Utopia, you are standing in it!

I’ve written about how our friends on the left represent the rich, and pointed out how big parts of their agenda are designed to help people with above-average incomes.

Today, let’s have some fun with that issue.

Bernie Sanders has three houses, yet complains about the supposed excesses of capitalism. I wonder if he applies that analysis to his Mini-Me, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

But that $3,500-plus ensemble is chump change compared to what she wore for Vanity Fair‘s obsequious cover story.

Next, we have the irony of “AOC” augmenting her financial status by selling $58 “tax the rich” t-shirts.

By the way, just in case you think I’m making this up, here’s AOC’s tweet.

In other words, we have one rich person selling over-priced products to other rich people so they can virtue-signal about how awful it is that some people are rich.

In the small town where I grew up, in the BFE borderlands of Virginia and N.C., I lived within walking distance of a downtown cinema that opened and closed a few times in my childhood, giving up the ghost completly at about the time I headed off to college.

By the early ’70s, I was walking to it on my own for the first time as my parents had aged out of going out to the movies, the way so many do. I’d see “Vadlez is Coming” or “The Getaway,” “The Three Musketeers” or “American Graffiti,” sometimes on weekends with friends but most often by myself because they weren’t as into cinema as me, and I had a paper route and pocket money.

“The Sting,” which opened on my birthday, Christmas of ’73 in much of the country, didn’t arrive until shortly thereafter. Well before the Oscars, as I remember…

The fact that the offshore wind industry is screaming for more subsidies undermines their wilder claims about offshore wind power being ‘free’ and getting cheaper all the time.

The true cost of wind power is staggering – the cost of offshore wind power is astronomical: the latter is more than six times the cost of gas-fired power, which is available around-the-clock, whatever the weather.

The operating cost of maintaining any industrial machine in a marine environment starts out high and only increases over time, thanks to the corrosive power of saltwater and salt-laden sea air.

Take a machine that, at best, has an economic lifespan of around 12 years and it doesn’t take long before the cost of operating a wind turbine offshore gets out of control.

However, as David Turner reports below, it is not just the rising cost of maintenance that puts paid to the cheap offshore wind…

On Good Friday, 10 April 1998, the Good Friday Agreement, also known as the Belfast Agreement, It consists of two closely related agreements,
the British-Irish Agreement and the Multi-Party Agreement. It led to the establishment of a system of devolved government in Northern Ireland and the creation of many new institutions such as the Northern Ireland Assembly and Executive, the North South Ministerial Council and the British-Irish Council. The Good Friday Agreement was approved by referendums held in both Ireland and Northern Ireland on 22 May 1998.

Northern Ireland was created in 1921 and remained part of the UK when the rest of Ireland became an independent state. This created a split in the population between unionists, who wish to see Northern Ireland stay within the UK, and nationalists, who want it to become part of the Republic of Ireland. From the late 1960s, armed groups from both sides, such as the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and…

Letter to the Editor

STOP brainwashing children with nonsense

“Indigenous writer says Aborigines were farmers “ (Courier Mail 25/5/19) writer Bruce Pascoe’s book ‘Dark Emu’ adapted for children is based on a nonsense theory without any substantiating facts. He refers to Sir Thomas Mitchell in the 1830’s who rode through nine miles of stooped grain, indicating aboriginal people were harvesting grain.  Nine miles really, where were the people to ‘stoop’ such a huge area and what species was it?  Far more likely the native grasses had been subject to a cyclone and were twisted into ‘stoops’ by the swirling winds, something a Pommie had never seen, it often happens in cane plantations and grasses today. Then claims the British destroyed the crops that’s why there’s no trace—rubbish.

Wild sorghum which grows abundantly throughout northern Australia today

Lieutenant Grey came across yam pastures that reached the horizon, there are no yams…

Safe, ever-reliable and always affordable nuclear power is a no-brainer. Especially for those worked up about carbon dioxide gas, nuclear being the only stand-alone generation source that does not generate CO2 in the process.

Finland gets it, and has done for decades. Nuclear power is the largest source of energy in Finland, with a current capacity of 2,794MW, to which another 1,600MW is about to be added when the new 3^rd reactor at Olkiluoto is commissioned soon.

No doubt prompted by the suicidal wind and solar obsession playing out across Germany, the incoming Finnish government has announced that the first order of business is expanding Finland’s nuclear power generation capacity as soon as humanly possible.

Sky News’ Chris Kenny has the story below.

‘Disingenuous’ for Albanese government to say ‘renewables are the only answer’
Sky News
Chris Kenny
4 April 2023

Sky News host Chris Kenny says it’s “disingenuous”…

More target mania. The way things are going, or not going, the climate-obsessed UK government won’t be able to hurt the national economy with expensive and unreliable electricity as fast as planned.
– – –
With some offshore wind projects waiting years in the pipeline, a report commissioned by the government has called for an urgent upgrade to the UK’s National Grid in order to reach the 2030 target of installing 50GW of wind power, says Sky News.

The UK will miss a key target to install 50 gigawatts (GW) of wind power by the end of the decade unless major changes are made to the grid, according to a government-commissioned report.

The 50GW target is at the heart of the government’s plans to phase out more polluting types of electricity generation by 2035, while also boosting energy security.

Tim Pick, who was appointed last year as an “offshore wind…

Over at Kiwiblog the latest proposed reforms to the godawful Resource Management Act (RMA), were reviewed in terms of the massive attacks being made on them.

The three strikes against the RMA reform

Now I’ve long thought the RMA was a disaster area, and in this I’ve often drawn not just upon my personal experiences trying to get anything done in the face it, but on those of Peter Cresswell (Not PC), who has been banging the drum about the awfulness of the RMA for nigh on two decades:

But it was this comment from DPF that I thought notable, especially since National Party criticisms of Parker’s proposed “reforms” have made exactly the same point.

Even the Greens have worked out this new law is a dog. The renewable energy sector have said it will mean no new renewable energy project will get consented for ten years.

Oh…

Governments oftentimes are spectacularlyincompetent. And when thathappens, it creates an opening for the private sector to step up in rather unexpected ways.

I’ve even created a semi-serious, semi-satirical series to commemorate these examples.

• The libertarian paradise of Mexico
• The libertarian paradise of Nigeria
• The libertarian paradise of Somalia
• The libertarian paradise of Germany
• The libertarian paradise of Argentina
• The libertarian paradise of South Africa

None of these places are libertarian, of course, but each of them illustrate how markets can provide surprising benefits. In most of the examples, markets are even providing so-called public goods.

Today, we’re going to revisit South Africa because of a remarkable report in the Wall Street Journal.

Written by Alexandra Wexler, it shows how the private sector is providing road repair, fire protection, and traffic control.

South African insurers are joining other private companies in taking over public services…

Given events in France and other nations perhaps this should become a series.

It seems that the Rainbow Nation’s problems are escalating rapidly across many areas of society, with the latest one being their energy system, which this article argues is at the heart of things.

But I don’t think that’s true, especially when you track down the roots of their energy system woes, which is basically what a former CEO of the giant state-run energy company Eskom, Andre de Ruyter, said in an interview following his quitting the job in December, 2022.

But before getting into that, here’s a quick synopsis of the conditions, which only really grabbed the attention of people outside South Africa when this was announced:

On February 15, the U.S. embassy in PretoriaadvisedAmericans in South Africa to have at least seventy-two hours’ worth of food, water, medicine, and hygiene supplies in case…

Restructuring the health system during a pandemic was an act of madness.

Wasting money on a transition unit that did little, if anything useful makes it worse:

. . . It will take until next year’s Budget for the public to discover how the overhauled health sector will be funded, despite more than $30 million being spent on a “transition unit” within the Prime Minister’s own department.

That’s left health industry insiders and watchers worried about the time and energy required to establish the new system, while, at the same time, it’s struggling with workforce issues, Covid-induced backlogs, and creaking infrastructure. . . 

The Health and Disability System Review Transition Unit, within the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC), was established in August 2020.

The following month, then-minister Chris Hipkins announced former director-general of health Stephen McKernan, head of consultancy EY’s government and public sector practice, would lead…

The US government has granted America’s offshore wind industry a sweeping licence to destroy thousands of whales, dolphins, porpoises, seals and more – while permanently trashing critical marine environments in the process.

The damage done starts with seismic surveys carried out pre-construction and continues as hundreds of 240m high turbines are punched into the seabed and trenches are ripped up for transmission cabling.

The industry euphemistically calls the direct and indirect harm caused to marine mammals “harassment”, when ‘pointless slaughter’ would be a more accurate description.

Bear in mind there is no commercial value for electricity that cannot be delivered as and when consumers need it; the only ‘value’ attached to wind power is the massive taxpayer and power consumer subsidies collected by generators. Cut the subsidies and this so-called ‘industry’ would disappear in a heartbeat.

As Constance Gee explains below the US government is complicit in what, once upon…

The death of Queen Anne on 1 August 1714 heralded the arrival of a new dynasty in Britain – literally – the kingdom had to await the arrival of the new king from Hanover on 18 September. Continuing our Coronation blog series, Dr Stuart Handley examines the preparations for and proceedings of George I’s coronation in 1714.

Following the death of the queen, according to the Act of Regency of 1706, a group of regents, both appointed and ex officio, took over running the country. On 1 September the Privy Council set up a committee composed of 15 councillors (all members of the House of Lords except for the marquess of Annandale) to look into the Coronation. At their first meeting on the 3rd, there was discussion about the Coronation medal, with Master of the Mint, Sir Isaac Newton’s designs being rejected. The chosen design bore the inscription…