Utopia, you are standing in it!

This winter is delivering wind and solar obsessed Europeans a banquet of consequences. Massive power price spikes in ‘wind powered’ Britain followed a period of dead calm, as the owners of Britain’s remaining dispatchable power plants cashed in: the wholesale price went from £40 to £4,000 per MWh.

Across the ditch, a complete collapse in wind and solar output on 8 January forced Europe’s grid managers to cut power to big users in France, Germany and Austria in order to avoid a complete ‘system black’. It was, like Napoleon’s Waterloo, “a close-run thing”.

The number of similar “emergency operations” has increased from a dozen or so each year to over 240, thanks to chaotically intermittent wind and solar.

None of this was on the radar when Germany was content to rely upon its ever-reliable nuclear and coal-fired power plants. As they say, you reap what you sow.

Here’s Henrik Paulitz…

On Sunday, Labour’s Anneliese Doddstweeted that the UK ‘had the worst recession and the worst growth of any major economy last year’, and that ‘Covid closed much of our economy, but the Conservatives crashed it’. Of course, this is just a tweet and almost all politicians try to score points in this way. Nonetheless, it was still pretty sloppy.

The Shadow Chancellor was citing the latest IMFestimates for GDP growth in the G7 economies in 2020, rather than the actual data. The official numbers have either not been published (we have to wait until 12^th February for the UK), or are slightly different. But the IMF probably wasn’t far wrong (UK GDP is indeed likely to have fallen by about 10%), so I’ll let that pass.

The real issue is how the data have been spun. For a start, rather than contrast the UK with the US…

Introduction

In January 2021, Julie Payette resigned the Office of Governor General in disgrace. Her troubled tenure has shattered the credibility of the institution and provided anti-monarchists a greater platform on which to stand than they ever dared hope. In “A Star Goes Supernova,” I reviewed three years’ worth of newspaper reports which chronicled from 2018 to 2020 her steadfast refusal to carry out her constitutional and ceremonial duties and the toxic culture of harassment and recrimination which she brewed at Rideau Hall, leading to mass resignations, insincere and mendacious non-apology apologies, and, ultimately, to a damning independent report that proved her downfall. Payette’s resignation broke new ground in Canada but has precedents elsewhere in our sister Commonwealth Realms. In this piece, I will explain what happens when the Office of Governor General becomes vacant, review similar precedents in the other Realms where other Governors have resigned their…

Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for the New York Times and Susan Glasser, a staff writer for The New Yorker have written an engrossing biography of James Baker III, a man whose impact from 1976 through the election of 2000 can not be denied. The book’s range is impressive as the authors describe a childhood under the thumb of a father whose nickname was “the Warden.” As an adult we witness the death of his wife from cancer at a young age and a remarriage that merged two families resulting in eight children, a number of which experienced numerous problems including drugs and alcohol. Baker would give up the practice of law in Texas and move on to a political education in Washington, D.C. that produced lessons that stressed how to accumulate power and…