Utopia, you are standing in it!

Yes, the headline is a rhetorical question. Because if there’s one thing the 50+ years since “Bullitt” has proven, it’s that most every big screen cop thriller has been in many if not most ways a remake of this Steve McQueen/Peter Yates classic.

We’ve had half a century of the “renegade” “outsider,” “goes his own way” cops, hunting for justice in a broken and/or corrupt system. There have been hundreds of films in which the cop hero drove a “car with character,” and any car buff or film fan knows what you mean when you say “Bullitt Mustang.” The “GT” is understood, the image iconic.

But let’s take that headline literally, shall we? Watching the film again for the umpteenth time last night, I gave it a hard, unsentimental pass for the first time in years.

The story — Lt. Frank Bullitt (McQueen) is tasked by his boss (the…

The votes are not yet final from the 1 November 2022 Israeli general election, but the outcome is quite clear. The right-wing bloc of parties supporting current opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu will have won a manufactured majority.Media are calculating the bloc’s combined seats at 65 out of 120. Yet the bloc currently has just 48.1% of the votes. That is actually lower than the clear majority of the vote they got in April, 2019, yet at that election the result was deadlock while this one will produce a majority coalition government. What explains the difference? Coordination.

The reason for the manufactured majority in this election, despite a nationwide proportional representation electoral system, is coordination failure. The strategic choices of political leaders and voters in both the left and the Arab political camps have made Netanyahu’s impending return to government possible. On the left, Labor has barely cleared the…

If you believe thesmoke signals from the Treasury– and you probably should – the Budget on 17 November will have to include big increases in tax in order to plug a ‘black hole’ in the public finances. But is it inevitable that taxes will have to rise and, if so, what’s the best way to do it?

The obvious starting point is the ‘black hole’ itself. Different numbers are regularly tossed about here, with recent estimates ranging from around £30 billion to more than £70 billion. However, few people understand what these mean. The size of the ‘black hole’ depends on two main factors.

The first is the set of fiscal rules against which the public finances are assessed. The ‘black hole’ is the difference between the forecast path for public sector borrowing on current policies and where borrowing needs to be to hit the government’s targets. The…

Bush fire
Hardly a surprising conclusion in this research. A classic example of replacing what worked with what sounded good.
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Southeast Australia’s bushfire crisis culminated in the devastating bushfire season of 2019 and 2020 that burnt nearly 25 million hectares of bush, says Phys.org.

Our new research demonstrates how the scale of this disaster blew out due to legislation introduced in the 1970s, which was based on idea that nature should be left to grow freely without human intervention.

We investigated the bushfire history of one of the worst hit areas: Buchan on Gunaikurnai Country in Victoria.

We found no bushfires burned there for almost a century until the mid 1970s, following the establishment of the Land Conservation Act of 1970—legislation that sought to protect the Australian bush from humans.

This legislation banned farmers from mimicking Aboriginal burning practices by using frequent fires to promote grass…

Ah, yes, we are doing this again: Another Israeli general election. I am not going to pretend to know what will happen. As I type this, ILTV is making it seem as if the right-wing bloc has a majority with 61 or 62 seats. That would be a government of Likud, the two Haredi parties (Shas and UTJ), and the Religious Zionist list, returning Benjamin Netanyahu to the prime ministership.

HOWEVER, this is based on exit polls. These have been off before. It is downright misleading of media to treat these as if they are indicative of real results. On the other hand, it would be in no way a surprise if the final results were to confirm these exit polls. We just don’t know yet.

I won’t get into other possible coalition scenarios till we have actual results, other than to note that there are interesting possibilities…

I’ve expressed opposition numerous times to so-called industrial policy because I don’t want politicians and bureaucrats to provide special favors to certain businesses or industries at the expense of everyone else.

That’s a practice known as cronyism, and it is absurd to think that selfish, election-focused politicians somehow correctly identify and subsidize the technologies of tomorrow.

But there are still people who think government should try to steer the economy – including some supposed conservatives.

Let’s remind ourselves why this is a bad idea. Samuel Gregg of the American Institute for Economic Research has a new article about the topic for National Review.

…several polling outfits have indicated an uptick in the number of Americans who say they are disillusioned with capitalism and willing to consider socialism as an alternative. This, however, isn’t the most immediate threat to American capitalism. …It is best labeled “corporatism.” …Examples of…

Try to cover up the chronic energy policy mistakes made in the name of climate theories by doling out vast sums of borrowed money to the struggling customers. That’s the current UK approach. Why should anyone be content with putting the exchequer ever further in the mire to keep futile net zero dogma alive?
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Often I have referred to the situation that the UK, Germany, California, and others have set themselves up for as “hitting the green energy wall,” says Francis Menton (via Climate Change Dispatch).

But now that the UK has actually gotten there and has begun to deal with the consequences, I’m not sure that “hitting the wall” is the best analogy.

A better analogy might be “driving into the green energy cul-de-sac.” After all, when you hit a wall you can probably just pick yourself up and turn around and be on your…

Still so profoundly sad that Dolores died so young, This is one of their best songs, although there is no such thing as a bad Cranberries song.

The song was written in response to the death of Johnathan Ball, 3, and Tim Parry, 12, who had been killed in the IRA bombing in Warrington, northwest England, when two devices hidden in litter bins were detonated. Ball died at the scene of the bombing as a result of his shrapnel-inflicted injuries and, five days later, Parry lost his life as a result of head injuries.56 others were injured, some seriously. Parry died in his father’s arms in Liverpool’s Walton hospital. The two boys had gone shopping to buy Mother’s Day cards on one of the town’s busiest shopping streets.

“There were a lot of bombs going off in London and I remember this one time a child was killed when a…

The forecast lithium demand to meet the Net Zero targets look to be completely unachievable. That is an enormous amount of new mining that would no doubt be opposed by self described environmentalists. The story of global growth and prosperity from the industrial revolution is tightly entwined with use of energy starting with coal, other fossil fuels and nuclear. It seems to me the underlying socialist green agenda is happily to take us all back to an agrarian lifestyle. They decry growth and seem happy to leave the undeveloped nations where they are and take the world down to their level, rather than encourage the use of fossil fuels to bring everyone forward.

There’s never been a financial scam that comes anywhere near rivalling subsidised wind power for longevity and audacity.

Stories of the gullible signing up to buy the London Bridge or the Eiffel Tower spring to mind, when it is borne in mind that wind power (which simply cannot be delivered on demand) has no commercial value, apart from the massive and endless subsidies its generators pocket.

One aspect of the so-called ‘business’ is earning outrageous amounts of revenue for doing nothing, that is, being paid to not produce what it is that your business is meant to produce. You’ll be hard-pressed to find any other examples that match the profligacy of paying “constraint payments” to wind power outfits, so that they won’t deliver power to the grid when the wind is blowing.

This is not nickels and dimes, either. Up to December 2019, British wind power outfits had collected over…