Utopia, you are standing in it!

Americans fight – which is the only way to beat Big Wind and Big Solar when they’re threatening anyone’s backyard.

Over the last few years, American communities have banded together, got organised and lawyered up. The result is an enviable string of victories by which pro-community and pro-reliable energy groups have defeated the crony capitalists and subsidy seeking carpetbaggers hoping to use their victims’ taxes to help them destroy the fabric of American rural life.

Increasing opposition to having their landscape carpeted in 600-700 foot high wind turbines and endless seas of solar panels was inevitable.

If you only subscribe to the ‘renewables will save us’ mob however, you’d believe that all is well and there is no limit to the number of these things or solar panels that the American heartland will take. Well, that’s the propaganda from RE GHQ, anyway.

Robert Bryce has been following the backlash against…

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin
736 pages
Alfred A. Knopf
Published: April 2005

“American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin was published in 2005 and earned the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Bird is a journalist and author who has written several books including a recent biography of Jimmy Carter. Sherwin was a professor of history until his death in 2021.

Fascinated by the atomic age and nuclear proliferation, Sherwin began working on this book in the late 1970s…and eventually asked Bird for assistance bringing the project to fruition. Built on a foundation of extraordinary research, the authors combed through thousands of once-classified documents, conducted more than 100 interviews and reconstructed seemingly contradictory historical threads in order to fully understand how Oppenheimer’s story unfolded.

The resulting 591-page…

Sam Houston
by James L. Haley
544 pages
University of Oklahoma Press
Published: April 2002

James Haley’s 2002 biography “Sam Houston” examines the life of a fascinating figure in early Texas-American history. Haley is the author of 14 books, including both fiction and non-fiction. Among his recent publications are a history of Hawaii and a biography of Jack London.

Readers familiar with Texas history (or America’s westward expansion more generally) are likely to recognize Sam Houston (1793-1863). He left home as a teen to live with a tribe of Cherokee Indians – for three years. Later he managed Texas’s war for independence, was President of the Republic of Texas, served as a U.S. Senator and, finally, was elected governor.

His personal life was no less exciting. He was thrice married and his final bride – 26 years his junior – bore him eight children. If Houston himself…

Al Gore springs to mind when it comes to woke billionaires determined to wreck your living standards, while improving their very own.

But there are plenty of other well-connected rent-seekers around the globe with similar insidious ambitions.

As Australia blunders its way towards another Federal Election in May, a gaggle of particularly slimy crony capitalists have emerged, ready willing and able to steal your money and use it to destroy your way of life.

Whether it’s subsidies for overpriced all-electric vehicles – that will struggle to carry you between Australia’s capital cities without being forced to stop for an overnight recharge – or ensuring even more endless subsidies for wind turbines, solar panels and mega-batteries, these man-bunned corporate hipsters know a good scam, when they see one.

Characters like Mike Cannon-Brookes (pictured above), who wouldn’t know the difference between a megawatt and Megadeth, have weighed into Australia’s renewables-driven pricing and…

Today, I am pleased to welcome Carol McGrath to the blog to discuss Tudor hygiene as part of the Sex and Sexuality in Tudor England blog tour. I would like to thank Carol McGrath and Pen and Sword Books for allowing me to be part of this tour.

Did Tudors smell whiffy? Did they care about personal hygiene? It may surprise you that the Tudors cared about cleanliness despite the fact many did not bathe regularly. Henry VIII frequently took baths and had a new bathhouse constructed at Hampton Court for his personal use and a steam bath at Richmond Palace. This new bath was made of wood but lined with a linen sheet to protect his posterior from catching splinters. It was a marvellous feat of Tudor engineering and allowed water to flow into it from a tap fed by a lead pipe bringing water from a spring over…

Princess Alice of Battenberg (February 25, 1885 – December 5, 1969) was the mother of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and mother-in-law of Queen Elizabeth II.

Alice was born in the Tapestry Room at Windsor Castle in Berkshire in the presence of her great-grandmother, Queen Victoria. She was the eldest child of Prince Louis of Battenberg and his wife, Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine.

Her mother was the eldest daughter of Ludwig IV, Grand Duke of Hesse and by Rhine, and Princess Alice of the United Kingdom, Queen Victoria’s second daughter. Her father was the eldest son of Prince Alexander of Hesse and by Rhine through his morganatic marriage to Countess Julia Hauke, who was created Princess of Battenberg in 1858 by Ludwig III, Grand Duke of Hesse and by Rhine.

Alice’s three younger siblings, Louise, George, and Louis, later became Queen of Sweden, Marquess of Milford Haven…

Russia launched a full invasion of Ukraine last night. Most of the discussion I’ve seen has naturally focused on the fighting itself- what is happening, what is likely to happen, how did it come to this.

Since there are plenty of better sources to follow about that, I’ll simply offer a few observations on the economics of the conflict:

1. Russia is not only more than 3 times as populous as Ukraine, it also more than twice as well off on a per-capita basis. This means its overall economy is more than 6 times the size of Ukraine’s. This gap has been growing since the fall of the Soviet Union, as Russia’s per-capita GDP growth has been much stronger, while its population has shrunk much less than Ukraine’s. Putting this together, Ukraine’s measured real GDP is actually smaller than it was in 1990, while Russia’s is larger.

2. Russia’s much larger…

Prince George Frederick Ernest Albert was distinct in nearly every way from his wayward, philandering father. He was a slim man –shy, and abstemious– and he often wore the same elegant clothes to public events (despising most newfangled trends). Moral strength was paramount for George. A former navy man, Prince George was accustomed to unchanging daily routines and the peace of mind that came with country life. He was a luddite who refused to be driven in a car above 30 miles an hour and he despised trains and airplanes, but loved hunting and stamp collecting. In all things, he was an orderly and disciplined man with an unassuming nature.

In 1892, Prince George’s erratic and apparently perverted older brother Eddy died and thus George found himself in the unexpected position of inheriting the crown’s succession. He quickly left the Navy and began preparations to one day become king. Unlike…

With the magnitude of the renewable energy-driven disaster playing out in Europe hard to ignore, it seems incredible that American Green New Deal Democrats remain fixated on chaotically intermittent wind and solar. And yet, they show no signs of relenting on their determined path to inevitable energy insecurity; an approach that borders on National treachery.

Call it a cult, call it good old-fashioned lunacy, whichever way you slice it becomes hard to explain, let alone justify, policies quite obviously designed to drive American enterprise into the ground.

The only winners are, of course, the rent-seekers and crony capitalists who stand to profit from an endless stream of subsidies directed to the owners of bird-mincing turbines and weather-prone solar panels.

Paul Driessen focuses on Virginia as the perfect example of the clear and present danger subsidised wind and solar represent to America’s energy security.

Assessing Virginia’s Hidden Wind and Solar Costs

I wasn’t going to write anything here today, but I couldn’t let the final question and answer from this morning’s Finance and Expenditure Committee hearing on the Monetary Policy Statement go without record and comment.

Simon Bridges, National’s FInance spokesman, asked the Governor whether the current prohibition – agreed between the Governor, the Board and the Minister – on any (external) MPC member having any active, engaged (present or future) analytical/research interest in monetary policy was not “frankly simply daft”, and did it not “ruin the ability to have thought diversity”.

He might well have added, but time was short, “and without precedent anywhere else in the advanced world” (or quite probably in most of the less-advanced world). Ben Bernanke would be disqualified, Lars Svensson would be out, and one could run a very long list of the sort of people who’ve served with distinction on the MPCs of other…

Last week the Supreme Court rendered the much-awaited judgment in R (PRCBC and O (by her litigation friend AO)) v Secretary of State for the Home Department

(‘PRCBC’), upholding the capacity for the government to set the fees as it pleases (subject to approval by both Houses of Parliament) for citizenship applications under Section 1(4) of the British Nationality Act 1981 (‘the 1981 Act’), pursuant to Section 68 of the Immigration Act 2014 (‘the 2014 Act’). The Supreme Court appears to have taken an even more rigid stance – and with potential far-reaching implications – on the question of the legality of the Fees Order, by which the citizenship application fees are set, than the Court of Appeal, whose decision has already been critically analysed in an excellentposton this blog in May last year. In this respect, the decision of the Supreme Court is striking from more than…

2021 was the year when the inherent unreliability of wind and solar revealed how everything depends upon reliable and affordable power supplies.

The wind and solar ‘industries’ talk a big game; and in their wilder moments even claim to be capable of replacing conventional coal, gas and nuclear generators, altogether. Europe’s months-long wind drought in the last half of 2021 demonstrated otherwise. And the peculiar disappearance of solar power, every day is readily explained by that phenomenon known as “sunset”.

The mega-batteries touted as a solution are nothing but an expensive pipe dream.

Which is why the French, among others, are now talking about nuclear power as if it was their very first love.

In short, the deliberate destruction of reliable and affordable power supplies has put their critical significance front and centre.

Energy is the most important issue in the world
Spectator
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
24 January…