Utopia, you are standing in it!

You know what this original trailer reinforces? The iconic characters, the legends playing them, the instantly recognizable music?

It’s the idea that “The Godfather” was a “Star Wars” or “Harry Potter” for grownup film lovers. An alien universe obsessively detailed, life and death stakes, villains, a young hero to be tempted and corrupted, all summoned up by a few perfect notes on a score, a line, a shadow, a gesture.

Film fans have obsessed over this film, this trilogy, for decades. Granted, they and we arent cosplayers. But geeking out over a movie can happen to great films, too.

Most of us associate these movies with the holidays, as the third and I believe the second “Godfather” movies opened on Christmas.

But the original came out on today’s date in March of 1972.

The Supreme Court’s decision, forcing a wind farm operator to shut down all of its turbines at night-time, lifts the lid on a toxic culture, where the wind industry torments and ridicules its victims, as a matter of standard corporate practice.

On 25 March 2022, Justice Melinda Richards of the Victorian Supreme Court slapped an injunction on a wind farm because the noise it generates has been driving neighbours nuts for seven years, and the operator has done absolutely nothing about their suffering.

The victorious plaintiffs, Noel Uren (pictured on the left above) and John Zakula (on the right) have set a legal precedent for the ages; every wind farm neighbour who has suffered at the hands of the wind industry owes them an eternal debt of gratitude.

The full judgment is available here: Uren v Bald Hills WF [2022] VSC 145

And our analysis is available here: Landmark Decision…

Quite a juicy report about the governing party of Alberta today. Premier and United Conservative Party (UCP) leader Jason Kenny has been recorded having told a caucus staff meeting that he does not need the job and could just walk away. However, he says the party is at risk of being taken over by conspiracy mongers and other fanatics, and he is trying to stop them. “I don’t say this stuff publicly, these are just kooky people generally,” he said, and “I will not let this mainstream conservative party become an agent for extreme, hateful, intolerant, bigoted and crazy views … the lunatics are trying to take over the asylum.”

The backstory is that the UCP is itself a merger of the old Progressive Conservative Party and the Wildrose, which is indeed a far-right “populist” and conspiracy-motivated group. This division on the right is what enabled the NDP to win government…

In a world-first, neighbours tormented by wind turbine noise have won a landmark victory, forcing the operator to shut down all of its turbines at night-time.

Yesterday, Justice Melinda Richards of the Victorian Supreme Court slapped an injunction on a wind farm because the noise it generates has been driving neighbours nuts for seven years, and the operator has done absolutely nothing about their suffering.

Her Honour also ordered damages, including aggravated damages for the high-handed way in which the operator has treated its victims. Since March 2015, the community surrounding the Bald Hills wind farm have been tortured by low-frequency noise and infrasound generated by 52, 2 MW Senvion MM92s.

Neighbours started complaining to the operator about noise, straightaway. But, as is their wont, the operator simply rejected the mounting complaints and carried on regardless.

Locals, however, were not perturbed. Instead, they lawyered up. Engaging the tough and tenacious

BMW i3 electric car plus battery pack [image credit: carmagazine.co.uk]
Unlucky. It’s not just lithium either. Nickel prices are going crazy as supply problems loom. The notion of EVs competing on price with fuel burners any time soon is receding fast, if not dead in the water.
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Soaring lithium prices are threatening energy transition efforts as EV battery makers will be forced to hike the prices for their products by as much as 25 percent, Morgan Stanley has warned.

Over the past 12 months, the bank said, as quoted by Bloomberg, the price of lithium carbonate, which is a key ingredient in electric vehicle batteries, has jumped five times.

This may force EV manufacturers to hike prices by up to 15 percent, hurting demand, reports OilPrice.com.

The news comes at a bad time for EVs. Rising retail fuel prices in some parts of the world, such…

Coal-hungry China [image credit: democraticunderground.com]
More doom-laden propaganda, pretending climate theories are facts and so on.
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The UN Secretary General says the rush to use fossil fuels because of the war in Ukraine is “madness” and threatens global climate targets.

The invasion of Ukraine has seen rapid rises in the prices of coal, oil and gas as countries scramble to replace Russian sources, says BBC News.

But Antonio Guterres warns that these short-term measures might “close the window” on the Paris climate goals.

A 60m long wind turbine blade tip travelling at 350 kph makes short work of birds and bats – smashing Eagles to smithereens and slicing Brolgas to ribbons is all part of our ‘inevitable’ renewable energy transition.

The Australian Brolga (a member of crane family) is a majestic creature known for its intricate, paired dance moves and devoted pairing when raising chicks.

In south-west Victoria, there are around 500 remaining Brolgas, but their chances of survival are becoming slimmer by the day.

Carpeted with hundreds of wind turbines, and more being added daily, their breeding grounds have become the avian slaughter yards that anyone with half a brain could have foreseen.

Hamish Cumming, a local farmer and environmentalist, has been, without doubt, the Brolga’s best and most effective defender. For his troubles, he’s been smeared and ridiculed by lunatics from the hard green left over the last decade.

His…

Elizabeth I (September 7, 1533 – March 24, 1603) was Queen of England and Ireland from November 17, 1558 until her death in 1603. Sometimes referred to as the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth was the last of the five monarchs of the House of Tudor.

Elizabeth was the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, his second wife, who was executed when Elizabeth was 2 and a half years old. Anne’s marriage to Henry was annulled, and Elizabeth was declared illegitimate. Her half-brother Edward VI ruled until his death in 1553, bequeathing the crown to Lady Jane Grey and ignoring the claims of his two half-sisters, the Roman Catholic Mary and the younger Elizabeth, in spite of statute law to the contrary.

Edward’s will was set aside mostly because it never had Parliamentary approval and Mary became queen, deposing Lady Jane Grey. During Mary’s reign, Elizabeth was imprisoned for nearly a…

The recent BBC adaptation of John Preston’s book – A Very English Scandal – about the trial of the former Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe for conspiracy and incitement to murder, prompted us at the HPT to think about other parliamentarians with links to murder, conspiracy and scandal. Today’s blog from our Lords 1715-1790 project Editor, Dr Robin Eagles considers duels between MPs and their political connections…

Politics could be a dangerous business in eighteenth-century England. In a period where the honour code made men quick to reach for their swords, fast friendships were occasionally ended by violent altercations. This was the case with Owen Buckingham, MP for Reading, who attended the birthday party of his friend, William Aldworth in March 1720, only for the two to fall out, for their quarrel to turn violent, and for Buckingham to end up on the floor with a mortal wound. Although technically a duel…

Last night the London Record Society held a launch event for ‘The Diaries of John Wilkes, 1770-1797‘ edited by our own Dr Robin Eagles. Here, Dr Eagles relates one of Wilkes’s extra-parliamentary duels…

The St James’s Chronicle of 15-17 November 1763 carried a story of a duel fought between two unnamed persons of distinction. The account confined itself to reporting the fact that the duel had happened and that one of the participants now lay delirious and in agony from his injuries in his house in Great George Street. Oddly, the same issue contained a separate and rather different account of what must have been the same duel (and its aftermath). Unlike the other, brief summary, this was detailed and named names. The duel had been fought on 16 November between John Wilkes and Samuel Martin, the latter a fellow MP and former secretary to the…

March 23, 2022: Solar Cycle 25 is intensifying–and Earth’s upper atmosphere is responding.

“The Thermosphere Climate Index (TCI) is going up rapidly right now,” reports Linda Hunt of Science Systems and Applications, Inc. “It has nearly tripled in the past year.”

TCI is a number published daily by NASA, which tells us how hot Earth’s upper atmosphere is. The thermosphere, the very highest layer of gas, literally touches space and is a sort of “first responder” to solar activity. Hunt created this plot showing how TCI has unfolded during the last 7 solar cycles.  Solar Cycle 25 (shown in blue) is just getting started:

“So far Solar Cycle 25 is well ahead of the pace of Solar Cycle 24,” notes Hunt. If this trend continues, the thermosphere could soon hit a 20-year high in temperature.

Before we go any farther, a word of caution: This does not mean Earth is…

The meme has it that wind and solar are all about slashing CO2 emissions, whereas that pathetic pair are just a colossal moneymaking scam.

Apart from South Australia, no country other than Germany threw more at chaotically intermittent wind and solar.

The results have been an utter debacle: Germans suffer the second highest power prices in Europe, just behind wind ‘powered’ Denmark, and those prices are rocketing north at double-digit rates. The German grid is on the brink of collapse.

And all in an effort to curb emissions of carbon dioxide gas. Leaving aside arguments about whether CO2 is a toxic pollutant or a naturally occurring beneficial trace gas which plants crave, if the primary object of Germany’s ‘transition’ to an all wind and sun powered future was cutting carbon dioxide gas emissions, the result has been a dismal failure – that’s cost Germans more than a €Trillion, so…

Victims of their own success, Europe’s wind turbine makers are being crushed by rocketing power prices – caused by reliance on intermittent wind and solar. Oh, the irony…

The staggering surge in European energy costs has rendered them unable to compete with Chinese manufacturers, whose operations benefit from abundant supplies of nuclear and coal-fired power. China’s rapid – and still surging industrialisation – wasn’t built on windmills and wishes, by the way.

One of the biggest, Siemens, has been particularly hard hit, with its wind turbine manufacturing unit dragging the company’s share price to the floor. Oh dear, how sad, never mind.

And, as you read on, note the candid response from Siemen’ boss, Christian Bruch to the petulant who believe that Germany should already be running exclusively on wind and solar – that Germany will remain dependent upon (mostly Russian) gas “over the next decades” which, he should have…