Utopia, you are standing in it!

Fossil fuel is the catalyst for modernity: coal, then oil and gas, have driven the mechanization and industrialisation responsible for lifting billions out of agrarian poverty, and all in the space of little more than a century.

A reliable supply of electricity allows the impoverished to escape the daily drudgery and misery of a life without it.

Spend a week gathering dung and twigs to cook meals over a smoky fire in an unlit hut, and you’ll soon be screaming for fossil fuels.

The miserable misanthropes and neo-Marxists reckon that fossil fuels are an evil to be driven back to the depths from whence they came. Except, of course, when it comes to their own selfish energy needs. Think pontificating actors, wannabe princesses and their royal beaus lecturing us about our energy use, as they traverse every inch of the globe in their private jets.

Amongst the anti-human, anti-progress squad…

The Māori Party, without any apparent blush, makes a provocative claim about the genetic superiority of Māori on its website.

The claim is to be found in a section which sets out the party’s sports policy:

 “It is a known fact that Māori genetic makeup is stronger than others.”

This genetic strength perhaps attenuates when Māori join the ACT or National Parties and express opinions that challenge the Government line on what must be done in partnership with Maori because of obligations supposedly demanded by the Treaty of Waitangi.

Māori Development Minister Willie Jackson earlier this year said ACT leader David Seymour, of Ngāpuhi descent, claimed to be Māori – but “he’s just a useless Māori, that’s all”.

“Absolutely [he’s] Māori but maybe just the most useless advocate for Māori we’ve ever seen.”

He subsequently told Morning Report he did not regret his comment because Seymour was a “dangerous…

The Reserve Bank’s MPC will deliver their next OCR decision on Wednesday. The consensus seems to be (quite strongly, and I have no particular reason to differ) that the Bank will raise the OCR by another 50 basis points. At 3.5 per cent, the OCR would then be at the peak level it was (inappropriately) raised to in 2014, at a time when core inflation was well below the target midpoint and the unemployment rate was lingering high.

I’m less interested in what the MPC will do than in what they should do, and on that count I’m less convinced that the consensus call would be the appropriate one. In times like the last 2-3 years, no one should feel overly confident about any particular assessment of what monetary policy stance will prove to be needed: there is inevitably an aspect of feeling your way, knowing that when all the…

Once the engineers were banished and the bureaucrats took charge, the fate of reliable and affordable energy supplies was sealed. Trashing coal-fired power plants, demonising nuclear power and squandering untold $billions on hopelessly unreliable wind and solar would have never happened if the engineers were left alone to run the show.

The results are difficult to conceal. Virtue signalling politicos and their barrackers in the MSM are, however, doing their level best to deflect attention from the disasters playing out in Europe, Britain and California.

They run a fair line in interference in relation to Europe, pointing the blame at Vlad Putin and his invasion of Ukraine. Which ignores the fact that Europe’s disaster was already revealed by the grand wind drought that hit during the last half of 2021.

America was, until Joe Biden took over, awash with gas, so wind and solar acolytes can’t run the same ‘Putin did…

What can you say about one of the funniest people that ever lived? Well frankly not much, except for that today marks his 132th birthday. Other then that I will leave Groucho do the talking.

“The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”

“I never forget a face, but in your case I’ll be glad to make an exception.”

“He may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot but don’t let that fool you. He really is an idiot.”

“While money can’t buy happiness, it certainly lets you choose your own form of misery.”

“Only one man in a thousand is a leader of men — the other 999 follow women.”

“Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn’t arrived yet. I have just one day, and I’m going to be happy in it.”

“One morning I shot an elephant in…

In the 2021-22 session of parliament, government defeats in the House of Lords reached record levels. Sam Anderson argues that two key factors combined to drive this phenomenon. First, the Johnson government pursued a controversial legislative agenda. Second, it seemed in some cases unwilling to compromise where evidence suggests that previous governments would have done so.

There were numerous examples throughout Boris Johnson’s premiership of his government’s rocky relationship with parliament. One recent manifestation – noted elsewhere – was that there were an unprecedented 128 government defeats in the House of Lords in the 2021-22 parliamentary session. This led some government supporters to suggest that the Lords has become a ‘House of opposition’ that ‘views themselves as there to obstruct’ the government. But is this assessment fair?

The Constitution Unit’s tracking of when and on what topics governments are defeated in the House of Lords offers key insights…

Sir Charles “Charlie” Spencer Chaplin (1889-1977) lived a tragic life. He was essentially abandoned by his parents as a child. When he grew up, he married four different women who were each much younger than Chaplin. He sired no less than eleven different children (many of whom he apparently treated poorly) and he entertained a long list of romantic affairs. Chaplin became a sympathetic socialist/communist despite being a wealthy millionaire and, as punishment for his political leanings, he was ultimately exiled from the U.S. and forced to live in Switzerland for the remainder of his life, returning to the U.S. only once in 1972 to accept an honorary Oscar.   

Charlie Chaplin’s life was one of the greatest tales of rags to riches. Almost as if mirroring a Horatio Alger novel, Chaplin was born in the rowdy, impoverished region of South London on the cusp of collapsing Victorian society. South…

Earl is a rank of the nobility in the United Kingdom. The title originates in the Old English word eorl, meaning “a man of noble birth or rank”. The word is cognate with the Scandinavian form jarl, and meant “chieftain”, particularly a chieftain set to rule a territory in a king’s stead. After the Norman Conquest, it became the equivalent of the continental count (in England in the earlier period, it was more akin to a duke; in Scotland, it assimilated the concept of mormaer).

In modern Britain, an earl is a member of the peerage, ranking below a marquess and above a viscount. A feminine form of earl never developed; instead, countess is used.

It is important to distinguish between the land controlled directly by the earl, in a landlord-like sense, and the region over which he could exercise his office. Scottish use of Latin terms provincia and comitatus…

Most people have heard of the Laffer Curve, which shows that there is a non-linear relationship between tax rates and tax revenues (for instance, doubling tax rates won’t produce a doubling of tax revenue because people and businesses will have less incentive to earn and report income).

There’s something similar on the spending side of the budget. I call it the Rahn Curve and it shows there is a non-linear relationship between government spending and economic performance.

The concept is not controversial, just like the concept of a Laffer Curve is not controversial.

What does trigger disagreement, however, is figuring out the shape of the curve, especially the growth-maximizing size of government (or, in the case of the Laffer Curve, the revenue-maximizing tax rate).

Much of the academic literature suggests that is maximized when government spending consumes about 20-plus percent of economic output.

But I’ve questioned whether…