Utopia, you are standing in it!

The UK shut down cheap coal, refused to drill for its own gas, and failed to replace its old nuclear power stations then, when gas suddenly becomes expensive, is caught with its proverbial trousers down. So much for ‘world leading’ climate policies.
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As energy prices in Europe go through the roof, factories are beginning to shut down and food is disappearing from the shelves, say The Times & The GWPF.

Welcome to green Britain, offering a foretaste of what life will be like under Net Zero conditions – poorer, colder, hungrier – unless Government changes course.

Acute food shortages were feared last night after high gas prices forced most of Britain’s commercial production of carbon dioxide to shut down.

Emergency talks were being held between government officials and food producers, retailers and the energy industry with warnings of a “black swan event”, an extremely rare blow with unpredictable…

I have no doubt that our labour market has been tight and that core inflation has been rising (finally above the target midpoint). It won’t make that much difference in the long-run, but it is a shame the “Level 4 lockdown” didn’t come a day or two later because if it had the Reserve Bank would, appropriately enough, have raised the OCR. I also don’t have any reason to doubt that there was a lot of GDP growth in the June quarter.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t some puzzles.

According to the official data the New Zealand economy is quite a lot bigger than it was pre-Covid, Of the two quarterly measures of real GDP, one was 5.3 per cent higher in the June quarter than it had been in the December 2019 quarter and the other was 4.3 per cent higher. Average the two and the best guess…

Anyone telling you that wind turbine noise isn’t soul-destroying, has never lived with it. The plaintiffs who are pursuing $millions in damages from a Victorian wind farm operator at Bald Hills (see our post here) have been telling a Supreme Court Judge, Justice Richards all about it over the last couple of weeks. Here are a couple of reports on what one of them, John Zakula had to say about trying to live with 52 giant industrial wind turbines thumping and grinding away in his backyard, every night.

Wind farm neighbour had to sleep at the beach
Sentinel-Times
9 September 2021

SO LOUD was the roaring and constant “woosh, woosh, woosh” of the Bald Hills Wind Farm turbine blades, after they became operational in 2015, that neighbouring landowner, John Zakula, had to clear out at night, on dozens of occasions, especially during winter, and sleep in his car at…

Standard M4A2(76mm) Sherman

M4A3(76mm) Sherman

The US Army made a conscious decision in 1943: to ignore calls for rapid development of the heavy, 90mm-gun T26 (Pershing) to take on the Panthers and Tigers, and instead to mass produce the M4 – a medium tank that would do the job well enough rather than brilliantly, and at a practical cost in time, talent, treasure, and shipping weight.

Its 75mm gun and 50mm (2in) frontal armor were not good enough to take on a late Panzer head-to-head; but Sherman crews used their numbers, speed and agility to swarm round the Panthers and Tigers. The Panzer might survive long enough to kill one, maybe even two M4s; but in the meantime the rest of the platoon, working round onto its flanks, would be putting rounds into its more vulnerable sides and engine compartment from close up.

The Sherman also lent itself to adaptation…

The Godfather Part II (1974) Director: Francis Ford Coppola

“I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart…”

★★★★★

The beauty of the Godfather Part II lies in it being both a sequel –perhaps the greatest sequel in cinematic history– and yet also a prequel. The two narratives, sequel and prequel, are beautifully interwoven in a way that forces the audience to contemplate the distinct lives between the old generation of Vito Corleone and his rise from Sicilian orphan to American mafia Don, and the new generation of Michael Corleone whose reign as mafia Don is plagued by political infighting, legal crackdowns, and familial collapse.

Shortly before the original Godfather was released, a sequel was approved by Paramount and Mario Puzo began working on the script for a sequel. Throughout the film we see Francis Ford Coppola quoting himself and re-working or reimagining scenes from the first film in…

The New Zealand Herald was not alone in reporting on the discomforting results for National in the latest Curia opinion poll and the petition mounted by Maori Party leaders to have the name of this country officially changed to Aotearoa.

The first matter was headlined The National Party’s polling company has the party crashing to within six points of Act

The writer of the report beneath this headline seemed to delight in noting who had conducted this poll.  

The National Party’s historic pollster has the party’s support crashing to historic lows, while Act is on the verge of overtaking it.

A Curia poll, conducted for the Taxpayer’s Union, has National on just 21.2 per cent, with Act close behind on 14.9 per cent.

The result is only a whisker above National’s worst-ever election result, 20.93 per cent in 2002. It is the closest National and Act have ever been in…