Utopia, you are standing in it!

In a couple of weeks it will be 2023. And then in a couple of years it will be 2025.

Those with longish geeky memories may recall that there was once talk of closing the gap between New Zealand and Australian incomes/productivity by 2025. Without any great enthusiasm no doubt, the incoming National government led by John Key agreed to ACT’s request for a (time and resource-limited) official 2025 Taskforce that would offer some analysis and advice on what it would take to achieve such a goal. The Taskforce’s first report had been dismissed by the Prime Minister before it was even released and after the second report the Taskforce was quietly disbanded. I held the pen on the first report and had some input on the second one (itself written by the current chair of the Reserve Bank Board), and since the reports were written when my kids were…

G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of
the American Century
by Beverly Gage
864 pages
Viking (Penguin Random House)
Published: Nov 2022

One of 2022’s most notable new biographies is Beverly Gage’s long-awaited “G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century.” Gage is a professor of American history at Yale University and the author of The Day Wall Street Exploded.

J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972) is an intriguing biographical subject; he spent 48 years as Director of the FBI and was arguably the most powerful unelected public official in the country at the time.  But any survey of his career also provides unique insight into the lives of the public figures who operated within his sphere. And during his nearly half-century at the FBI he worked with every president from Calvin Coolidge to Richard Nixon.

One might assume that Hoover’s life has been fully…

Ralph Schoellhammer writes from Vienna at Spiked Renewables won’t keep us warm this winter.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The cold snap is exposing the limits of wind and solar – and the insanity of the green agenda.

There are already many German loan words in the English language, but the latest addition should surely be the term ‘Dunkelflaute’. It describes a period of time in which virtually no energy can be generated using wind and solar power. It is a word that captures the grave problem that both Britain and Germany are facing today – namely, that you cannot run a modern economy on renewable energy. Especially during a windless and dark winter.

As real-time data from Electricity Maps shows, electricity production from renewables in Germany and the UK over the past few days has been abysmal. In Germany it is coal that…

When Pope Paul III excommunicated King Henry VIII of England on December 17 this was the second time the King had been excommunicated. I will begin by giving some background information on Pope Clement VII and the first excommunication of the King.

King Henry VIII of England and Lord of Ireland

Pope Clement VII (May 26, 1478 – September 25, 1534) was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 19 November 1523 to his death on 25 September 1534.

Born Giulio de’ Medici, his life began under tragic circumstances. On April 26, 1478—exactly one month before his birth—his father, Giuliano de Medici (brother of Lorenzo the Magnificent) was murdered in the Florence Cathedral by enemies of his family, in what is now known as “The Pazzi Conspiracy”.

The future Pope was born illegitimately on May 26, 1478, in Florence; the exact identity of his mother…

It’s ‘study suggests’ time again. NZW: They say (p 4283) it’s a credible hypothesis that global temperature trend changes since 2000 could be “arising largely from internal variability.”
— These results definitely won’t please the climate obsessive tendency.
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A new study by a team of leading climate scientists suggests that the effect of carbon dioxide this century might be small when compared to natural climate variability, says Net Zero Watch.

Global surface temperature is, and always has been, the key climate parameter.

Whatever is happening to the Earth’s climate balance, it must, sooner or later, be reflected in the global annual average temperature, and not just in regional variations.

But therein lies what is to some an inconvenience, as the changes in the global temperature this century is open to differing interpretations including the suggestion that increases in anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are not needed to…

Windfarm in the California desert
They plan to keep increasing electricity demand by (for example) mandating EVs, while reducing reliable supply in pursuit of climate obsessions. How long can US States go on ignoring the obvious?
– – –
California and parts of the Midwest are at a high risk of electricity shortages in the coming years amid the transformation of their grid from one reliant on fossil fuels to one reliant on other sources of energy such as wind and solar, says OilPrice.com.

The warning comes from the latest annual assessment of the grid by the North American Reliability Corporation, as cited by CNBC.

According to the assessment, the Midwest and Ontario in Canada risk power shortages because they are retiring more generation capacity than they are adding.

The Labour Party’s Commission on the UK’s Future has published a report making some bold proposals for constitutional reform.  The most striking proposal in A New Britain: Renewing our Democracy and Rebuilding our Economy is to change the UK’s constitutional model in a way which introduces a form of entrenchment into our legal and political system.  In essence, this mechanism would protect certain constitutional arrangements or principles from being repealed or amended in the same way as ordinary legislation – the entrenched provisions might include a new statement of purposes for the UK, the autonomy of local government, a new set of social rights, a legalised version of the Sewel convention (constraining the law-making power of the UK Parliament in relation to devolution), and a series of other ‘protected constitutional statutes’.  Entrenchment of these provisions would be achieved through a new Assembly of the Nations and Regions, which would have a veto…