Utopia, you are standing in it!

(Marie Colvin in the Chechen Mountains, 1999)

“Why do I cover wars…. It is a difficult question to answer.  I did not set out to become a war correspondent.  It has always seemed to me what I write about is humanity in extremis, pushed to the unendurable, and that it is important to tell people what really happens in war—declared and undeclared.” (Marie Colvin, The Sunday Times, Sri Lanka, April 22, 2001)

Lindsey Hilsum’s new biography of Marie Colvin is a stark reminder of the plight of journalists in our ever-dangerous world.  According to the Washington Post at least 43 journalists were killed in 2018 with another 12 deaths whose causes are not totally clear.  The role of a journalist is to report the news as accurately as possible so citizens can make intelligent judgements about world events.  The life of Colvin presented in IN EXTREMIS: THE LIFE AND…

Introduction

The on-going constitutional laboratory experiment that is Brexit has now turned to the question of whether a bill proposed by a backbench MP can be passed into law against the express opposition of the Government.  This scenario gives rise to a number of issues, including whether Parliamentary rules in the form of its standing orders, will need to be amended to enable this.  A number of commentators, including on this blog, have even considered the question of whether in those circumstances, ministers could advise the Queen to refuse Royal Assent to such a bill.  One of the most eminent of these, Sir Stephen Laws, has argued here such a situation might arise if the Speaker endorsed “… an attempt to bypass the financial Standing Orders and allowed a Bill to pass that contravened them”, a situation he describes as “potentially horrific”.

In particular he considers that legislation to…

TIM FLANNERY, former Climate Commissioner of Australia from 2011-2013 earned $180,000 per year for a three-day working week to make predictions and decisions that affected billions upon billions of dollars of Australian taxpayers’ money.

AFTER being rightly sacked by the Abbott government in 2013, Flannery began his own go-fund-me version of the Climate Commission, the Climate Council, which continues the propagandised rollout of catastrophic climate predictions and unreliable-energy pipe dreams.

NEVER far from the government teat, Flannery is regularly wheeled out by Australia’s government run media monolith their ABC, appearing as resident climate ‘expert’ whenever a catastrophic weather event hits the news cycle, or simply to inject a dose of hysteria into the conversation when climate alarm is waning.

TONIGHT, Flannery appears on Q&A, the ABC’s TV panel discussion program…

Coming up | Q&A | ABC TV

TO understand why the ABC and Q&A are so ‘impressed’ by the…

As of Saturday, CNN reports the Governor of Washington has declared a state of emergency for his state after 31 cases of measles were diagnosed in Clark County which sits on the state’s southern border and is 23 miles north of Portland, Oregon.

Of the 31 cases, CNN reports, 21 are children between the ages of 1 and 10 years old. Unfortunately, Washington and Oregon are two states with very high rates of un-vaccinated children. If you or your loved ones have not kept up on their vaccinations, please make it a point to do so as soon as possible. Outbreaks like this will be more common unless more people immunize and herd immunity of ninety percent or more of the total population is achieved.

Never forget that the anti-vaccine movement (which is largely the cause of outbreaks like this)P is an environmentalist front that seeks to kill off humans…

The dreamers who think they’ll soon be running entirely on sunshine and breezes, have just been smacked with reality, in Victoria, at least.

There’s something poetic about watching infants being forced to grow up. And, so it is, with once loyal RE zealots, being forced to rethink their love affair, after their taste of what it’s like swelter in Melbourne, without the benefit of that first world necessity, electricity.

Over the last couple of posts, STT has focused on the chaos that reigned in South Australia and Victoria on a couple of hot days – coupled with wind power output collapses (see above) that resulted in hundreds of thousands being deprived of power, 200,000 in Victoria, alone – and the price of power going through the roof.

Watching the panic spread was, somewhat, amusing. Nothing like watching those who thought they understood the electricity system left floundering and struggling for…

Ahead of Tuesday’s votes on Brexit, attention has focused on the rights and wrongs of the House of Commons seeking to ‘seize control’. Meg Russell argues that there’s nothing unusual about a democratic parliament controlling its own procedure and business. Indeed, the core principle of parliamentary sovereignty already gives the Commons control by default.

With stalemate over the Prime Minister’s Brexit deal, rejected dramatically by the House of Commons on 15 January by 432 votes to 202, there is increasing talk of parliament ‘seizing control’. On Tuesday, following the Speaker’s controversial decision to allow a vote on Conservative backbencher Dominic Grieve’s amendment speeding up the timetable, MPs will vote on a series of propositions about what should happen next. These include a further proposal by Grieve that the government’s usual control of the agenda should be set aside on specified days to allow MPs to make decisions on Brexit, and…

Consider, Limousine Liberals whose children attend private schools with an armed staff for protection lecture the rest of us that we cannot have armed staff in our schools protecting our children because it would be too dangerous.

You see, they have decided their children are more important than your children. They will protect your children with a sign, a law, and slogans. They do not live under the laws they create for you.

Hayek’s advice on the limits of, and lack of knowledge to make accurate predictions and policy about complex phenomena does not just apply to economics. As I reread this article, it reminded me of the unscientific nature of the climate change alarmists, and their pretense of knowledge.   Some highlights from the article.

“It seems to me that this failure of the economists to guide policy more successfully is closely connected with their propensity to imitate as closely as possible the procedures of the brilliantly successful physical sciences – an attempt which in our field may lead to outright error.

This brings me to the crucial issue. Unlike the position that exists in the physical sciences, in economics and other disciplines that deal with essentially complex phenomena, the aspects of the events to be accounted for about which we can get quantitative data are necessarily limited and may not include the…

Wind ‘powered’ South Australians already know the drill…

In renewables obsessed Australia these days, whenever the sun sets and/or calm weather sets, the talk inevitably turns to blackouts.

Last summer, load shedding caught power consumers short in South Australia, Victoria and NSW. Energy hungry businesses such as aluminium smelters and even hospitals were forced to power down during run a scorching days and nights, when temperatures soared and wind power output plummeted: Australia Closes Coal-Fired Power Plants: Hospitals Forced to Cut Power Use & Power Prices Rocket

Well, this Australia Day long-weekend, the barbecue stopper will be this week’s round of what’s euphemistically called “demand management”: Soviet era power rationing, an integral part of Australia’s ludicrous attempt to run on sunshine and breezes. If it wasn’t deadly serious, it’d almost be hilarious.

STT spelt out the truly ‘inevitable’ consequence of attempting to run on sunshine and breezes back in November…