Utopia, you are standing in it!

Dave Stockman on the tyranny of the PHD’s.

A Sept. 25th op-ed at the Guardian (“Ousting Netanyahu isn’t enough for Israel’s Palestinians. They want equality”) by former +972 contributor Amjad Iraqi included the claim that Israel has “dozens of discriminatory laws”.

Iraqi’s claim that Israeli Arabs are afforded less rights than Jews links to a report by the radical-left NGO Adalah (where he works as its advocacy director) alleging the existence of at least “50 racist laws” in Israel.  However, CAMERA and other watchdog groups have refuted Adalah’s claims of racism – a term used so carelessly by the NGO that even an Israeli public health law requiring that parents vaccinate their children isincluded on their list of “racist laws”.  

Among the most comprehensive analyses of the “50 racist laws” claim was conducted by the Institute for Zionist Strategies (IZS), a policy and research organization dedicated to preserving Israel as a democratic Jewish state. 

A post this morning doing something rare: praising National, or more particularly their finance spokesman Paul Goldsmith.

There was an article on Stuff yesterday, and in the Dominion-Post this morning, in which Goldsmith is quoted as suggesting that politicians should set policy.    In this particular case, National is proposing that the Governor of the Reserve Bank – unelected, and in effect appointed by other unelected people –  should not get to set regulatory policy around banks all by himself, but that politicians –  in this case the Minister of Finance –  should do so.

The article begins in a rather overwrought style

National Party Finance Spokesperson Paul Goldsmith wants to  shake-up banking, by ripping a scab that hasn’t been touched for 30 years.

Goldsmith has called into question the independence of the Reserve Bank, responsible for setting interest rates and regulating banking.

But read on a bit and, of…

Mary I (February 18, 1516– November 17, 1558), also known as Mary Tudor, was the Queen of England and Ireland from July 1553 until her death. She is best known for her aggressive attempt to reverse the English Reformation, which had begun during the reign of her father, Henry VIII and return England to Roman Catholicism. The executions that marked her pursuit of the restoration of Roman Catholicism in England and Ireland led to her denunciation as “Bloody Mary” by her Protestant opponents.

Accession

On July 6, 1553, at the age of 15, King Edward VI died from a lung infection, possibly tuberculosis. He did not want the crown to go to his sister Mary, because he feared she would restore Catholicism and undo his reforms as well as those of his father Henry VIII, and therefore he planned to exclude her from the line of succession. His advisers, however…

If you have any doubt that the war waged by North Vietnam against the Republic of (South) Vietnam and the United States was, above all, a political one, Pierre Asselin’s Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (University of California Press, 319 pp., $55), should change your mind.

Asselin, a Hawaii Pacific University history professor who specializes in the Vietnam War, has come up with a well-researched, in-depth look at the decision-making process in Hanoi from the signing of the Geneva Accords in 1954 to the start of the American war in 1965. He makes a strong case that North Vietnam’s communist leaders—led by the General Secretary of the Vietnamese Communist Party, Le Duan, who wrested real power away from the slightly less doctrinaire nationalist/communist Ho Chi Minh—were dogmatic revolutionaries who shaped their war against the Americans in three “separate but related modes of struggle”: the political, diplomatic and military.

Electricity grids are finely balanced systems, which depend upon order and are wrecked by chaos; chaos of the kind these things deliver on a daily basis across Australia’s Eastern Grid.

Pictured above – courtesy of Aneroid Energy – is the output of every wind turbine connected to Australia’s Eastern Grid, situated from Far North Queensland, down through New South Wales, all over Victoria, Northern Tasmania and South Australia, with a combined notional capacity of 6,702 MW during June.

Throwing 2-3,000 MW into the grid one minute and sucking the same magnitude out, the next, the chaotic intermittency associated with wind power threatens the Eastern Grid with a complete ‘system black’ this coming summer – to match the complete ‘system black’ enjoyed by South Australians in September 2016, thanks to its obsession with wind power.

A couple of Australia’s leading electrical engineers, Tom Quirk and Paul Miskelly, take a critical look…

This is the Legal succession issue which inspired me to do this series. It is complex so I will divide it into a couple of blog entries.

Many know that Richard III was killed at Bosworth Field on August 22 1485 in the last battle of the War of the Roses and that the victor on the field of battle, Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, a scion of the House of Lancaster, mounted the English throne to become King Henry VII. The question I ask is, did Henry VII have any legal claims to the throne? Was he a usurper or did he obtain the crown by conquest? My assertion is that his blood claim to the throne was weak, there were many ahead of him in the order of succession, therefore that he obtained the throne by right of conquest.

First of all I would like to examine his blood claim…

I was interviewed a couple of days ago about rival tax plans by various Democratic presidential candidates.

It’s the “Class Warfare Olympics,” and even Joe Biden is thinking about going hard left with a tax on financial transactions.

It’s not just Joe Biden’s crazy idea. Other Democratic candidates have endorsed the idea, as has Nancy Pelosi, and CNBC reports that legislation has been introduced in the House and the Senate.

House Democrats are reintroducing their proposal of a financial transaction tax on stock, bond and derivative deals, and this time they’ve signed on a key new supporter: left-wing firebrand Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. …“This option would increase revenues by $777 billion from 2019 through 2028, according to an estimate by the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation,” the Congressional Budget Office’s website says. …The House bill comes on the heels of its companion legislation introduced by Sen…

This Sunday’s New York Times Magazine has a long interview with Bill Maher (click on screenshot below)—complete with footnotes, something I haven’t seen in the NYT.

I’ve always been a big fan of Maher: there are in fact few things he’s said on his show that I don’t agree with. I suppose it’s because both he and I criticize both the Right and the Left, and Maher, one among many, has suffered for doing that. The Left wants to be immune from criticism by others who profess to be Left, but Maher is not only a Leftist, but an incisive social critic.  And now I learn that he’s a huge Beatles fan as well. What’s not to like? And so, to celebrate International Blasphemy Day, treat yourself to a read. I’ll put a few excerpts below.

By the way, in the interview Maher defines political correctness as “the elevation of…

Now you’ve made your acquaintance, get on and start using it.

Subsidised into existence, intermittent wind and solar now pose existential threats to Australia’s once reliable power supply, this summer and beyond.

No industrialised country has ever run itself on sunshine and breezes; no country serious about maintaining first world living standards, ever will.

So just how Australia’s energy boffins still cling to the notion that wind and solar are meaningful parts of the so-called ‘energy mix’, remains a mystery.

Ross Fitzgerald attempts to unravel that mystery in a pertinent and timely article below.

Don’t Leave Us in the Dark, Mr Morrison
Quadrant Online
Ross Fitzgerald
19 September 2019

Just now, the Morrison government still seems secure. Its narrow but decisive win has shattered an opposition that had thought it was coasting to victory. The Labor Party is about to begin a civil war between green-left ideologues and old-fashioned pragmatists…