Utopia, you are standing in it!

Here’s another multi-passport challenge for Foreign Minister Winston Peters. The US is proposing former NZ businessman Chris Liddell as the next director-general of the Paris-based OECD, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The current DG, Angela Guria, has been in the job since 2006. There’s word he wants yet another term. He is a Mexican diplomat and former politician and his term ends this year.

Liddell is head of policy coordination at the White House. He has held high rank in Microsoft and General Motors and joined President Donald Trump at the beginning of his presidency.

What worries Wellington is that he retains joint US and NZ citizenship.

(Lawrence Peter Berra ….”Yogi”)

Growing up in Brooklyn, NY I had had ample opportunity to sit in the bleachers in the old Yankee Stadium or watch the “Bronx Bombers” on WPIX.  If I could not watch the team in person or watch them on television, I could listen to my Sony transistor radio and learn of the exploits of my heroes.   The names of the players are embedded in my memory; Mantle, Ford, Skowron, Richardson, Kubek and of course Berra.  The Yankee catcher, sometimes outfielder was a sight to behold.  His awkward swing that paid no attention to the strike zone or his bowl legged stride did not detract from his baseball grace.  Be it jumping into Don Larsen’s arms following the 1956 World Series perfect game or turning his back on Bill Mazeroski’s game winning homerun to win the 1960 World Series, Berra always stood out as a leader…

(Donald Trump and Fred Trump in December, 1987.)

As a retired educator last Fall, I taught a Psychohistory course for Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Granite State College in New Hampshire.  One of my topics was an analysis of Donald Trump exploring personality issues trying to determine what lay behind his decision making and behavior.  After conducting my research what emerged is the picture of a deeply flawed individual and a fifty-slide power point.  As a fellow New Yorker, I have watched Trump for decades and I wondered how my analysis measured up to the views of psychology professionals.  After reading Mary L. Trump’s new book, TOO MUCH AND NEVER ENOUGH: HOW MY FAMILY CREATED THE WORLD’S MOST DANGEROUS MAN I found that my perspective and insights dovetailed nicely  with those of Trump’s niece.

It is clear from Mary Trump’s title that her conclusions reached in analyzing her uncle’s behavior…

Back in 2017, the Center for Freedom and Prosperity released this video, which shows that free markets and small government are the best recipe for poor nations that want to become rich nations.

The CF&P video was motivated in part by a need to debunk international bureaucracies such as the OECD and IMF, which abandoned the “Washington Consensus” for economic liberalization and instead have been making the odd argument that prosperity can be achieved with higher taxes and a bigger burden of government spending.

Needless to say, neither of these international organizations has bothered to explain how such dirigiste policies produce more growth.

But the politicians who fund and control such bureaucracies doubtlessly appreciate the message.

You probably won’t be surprised that the United Nations also is on the wrong side of this issue.

A recent report from the New York City-based group regurgitates the anti-market…

Credit: OH 237 @ Wikipedia
Natural climate variability similar to what we see today has been going on for thousands, if not millions of years, whether ‘greenhouse gas’ theorists moaning about modern human activities like it or not.
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The Roman Empire coincided with warmest period of the last 2,000 years in the Med, says The GWPF.

The Mediterranean Sea was 3.6°F (2°C) hotter during the Roman Empire than other average temperatures at the time, a new study claims.

The Empire coincided with a 500-year period, from AD 1 to AD 500, that was the warmest period of the last 2,000 years in the almost completely land-locked sea.

by Judith Curry

Two important new books to discuss.

Queen Mary I of Scotland (December 8, 1542 – February 8, 1587), reigned over Scotland from December 14, 1542 to July 24, 1567.

Mary, the only surviving legitimate child of King James V of Scotland, was six days old when her father died and she acceded to the throne. She spent most of her childhood in France while Scotland was ruled by regents, and in 1558, she married the Dauphin of France, François. Mary was queen consort of France from the accession of her husband as King François II of France in 1559 until his death in December 1560. Widowed, Mary returned to Scotland, arriving in Leith on August 19, 1561. Four years later, she married her half-cousin, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, and in June 1566 they had a son, James.

Mary I, Queen of Scotland

In February 1567, Darnley’s residence was destroyed by an explosion, and he was found…

Australia’s obscenely generous subsidies and Feed-in-Tariffs for domestic solar resulted in millions of households blanketed in panels. The consequences for the power grid have been diabolical; its management is now a daily nightmare.

Western Australia’s fixation with heavily subsidised solar power is threatening to destroy its once wholly reliable electricity grid, thanks to its sporadic and unreliable delivery.

In October last year, Alice Springs (in Australia’s Red Centre) suffered a widespread blackout that lasted for around nine hours, thanks to a little pesky cloud cover that interfered with the output from its thousands of solar panels, which are meant to provide a substantial proportion of the power needed to run the outback town of around 29,000 inhabitants.

The NT government’s spin doctors went into damage control, with a waffling response that avoided any reference to solar panels being the (obvious) culprits, as the ABC dutifully reported:

The outage was…

The wind power cult have no difficulty in justifying the destruction of pristine landscapes; the dismemberment of once cohesive, rural communities; the creation of toxic waste lands in China (where the rare earths essential to wind turbines are processed); power prices that punish the poorest and most vulnerable in society; and barely bat an eyelid at the slaughter of millions upon millions of birds and bats, across the globe.

In the US, a recent study has exposed the fact that the number of bats belted into oblivion by these things is magnitudes greater than originally estimated by wind industry controlled surveys.

Instead of a mere 2 to 3 million critters being annihilated annually, it appears that the numbers of bats killed by wind turbines in the USA may well be somewhere north of 20 million, every single year.

‘Green’ Carnage Study: In 2019 US Wind Turbines Killed…