Utopia, you are standing in it!

There has been extraordinary progress made in many facets of medical science and treatment, with the obvious front runner being cardiac issues. Nowhere is such progress better demonstrated than in the life insurance industry with its actuarial downgrading of cardiac risk over the last thirty years.

Not so well known, perhaps, is the art of pain management.

Some of our more alert readers will know Adolf underwent surgery on his left shoulder nearly three months ago to reattach a snapped tendon. The surgeon told me while such surgery is not major compared with many other types, this particular case was at the top of it’s class for being ‘major.’

So there I was, slung in a sling for six weeks, unable to drive.

For the whole six weeks l was required to take Panadol, 24 hours per day, every day, continuing up to today and for God knows how much…

In a ‘don’t say we told you so moment’, wind and solar obsessed California has just suffered another run of weather induced mass blackouts. Like clockwork, wind power output collapsed just as the summer heat and demand for electricity rose – leaving a million or more Californians sweltering in the dark.

Anyone wondering what an all wind and sun powered future might look like need look no further than the debacle that is California. Oh, and for those who think this might be novel or unique, you can always trawl our archives on Australia’s blackout capital, the equally wind and solar obsessed South Australia: Déjà Vu (All Over Again): Yet Another Wind Power Output Collapse Plunges 200,000 South Australian Homes into the Dark Ages

Here’s a couple of primers on what happens when brazen ideology trumps sound engineering.

Green California Has the Nation’s Worst Power Grid
Washington Examiner
Steve Goreham
18…

The scare du jour is about Greenland Ice Sheet (GIS) and how it will melt out and flood us all.  It’s declared that GIS has passed its tipping point, and we are doomed.  Typical is the Phys.org hysteria: Sea level rise quickens as Greenland ice sheet sheds record amount:  “Greenland’s massive ice sheet saw a record net loss of 532 billion tonnes last year, raising red flags about accelerating sea level rise, according to new findings.”

Panic is warranted only if you treat this as proof of an alarmist narrative and ignore the facts and context in which natural variation occurs. For starters, consider the last four years of GIS fluctuations reported by DMI and summarized in the eight graphs above.  Note the noisy blue lines showing how the surface mass balance (SMB) changes its daily weight by 8 or 10 gigatonnes (Gt) around the baseline mean from 1981…

There is a lively debate among economists about the way in which UK statisticians are estimating the impact of the pandemic on the output of the public sector. This is a relatively arcane topic and the mainstream media can be forgiven for not yet covering it. But it is important, not least because other countries do things differently.

If everyone used the same method, the reported fall in UK GDP in the first half of the year would actually be similar to that in France and Italy, rather than the outlier that the headlines suggest. On the other hand, the UK method, which is more accurate, will also show an even stronger recovery in the third quarter and beyond.

These issues have also led to some confusion about an alternative measure of inflation known as the implied GDP deflator, prompting the economist Shaun Richards to ask “Has nobody else…

(The 1968 Democratic Convention demonstration on the streets of Chicago)

The publication of MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell’s new book, PLAYING WITH FIRE: THE 1968 ELECTION AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN POLITICS comes at a propitious moment in American political history.  According to O’Donnell 1968 is the watershed year that set our current politics in motion – a partisan conflict were by ideology and party affiliation has become more important than the needs of the American people.  O’Donnell argues that before 1968 the terms conservative democrat and liberal republican existed, today they are pretty much extinct.  By examining 1968 we can discern the origin of this political schism and conjecture on how it affects the United States domestically and in the realm of foreign policy.  The comparison between our current politics and 1968 is fascinating as Donald Trump seems to have adopted the populist message of Alabama governor George C. Wallace…

The Heartland Institute’s Andy Singer explains why Golden State residents are dealing with rolling blackouts. As an aside, Governor Gavin Newsom, promised in May he would take a pay cut after slashing California state employee salaries. To this day, not surprisingly, he has yet to do so.