Utopia, you are standing in it!

Subsidised and intermittent wind and solar infiltrate and destroy power grids like an aggressive cancer. But, unlike cancer, the cause of Australia’s power pricing and supply debacle is precisely known, and was as perfectly predictable, as it was perfectly avoidable.

The massive subsidies to wind and solar were deliberately designed to knock reliable and affordable generators off the grid. This they have done – with a vengeance. With a grid literally on the brink of collapse, the political brains trust are trying to undo what their policies were destined to do, with desperate moves to keep Australia’s remaining coal-fired power plants up and running using “capacity payments” – ie taxpayer subsidies paid to the owners of coal-fired plants as an antidote to the $7 billion in annual RET subsidies already being pocketed by wind and solar generators, that allow them to underbid Australia’s based load generators.

STT predicts that we…

Posted by Sara M. Butler, 13 May 2022.

Discovering that the Supreme Court of the United States of America, now dominated by an ultra conservative majority of chiefly white men, is planning to overturn Roe v. Wade (1973) was not as unexpected as one might imagine. At least, for any woman who has been living in this country for the past decade it was something we could see coming. For those who work at religious institutions or in conscientiously-Christian businesses, the ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014) already took away our right to use our health plans to pay for birth control.[1] (This happened to me when I worked at Loyola University New Orleans, a Catholic university). Access to a legal abortion did seem like the next logical provision to disappear.

What was surprising, however, is to discover that Justice Samuel Alito’s leaked draft majority opinion (it can…

I’m currently in Tanzania as part of a speaking tour in Africa. My remarks today largely repeated the message I gave to an audience last week in Nigeria.

So I won’t bother sharing anything from my presentation. Instead, I want to highlight some numbers from a presentation by Professor Ken Schoolland.

He shared some data showing how the “Asian Tigers” grew far faster than major Latin American nations between 1950 and 2000.

These are very impressive examples of convergence (as the Asian Tigers caught up with Latin America) followed by divergence (as the Tigers then continued to grow much faster).

I’ll be adding this data to my “anti-convergence club.”

But I also noticed that Professor Schoolland was sharing some old data from 1995.

So I went to the Maddison website and created some new charts based on the latest-available data.

As you can see, the Latin American nations…

So, we have the result of the Referendum, and a majority of voters have voted to leave the EU. A mantra of Leave campaigners seems to have been the desire to ‘take back control’. There has been much talk of sovereignty, although less clarity on what it actually means. However, at its most basic, there are at least three notions of sovereignty that are relevant in the context of Brexit, and they are often confused. The first is parliamentary sovereignty, which is said to have particular resonance in the UK because, due to the vagaries of the uncodified UK Constitution, the Westminster Parliament has been recognised as a body with unlimited legislative power. Yet the parliamentary sovereignty of a representative democracy may seem to be at odds with popular sovereignty as exercised in a referendum. Popular sovereignty also has other implications, such as in Scotland, where an indigenous Scottish tradition…

The results of the third nation-wide referendum in the United Kingdom are still sinking in at home and around the world. Just below 52% voted to leave the European Union, just over 48% voted to remain. The widespread conclusion is that the UK must leave the EU.

But there is another way of reading the result. The United Kingdom is not a centralised state. It is a ‘family of nations’. There is a strong case for arguing that the referendum carries only if a majority of voters in all four nations respectively give their backing. England and Wales voted to leave, but Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain. Recognising that split is not a matter of shifting the goalposts after the fact. It is about respecting an established, indeed a compelling constitutional order.

Before Westminster politicians think about the practicalities of withdrawing from the EU, they urgently need to…

In the 1930 we had the Nazis burning and banning books which were not complying to Nazi ideology. They were not only books by Jewish authors but also books like “the Hunchback of the Notre Dame” and Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. Or “the Time machine” and “War of the Worlds” by HG Wells. Or books by James Joyce,Ernest Hemingway .

Fast forward to 1947 -1957 during the McCarthy era where famous and successful film producers, directors and screenwriters were silenced because they were deemed to be either communist or communist sympathizers, silenced without any trial or a shred of evidence, often because of hear say or the interpretation by someone. People like The Hollywood Ten with the likes of Oscar winning screenwriter Dalton Trumbo and Oscar winning director  Edward Dmytryk.

Fast forward to today. It is not the Nazis or the McCarthy committee but extreme feminists and vegans who…

If it were only intended as a joke, wind power would be hilarious. However, the power pricing and supply calamity that follows any attempt to rely on sunshine and breezes tend to sober things up.

Random 3,000 to 4,000 MW wind power output collapses are at the heart of Australia’s self-inflicted renewable energy debacle. The consequences of an obsession with subsidised wind and solar were as perfectly predictable, as they were perfectly avoidable. Power rationing is now routine and power prices are soaring out of control.

What’s depicted above – courtesy of Aneroid Energy – is the output delivered by Australian wind power outfits to the Eastern Grid last month. To describe wind power as a power generation system, given that kind of performance is not just delusional, it’s dangerous. Australia’s Eastern Grid is, literally, on the brink of collapse.

One of the few that gets it is, the…

Is more computing power just getting us the wrong results from overheated models faster?
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Outside of their academic fascination, looked at in terms of their contribution to climate policy, it seems that we may have reached the useful limit of computer climate modelling, says Dr. David Whitehouse.

The first computers built in the 1950s allowed climate scientists to think about modelling the climate using this new technology.

The first usable computer climate models were developed in the mid-1970s.

Shortly afterwards the US National Academy of Sciences used their outcomes to estimate a crucial climate parameter we still calculate today – the Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) – how much the world would warm (from ‘pre-industrial’ levels) with a doubling of CO2 — and concluded that it had a range of 1.5 – 4.5°C.

Wherever the wind industry plies it subsidy-soaked trade, there’s a wave of avian carnage, and offshore is no exception.

While Greta & Co fret about global incineration and mass extinctions, the wind industry is doing a very fine job of extinguishing millions of birds and bats, every year. Indeed, entire species are under threat, including Europe’s Red Kite and Tasmania’s Wedge Tailed Eagle.

Plans to erect thousands more of these things around Britain’s coasts, spell the death knell for millions of seabirds, with several species under threat.

The offshore wind industry is already exacting a phenomenal toll on a whole range of seabirds in the waters surrounding Britain, including the Lesser Black-backed gull, as Jason Endfield details below.

Alarming 99% Decline In Gulls Raises Questions Over Expanding Wind Farms
Jason Endfield Blog
Jason Endfield
6 May 2022

A shocking 99% decline in the population of Lesser Black-backed gulls raises…

Fortune, which has great influence in affairs generally and especially in war, produces by a slight disturbance of balance important changes in human affairs.
(The Civil War Book 3 chapter 68)

I picked up this 1967 Penguin paperback of Julius Caesar’s Civil Wars, translated by Jane Gardner, in the sensible A format size (18 cm by 11 cm) with reassuringly browned paper, in a second hand bookshop for just £2. Though nearly 60 years old it has fewer scuff marks and scratches than a book I recently bought ‘new’ from Amazon, ‘destroyer of books’, whose cover was smeared, scuffed and scratched.

This Penguin volume actually contains four ‘books’:

• The Civil War, the longest text at 112 short ‘chapters’ or sections (often no more than paragraphs), making up 130 Penguin pages
• The Alexandrian War (78 sections, 42 pages)
• The African War (98 sections, 49 pages)
• The Spanish War (42…

A new online pharmacy funded by Mark Cuban promises to sell prescription drugs at a fixed markup, 15% over cost plus a $3 flat fee. What’s the catch?

As far as I can tell, there are two- they only sell generics, and they don’t take insurance. But I think this will still save many people a lot of money.

The most expensive drugs get that way because they are sold by monopolies, almost always because they were invented less than 20 years ago and are still on-patent. But it’s still possible for older drugs to be sold at huge markups, as Martin Shkreli could tell you now that he’s out of prison (Shkreli’s case is supposedly what inspired Dr. Alex Oshmyansky to start this pharmacy). Sometimes you can still blame these markups on monopolies, just induced by the FDA instead of patents. But even for generic drugs with competitive manufacturing…