output delivered by Australian wind power outfits and every one of their wind turbines connected to the Eastern Grid (with a combined notional capacity of 9,854 MW) so far this month.

While purported energy pundits rant about “coal outages” – referring to either scheduled maintenance or unscheduled repairs to one or two units among several within a coal-fired power plant – they never talk about…

Germany, Denmark, South Australia, California, the list of places that prove our headline grows by the day. The wind and solar cancer that saw South Australia suffer the country’s only statewide blackout and end up suffering the world’s highest power prices, bar none, quickly spread and has now taken hold across the entire Eastern Grid (which takes in Queensland, New Wales, Victoria and Tasmania as well as SA).

Wholesale power prices have more than doubled in the last six months; retail power prices are rising at double-digit rates each year – consumers face a minimum 18-20% jump in their power bills next month; and power rationing by postcode is the new normal, whenever the sun sets and/or calm weather sets in.

The last thing Australia needs is another MW of intermittent power generation, which means slashing subsidies to wind and solar, right now, re-engineering the electricity market and returning…

For many, one of the most polarizing figures of the Second World War was Pope Pius XII. Up until 2019 the Vatican archives did not allow access to most of the documents related to Pius XII’s actions before and during the war. Under the current leadership of Pope Francis, the archive has been made available to historians and has brought about a reassessment of Pius XII’s relationship with Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in addition to his attitude toward the Holocaust.

Until the opening of the archive, historians were of two minds; either Pius XII was too close to Mussolini and Hitler and did not confront them publicly concerning their murderous atrocities and said and did little in relation to the genocide of European Jewry or he did as much as he could in balancing the protection of the Catholic clergy in Germany…