Utopia, you are standing in it!

I’ve been reading the papers released the other day by Treasury (in one case written jointly with IRD) on the Minister of Finance’s hankering to tax Australian banks more heavily, retrospectively.

There seem to be three such papers, a 10 February Treasury Report, a short 17 February Treasury aide-memoire, and a 10 March joint Treasury/IRD report. Nothing appears to have been withheld from the first two, but there are several, quite lengthy, bits withheld from the 10 March paper, in many cases apparently references to legal advice officials may have received.

The 10 February paper is titled “Windfall gains in the New Zealand banking sector, and responses”, apparently part of something called “Project Cricket”. Retrospective taxes targeted at companies the Minister of Finance doesn’t like and are just considered politically ripe for the plucking are…..really not cricket. But perhaps that irony escaped both the authors and the…

• Bryce Edwards writes –

The ultra-rich can breathe easy and progressive voters can scream into the void, because Prime Minister Chris Hipkins has ruled out any meaningful reform to our broken and unfair tax system. The Labour leader says it won’t happen on his watch.

Official documents were released on Wednesday showing the Government asked officials to draw up ideas for how a wealth tax might work. They then focused-grouped the idea and this exercise showed it wouldn’t be an easy win for Labour so, regardless of its merits, it was thrown on the bonfire.

Hipkins was then asked whether Labour might implement wealth taxes during its next term in government, and he categorically ruled out any such progressive reforms under his leadership.

The Progressive tax reforms that Labour rejected

We now know that Treasury put together a number of different models for how a major taxation reset could be…

Dare we hope that this strong feeling there’ll be a change of government will be what happens?

. . .Appearing on AM’s political panel, Newstalk ZB’s senior political correspondent Barry Soper and Newshub’s Patrick Gower from Paddy Gower Has Issues slammed the current Labour Government.

“Chris Hipkins, he’s liked by his caucus, there’s no doubt about that, but he can’t remove himself from all of the decisions that were made in Cabinet,” Soper said.

He might like us to see him as a new Prime Minister but Hipkins was a senior Minister and responsible for many of the failings under the previous PM.

“You can have as many bonfires as you like, it’s still, essentially, the same Government and when it comes to people getting thrown out like Michael Wood, all the portfolios where do they go? They go to overworked ministers.”

Soper said earlier this year he told Hipkins…

The wind and solar ‘industries’ always struggle with their neighbours, principally because they treat them as ‘roadkill’.

But that model doesn’t work when those neighbours are determined to fight back, using every legal means available.

Such is the case with Shaun and Amie Harris, who took a solar power outfit to court seeking damages for the nuisance that it had caused by polluting their land with silt and sediment.

The jury awarded them a cool US$10.5 million in damages, and whacked the solar generator and its construction contractors with a further US$125 million in fines for their egregious misconduct.

Bonner Cohen reports on the result below.

Solar farm runoff pollutes property, couple awarded $135 million
CFACT
Bonner Cohen
6 June 2023

Inflicting heavy fines on developers of a project billed as supplying clean, renewable energy, a federal jury has awarded a couple in southwest Georgia $135.5 million after runoff from…

Currently some Zero Carbon zealots are trying to discredit and disappear a peer reviewed study of CO2 atmospheric concentrations because its findings contradict IPCC dogma.  The paper is World Atmospheric CO2, Its 14C Specific Activity, Non-fossil Component, Anthropogenic Fossil Component, and Emissions (1750–2018). by Skrable et al. (2022).  The link is to the paper and also shows the comments recently addressed to the authors and the editor of the journal, as well as responses by both.

This came to my attention by way of a comment by one of the attackers on my 2022 post regarding this study.  Text is below in italics with my bolds.

D. Andrews 10/7/2023

This post is over a year old, but in the interest of correcting the record, please note the following:
1. Skrable et al. have conceded that the data they “guesstimated” bore little resemblance to actual atmospheric radiocarbon data.

2. In…

NYC going after pizza oven emissions. You’d have to burn a pizza stove 849 years to equal one year of John Kerry’s private jet

In his Master Resource article Energy Appliance Victory! (DC Circuit vs. DOE), Mark Krebs explains the DOE agency machinations targeting boilers as a case in point of government bureaucrats attacking everyone’s economic well-being in the name of saving the planet.  First, a contextual piece describes the game plan behind all this.  Later on, a synopsis of Kreb’s analysis of the tactics on the ground.

Background:  Why This Judgment Matters 

Biden’s Green Rules Make Appliances Cost More and Do Less

Authored by Kevin Stocklin at The Epoch Times, published at Planet Today.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The Biden administration announced in December 2022 its pledge to take “more than 100 actions” to impose significantly tighter environmental standards on consumer goods is…

I was about five minutes into re-watching “The Cincinnati Kid” when it struck me that I needed to read or re-read director Norman Jewison’s autobiography, or hunt down the recent biography of the Canadian director.

He’s not exactly an obscure filmmaker, with seven Oscar nominations and films like “Moonstruck” and “The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming” in his extensive filmography.

But his fifth feature film, his first “serious” movie, has threads that turn up so often in his later work that one wonders, “What made him such a righteous dude?”

The Toronto native who made the groundbreaking “In the Heat of the Night,” “A Soldier’s Story” and the very impressive bio-pic “The Hurricane” was astutely in touch with America’s shifting attitudes on race. And he made sure his films were ahead of the curve in that regard.

Jewison, a child of the Great Depression, took over a 1930s…

This blog has been a bit quiet in recent weeks (if anyone has insights on what sections 15D and 98 of the Government Superannuation Fund Act do and don’t allow I’ll be happy to hear from you) but I hope to make up for it this week.

In the 4+ years the statutory Monetary Policy Committee has been in existence, there has been not a single public speech given by any of the three external members. There have been no serious interviews either, just one petulant and testy set of responses to some emailed questions late last year, responses that I characterised at the time this way:

At times, Harris displays all the grace and constructive open and engagement we might expect in a rebellious 15 year old told they have to make conversation with Grandma at the family Christmas celebrations. If the answers aren’t quite monosyllabic grunts. most of…

After a  succession of ministerial stumbles, some of them fatal for the respective political careers of the stumblers, the  Labour  government is still  buoyed by its own polling.  And even independent  commentators think the parties  of the  left are level-pegging  with  those on the right.

How  could  this  be?  There  is little  argument  NZ has been hit by a  cost-of-living crisis,  families are going hungry, hospital emergency departments are overflowing.  Others cite ministerial fumbling for the failure  to deliver on policy announcements. Economists  point to  the deficits in the public accounts getting worse and net debt  climbing. 

Wherever voters look,  the Labour government has  a  dismal story  to present.

So why aren’t Opposition parties racing ahead?

Intermittent wind and solar deliver guaranteed grid chaos and rocketing power prices. Every single country that’s chased the wind and solar pipe dream has watched their power prices go through the roof, with no exception.

STT has been banging on about this since December 2012. So, don’t say we didn’t warn you. The graphic above from Dr Michael Crawford spells it out: add massively subsidised and chaotically intermittent wind and solar to your power grid and watch power prices spiral out of control.

As STT has pointed out a number of times, power market gaming – of the kind that made Eron infamous – is a natural consequence of a very natural set of phenomena: wind and solar power output collapses that occur whenever the sun sets and/or calm weather sets in:

Wind Power Output Collapses Send Power Prices into Orbit: The World’s Biggest Joke Just Got Serious

and

South Australia’s…

As reported last month, the Oregon activist judge invited the plaintiffs in Juliana vs US to reopen that case even after the Ninth Circuit shot it down.  Now we have a complete and thorough Motion from the defendant (US government) to dismiss this newest amended complaint.  Most interesting is the section under the heading starting on page 30.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Plaintiffs’ Claims Fail on the Merits

Because Plaintiffs’ action fails at the jurisdictional threshold, the Ninth Circuit never reached—and this Court need not reach—the merits of the claims. . . Plaintiffs’ second amended complaint, which supersedes the first amended complaint, asserts the same claims that were brought in the first amended complaint, which this Court addressed in orders that the Ninth Circuit reversed. Defendants thus renew their objection that Plaintiffs’ claims fail on the merits and should be dismissed pursuant to Fed…

Operation PX was the codename for the Japanese plan for a biological terror attack on the U.S. west coast in World War 2. The planned operation was abandoned due to the strong opposition of Chief of General Staff Yoshijirō Umezu, as well as the Japan surrender following the atomic bombings and the Soviet declaration of war.

Operation PX, also known as “Cherry Blossoms at Night” was proposed in December 1944 by the Japanese Naval General Staff, led by Vice-Admiral Jisaburō Ozawa. The name for the operation came from the Japanese use of the code name PX for Pestis bacillus-infected fleas.

In planning the operation, the navy partnered with Lieutenant-General Shirō Ishii of Unit 731, who had extensive experience on weaponizing pathogenic bacteria and human vulnerability to biological and chemical warfare.

UNIT 731-Japanese WWII Experiments

The plan for the attack involved Seiran aircraft launched by submarine aircraft carriers upon the United States…

+++++ Contains Graphic Images++++++

Officially World War II started on September 3 1939,but in all earnestly it had really already started in 1937 with Japan attacking China.

We often hear about the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime, however the Japanese were as brutal if not more brutal and evil.

The Nanking Massacre was an episode of mass murder and mass rape committed by Japanese troops against the residents of Nanjing (Nanking), then the capital of the Republic of China, during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The massacre is also known as the Rape of Nanking.

The massacre occurred over a period of six weeks starting on December 13, 1937, the day that the Japanese captured Nanjing. During this period, soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army murdered Chinese civilians and disarmed combatants who numbered an estimated 40,000 to over 300,000, and perpetrated widespread rape and looting.

Some of the pictures below…