Utopia, you are standing in it!

 The Ardern Government risks the emergence of what political commentator CHRIS TROTTER calls a “super-narrative” in which all the negatives of co-governance, media capture, and Neo-Tribal Capitalism are rolled into one big story about the deliberate corruption of New Zealand democracy. The guilty parties would be an unholy alliance of Pakeha and Māori elites determined to keep public money flowing upwards into protected private hands. Here’s what he posted on  his Bowalley Road blog ….  

WHETHER NANAIA MAHUTA followed the conflict-of-interest rules set out in The Cabinet Manual hardly matters. A dangerous political narrative is forming around the appointment of, and awarding of contracts to, Mahuta’s whanau in circumstances that, at the very least, raise serious questions about this Government’s political judgement. Enlarging this narrative is the growing public perception that the mainstream news media is refusing to cover a story that would, in other circumstances, have attracted…

Edward VIII (Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David; June 23, 1894 – May 28, 1972) was King of the United Kingdom and the Dominions of the British Empire, and Emperor of India from January 20, 1936 until his abdication in December of the same year.

Edward was born during the reign of his great-grandmother Queen Victoria as the eldest child of the Duke and Duchess of York, later King George V and Queen Mary.

Edward was created Prince of Wales on his 16th birthday, seven weeks after his father succeeded as king. As a young man, Edward served in the British Army during the First World War and undertook several overseas tours on behalf of his father. While Prince of Wales, he engaged in a series of sexual affairs that worried both his father and then-British prime minister Stanley Baldwin.

Upon his father’s death in 1936, Edward became the…

To make way for over 30,000 of these things, the German wind industry has ruthlessly clear-felled ancient forests, once considered out of bounds.

Provided the wilderness being turned into smouldering ash is used as a platform for hundreds of 260m high/300 tonne industrial juggernauts, it’s all for the greater good.

Trashing thousand-year-old oak trees and carving up pristine woodland is all in a day’s work for those promising to save the planet.

Germany’s Black Forest has already been overrun; chainsaws, bulldozers and blazing torches doing their worst to save us from the horrors of a change in the weather.

The Reinhardswald in the State of Hesse is their next target. A magical place where the Brothers Grimm brought Snow White and Sleeping Beauty to life, both literally and figuratively.

The Greens are determined to wreck even that remnant of German history and culture with a move to rip up…

I’d just bought the Oxford University Press edition of Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars off Amazon when I walked into my local charity shop and found the old Penguin edition going second-hand for £2. So I snapped it up and am now reading the two editions interchangeably.

The OUP edition (1996)

The OUP edition (1996) is translated and introduced by Carolyn Hammond. She began to put me off almost immediately when, in her preface, she writes:

The subject-matter of The Gallic War is potentially distasteful, even immoral, for the modern reader. The drive to increase territorial holdings, high civilian as well as military casualties, and the predominance of economic motives for organised aggression – all these belong to an accepted norm of international activity in the ancient world, and hence need careful introduction and explanation…

This begs all kinds of questions. For example: Why are you devoting so much time to…

Good tax policy should strive to solve the three major problems that plague today’s income tax.

1. Punitive tax rates on productive behavior.
2. Double taxation of saving and investment
3. Corrupt, complex, and inefficient loopholes.

Today, let’s focus on the second item. If the goal is to minimize the economic damage of taxation, both labor and capital should be taxed at the lowest-possible rate.

But, as illustrated by the chart, the internal revenue code imposes widespread “double taxation” on income that is saved and invested.

Actually, it’s more than double taxation. Between the capital gains tax, corporate income tax, double tax on dividends, and death tax, there are multiple layers of tax on income from saving and investment.

So even if statutory tax rates are low, effective tax rates can be very high when you consider how the IRS gets several bites at the…

Wind and solar subsidies were designed to undermine the owners of reliable power generation plants, making them uncompetitive in the first instance and ultimately putting them out of business.

The problem with that model, though, is that once-reliable generators are knocked off the grid, power consumers are then forced to pay the full price of the market chaos caused by weather-dependent wind and sunshine-dependent solar.

Well, as they say, you reap what you sow. And, so it is in the USA.

Robert Bradley takes a look at the cancerous destruction being wreaked by subsidised wind and solar in Texas.

“Negative Electricity Prices and the Production Tax Credit” (2012 warning for Texas went unheeded)
Master Resource
Robert Bradley
17 May 2022

[Editor note: The current (May) problems of the Texas Grid reflect a socialized wholesale market (ERCOT) in light of the wind/solar cancer that has wounded the ‘reliables.’ Specifically, negative pricing of windpower, a…

Anne Boleyn (c. 1501 – May 19, 1536) was Queen of England from 1533 to 1536, as the second wife of King Henry VIII. The circumstances of her marriage and of her execution by beheading for treason and other charges made her a key figure in the political and religious upheaval that marked the start of the English Reformation.

Anne was the daughter of Thomas Boleyn, 1st Earl of Wiltshire, and his wife, Lady Elizabeth Howard, and was educated in the Netherlands and France, largely as a maid of honour to Queen Claude of France. Anne returned to England in early 1522, to marry her Irish cousin James Butler, 9th Earl of Ormond; the marriage plans were broken off, and instead she secured a post at court as maid of honour to Henry VIII’s wife, Catherine of Aragon.

Early in 1523, Anne was secretly betrothed to Henry Percy, son of…

What follows is the raw script/notes from my presentation at the World Potato Congress in Dublin on 1 June 2022. As the presentation was given without supports, some of the text may differ from the actual delivered speech.
It was nice to be back on stage.

Reality is perceived by the definitions we give; the black and white lines we draw upon a grey canvas. So in communications, the message is controlled by the wordsmither – the one framing the language that guides our social discourse.

Who is controlling the definitions to the concepts we are using in agriculture and food research?

This might seem obvious but many food/agriculture issues in Brussels are problematic because of poor lexicons. Definitions matter in that they frame our policy discussions, regulations and emotional responses. Regulators start their work with definitions and tend to use this to limit problems or to reach solutions to…

Suetonius

Not much is known about Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, generally referred to as Suetonius. He was born around 70 AD, probably in a town in modern-day Algeria. He may have taught literature for a while, he seems to have practiced the law. He is recorded as serving on the staff of Pliny the Younger when the latter was governor of Bithynia in north Turkey in 110 to 112 AD. Subsequently he served on the staff of emperors, being in charge of the emperor’s libraries under Trajan and then managing the emperor Hadrian’s correspondence. Pliny describes him as a quiet and studious man devoted to his writing. He wrote The Lives of Illustrious Men, 60 or so biographies of poets, grammarians, orators and historians, almost all of which has been lost (except for short lives of Terence, Virgil and Horace).

The Lives of the Caesars, by contrast, has survived…