Utopia, you are standing in it!

From the Emperor’s Desk: for some reason I am unable to post with pictures. I am looking into it and hopefully pictures will be back soon!

Charles I (November 1, 1600 – January 1649) was King of England, Scotland, and Ireland from March 27, 1625 until his execution in 1649. He was born into the House of Stuart as the second son of King James VI of Scotland, but after his father inherited the English throne in 1603, he moved to England, where he spent much of the rest of his life.

He became heir apparent to the kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland in 1612 upon the death of his elder brother, Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales. An unsuccessful and unpopular attempt to marry Charles to the Spanish Habsburg Infanta Maria Anna culminated in an eight-month visit to Spain in 1623 that demonstrated the futility of the marriage…

Shortly after the death of King Edward IV, Bishop Robert Stillington, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, is said to have informed Richard that Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville was invalid because of Edward’s earlier union with Eleanor Butler, making Edward V and his siblings illegitimate.

Bishop Stillington asserted Eleanor Butler had had a legal precontract of marriage to Edward, which invalidated the king’s later marriage to Elizabeth Woodville. According to Richard Duke of Gloucester, this meant that he, rather than Edward’s sons, was the true heir to the throne.

A precontract is a legal contract that precedes another; in particular it can refer to an existing promise of marriage with another. Such a precontract would legally nullify any later marriages into which either party entered. The practice was common in the Middle Ages, and the allegation of a precontract was the most common means of dissolving a marriage…

In September last year, former Bank of England Deputy Governor Sir Paul Tucker published a substantial discussion paper suggesting paying a sub-market, or zero, interest rate on some portion of the huge increase in bank deposits at the central bank that had resulted (primarily) for the large-scale asset purchase programmes central banks had been running (in the Bank of England’s case since the 2008/09 recession, but in some countries – including New Zealand and Australia – just since 2020).

In late October, I wrote about Tucker’s paper, and you will get the gist of my view from the title of that post, “A Bad Idea”. The Herald’s Jenee Tibshraeny picked up on that post and the following day ran an article on the Tucker tiering proposal, with sceptical quotes from several people including me. There was a difference of view in those quotes. As in my post, I argued that…

It was something of a (perhaps minor) landmark event last Thursday when the Reserve Bank’s chief economist Paul Conway gave an on-the-record speech on inflation. It was only Conway’s second on-the-record speech (the first was on housing, something the Bank has little or no responsibility for) and thus only the second speech from a Reserve Bank chief economist for almost five years. Five years in which chief economists have become statutory decisionmakers (members of the MPC), in which monetary policymakers have dealt with a huge and expensive shock, and in which inflation – prime focus of central bank monetary policy – has been let run amok in ways never seen previously (arguably never envisaged) in the first 30 years of inflation targeting. And when (a) external MPC members are barred from research/analysis, and (b) barred from speaking or disinclined to do so, and (c) the chief economist’s own boss…

The United States has a medium-sized welfare state and nations in Western Europe have large-sized welfare states.

Which approach is better (or, to be more accurate, less worse)?

To answer that question, you want to compare living standards. And that means looking at how much people earn, adjusted for factors such as how much they get to keep after taxes.

The United States wins that contest. Americans earn more and they get to keep more.

That’s apparent when you look at average levels of consumption on both sides of the Atlantic. And it’s even true when you compare living standards of low-income and poor Americans to living standards for average Europeans.

But what if Americans only earn more because they work longer hours? When my left-of-center friends make this argument, my usual response has been that Americans choose to work longer hours because they have better incentives…

This is not the way to win friends or persuade people to your views. It is a shameful display of violence:

. . . As soon as she arrived, an activist who was also in there under false pretences, threw what looked like tomato sauce or soup all over KJK and the women who stood next to her. It seemed almost as though this was a signal of sorts, because suddenly there were no more barriers, no more fences – we were utterly surrounded. I couldn’t see a single Marshall in the crowd and feared for their safety as the sea of screaming, chanting and feral protesters swarmed the rotunda.

For awhile, they stayed off the rotunda and we made an effort to get a couple of elderly & disabled women up onto the rotunda with us. My thinking at that stage was that the police would arrive any…

The wind and sun might be free, but the true and total cost of wind and solar power is truly astronomical.

Every country that’s hitched its wagon to the subsidised wind and solar scam has seen retail power prices rocket; with no single exception.

Francis Menton has been trawling through the evidence for some time and comes to that very conclusion below.

Rank Innumeracy On The Cost Of Electricity From Renewables
Manhattan Contrarian
Francis Menton
21 February 2023

Courtesy of the lovely Maggy Wassilieff over at Kiwiblog comes the result of her investigation into all the wonderful new ideas from our Education Experts.

Maggy has a PhD in Biology and spent decades working on New Zealand environmental issues, as well as teaching.

She’s found a link to their new plans to revamp the School curriculum and strengthen Maths and Literacy teaching – or at least half of it:

Common Practice Model-2023 (Phase 1)

• Kaiako (teachers) will *recognise that the artefacts, concepts, and ideas of maths are cultural
• but Ākonga (students) areare encouraged to interrogate dominant discourses and assumptions, including that maths is benign, neutral, and culture-free.
• This will include terms such as Data sovereignty, humanising mathematics, teaching maths for social justice (TMfSJ),, ethnomathematics,maths + {conscientisation, equity, ethics, citizenship}.

Which is all funny enough but it was the following that caught my eye as Maggy bolded it:

Ākonga:

Wind and solar have justly earned the tag ‘unreliables’: sunset and calm weather are inevitable, whereas the so-called ‘inevitable renewable energy transition’, is anything but.

The Germans call it ‘dunkelflaute’ – meaning a period of gloomy, windless weather and a total collapse in output from their more than 30,000 wind turbines and millions of solar panels.

As Andrew Montford outlines below, the unreliables are destined to remain that way, despite all the fast and loose talk about mythical mega-batteries and ‘green’ hydrogen hype.

Why the intermittency problem can’t be solved
Net Zero Watch
Andrew Montford
15 February 2023

I often ask renewables enthusiasts to explain what we are supposed to do when the wind isn’t blowing if we can’t fall back on fossil fuels. The other day, I pressed James Murray, the editor of Business Green magazine, what forms of storage he thought we could use, and this is what…

James VI- I (June 19, 1566 – March 27, 1625) was King of Scotland as James VI from July 24, 1567 and King of England and Ireland as James I from the union of the Scottish and English crowns on March 24, 1603 until his death in 1625.

James was the son of Queen Mary I of Scotland, and a great-great-grandson of Henry VII, King of England and Lord of Ireland, and thus a potential successor to all three thrones. He succeeded to the Scottish throne at the age of thirteen months, after his mother was compelled to abdicate in his favour.

Four different regents governed during his minority, which ended officially in 1578, though he did not gain full control of his government until 1583

The Union of the Crowns followed the death of James’s cousin, Queen Elizabeth I of England, the last monarch of the Tudor dynasty, and…