Utopia, you are standing in it!

While discovering electricity was part insight, superstition and serendipity, harnessing it for good came down to the laws of physics and sound engineering.

Exciting as it might be, feeling your hair stand up during an electrical storm was never going to alter the course of human affairs. Whereas the ability to generate and then deliver electrical power at a given frequency and voltage over time and on demand was an inevitable game changer.

Once thermal energy was used for that purpose, wind power was then and thereafter utterly redundant. Productive work could then be carried out at any time and without the need for a favourable weather forecast in advance.

The dismal history of early efforts to use windmills to generate electricity ought to have provided sufficient evidence to future generations attempting to do likewise. But, as they say, those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.

Parker Gallant…

Stardate: 5784.2 (2268)
Original Air Date: November 22, 1968
Writer: Meyer Dolinsky
Director: David Alexander

“Plato wanted truth and beauty and above all, justice.”

In response to “desperate distress calls from an unknown planet,” Enterprise crewmen Kirk, Spock, and Bones beams down to a planet rich in kironide deposits, a high-energy substance. Supposedly, the Enterprise scanners show no life forms on the planet. However, they find towering columns and statues a la ancient Greece and the crewmen are quickly greeted by a small-sized court jester named Alexander (Michael Dunn). He explains that there are beings on this planet. The sun near their home planet Sahndara went super-nova a millennia ago. They had instituted a a mass eugenics program focused on longevity (they are each over 2,000 years old). They transported themselves to ancient Greece on earth to study under Plato. After Plato died, they traveled to this new…

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…