Utopia, you are standing in it!

For those who don’t think that they can align perfectly and turn into control freakdom, I present to you the Pink Horror of the Great Chinese Snot Pandemic

Feeling the love yet Siouxsie? Will another bout of TV spots in another pandemic make you feel better, you attention-seeking, panic-spreading British Fauci? Any chance you’ll be drastically reducing your carbon footprint by staying off planes and cars? Our Planet is crying for you to eat less, Siouxsie.

Let me be clear: Wayne Brown is 80 years old and shows similar cognitive problems to that of Biden, though no where near as bad. I suspect that he’ll be as useless as he was when Far North Mayor back in the late 2000’s – while hoping against hope that he isn’t. And of course even if he was a dynamo he’d still only be one voice on the Council – and then…

Because of my libertarian proclivities, I don’t like when people assert that the United States should have European-sized government.

But this is not merely a question of ideology.

I’ve repeatedly pointed out that there is a relationship between national prosperity and economic liberty. And I’ve shared plenty of data showing that ordinary Americans have significantly higher living standards that their counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

So why “catch up” with countries that are lagging behind?

One of my favorite ways of illustrating the gap is the “actual individual consumption” data from the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Here are the latest numbers, with show that the United States is more than 50 percent above the average for OECD nations.

I’m not surprised that Luxembourg ranks second since it is a tax haven. And it’s also not surprising that

Tales of Japanese soldiers who refused to surrender at the end of World War II long ago entered the realm of legend, and even became a punchline as the decades passed and the myth of the “fanatics” still holding out in the Philippines approached the realm of the ridiculous.

But every so often a new “survivor” turned up, on into the 1970s, giving this bizarre, almost laughable “devotion to duty” a moment in the spotlight of cold, hard reality.

“Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle” is an epic-length story of one of the last holdouts. This French production is slightly sentimentalized, perhaps for the Japanese marketplace, but grimly realistic in its depiction of the moral dilemma such men faced as evidence grew that they were fighting a war that was over. And that they were “fighting” against civilians they were robbing, terrorizing and even murdering.

“Onoda” is framed in the…

Zealots tout Germany as the benchmark for the ‘inevitable transition’ to wind and solar, but its energy system is a complete debacle; power rationing is the new normal and prices are through the roof.

Indeed, any country that got serious about subsidising wind and solar is finding itself in serious trouble.

Disastrous examples such as Germany, Britain, California, Denmark and South Australia have provided ample evidence from anyone who cares to understand why wind and solar can’t power us, and never will.

Mark P Mills has been trawling over that evidence for years now.

Mark is a Manhattan Institute senior fellow, a faculty fellow at Northwestern University’s engineering school, and a partner in Montrose Lane, an energy-tech venture fund. He is author of the book The Cloud Revolution: How the Convergence of New Technologies Will Unleash the Next Economic Boom and a Roaring 2020s (2021), and previously: Digital Cathedrals (2020)…

Stardate: 4211.4 (2268)
Original Air Date: Feb 2, 1968
Writer: Donald G. Ingalls (pseudonym of “Jud Crucis”) and Gene Roddenberry
Director: Marc Daniels

“A balance of power. The trickiest, most difficult, dirtiest game of them all,
but the only one that preserves both sides.”

Several crew members are admiring the “interesting organic compounds” on a planet informally known as Neural (the name is never actually mentioned in the episode, only in the script). Spock notes it is a Class-M planet in every respect. Thirteen years earlier, Kirk was part of a surveying mission on Neural which allowed him to better understand the planet’s Edenic qualities –it is filled with fascinating flora, as well as apelike carnivorous horned creatures known as Mugatos. There are also two groups of primitive people living on Neural –villagers and hill people. Both are peace-loving compassionate people. Any use of phasers here is…

Dr Eric Crampton  writes:

The Crown Accounts are in better shape than had been expected when the Budget was set.

That’s the good news.

But the Reserve Bank this week warned, while increasing interest rates by 0.5 percentage points, that “overall spending continues to outstrip the capacity to supply goods and services.”

The deficit still stands at $9.7 billion dollars. Core crown expenses, in 2022, were some $17 billion higher than they were in 2020 and 2021, when lockdowns and wage subsidies warranted substantial fiscal support.

Fiscal policy continues to provide too much stimulus in an overheated economy.