Utopia, you are standing in it!

With the “Top Gun” sequel firmly (Hah!) set for release on May 27, it occurred to me that I should at least re-familiarize myself with this icon of ’80s “High Concept” cinema. And then it occurred to me that I’ve never actually seen it, start to finish.

I was reviewing films for a newspaper when it came out, and I’m guessing the fellow I shared those duties with drew this assignment. It’s not like I didn’t try to watch it, once or thrice. I’d get 5-20 minutes in while channel surfing, mutter “Why people ever liked this is beyond me” and move on.

“Top Gun” is Reagan Era American jingoism at its glossiest, something worth remembering when watching it. A common criticism of this film of-its-time/at-that-time was that it was a “recruiting film.”

Reagan’s gone, the Navy moved on from the ruinously expensive to maintain,/Achilles Heeled F-14 Tomcat, and Hollywood…

The renewable energy cult reckons “coal is dead”, but the market says otherwise.

Thermal coal prices are off the charts, with record demand driving record prices: Australian thermal coal prices recently hit $US$400 ($548 a tonne), with prices still on the rise.

The crowd that tells us that we’re only a heartbeat away from an all wind and sun powered future have been telling all who care to listen that investing in fossil fuel producers, in particular coal-miners, borders on insanity; with lots of talk about “stranded assets”, the prices of which will plummet, to never recover.

Well, that’s the cult’s mantra, anyway.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, Terence Corcoran explains that, in an energy hungry world, fossil fuel producers are a very safe bet, indeed.

Which energy assets will be stranded?
Financial Post
Terence Corcoran
4 May 2022

Oilprice.com covered the latest energy trends Monday with a report that U.S…

When finance professors publish papers claiming to find inefficiencies in asset markets, my initial reaction is skepticism. The odds are stacked against them to start since asset markets are mostly efficient. Then even if the inefficiency they found is real, shouldn’t they keep that fact to themselves and get rich trading on it?

But listening to a recent interview with Edward Thorp, I realized I shouldn’t entirely discount the possibility that someone would publish a real inefficiency, even a tradeable one. After all, Myron Scholes and Fischer Black did just that when they published the Black-Scholes model in the Journal of Political Economy. This made them famous on Wall Street and in econ/finance academia, and won Scholes the 1997 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.

Thorp explained that he had come up with a similar model years earlier, but instead of publishing it, he started a hedge fund and…

The current system of recruiting and employing MPs’ staff is not one you would design if you were starting from scratch, but before considering an overhaul, it is useful to ask how we got here. In this blogpost Rebecca McKee, who is currently running a project on MPs’ staff,examines the evolution of MPs’ staffing arrangements, providing some context to the current arrangements so we can understand how best to reform them.

Speaker Lindsay Hoyle has called for a Speaker’s Conference to consider a major overhaul of workplace practices in the House of Commons. Under our current system, it is MPs – not the Commons – who recruit and employ their staff, within a framework of regulations set out by the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA).While the devolved legislatures and many other countries have similar arrangements, New Zealand stands out as an example where MPs engage staff employed…

During her record-breaking 70 years of service, Queen Elizabeth II has become no stranger to parliamentary traditions like the State Opening of Parliament, and next weekend her milestone as the first British Monarch to celebrate a Platinum Jubilee will be celebrated with four days of festivities. But Her Majesty the Queen’s predecessor as a female monarch, Queen Victoria, also witnessed many ceremonies during her own long reign.

Here Dr Kathryn Rix, Assistant Editor of our Commons 1832-1868 project and voice behind the VictCommons twitter page, explores Queen Victoria’s approach to parliamentary ceremony…

On 17 July 1837, less than a month after becoming Britain’s first reigning queen in over a century, Queen Victoria visited Westminster to prorogue Parliament. She had been persuaded by the Whig ministry to perform this duty in person, rather than delegating it to commissioners. The presence of the youthful new monarch generated widespread…

Read the first page of the Reserve Bank’s Monetary Policy Statement yesterday (the press release) and it is hard to find anything to quibble with. It was a strong statement, backing up another large OCR increase, and referencing a further increase in inflation pressures (and thus a revision up in the forecast track). One might wish they had gotten this serious back in November/December when the issues were already becoming stark and the upside risks high, instead of doing one 25 point increase in November and then heading off for a very long summer recess. But if they have got serious, and a bit worried, now, then better late than never.

And given where we are now – which is not a good place – if they manage to deliver core inflation next year at 2.6 per cent (as in the projections) I’d probably count that as quite a reasonable…

The wind and solar obsessed in the first world are quite prepared to ensure the World’s poorest stay that way. With economic development agencies peddling ridiculously expensive solar panels – seen as ‘fake electricity’ by those lumbered with it – and forcing tinpot governments to sign up to costly and pointless wind and/or solar power schemes, the ratio of haves to have-nots is likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future.

Eco-zealots have attempted to ram wind and solar power down the throats of Third World governments under the auspices of saving the planet and purportedly with the purpose of dragging millions out of poverty. But it never takes their targets long to work out that wind and solar power are both insanely expensive and hopelessly unreliable; sitting in the dark, night after night, generally does the trick.

Thomas Catenacci reports on another case where first-world virtue signallers found…

Earlier this year, I pointed out that President Biden should not be blamed for rising prices.

There has been inflation, of course, but the Federal Reserve deserves the blame. More specifically, America’s central bank responded to the coronavirus pandemic by dumping a lot of money into the economy beginning in early 2020.

Nearly a year before Biden took office.

The Federal Reserve is not the only central bank to make this mistake.

Here’s the balance sheet for the Eurosystem (the European Central Bank and the various national central banks that are in charge of the euro currency). As you can see, there’s also been a dramatic increase in liquidity on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

Why should American readers care about what’s happening with the euro?

In part, this is simply a lesson about the downsides of bad monetary policy. For years, I’ve been explaining that…

Putin’s Ukrainian adventure has Europeans talking about nuclear power as if their existence depends on it. Threaten to deprive people of access to reliable and affordable energy and the love affair with wind and solar is soon forgotten.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to explain the relationship between total collapses in wind and solar output and sunset and calm weather.

True enough the political intelligentsia have done all they can to have the masses believe otherwise but, anticipating that the mob will surely revolt if left freezing in the dark for any length of time, the focus is now on power that can be delivered on-demand, come what may.

Following Europe’s Big Calm, when wind power output barely registered for months, the French President announced a wholesale reversal of their anti-nuclear power plant policy, no doubt driven by the need to ensure that they will never suffer…

Shell Oil scientist M. King Hubbert made a remarkable prediction in 1956. He had analyzed the depletion patterns of various natural resources, and proposed that the production rates of a given resource from a given region would tend to follow a roughly bell-shaped curve. More specifically, he used what is now called the “Hubbert curve”, which is a probability density function of a logistic distribution curve. This curve is like a gaussian function (which is used to plot normal distributions), but is somewhat “wider”:

Normalized Hubbert Curve. Source: Wikipedia.

Hubbert used various reasonable assumptions (which we will not canvass here) in formulating this model curve. Notably, it predicts that the peak production rate will occur when the total resource from that region is 50% depleted, and that the fall in production on the back side of the curve will be as fast as the rise in production…