Utopia, you are standing in it!

I shared a clever video in 2011 exposing the hypocrisy of rich leftists. They claimed to support higher taxes, but refused to put their money where their mouths were.

Now we have a new version.

One difference is that the first video asked them on the spot to pay more tax. This time, Steve Moore merely asked them to pledge to voluntarily cough up some extra cash to the IRS.

And they refused. How predictable.

Steve should have further exposed their hypocrisy by directing them to Uncle Sam’s website that exists to accept voluntary payments.

Not that it would have made a difference. These leftists are engaged in moral preening, not serious policy.

Incidentally, I have debated rich statists on TV, telling them not to make the rest of us victims of their neurotic guilt feelings.

For what it’s worth, if they feel guilty having so…

One comes to take for granted the gross inadequacies of the Official Information Act, including the systematic under-resourcing of the Ombudsman’s office, which just reinforces the incentives on officials to play fast and loose with the spirit of the law, banking on the fact that if their agency ever loses at the Ombudsman it will be so far down the track that most people – possibly including the requester- will have lost interest in whatever it was the agency didn’t want to release.

But just occasionally it still gets to one. No doubt many requesters have this sort of experience.

I had an email this afternoon from the Ombudsman’s office

It didn’t sound like much of an update – “we are writing to tell you that we have still done nothing about your complaint and have no idea when we will”. I couldn’t even remember what I’d made a complaint…

Ideologues are quick to find a conspiracy, whenever their pet belief ultimately fails. So it is with the renewables cult – accusing mother nature of dishing up “dark doldrums”, or “dunkelflaute” (as the Germans call it) – with seemingly increasing regularity.

Cloudy, calm weather is seen as a curse, and the lengthy absence of suitably strong breezes now referred to despairingly as a “wind drought”. Not long ago, only sailors and kite flyers gave a hoot about wind strength and direction.

Of course, if you subscribe to the catastrophic climate change story, it’s no great leap to believe that the weather has it in for you; particularly when you’re pinning all your power supply hopes on sunshine and breezes.

As Rafe Champion reports below, the wind and sun cult in Australia are having to recalibrate their dreamy vision about an all wind and sun powered future, thanks to an uncooperative…

No civilised country has ever powered itself entirely with wind and solar; no country ever will. And yet the grand wind and solar ‘transition’ – being peddled by rent-seekers and crony capitalists – is still taken as an article of faith by the naïve and gullible.

What is evident is the direct and unassailable relationship between intermittent wind and solar, rocketing power prices, load shedding and, ultimately, mass blackouts.

In this piece from September last year, Isaac Orr, Mitch Rolling and John Phelan rich precisely that conclusion in relation to plans by Governor Tim Walz to permanently unhitch Minnesota from reality and reason.

The High Cost of 100 Percent Carbon-Free Electricity by 2040
American Experiment
Isaac Orr, Mitch Rolling, John Phelan
12 September 2022

The 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2040 mandate proposed by Minnesota Governor Tim Walz would cost the state $313.2 billion through 2050 and lead to devastating…

I have been very pessimistic in recent years about the United Kingdom. Now, having just finished giving speeches in Bristol and London, I’m even more pessimistic.

The core problem is that the burden of government spending has expanded dramatically in recent years, in part because of the pandemic.

But there’s been no move to undo the damage. Instead, the (supposedly) conservative governments of Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak have kept the spigots open.

So there’s a new spending baseline showing a permanent expansion in the fiscal burden.

And this does not even include all the additional spending that almost surely will get added because of demographic change.

Sadly, none of the experts I met with on my trip expressed much hope of reversing the nation’s fiscal decline.

Indeed, most of them have a a glum outlook. Including the ones I didn’t talk to. For instance, Fiona Bulmer authored some depressing…