Utopia, you are standing in it!

The Coronavirus Bill introduced by the government last week will be debated by parliament in circumstances where it is harder for both Houses to meet, scrutinise and vote than at any time in recent memory. How should parliament respond to both the legislation and the crisis that prompted it? Former Clerk of the Commons David Natzler outlines the key issues facing MPs and peers as they consider how parliament should function in the coming months.

Just as the dust is settling on the first phase of the Brexit marathon, and the Constitution Unit and others are examining the role played by Parliament over the past three years, COVID-19 presents itself wholly unexpectedly as a challenge to all the nation’s institutions. Parliament was settling in for five years of single-party majority government and it looked as if, Brexit deal aside, it would be relatively smooth sailing. Now parliament faces…

MOST OF UShave a rough map of the world in our minds that we use any time we think about places. But these mental maps aren’t necessarily reliable. In fact, many of the maps in our heads share the same errors, some of which are quite large—and surprisingly resistant to correction.

For instance, we all know thatSouth Americais south ofNorth America, of course. But you may be surprised by the fact that virtually the entire South American continent iseastof Florida. There are lots of possible reasons for geographical misconceptions like this one, says cartographer John Nelson. Mental maps are necessarily simplifications, and Nelson suspects the misplaced Americas may be partly a result of their names. After all, it’s not calledSoutheastAmerica.

Nelson’s father, who was…

Mark Thoma directs us to David Warsh on Gorton and Holmstrom’s view of the role of banking. I’ve written about this view in severalplaces. My own view of banking is very different and here is a quick summary of my key points.

The source of Gorton and Holmstrom’s errors: Taking U.S. banking history as a model

In my view Gorton and Holmstrom err by basing their view of what banking is on the pre-Fed U.S banking system. Nobody argues that the U.S. represented a “state-of-the-art” banking system in the late 19th century. In fact, in the late 19th century the U.S. banking system was still recovering from the reputational consequences of the combination of state and bank defaults in the 1840s that had led many Europeans to conclude that American institutions facilitated fraud. By the end of the 19th century, however, the U.S. did have access to…

By Anton Lang ~

This Series of Posts will show the data for wind power in Australia.

This is the Permanent link to all those Posts in that Series.

The image you see immediately below is of the Macarthur Wind Plant in Victoria Australia, and this is the largest wind plant currently in Australia. It has a Nameplate of 420MW and has 140 of those huge towers, each with a nacelle on top which contains a 3MW generator.

Macarthur Wind Plant In Victoria Australia

I have recently completed a Series of Posts for electrical power generation from every source here in Australia, and that was a collection of data for every day in one complete year of consecutive days. Now while this collection of data was done on a manual basis, there are now sites which give those same details without my having to compile them manually in such a…

The Canadian government has often treated its indigenous people horribly, including taking kids from their family and sticking them in special residential “Indian schools” where they were forbidden to use their language or learn about their culture, and where they were often horribly abused. I saw one of these schools, now closed, when I was in Kamloops last year for the Imagine No Religion conference. Hearing the story, I was horrified.

So, in an admirable effort to make up for past misdeeds, Canada has made a number of accommodations to the people of the “First Nations”, as they call them. But this time they’ve gone too far, and have failed to remove children from their homes when they should have. These children are ill with cancer, and the government endorses “traditional” methods of healing, which inevitably lead to death. The government’s failure to insist on modern medical treatment for First Nations children has…

After writing previous post, I wondered how much impact the Tesla battery of the Hornsdale Power Reserve actually has on the South Australia grid. Just looking at the numbers (the battery has a capacity of 100 MW and can deliver 129 MWh), I expected it to be rather insignificant. In the meanwhile, I came across a heated discussion on a reblog of previous post on the blog “Utopia, you are standing in it!“. That post was about the Tesla battery of the Hornsdale Power Reserve in South Australia. The discussion started with the comment that South Australia is a net exporter and after the question how long the Tesla battery would last, this suprising claim was made:

Long enough to stop potential blackouts in Melbourne because of the unreliability of their coal fired power stations! […]

THIS 1491 MAPis the best surviving map of the world as Christopher Columbus knew it as he made his first voyage across the Atlantic. In fact, Columbus likely used a copy of it in planning his journey.

The map, created by the German cartographer Henricus Martellus, was originally covered with dozens of legends and bits of descriptive text, all in Latin. Most of it has faded over the centuries.

But now researchers have used modern technology to uncover much of this previously illegible text. In the process, they’ve discovered new clues about the sources Martellus used to make his map and confirmed the huge influence it had on later…

On the Western Front: a soldier’s trench, too often became his grave.

The efforts by wind power outfits to desecrate the battlefield graves of thousands who died in France are nothing short of outrageous.

Quite rightly, historians and the relatives and descendants of those who died fighting to protect French lives and liberty are furious as a French wind power outfit literally rips up a battlefield and the final resting place for thousands of men who made the supreme sacrifice. This latest outrage follows several other proposals to do precisely the same across the battlefields of northern France.

When the guns fell silent all across the Western Front on 11 November 1918, thoughts naturally turned to the 10 million combatants who had perished in what was meant to be the war to end all wars.

Of those who were killed in action, countless thousands remain buried where they fought and fell…

Henry IV ‘s first major problem as monarch was what to do with the deposed Richard II. After an early assassination plot (the Epiphany Rising) was foiled in January 1400, Richard died in prison, probably of starvation. He was 33 years old. Though Henry is often suspected of having his predecessor murdered, there is no substantial evidence to prove that claim.

As king, Henry IV consulted with Parliament frequently, but was sometimes at odds with the members, especially over ecclesiastical matters. On Arundel’s advice, Henry IV obtained from Parliament the enactment of De heretico comburendo in 1401, which prescribed the burning of heretics, at the stake as an act done mainly to suppress the Lollard movement.

De heretico comburendo was one of the strictest religious censorship statutes ever enacted in England. In March 2, 1401 William Sawtrey became the first Lollard to be burned. This law stayed on the books…

From the Emperor’s Desk. This will be a four part series on the life of King Henry IV of England. Part I will look at his lineage and rise to the throne, Part II will examine his reign and Part III will examine his claim to the throne.

Henry IV (April 15, 1367 – March 20, 1413), also known as Henry Bolingbroke, was King of England and Lord of Ireland from 1399 to 1413. He reasserted the claim of his grandfather King Edward III, a maternal grandson of Philippe IV of France, to the Kingdom of France.

Henry was the son of John of Gaunt (the fourth son of Edward III) and Blanche of Lancaster. John enjoyed a position of considerable influence during much of the reign of his cousin King Richard II, whom Henry eventually deposed. Henry founded the Lancaster branch of the House of Anjou, also known as…

Chaotic intermittency means wind and solar cannot, and will never, replace coal, gas or nuclear.

The fact that wind and solar output plummets whenever the sun sets and/or calm weather sets in has been treated by RE zealots as (yet another) inconvenient truth, that just won’t go away.

In the first few years of the great wind power fraud in Australia, its promoters kept telling us that all we needed to do was spread these things far and wide and we would have an endless supply of ‘free’ electricity, lovingly caressed from mother nature. Well, that didn’t pan out, as any South Australia will tell you.

So, talk soon turned to mega-batteries, as if the wind and solar industry was like some ditzy shopper who’d forgotten to add milk and bread to their shopping list.

The meme is that the chaos delivered by wind and solar can all be solved…