Utopia, you are standing in it!

On Saturday I did a guest lecture to the Master of Applied Finance course at Victoria University. Martien Lubberink, who runs the course, invited me along to talk to the students about the Reserve Bank’s monetary policy this year (as it happens, most years for the best part of two decades I used to do a lecture to this same course articulating and championing the monetary policy framework and the Bank’s conduct of policy).

There wasn’t a great deal in the lecture that hasn’t already been covered in one or (many) more posts over the course of the year, but if anyone is interested here are the slides I used

Activity over substance VUW presentation 12 Dec 2020

and this is the story I was trying to tell

Notes for VUW MAF lecture on 2020 mon pol 12 Dec 2020

For the most part, I tried to look at what…

Stuff delivered another woke-up call to its readers this morning with a report which presses Pharmac to hire more Maori.

There’s nothing in the article to convincingly explain how current staff ratios adversely affect Pharmac’s job of buying medicines or how they actually undermine the nation’s health.

The drug-purchasing agency’s “appalling” shortcomings instead relate to concerns about cultural inadequacies, systemic racism and a failure to meet Treaty of Waitangi obligations.

The on-line report is accompanied by a video of the PM facing questions about the government’s healthcare policy and its funding of Pharmac.

She will be used to such questioning.  Pharmac is the constant target of grievances about its medicine-buying priorities and of petitioners who quickly muster popular support for demands that certain drugs be bought (typically at great cost) to deal with one life-sapping illness or another.

This time Stuff’s Katarina Williams has discovered –

Just three of Pharmac

Millions of Chinese are learning just how important coal-fired power is to their health, safety and comfort, thanks to Beijing’s ban on Australian coal imports.

High-quality Australian coal has helped fuel China’s miraculous industrial growth over the last generation. But the escalation of a trade spat between the PRC and the Morrison led Federal Government over the original source of the coronavirus has resulted in coal being added to a growing list of Australian exports which are no longer welcome in the Middle Kingdom.

Despite claims by wind and solar acolytes that China is well on its way to an all renewables powered future, apparently, the black stuff still matters.

China shivers as coal ban sparks electricity shortages
The Australian
Will Glasgow
18 December 2020

Electricity shortages are worsening across China, forcing tens of millions of residents in large cities to ration heating, raising questions about how long Xi Jinping…

Solar power complex in California [USA. Gov – BLM – Bureau of Land Management]
Welcome to the inglorious green revolution, where the lives of ageing gas power plants have to be extended and various other mini ‘solutions’, some relying on equipment owned by individual citizens, have to be adopted in a frantic effort to keep the lights on. Of course none of this was necessary before renewables were deemed to be the future of electricity supply, in the vain hope of altering the climate. What’s next if these measures are not enough?
– – –
Sometime next summer, there’s a decent chance a heat wave will bake the American West, and California’s power grid will again be stretched to its limits, says TechXplore.

As the sun sets, solar panels will start generating less electricity even as temperatures remain high.

Power plants that burn natural gas will fire up as…

The Setting is the Enemy

The peculiarities of the Finnish theater of war that caused the greatest combat difficulties were the absolute lack of roads and the close character of the terrain which, with its vest zone of virgin forests, is so very different from the European landscape in latitudes farther south. The Karelian woods are under no forestry management such as is commonly applied in central Europe. The primeval forest is the result of natural reseeding. Old and young stands of trees are intermingled and frequently give rise to impenetrable thickets. This boundless forest is virtually unexplored. Throughout the trackless, desolate region, deepest solitude and deathly silence reign supreme. Lakes, swamps, moors, and loose rock are characteristic of the Karelian landscape. Although on the Karelian Isthmus (the corridor between the Gulf of Finland and Lake Lagoda) and in the area between Lake Lagoda and Lake Onega the woods in…

It’s at least mildly intriguing to consider how international news outlets can be so eager to recite prominent myths about the American media.

Johnson: Not watching Cronkite

A few months back, for example, the Guardian of London invoked the heroic-journalist myth of Watergate, declaring that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein “brought down” Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency “with their reporting on Watergate nearly a half-century ago.”

Toronto’s Globe and Mail newspaper has been known to invoke the mythical “Cronkite Moment” to underscore how, in a splintered media environment, no single television anchor can project ousize influence. Not that Walter Cronkite, the CBS News anchorman, actually did so in editorializing about the Vietnam War — the occasion in late February 1968 that gave rise to what has become a hoary media myth.

Just the other day, La Razón, a newspaper in Madrid, conjured the “Cronkite Moment” in

The story of the Tudor dynasty has been told from many different angles. Each monarch has been explored through lenses like social and political history numerous times. However, there is a new approach that is coming into the forefront of historical research and that is the focus on the medical history of the Tudors. Each Tudor monarch, from Henry VII to Elizabeth I, had some sort of bout with illness that would drastically alter the course of their reigns and the future of the dynasty. In Sylvia Barbara Soberton’s latest book, “Medical Downfall of the Tudors: Sex, Reproduction and Succession”, she explores the more intimate aspects of this turbulent dynasty to discover the truth about why they fell.

I would like to thank Sylvia Barbara Soberton for sending me a copy of her latest book. I have talked to Sylvia in the past and I have hosted her on my…