Utopia, you are standing in it!

World’s Biggest Battery: Hornsdale, South Australia

The French owners of the world’s biggest battery are being sued for simply failing to deliver the goods. When Elon Musk’s 150MW battery was hooked up to the South Australian grid, the wind and solar cult rejoiced. The meme had it that – with a few thousand more just like it, we’d soon all be running on nothing more than sunshine and breezes. Well, that was the propaganda pitch, anyway.

Back in 2017, Reefer-smoking Tesla tycoon, Elon Musk convinced South Australians to spend $150 million on a battery that could power the state for all of four minutes. Now that’s salesmanship! Even as a piece of political propaganda, it failed: then Labor Premier, Jay Weatherill touted Musk’s battery as the panacea to his state’s power woes, as he tried to cling to power in March 2018. He was duly ditched. But, Musk’s South Australian…

A very persuasive argument against Biden’s fiscal agenda is that it makes no sense to copy the fiscal policies of European welfare states.

Indeed, I routinely share this column from January, which looks at three different measures of comparative prosperity – all of which show the United States is way ahead of nations on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

One of the three data sources is this comparison of “actual individual consumption” (AIC) in the member nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

We now have updated AIC numbers. Here’s a look at the OECD’s latest data. As you can see, people in the United States enjoy levels of consumption 50 percent above the average for developed nations.

The U.S. is even way ahead of oil-rich Norway and the tax havens of Luxembourg and Switzerland.

By the way, if you look at the OECD’s…

If the wind and solar rent-seekers destroying our power supplies know what they’re doing, it’s criminal; if they don’t, it’s still criminal. However, the penalty is not borne by them, but by you and me.

Where the premise for part-time power is said to be a looming climate ‘catastrophe’, it’s the power supply catastrophe that wind and solar are delivering on a daily basis, that should concern us most.

A burst of calm weather across Western Europe has proved the point. John Hinderaker takes a look at the slow-motion train wreck that is so-called ‘green’ energy.

Green: A Slow-Motion Train Wreck
Power Line
John Hinderaker
10 September 2021

Around the world, “green” energy is failing with consequences that soon will be catastrophic. From the U.K.: “Ireland freezes power exports to UK as energy costs rocket tenfold.”

Shockingly, if you depend on wind energy you are in trouble when the…

Chinatown (1974) Director: Roman Polanski

“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”

★★★★★

Chinatown is a Los Angeles noir murder mystery picture that comes down to us in the great American tradition of Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Chinatown was part of the extraordinary, albeit brief, era of Robert Evans productions at Paramount, which also included movies like The Godfather. Written by Robert Towne, Chinatown has often been called the greatest screenplay ever written. He later said it was inspired by a chapter in Carey McWilliams’ Southern California Country: An Island on the Land (1946) and a West magazine article on Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles. Perhaps the film is to some extent Roman Polanski’s personal reflections on the decay and decline of our civilization; this was the first Hollywood film he made after the dark and tragic events that rocked his life five years prior when his 8 months pregnant wife…

Armin Faber’s Focke-Wulf Fw 190A-3 of III/JG 2 at RAF Pembrey, June 1942.

In June 1942, Oberstleutnant Armin Faber was Gruppen-Adjutant to the commander of the III fighter Gruppe of Jagdgeschwader 2 (JG 2) based in Morlaix in Brittany. On 23 June, he was given special permission to fly a combat mission with 7th Staffel. The unit operated Focke-Wulf 190 fighters.
The FW-190 had only recently arrived with front line units at this time and its superior performance had caused the Allies so many problems that they were considering mounting a commando raid on a French airfield to capture one for evaluation.
7th Staffel was scrambled to intercept a force of six Bostons on their way back from a bombing mission; the Bostons were escorted by three Czechoslovak-manned RAF squadrons, 310 Squadron, 312 Squadron and 313 Squadron commanded by Alois Vašátko. A fight developed over the English Channel with the…

More than 12 years ago, I shared this video containing lots of data and research on the negative relationship between government spending and economic performance.

Since then, I’ve share numerous additional studies showing that bigger government dampens growth, mostly from scholars in academia.

Now it’s time for me to directly contribute to this debate.

In a study just published by the Club for Growth Foundation, co-authored with Robert O’Quinn (former Chief Economist at the Department of Labor), we estimated the likely economic impact of President Biden’s so-called Build Back Better plan to expand the welfare state.

Here are our main findings.

What’s especially noteworthy about our study is that we based our analysis on research published earlier this year by the Congressional Budget Office. In other words, a very establishment source.

And here are some excerpts from what we wrote.

President Biden has proposed to increase the burden…

One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) Director: Miloš Forman

★★★★★

Based on the 1962 novel of the same name by counterculture Beat-adjacent writer Ken Kesey, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest is an amazing film adaptation of a challenging novel. One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest is one of Jack Nicholson’s seminal movies from the 1970’s along with Five Easy Pieces(1970), Chinatown(1974), and The Shining (1980) among others. One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest swept the 1975 Academy Awards winning Best Picture, Best Director (Miloš Forman), Best Actor (Jack Nicholson), Best Actress (Louise Fletcher). There are a number of other recognizable names in the film, including Christopher Lloyd, Brad Dourif, and Danny DeVito. Czechoslovakian Director Miloš Forman built a name for himself satirizing Eastern European communism hence why he was a perfect fit for this film. His later notable films include Hair (1979), Ragtime…

Behind the coverage of David Seymour’s rise in the polls and Maori Language Week lurk inconvenient truths. Graham Adams argues journalists need to be more even-handed to maintain their credibility.

*****

IN THE HULLABALOO that followed Curia’s poll results last week, the media focused mainly on the startling fact that National’s support had collapsed to 21.3 per cent — with all its dire implications for Judith Collins continuing as the party’s leader.

Predictably, the dismal figures spawned a flurry of articles predicting a palace coup — with the rider that the mutiny could not be immediate because Level 4 lockdown prevented the party’s Auckland MPs flying to Wellington en masse to disembowel their leader in person. A coup conducted over Zoom would have been unseemly and presumably unsatisfying to those consumed with blood lust.

The fact that Act reached its highest number in any poll — at 14.9 per cent…