Utopia, you are standing in it!

Domestic Air Source Heat Pump [image credit: UK Alternative Energy]
The ill-conceived ‘net zero’ emissions plan born of the UK government’s carbon dioxide obsessions takes another hit. Five-figure radiator installation bills will put people off bigtime.
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Homeowners trying to install eco-friendly heat pumps have been left with surprise £30,000 bills after it emerged millions of radiators are too small to work with the new technology, says The Telegraph.

The Government wants 600,000 heat pumps installed every year by 2028, in line with its “net zero” aims, but the majority of homes may need thousands of pounds worth of upgrades to accommodate them.

Heat pumps need larger radiators to achieve the same heat output as gas boilers, which heat water to much higher temperatures.

Some 99pc of British homes do not have radiators large enough to heat a room on the coldest winter’s day, using a low-temperature…

Most people would say high prices are the biggest problem with health care in the United States. But high prices should be viewed as the symptom of the real problem, which is “third-party payer.”

And what is third-party payer?

It’s the fact that consumers purchase health care with other people’s money. And we should blame government intervention.

To be more specific, the vast majority of purchases are financed by government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, or by insurance policies that are subsidized by the tax code’s healthcare exclusion.

And that means people have very little reason to care about the cost of care – creating a recipe for higher costs and inefficiency.

Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute explains the problem.

One of the reasons that the costs of medical care services in the US have increased more than twice as much as…

Readers will be well aware that my attitude towards the MSM is that that they are, at best, shallow and useless in their reporting and “analysis”, and at worst combine that with massive ideological bias to the Left as well as the occasional bouts of outright partisanship towards, in the case of New Zealand, the Greens, Labour, or the Maori party, depending on how well each of them is doing in supporting a Left wing agenda.

The read I have on the NZ MSM at present is that, as Chris Trotter and Martyn Bradbury have often pointed out, they’ve sold their souls for capitalist money and the “neo-liberal” status quo established since 1984, in exchange for pushing every other piece of Leftist wank. I think those two gentlemen are nostalgic screamers because, at least in the environmentalist world of combating AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) they may get want they want…

Early last year, I shared a video explaining that Karl Marx was a despicable human being. Today, let’s look at a video that further examines him and his hideousideology.

This raises an interesting question of picking the most offensive feature of Marxism.

1. The totalitarian brutality in nations that (so far) have murdered and starved 100 million people?
2. The economic illiteracy of a system that has anywhere and everywhere produced misery and poverty?
3. The moral abomination of an ideology that assumes individuals are abjectly subservient to the state?

The the video above is from the Ayn Rand-inspired Atlas Society, I suspect they might emphasize answer #3.

And that certainly is correct, but the best answer is “all of the above.”

I’ll close with the observation that Marx was a bad person, but he’s not nearly as bad as modern-day Marxists.

That’s because Marx was guilty of coming…

Since more than 100 million people have been killed by communist regimes, should we conclude that Karl Marx is the worst person in world history?

To address that question, let’s start with this video from Prager University, which is narrated by Professor Paul Kengor of Grove City College.

At the risk of understatement, the video is a damning indictment of Marx’s legacy.

His political ideas provided the justification for the genocides of dictators such as Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot.

His economic ideas led to policies that produced mass deprivation, starvation, and immense human suffering.

Now let’s take a closer look at Marx rather than just his ideas.

Was he a good person who simply had some horribly misguided ideals?

Hardly. Everything we know suggests he was a sickeningly despicable excuse for a human being.

Professor Richard Ebeling has some of the sordid details in an…

I’ve long maintained the view that spies never discover anything useful about a country’s foreign enemies, though they are very useful in suppressing domestic opponents. This is a straightforward implication of game theory, but my attempts to explain it haven’t worked in the past, and I don’t know how to do much better. So, I’m going to restate my arguments from 10 years ago, against the massive expansion of spying that was already under way, and make the observation that the evidence since then strongly supports my case.

Despite an espionage and surveillance effort unparalleled in history, the US NSA has been unable to produce any convincing evidence of stopping even one domestic terror plot. Its best case was someone alleged to have sent a few thousand dollars to Al Shabab in Somalia. The NSA not only missed actual terror plotters like those in Boston, but also performed poorly relative…

The relationship between weather-dependent wind/sunshine dependent solar and rocketing power prices is crystal clear, so too the post ‘transition’ phenomenon of power rationing caused by sunset and/or calm weather.

Australia isn’t alone in experiencing a power pricing and supply calamity, all its very own making; Germans, Danes and Californians have enjoyed much the same and for all the same reasons.

Australia’s suicidal obsession with heavily subsidised and chaotically intermittent wind and solar is delivering precisely what this site has been predicting for the best part of the decade. No surprises there.

Wholesale power prices are surging out of control and major energy users are simply being chopped from the grid when wind and/or solar output hits the floor. And this is just the beginning.

For some horrifying numbers, we’ll head to the team from Jo Nova.

Mayhem on the Australian Grid continues — Record prices, factory shutdowns, emergency warnings
Jo…

When the actor Thomas Hulce was preparing to play the film role that defined him, “Amadeus,” he read about Mozart, but he truly studied the tennis star of the day, John McEnroe. Who better to model a precocious brat of a composer on than the player the world nicknamed “SuperBrat?”

“I’m a vulgar man,” Hulce’s Mozart admits in the film, “I assure you my music is not.”

The McEnroe analogy is almost too obvious.

When filmmaker Julien Faraut was plumbing the archives of French sport for a documentary about Gil de Kermadec, the government cinematographer charged with capturing close-up footage of every year’s French Open Tennis Championships in the ’70s and ’80s, he found reels of every great players of the era — Borg, Vilas, Connors and Lendl. And he found reel upon reel of John McEnroe.

Kermadec was putting together instructional films out of this footage, and…

In the years since William Klein’s intimate “all access” tennis documentary “The French” came out, it’s been somewhat displaced as the definitive statement on that glorious era in tennis — the late’70s through the mid-’80s.

“John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection” (2018) is a genre-best dissection of tennis, one player’s game and his psyche during McEnroe’s years attempting “perfection” at Roland Garros Stadium outside of Paris, a movie assembled thanks to an archivist’s obsessive examination of the hours and hours of footage that the French shot of McEnroe’s matches there.

But in 1981, photographer and filmmaker William Klein (“Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee”) was granted the sort of access sports rarely permits today. “The French” allowed him into their tourney, behind the scenes, in the alley with the ballgirls and ballboys, in the locker rooms with the players and in the various courts of the stadium…

By Dr. Kelvin Kemm ~

The first two decades of the 21st Century will go down in history as a time of amazing world confusion about energy supplies, particularly electricity.

This is all due to electricity planning being done too much at a political policy level, and not by engineers and scientists. This in turn was linked to an inordinate fear of supposed man-induced climate change linked to fossil fuels, primarily driven by extreme green activist groups. Sadly, much scientific logic was trampled under the feet of street demonstrators, clamoring for Mother Nature’s natural energy: wind and solar.

The result has been soaring electricity prices in many countries, and power shortages leading to blackouts, resulting in major economic and social upheaval.

There has also been significant interference from European countries in the affairs of African and other countries around the world, insisting that developing countries adapt their energy usage…

If wind power is so ‘cheap’, then why is it that retail power prices continue to rocket in every country attempting to run on breezes?

There are, as this site has pointed out over the last decade, myriad reasons, starting with the fact that wind power can only be delivered as and when Mother Nature feels obliged. Britain, as with much of Western Europe, was the victim of the Big Calm that struck in September last year and lasted for months.

Add in the exorbitant cost of using gas and diesel to generate power whenever calm weather sets in; the additional transmission and network costs of bringing power produced occasionally from remote locations; and the billions in subsidies paid to wind power generators all paid for by power consumers and/or taxpayers, and you’re well on your way to an explanation as to why wind power is so punishingly expensive.

Andrew…

It was a simple question about housing and Point of Order listened closely to Housing Minister Megan Woods’ response.

Alas, we are none the wiser on one part of the question, about advice on how long it will take to get the waiting list down to around 5844. But – if we have done our sums correctly – we can tell readers there has been a hefty increase in the numbers of people on the state housing waiting list over the past five years.

We took a crack at working this out after Parliamentary questions were put by National MP Chris Bishop to the Associate Minister of Housing (Public Housing), who presumably was not in Parliament at the time.  Megan Woods did the answering.

Bishop asked:

“How many people are on the State housing waitlist now compared to September 2017, and has she received advice on when that number will…

A week is a long time in politics, so said Harold Wilson.

One week ago the police were saying they were sufficiently resourced and in control.

One week ago the Police Minister Potato Williams, was, on her own assessment, on top of her game.

One week ago New Zealand was a nation at peace with crime under good management of Commissione Coster so any talk of Labour Being “soft on Crime” only mere baseless denigration by misogynistic dog whistling of males unable to accept a “Female Minister”

Forward seven days and suddenly there is a need for an additional six hundred million dollars to be spent over four years?

The Government will spend an extra $562m on police over the next four years – promising to keep a ratio of one cop for every 480 people.
It comes as ramraids have gained significant national media attention, despite an overall drop…

As I’ve written before, our fight to restrain the size and scope of government will be severely hamstrung – perhaps even mortally wounded – if the crowd in Washington ever succeeds in getting a value-added tax as a new source of revenue.

This is why many statists are pushing so hard for the VAT. It’s a money machine for big government.

But what makes this battle especially frustrating is that there are some otherwise sensible people who are on the wrong side of the issue. I was stunned, for instance, when Rand Paul and Ted Cruz included VATs as part of their presidential tax plans.

And I’ve been less surprised, but still disappointed, to find support for a VAT from people such as Tom Dolan, Greg Mankiw, and Paul Ryan, as well as Kevin Williamson, Josh Barro, and Andrew Stuttaford. And I wrote…

As part of my (reality-based) opposition to a value-added tax, I testified to the Ways & Means Committee back in 2011.

My primary argument against the VAT is that it would enable a bigger burden of government spending.

I frequently share this chart, for instance, that shows that the nations in Western Europe were quite similar to the United States back in the 1960s, with government budgets that consumed about 30 percent of economic output.

That was before they enacted VATs.

But once European politicians got that new source of revenue, the spending burden diverged, with the welfare state becoming a much larger burden in Western Europe than in the United States.

In other words, the VAT was a money machine for big government.

That argument is just as accurate today as it was back in 2011.

For today’s column, however, I want to…