Utopia, you are standing in it!

There are some issues – such as class-warfare tax rates and the minimum wage – where intelligent people on the left will privately admit being wrong (or at least they will admit adverse consequences).

Another example is rent control.

Indeed, it’s so obvious that imposing price controls on housing will create shortages that some folks on the left even admit publicly that it’s a bad idea.

Yet leftist politicians are drawn to the policy for the simple reason that renters outnumber landlords.

Simply stated, they’re willing to impose considerable damage so long as they can grab a few extra votes.

Let’s look at some evidence about the folly of rent control, and we’ll start with a hot-off-the-presses column by Ryan Mills for National Review.

Democratic leaders in Minnesota’s capital city are scrambling for solutions after developers put several large projects on hold across St. Paul in the wake…

One of the (many) disillusioning aspects of the Covid response of the New Zealand government (politicians and public service) has been the apparent total absence of any use of cost-benefit analysis techniques to help inform thinking about policy responses. No cost-benefit analysis on any aspect of the policy response has ever been published (or hinted at), on the couple of occasions I’ve OIAed any such analysis (just to be sure) agencies have been quick to deny any such analysis exists, and when one independent agency (the Productivity Commission) did do a little exercise along these lines at one point last year it was shunned as almost “unclean”. And if there had been any slight excuse early last year about “no time” – not convincing even then – officials have had 22 months now to get toolkits in place. But they (and their political masters) seem to prefer seat-of-the-pants thinking, all…

Diagram showing solid-body rotation of the Earth with respect to a stationary spin axis due to true polar wander. [Credit: Wikipedia] The researchers say their finding ‘challenges the notion that the spin axis has been largely stable over the past 100 million years.’
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We know that true polar wander (TPW) can occasionally tilt whole planets and moons relative to their axes, but it’s not entirely clear just how often this has happened to Earth, says ScienceAlert.

Now a new study presents evidence of one such tilting event that occurred around 84 million years ago – when dinosaurs still walked the Earth.

Researchers analyzed limestone samples from Italy, dating back to the Late Cretaceous period (100.5 to 65.5 million years ago), looking for evidence of shifts in the magnetic record that would point towards an occurrence of TPW.

Bacteria fossils trapped in the rock, forming chains of…

Charles, Prince of Wales (Charles Philip Arthur George; born November 14, 1948), is the heir apparent to the British throne as the eldest son of Queen Elizabeth II.

Charles was born in Buckingham Palace on November 14, 1948, during the reign of his maternal grandfather King George VI, as the first child of Princess Elizabeth, Duchess of Edinburgh, and Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. He was baptised there by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, on December 15, 1948.

The death of his grandfather and the accession of his mother as Queen Elizabeth II in 1952 made Charles the heir apparent. As the monarch’s eldest son, he automatically inherited the titles Duke of Cornwall, Duke of Rothesay, Earl of Carrick, Baron of Renfrew, Lord of the Isles, and Prince and Great Steward of Scotland. Charles attended his mother’s coronation at Westminster Abbey on June 2, 1953.

Prince Charles was created Prince…

If the Climate Industrial Complex gets its way, kiss goodbye to reliable and affordable energy. The apparent answer all our woes is more of the same: endless subsidies to hopelessly chaotic wind and solar, with even greater subsidies to pie-in-the-sky ‘green’ hydrogen and insanely expensive giant lithium batteries.

If you’re not already suffering the consequences of policies that favour meaningless weather-dependent wind and solar over meaningful coal, gas and nuclear power generation systems, you soon will be. Brits, Germans, Californians and South Australians already know what it is to suffer crippling power prices and unreliable supplies.

After the climate cult jamboree in Glasgow, crony capitalists and rent-seekers have zeroed in on net-zero emissions targets as the next great opportunity for government-mandated racketeering.

Which means this is as good as time as any to get a grip on what net-zero madness will cost us all.

Aynsley Kellow is Professor Emeritus of…

The French already get more than 70% of their power from nuclear plants. Now, thanks to a massive month-long wind power output collapse, that proportion is destined to increase.

Following Europe’s ‘disastrous’ wind drought – that saw wind power output plummet throughout most of September and into October, and early November – the need for reliable power was never more keenly felt.

Eager to avoid being locked into Russian gas supplies, like his German neighbours, French President, Emmanuel Macron has decided to reverse France’s policy of winding down its nuclear power generation fleet in favour of wind and solar, backed up with costly to run gas-fired plants.

Channelling the little Corsican, Napoleon’s thirst for French independence, Macron has given a resounding ‘oui’ to nuclear power, with plans to commence construction of new nuclear plants, ASAP. Much to the horror of the hard-green-left. Here’s a short report from Sky News’…

Norway’s Supreme Court has stripped two wind farms of their operating licenses for wrecking the lives of Sami reindeer herders.

Life in the frozen North was never meant to be easy – sub-zero temperatures and stark isolation are tough enough, but Sami reindeer herders have drawn the line at the adverse effect the visual and auditory cacophony these things generate has on their livestock.

Giant 260m turbines with 60m blades generate shadow flicker and pulsing, thumping low-frequency noise – a well-known source of disturbance for grazing (and other) animals; reindeer apparently no exception.

For centuries, the nomadic Sami have herded their reindeer across northern Europe’s frozen tundra, ranging across the north of Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Kola Peninsula. And have done so untouched by industry and urbanization. Until now.

Over the last decade or so, hundreds of these things have been speared across their grazing rangelands.

Not afraid…

As king, George II exercised little control over British domestic policy, which was largely controlled by the Parliament of Great Britain. As Elector of Hanover, he spent twelve summers in Hanover, where he had more direct control over government policy. He had a difficult relationship with his eldest son, Frederick Louis, the Prince of Wales, who supported the parliamentary opposition.

When George visited Hanover in the summers of 1729, 1732 and 1735, he left his wife to chair the regency council in Britain rather than his son. Meanwhile, rivalry between George II and his brother-in-law and first cousin Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia led to tension along the Prussian–Hanoverian border, which eventually culminated in the mobilization of troops in the border zone and suggestions of a duel between the two kings.

Negotiations for a marriage between the Prince of Wales and Friedrich Wilhelm’s daughter Wilhelmine dragged on for years but…

As king, George II exercised little control over British domestic policy, which was largely controlled by the Parliament of Great Britain. As Elector of Hanover, he spent twelve summers in Hanover, where he had more direct control over government policy. He had a difficult relationship with his eldest son, Frederick Louis, the Prince of Wales, who supported the parliamentary opposition.

When George visited Hanover in the summers of 1729, 1732 and 1735, he left his wife to chair the regency council in Britain rather than his son. Meanwhile, rivalry between George II and his brother-in-law and first cousin Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia led to tension along the Prussian–Hanoverian border, which eventually culminated in the mobilization of troops in the border zone and suggestions of a duel between the two kings.

Negotiations for a marriage between the Prince of Wales and Friedrich Wilhelm’s daughter Wilhelmine dragged on for years but…