Utopia, you are standing in it!

In 2022, I did a seven-part series about Bidenomics, focusing on the president’s track record on subsidies,  inflation,  protectionism, household income, fiscal policy, red tape, and labor-force participation.

Let’s take an updated look at his record on household income.

I’m motivated to address this issue because of a Wall Street Journaleditorial featuring this depressing chart showing that inflation-adjusted wages for the average American worker have declined during the Biden presidency.

This is not a happy chart, though at least there’s been some slight improvement over the past 12 months.

Here’s some of the accompanying analysis from the WSJ‘s editorial.

…why are voters so unhappy? The answer can be found in one lesson by looking at the…chart. It tracks average real hourly earnings for all workers in the private economy across the Biden Presidency, and it tells an ugly story about the…

I created the Bureaucrat Hall of Fame to give recognition to government employees who confirm our worst suspicions about being lazy and overpaid. Or worse.

Getting selected is not easy. For instance, the bureaucrats from the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board (the focus of yesterday’s column) did not make it into the Hall of Fame.

This is an “honor” reserved for those who go way above and beyond the call of duty.

Such as Cinzia Paolina De Lio.

Who is this person? What makes her worthy of being inducted into the Bureaucrat Hall of Fame?

She’s an Italian teacher. But she’s a teacher who almost never taught. She missed 20 years of work over her 24-year career.

Here we go again. Do this, don’t do that, and somehow the globe will cool down a bit.
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King Charles III helped activate a “Climate Clock” at a London forum on Wednesday, counting down the time until 2030, the alleged time allotted to avoid the worst effects of climate change, despite the UK King offering several different timetables in years past, says Just the News.

The Climate Clock countdown began at the Climate Innovation Forum during London’s 2023 Climate Action Week. Founder and CEO of Climate Action, Nick Henry, said it serves as a “visual reminder of the urgency of the climate crisis,” according to Fox News.

“TIME IS RUNNING OUT” and “ACT TODAY SAVE TOMORROW” were just a few of the interchanging slogans on the jumbotron that displayed the Climate Clock. The button to activate the clock was pressed by London Mayor Sadiq Khan while…

See Also Virtue Signaling Is a Vicious Circle

One key to understanding much of the bewildering behavior we see around us is to recognize the power and popularity of “virtue signaling.” Keeping virtue signaling in mind will help you understand a lot of behavior that otherwise makes no sense.

What, for example, is the point of removing Confederate statues or attempting to disown the country’s Founding Fathers because some were slave owners? It makes sense if your objective is to be sanctimonious. You make yourself feel better by looking down your nose at Thomas Jefferson.

Virtue signaling is the modern version of what St. Augustine in the 5th century referred to as “outward signs of inward grace.” A major difference, however, is the kind of grace he referred to actually meant something.

A precondition to needing to virtue signal is guilt. Virtue signaling is one of the left’s package deals…

In his most manic comedies, the great “reactor,” the unflappable Alan Arkin, looks like he’s on the verge of cracking up and blowing the take — scene after scene. He can’t wholly hide how tickled he is at what’s going on around him. It’s in his eyes, the barely-controlled grin that’s trying to bust out on his face.

You see it, here and there, in *The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming.” And there’s a moment in “The In-Laws” in which he glances towards the camera in his harrowing ride, clinging to the roof of a taxi he’s just clambered aboard, as if the actor playing the part sees the cameraman laughing at how this looks and wishes he could join him.

Legend has it that Arkin was so broken up by the great character player James Hong‘s improvised chattering Mandarin monologue, adding a magazine to his…

Alan Arkin, who passed away today at the grand old age of 89, was one of the great comic actors of his generation and a couple of generations that followed.

He was one of my all-time favorites, and if he wasn’t one of yours, maybe you need to see a few more of his movies.

An Oscar winner for “Little Miss Sunshine,” he shone even more brightly in his debut film, the comedy classic “The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming.”

He provided old school Hollywood chutzpah in “Argo,” was the long-suffering shrink John Cusack’s hitman worries to death in “Grosse Point Blank,” held down his half of one of the funniest films of all time, “The In-Laws,” and dignified many a big screen and small screen production — “Escape from Sobibor” comes immediately to mind.

He was as good as funnymen get, and scary enough to make…

“The court holds that Harvard and UNC’s admissions programs violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.”

From SCOTUS lips to He Puapua’s ears:

“The solution to our Nation’s racial problems thus cannot come from policies grounded in affirmative action or some other conception of equity,… racialism simply cannot be undone by different or more racialism. Instead, the solution announced in the second founding is incorporated in our Constitution: that we are all equal, and should be treated equally before the law without regard to our race. Only that promise can allow us to look past our differing skin colors.”

That’s language from the decision by the US Supreme Court, which has come through for the Asian-Americans who charged Harvard University with violating their civil rights by not admitting them because of their race in order to meet affirmative action quotas for accepting Blacks. But this is a decision…

People generally credit National as being a better economic manager but unfortunately don’t always join the dots between that and better social services.

However, David Farrar shows the impact of  Labour’s increased spending for worse outcomes is showing up in Curia’s polls:

. . . A year after the last election, Labour had a huge 36% lead over National as the party which had the right approach to the health system. Only 14% of respondents picked National, and 50% Labour.

In my latest poll in June 2023, Labour were down 16% to 34% and National up 16% to 30%. The 36% gap is now only 4%.

Based purely on spending, you would expect Labour to remain way ahead of National. In the 2017 Budget, Steven Joyce announced $16.7 billion for the public health service. In the 2023 Budget Grant Robertson announced $26.5 billion. That is a massive 60% increase…

You’re probably seeing headlines like this one from The Hill Insurers pull back as US climate catastrophes intensify.   H/T Mark Krebs.  As usual, the Climate Card is a coverup for others who really are to blame for losses.  The linked article starts to look under the carpet, and I will dig deeper in this post.

Firstly, they label weather events as climate castastrophes in order to blame them on everyone else.  

From The Hill:

This month Farmers Insurance announced that it will no longer write new property insurance policies in Florida, citing “catastrophe costs … at historically high levels.” AIG also recently stopped issuing policies along the Sunshine State’s hurricane-vulnerable coastline.

State Farm, meanwhile, said in May, that it would impose a moratorium on new policies in California due to “rapidly growing catastrophe exposure.”

Mark Friedlander, director of corporate communications at the Insurance Information Institute, said that…

Earth’s atmosphere [image credit – learnweather.com]
Our headline differs slightly from the article below, which glosses over the actual research findings to some extent. Speculation about possible future unwanted climate scenarios is a favourite hobby of climate alarmists, but this one at least has been largely discarded. As a co-author put it “we were able to show that many climate model projections of very large stratospheric water vapour changes are now inconsistent with observational evidence.”
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New research led by the University of East Anglia (UEA) reduces uncertainty in future climate change linked to the stratosphere, with important implications for life on Earth, says Science Daily.

Man-made climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing us today [Talkshop comment – unsupported assertion], but uncertainty in the exact magnitude of global change hampers effective policy responses.

A significant source of uncertainty relates to future changes to…

There’s a reason that windmills were abandoned in the 19^th century: it’s called “the wind”. And it’s why anyone serious about power generation, never takes wind power seriously.

Sailors and kite flyers know everything there is to know about long bursts of calm weather. However, naturally occurring meteorological phenomenon comes as news to the wind industry, which now curses these events as “wind droughts” – as if there was some kind of grand conspiracy afoot.

This time the weather is doing its dastardly worst across the American and Canadian Prairies, Cosmin Dzsurdzsa report.

Collapse of wind power across prairies and central U.S. on Wednesday morning
True North
Cosmin Dzsurdzsa
7 June 2023

Wind power generation dwindled to a near standstill across Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and even deep into the central United States on Wednesday morning.

According to the outlet Pipeline Online, major wind farms ranging across Alberta to Saskatchewan…