Utopia, you are standing in it!

While waiting for Hansard’s official record of Meka Whaitiri’s personal statement to Parliament this afternoon, Point of Order found a press statement from New Zealand First.     

It was teasingly headed Whaitiri fiasco a multi-party deception. 

More teasingly, Winston Peters’ name was absent from the text which kicked off:

‘Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive’

The statement proceeded to say:

There was a great deal of debt defaulted on during the Great Depression.   Businesses failed, farms went bust, and some mortgage borrowers defaulted too.    But a huge number of governments also defaulted on their obligations, not just in places like Greece or Argentina which had form in that regard, but including many of the governments of the richest countries in the world.  You could read about the New Zealand episode here.   Most countries in Europe (including the UK and France) defaulted on their (substantial) war debts to the United States –  in fact, only Finland paid in full.  But even the United States government defaulted.

There is an interesting and accessible new book out about that experience, American Default.   It is written by UCLA Chilean academic Sebastian Edwards (who has been used as an adviser and author here, including this paper at a Treasury/Reserve…

Along with giant batteries and ‘green’ hydrogen, pumped hydro is touted as the solution to wind and solar power’s hopeless intermittency. Five years ago, Australia’s PM, Malcolm Turnbull pitched his very own mega-pumped hydro project, tagged Snowy 2.0.

The numbering was meant to be a nod to computer program upgrades and signal an improvement on the original Snowy scheme – without doubt – the single greatest renewable energy project ever built in Australia – with a mammoth 3,950 MW of capacity, which is available on-demand (unlike the pointless nonsense that is wind power). It cost $1 billion (in today’s money) to build.

Except that five years later the 0 in Snowy 2.0 looks more like a quantification of the amount of power the scheme is likely to deliver.

The plan never stacked up economically – see our posts here and here – and is never likely to.

One of…

Walk in the main entrance of the British Museum, go through the central courtyard past the great round building in the middle and walk on through the archway into room 24. This room is titled ‘Living and Dying’ and contains cases exploring ‘how people everywhere deal with the tough realities of life and death’. There’s a number of display cases looking at particular aspects of this (big) subject via the customs and artefacts of First Peoples from around the world, a lot of them from around the Pacific, although some are from Africa. But four or so big display cases are devoted to artefacts and explanations about the culture of indigenous Australians, or Aborigines as we used to call them.

Indigenous Australian beliefs

Indigenous Australians understand that ancestral beings created the land, the oceans and all living things, passing on knowledge of how to live from, and care for…

Andrew Doyle writes at Spiked The New Puritans must be stopped.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images

A regressive, authoritarian ideology is cannibalising public life.

My book, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World, is my attempt to grapple with this disturbing new reality. A new paperback edition has been published this week, and I had hoped that by this point, it would already have started to seem out of date. In truth, the problems I describe in the book are accelerating.Novels by Roald Dahl, PG Wodehouse and Agatha Christie have since been rewritten by ‘sensitivity readers’ (newspeak for ‘censors’). The Irish government is currently passing new hate-speech laws that are similarly draconian to those passed by the Scottish government in 2021. Prestigious scientific journals are publishing pseudoscience in order to uphold this new ideology, too. Only this week…

“Ireland’s far-left government is in the midst of passing some of the most extreme legislation on so-called hate speech that the Western world has ever seen. The Criminal Justice Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences bill would prosecute what even leftist politician Paul Murphy called “thought crimes.”

Should the bill become law, which seems likely, the government will possess unprecedented power to quash or silence peaceful protests and demonstrations, prosecute the makers and sharers of memes, and effectively ban opinions it doesn’t like. Even prejudice against a “protected characteristic” will become a crime, as will merely possessing material deemed hateful, like a history book or meme.”

We almost got this in New Zealand, and if a Labour-Green-Te Paiti Maori government wins power this year then it will be back.

Destroying coal-fired power plants is all part of the grand wind and solar ‘transition’ and precisely the point of the subsidies to wind and solar which are designed to allow the unreliables to undercut cheap and reliable coal-fired power, thereby driving coal-fired plants out of business. The inevitable consequences include rocketing power prices and rolling blackouts.

The Australian state of New South Wales has just shut Liddell (above) – a perfectly operable coal-fired plant, that once delivered 2,000MW to the grid, around-the-clock, whatever the weather.

Wholesale power prices jumped from $96 to $228 – almost overnight; an 80% increase within a week of the plant’s closure.

The loss of that volume of power to a grid already teetering on the brink of collapse, can only help ensure that result.

Liddell’s planned (yes, ‘planned’) closure was meant to be no big deal.

You see, back in March 2017 then PM, Malcolm…

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Whether it is Posie Parker, hate-speech laws or donations, the East Coast MP is completely out of her depth.   Graham Adams writes –

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Kiritapu Allan was appointed New Zealand’s 51st Minister of Justice on 14 June 2022. Her predecessors — nearly all men — include political heavyweights such as Jack Marshall, Ralph Hanan, Martyn Finlay, Geoffrey Palmer, Doug Graham and Annette King.

Less than a year into her tenure, Allan is looking more and more like a rube who lacks the gravitas and good judgment to hold such an important position in government.

The news that in 2020 she accepted a payment of $1500 and rent subsidies worth $9185 for a campaign office from Race Relations Commissioner Meng Foon and his wife but didn’t declare a conflict of interest when she became Minister of Justice was astonishing. Foon’s appointment was made by then Justice Minister Andrew Little in…

Jørgen Peder Steffensen, of Denmark’s Niels Bohr Institute, is one of the most experienced experts in ice core analysis, in both Greenland and Antarctica. In this video he explains a coincidence that has misled those alarmed about the warming recovery since the Little Ice Age.  And if you skip to 2:25, you will see the huge error we have made and the assumptions and extrapolations based on that error.  Transcript below is from closed captions with my bolds and added images. H/T Raymond

What do ice cores tell us about the history of climate change and the present trend? 

This ice is from the Viking age around the year one thousand, also called the medieval warm period. We believe that in Greenland the Medieval Warm Period was about one and a half degrees warmer on average than today

NorthGRIP the Greenland ice core project is being reopened to drill…

(British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher)

A few weeks ago, former President Bill Clinton visited Northern Ireland in commemoration of the 25^th anniversary of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that mostly ended the violence of the period known as “The Troubles” that had prevailed since the 1960s.  Clinton’s administration helped negotiate a multi-party agreement between most of Northern Ireland’s political parties, and the British-Irish Agreement between the British and Irish governments.  To this day the agreements have been held with a minimum of violence, but decades of ill-will between all sides and the January 2020 Brexit Agreement has created a series of obstacles which at times makes the situation tenuous.

For years, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and its splinter groups resorted to violence to achieve an independent republic free of British rule. One of the most violent attacks occurred on October 12, 1984, with an assassination attempt against Prime…

A mob of pretentions Australian wankers has written to King Charles, demanding, among many other things, the following:-

“We expect a formal apology for the systemic racism, oppression and Crown-sponsored attempted genocide of the First Nations peoples of Australia, a call that we see being replicated across many Commonwealth nations,”

In their long, tedious and verbose missive I did not detect even one word of thanks for the immense benefits bestowed by Great Britain upon the barbaric, savage, warlike and often cannibalistic Natives of the world.

Little things like an extra forty years life expectancy, civilising Christian influence, administrative skills, agriculture, modern transport, schools, hospitals, guns and rum.

Funny that……………….

The Natives should count themselves lucky the British arrived before the French.

Hove you noticed everything these dopes talk about is ‘systemic’? I’ll bet they don’t actually know the meaning of the word.

Long bursts of calm weather are no mystery to sailors and kite flyers, but the wind industry apparently never got the memo. Hence the type of indignation expressed when the wind fails to materialize – in its financial statements, Australian outfit, Infigen has repeatedly cursed the Wind Gods for its often-dismal profit results.

The industry has started calling a hitherto well-known meteorological phenomenon a “wind drought”. As if there’s some basis to expect that the wind will blow around-the-clock, at a constant 11m/s – the ideal rate at which wind turbines operate.

Rafe Champion has been tracking these so-called “wind droughts” and their consequences for our power supply for some time. Here he is again.

The endless wind drought crippling renewables
Spectator Australia
Rafe Champion
23 April 2023

The spectre of power failure is haunting Europe as Britain and Germany demonstrate that modern societies can’t run on wind and solar…

During my early years in public policy, back in the late 1980s, I repeatedly crossed swords with people who argued that Washington should have more power over the economy so that the United States could compete with Japan, which supposedly was an economic juggernaut because of “industrial policy” directed by wise and far-sighted bureaucrats at the Ministry of International Trade and Industry.

Given Japan’s subsequent multi-decade slump, it certainly seems like I was right to warn against giving American politicians the power to pick winners and losers.

But not everybody learned from that experience. In the words of Yogi Berra, “It’s deja vu all over again,” only this time we’re supposed to be terrified because the Chinese government wants to subsidize and promote certain industries as part of “Made in China 2025”.

At the risk of understatement, I’m not scared.

Yes, China has enjoyed some impressive growth since…