Utopia, you are standing in it!

Sometimes spotting potential bank failures must be hard. One might think of really serious undiscovered fraud, or the weak controls that enabled a rogue trader such as Nick Leeson (who brought down Barings).

But if you were given the following set of facts about a bank:

• very rapid growth over a short period
• a heavy reliance on deposits withdrawable on demand,
• perhaps especially a heavy reliance on uninsured deposits or similar funding,
• a huge (and unusually large) share of the asset portfolio made up of long-term fixed rate bonds,
• a position greatly expanded at a time when short and long term interest rates were at record lows.
• no sign of any extensive use of interest rate risk hedging.

then even if you had reason to believe that the quality of the loans the bank had made were fine, the alarm bells should have been ringing very loudly.   It was a…

One of Labour’s worst legacies will be the decline in educational standards.

The Government must rule out lowering the standards required to obtain the NCEA literacy and numeracy co-requisites, National’s Education spokesperson Erica Stanford says.

“Revelations that the Government is considering lowering standards to help students pass shows an astounding lack of ambition from Labour.

“Two-thirds of New Zealand students failed to pass the new minimum literacy and numeracy standards for NCEA.

“Instead of simply dumbing down the tests to make them easier to pass, the Government could actually consider teaching kids more maths, reading and writing before they start secondary school.

“The Royal Society has already recommended that kids spend at least one hour a day learning maths. Why has the Government not acted on this advice?

“Rather than focusing on what students need in primary and…

By Dr. John Happs ~

According to Wikipedia the scientific method involves careful observation, rigorous scepticism about what is observed … formulating hypothesis … testing and refinement etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method

A number of entries in Wikipedia appear to display an absence of the above principles when it comes to reporting about climate change, with little criticism of the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) narrative. Thus, we have excellent examples of why this online source should be closely examined for possible bias when providing information about climate change and influencing factors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_conspiracy_theory

Close inspection suggests that Wikipedia has deleted a list of the many well-qualified scientists who have rejected the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming meme:

http://joannenova.com.au/2020/03/wikipedia-deletes-the-list-of-scientists-who-are-skeptics-of-the-sacred-consensus/print/

William Connolley was noted for promoting Wikipedia’s climate alarmist views whilst suppressing any rational, skeptical information that he didn’t like. Lawrence Solomon noted how:

“He rewrote Wikipedia’s articles on global warming, on the greenhouse effect…

Industrial scale wind and solar are world leaders when it comes to wrecking communities and destroying the environment.

Heavily subsidized, chaotically intermittent and an environmental nightmare, there’s a veritable smorgasbord of arguments against returning to the Dark Ages. A time when daily life was dictated by the seasons and the weather. The reason that human beings developed, harnessed and perfected thermal power was because they could. And (until now) we never looked back.

The Industrial Revolution, Space Race and the Internet Age would have been impossible without (respectively) coal, gas and, later, nuclear power.

No modern economy has ever powered itself in any meaningful way using wind and solar power. No country ever will.

Notwithstanding the reality, in the present Age of Morons, there’s an unhealthy stock of cynical rent-seekers dedicated to convincing gullible politicians that we’re only a technological heartbeat away from an all wind and sun powered future.

Never stand between rent seekers and a fat pile of taxpayers’ money. The wind and solar industries were built on lies and myth, but they can only survive when there’s a steady stream of massive and endless subsidies. Cut the subsidies and rent seekers disappear in a heartbeat.

BP was once the head of the ‘renewable’ energy rent-seeking queue. However, as Paul Homewood explains below, its management has seen the writing on the wall.

The climate scaremongers: BP gets real about Net Zero illusions
Conservative Woman
Paul Homewood
10 February 2023

IN LAST week’s column, I wrote about BP’s warning that the world would still be needing fossil fuels in three decades’ time. The Telegraph reported the claim of their Chief Economist Spencer Dale that the world would still be reliant on fossil fuels for a fifth of its energy in 2050, despite adopting radical climate policies, according to BP’s…

A correspondent asked me recently if I thought the refusal of Israeli opposition leaders to hold talks on the government’s proposed judicial overhaul, unless the government first pulled the bills from currently scheduled committee consideration, was “legitimate.” She did not think so, and her reason was sensible enough and certainly not something I can disagree with: Committees are where the details of legislation are worked out, after all, and the final version could be quite different from the initial draft.

My response was that I did not think there was anything illegitimate about the opposition’s stance. Basically, that anything that is not illegal is fair game in a democracy, because of what the title of this post says. It is all about bargaining.

What I mean is that the opposition has a weak hand in the legislature and its committees–the government has a majority of the Knesset and the…

Buckingham Palace announced today that, as was widely expected, the Earl of Wessex will be created Duke of Edinburgh. However, the title will apparently be granted for life only, which is unusual by modern standards.

Aside from some isolated creations of life peerages in the medieval and early modern periods,[1] the English (and later British) peerage was overwhelmingly hereditary until the latter half of the 20^th century. However, the emphasis on heredity made it difficult to inject fresh talent into the House of Lords since ministers were reluctant to ennoble someone unless his family could maintain the social standards of the peerage for generations to come.[2]

Matters reached a head in the mid-19th century. The House of Lords desperately needed peers with legal training to help with its judicial work, and in 1856, the Government advised Queen Victoria to confer a barony for life upon the jurist…

The post below updates the UAH record of air temperatures over land and ocean.  But as an overview consider how recent rapid cooling  completely overcame the warming from the last 3 El Ninos (1998, 2010 and 2016).  The UAH record shows that the effects of the last one were gone as of April 2021, again in November 2021, and in February and June 2022  Now at year end 2022 and continuing into January 2023 we have again global temp anomaly lower than average since 1995. (UAH baseline is now 1991-2020).

For reference I added an overlay of CO2 annual concentrations as measured at Mauna Loa.  While temperatures fluctuated up and down ending flat, CO2 went up steadily by ~60 ppm, a 15% increase.

Furthermore, going back to previous warmings prior to the satellite record shows that the entire rise of 0.8C since 1947 is due to oceanic, not human activity.

Duke of Edinburgh, named after the city of Edinburgh in Scotland, is a substantive title that has been created four times since 1726 for members of the British royal family. It does not include any territorial landholdings and does not produce any revenue for the title holder.

1726 Creation

HRH Prince Frederick Louis, Duke of Edinburgh

The title was first created in the Peerage of Great Britain on July 26, 1726 by King George I of Great Britain, who bestowed it on his grandson Prince Frederick Louis, who also became Prince of Wales the following year.

The subsidiary titles of the dukedom were Marquess of the Isle of Ely, Earl of Eltham, in the County of Kent, Viscount of Launceston, in the County of Cornwall, and Baron of Snowdon, in the County of Caernarvon, all of which were also in the Peerage of Great Britain.

The marquessate was gazetted as…

Eventually, order emerges from chaos. Thanks to the chaos of Europe’s self-inflicted wind and solar disaster, reality is starting to take hold, with the promise of order on the horizon.

Investment in new wind turbines and solar panels has plummeted across Europe. Coal-fired power is back in vogue and nuclear plants are the next must-have.

Ralph Schoellhammer is an assistant professor in economics and political science at Webster University Vienna.

Here he is explaining why the end is nigh for the grand wind and solar transition, with its inevitable demise starting in Europe.

Is the eco-bubble about to burst?
Spiked Online
Ralph Schellhammer
14 February 2023

Economist Herbert Stein once said that ‘if something cannot go on forever, it will stop’. Today, there is growing evidence that ‘Stein’s law’ is coming for the renewables industry, particularly for wind and solar power.

After investing billions of dollars into the green-energy transition, many…

At a  time  when the nation is reeling from the impact of Cyclone Gabrielle, climate change campaigner  Greenpeace  is demanding answers on why the government has yet to come up with an effective plan to cut emissions from the country’s biggest polluter.

Where’s the long-awaited plan to cut agricultural emissions? Greenpeace climate campaigner Christine Rose demands.

Prime Minister  Christopher Hipkins has been working round the clock, helping New Zealanders get back into their flood-wrecked homes. So he  might be muttering “Give me a  break”.