Utopia, you are standing in it!

Believe that we can run on nothing but sunshine and breezes, then you’ll believe anything.

No country has ever run itself on wind and solar power, alone. No country ever will. Even mythical mega-batteries can’t change that equation.

The truly delusional belief that we can eradicate our reliance upon fossil fuels of all descriptions, kill off nuclear power plants and rely exclusively on wind and solar.

Then, the unhinged zealots tell us, we can totally ‘electrify’ our economies, with tales about all-electric households and all-electric vehicles doing away with the need for the gas, petrol and diesel that presently fuel our safe and comfortable lifestyles.

As the adage has it, if it sounds too good to be true, it surely is.

Ben Pile sorts energy fact from ideological fantasy, below.

The green industrial revolution is a lie
Spiked Online
Ben Pile
22 February 2022

The Office for National Statistics (ONS)…

Dr. Menzie Chinn of Wisconsin-Madison hypothesizes that Democrats may have opposed FTAs not because they have protectionist sentiments, but because they prefer multilateralism:

In the wake of the midterm elections, and the failure to renew Vietnamese PNTR, there has been a lot of talk about how more protectionist Democratic lawmakers are…While the rhetoric from some quarters of the Democratic Party is more protectionist than from the Republican Party, I think the story is a little more complicated than initially appears to be the case, although I will not claim to have the answer to the question…

[I]t’s wrong to equate all FTAs with freer trade. Indeed, the proliferation of FTAs poses a number of well-known problems for the global economy…

So, just because American business interests favor these pacts, while labor often opposes, it’s not clear free trade is enhanced by such initiatives; in other words, one should not confuse…

It’s likely been more than a decade since a Trade Diversion blog post actually mentioned trade creation and trade diversion. Having missed numerous opportunities in recent years, I won’t pass up commenting on the following paragraph in Noah Smith’s recent post about experts and public policy:

Nor was this the only form of deception that economists employed in defense of free trade. Economists have known for many decades that some countries as a whole can be hurt by free trade. If a multilateral trade agreement — like the WTO, for example — admits new member countries, existing countries who compete directly with the newcomer nations can become poorer. This is called “trade diversion”, and it follows directly from the same simple classical economic theories of comparative advantage that economists typically use to justify free trade.

That paragraph is neither the most important nor most interesting part of his recent…

David Ricardo:

Under a system of perfectly free commerce, each country naturally devotes its capital and labour to such employments as are most beneficial to each. This pursuit of individual advantage is admirably connected with the universal good of the whole… It is this principle which determines that wine shall be made in France and Portugal, that corn shall be grown in America and Poland, and that hardware and other goods shall be manufactured in England…

If Portugal had no commercial connexion with other countries, instead of employing a great part of her capital and industry in the production of wines, with which she purchases for her own use the cloth and hardware of other countries, she would be obliged to devote a part of that capital to the manufacture of those commodities, which she would thus obtain probably inferior in quality as well as quantity.

The quantity of…

Ivan IV Vasilyevich (August 25, 1530 – March 28, 1584), commonly known in English as Ivan the Terrible, “Ivan the Formidable” or “Ivan the Fearsome” was the Grand Prince of Moscow from 1533 to 1547 and the first Moscow ruler to be crownedTsar of all Russia from 1547 to 1584.

Ivan was the first Moscow ruler born after its independence.

Early life

Ivan was the first son of Grand Prince Vasili III of Moscow and his second wife, Elena Glinskaya, Elena was born in 1510 as the daughter of Prince Vasili Lvovich Glinsky (d. 1515), a member of a Lipka Tatar clan claiming descent from the Mongol ruler Mamai, and Serbian Princess Ana Jakšić from the Jakšić noble family.

Elena’s mother was a Serbian princess and her father’s family, the Glinski clan (nobles based in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania), claimed descent both from Orthodox Hungarian nobles and the Mongol…

We have reached an interesting point in this series. Although, as we shall see, the House of Stuart will have its difficult times on and off the thrones of England and Scotland, we have reached a period of relative stability as far as legal successions are concerned. There will be a few more crises for the throne but we will not see civil wars and usurpations like we have had in the past. In the next section of this topic we will see the rise of Parliament and the battle with the Crown over the power within the government. I will examine how this conflict actually helped stabilize the Crown and the succession to the throne.

James I-VI, King of England and King of Scots (when still only King of Scots) married Princess Anne of Denmark in 1589, the daughter of King Frederik II of Denmark and Norway and his wife…

Charles I (November 19, 1600 – January 30, 1649) was King of England, Scotland, and Ireland from 27 March 1625 until his execution in 1649. He was born into the House of Stuart as the second son of King James VI of Scotland and Anne of Denmark and King Frederik II of Denmark and Norway and Sophie of Mecklenburg-Güstrow.

James VI was the first cousin twice removed of Queen Elizabeth I of England and Ireland, and when she died childless in March of 1603, he became King of England and Ireland as James I. Charles was a weak and sickly infant, and while his parents and older siblings left for England in April and early June that year, due to his fragile health, he remained in Scotland with his father’s friend Lord Fyvie, appointed as his guardian.

By 1604, when Charles was three-and-a-half, he was able to walk the length…

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…