Utopia, you are standing in it!

Renewable energy rent seekers are fuming because Australia’s power grid can’t take any more of their chaotically generated wind and solar power.

The massive daily spikes and collapses in wind and solar power output have made the grid manager’s life a living hell: Hopeless Joke: Australia’s Wind Industry Keeps On Failing to Deliver the Goods

As a result, AEMO has introduced new rules about grid access for intermittent wind and solar and, much to the horror of the wind and solar industries, is actually enforcing them.

Dozens of proposed wind farms and large-scale solar projects have been shelved, simply because they can’t be guaranteed of ever being able to deliver a single watt into the grid.

Their grid troubles also coincide with the fact that the Federal government’s principal RE subsidy scam – the Large-Scale Renewable Energy Target – tops out this year at its ultimate annual target of 33,000 GWh…

Political documents of the civil wars

What follows are summaries of some of the key political documents from the start of Charles I’s conflict with Scotland  in 1637 to the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. Instead of a chronological or thematic approach, this is a different angle from which to consider the history of the period, a record of the proliferation of plans and constitutions cooked up by all sides in their attempts to find a solution to the nation’s deep divisions.

Lining them up like this brings out the collapse of consensus, the collapse of belief in a central set of political and religious values which characterised the era, and the countless attempts made by different political players to rebuild it. In the last few documents you can see the eventual realisation emerging that only some measure of tolerance and pluralism could replace the late-medieval idea of…

The good ship Green is taking on water, the pumps are failing and some of the crew are planning a mutiny. I have been leaked details of the Green Party ‘Come to Jesus’ conference call to discuss Shaw’s championing of the $11.7m grant to a private school that aligns itself with the Green Party kaupapa in contravention of Green Party policy.

A young Green Party activist from Otago University was on the call. She said Shaw came in for a fair amount of stick as you might imagine but the really fascinating piece of information was the line being peddled by Shaw that he was ‘set up’ by Labour to take the bait, he bit and signed off on the deal without reference to the Green Party caucus for which he is really truly, truly, truly sorry and that if he could take the grant back he would, but he…

Today is the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivering his stirring, moving, and infamous I Have A Dream speech during the Civil Rights March in Washington D.C. during 1963. Despite today’s racially divisive March on Washington geared to commemorate the historic event, Dr. King’s speech is an inspirational, welcoming, hopeful message that deserves to be watched again and again.

PHOTO CREDIT: Martin Luther King Jr.delivering the speech at the 1963Washington D.C. Civil Rights March – By Rowland Scherman – This media is available in the holdings of the National Archives and Records Administration, cataloged under the National Archives Identifier (NAID) 542069., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=294345

The Commonwealth 1649-1660

In my life I’ve met plenty of earnest republicans, who think we in the UK should abolish the monarchy because it stands at the apex of the system of power and privilege which entrenches privilege and inequality in British society, that we should disestablish the Church of England – whose only role is to prop up ‘the Establishment’ – and we should abolish the House of Lords, a ramshackle combination of Anglican bishops, hereditary peers and dodgy political nominees given places for ‘services rendered’ to the ruling party.

Anyway, all these steps were carried out 370 years ago, during the English Civil War and Commonwealth, and all modern republicans would do well to study in detail what happened.

Basically, the big constitutional experiment of the English Republic (from the execution of Charles I in 1642 to the restoration of Charles II in 1660) was a failure, because…

It’s Caturday, and you know what that means. (I don’t believe I’ve missed a week in years.)

Reader Peter sent this video of a treed cat being rescued in Sacramento, California, and added his take:

Here’s a short video of the Sacramento Fire Department rescuing a cat from a tree — the cat is fine and the guys have fun with it, but unfortunately the one they sent up the ladder clearly doesn’t know much about cats! He paid the price.

It is nice that some fire departments send out ladder trucks to do this. My one question is this: What happened to the cat after they brought it down? Did it have an owner?

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From ilovelibraries we have an article about what “library cats” (those moggies who actually live in libraries) are doing during a time when nobody can go to libraries. Click on the screenshot to…

I figured that this kind of report was over and done with, as surely airlines know that it’s gender discrimination to ask a passenger to move to accommodate a religiously-based request not to sit next to someone of the opposite sex. Yet, despite lawsuits won by women who complain about being forced to move, the incidents persist. And the situations invariably involve male ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) Jewish men, who consider themselves polluted and violating the dictates of Yahweh should they touch a woman.

The most famous incident even has its own Wikipedia page: the case of Renee Rabinowitz, an American-Israeli psychologist. Flying to Tel Aviv in business class in 2015, she was forced by the El Al flight attendants to change seats at the request of a Haredi male. She sued for discrimination, and won a settlement of 6500 shekels (about $1800) plus a promise from El Al that it…

I’m not sure whether access to Andrew Sullivan’s The Weekly Dish is still free, but you can try by clicking on the screenshot below (I have a paid subscription, which I think is money well spent). It’s only $50 per year, and if it’s not free I can use only very short quotes, which I will start doing. Today, however, I’ll quote Sullivan at some length, though not excessively.

Sulilivan’s thesis is one that I’ve broached before: violent protests racking many cities, and the apparent reluctance of leading Democrats (including Biden) to criticize them publicly, is a “trap” that could play into the hands of Trump.  Now perhaps you’ll contest the claim that the Democrats are reluctant to criticize violent protests, but my impression is that these “crickets” are a real thing. Sure, Biden has lamely criticized them once, but not often, and the denunciation of violence was not even…