Utopia, you are standing in it!

Climate Control Panel

“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue.
Even if the theory of global warming is wrong,
we will be doing the right thing in terms of
economic and environmental policy.“
– Timothy Wirth
Fmr President of the UN Foundation

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OVER the past month a staggering 8,742 cold temperature records were set in the United States.

Electroverse with the ‘inconvenient’ data …

Over the past 30 days, the United States set 8,742 New All-Time Low Temperature Records vs just the 1,832 Max | Electroverse

the U.S. busted a staggering 8,742 low temperature records over the past 30 days, compared with just the 1,832 maximum ones — 7,361 of those were new daily record-lows — 1,378 were new monthly record-lows for October — while 3 were all-time record lows; temps never-before observed during any month of the year. And further to all that…

A standard proposition in the literature on delegating public powers to unelected (agents or) agencies in a free and democratic society is that such agencies should operate in a way that leaves no basis for any reasonable person to suspect that those running the agencies are using their platform, and the associated public resources and powers, for any purpose other than the very specific ones Parliament has provided those powers/resources for.   Abuses and departures from this norm need not –  and fortunately in New Zealand rarely do –  involve officeholders seeking to personally enrich themselves or their families.  Here it is more likely to take the form of using the platform/powers provided for specific narrow purposes to advance the personal ideological and policy preferences of top managers/Board in quite unrelated areas.

The fact that those individuals, in abusing their powers, do so believing –  probably quite sincerely –  that they…

Readers of this blog will be aware of the dispute between the Scottish and UK Governments over who should legislate in areas hitherto covered by EU law after Brexit (or more accurately after the end of the post-withdrawal Implementation Period). That dispute saw the Scottish Parliament enact its own Continuity Bill intended as an alternative to the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 (EUWA). That Bill – the UK Withdrawal from the European Union (Legal Continuity) (Scotland) Bill (the “first Continuity Bill”) (discussed here and here) – was subsequently referred to the Supreme Court and held to be outwith devolved competence so far as it conflicted with the EUWA (discussed here). Although some provisions of the Bill survived the Supreme Court reference, the Scottish Government decided not to proceed with Bill, but undertook to bring back the remaining provisions on a future occasion.

On 18 June 2020, the Scottish…

Since World War II affordable power was regarded as a birthright: RE obsessed virtue signallers have destroyed that notion in a heartbeat.

In California, compassion is a rare commodity among those promoting and profiting from subsidised wind and solar. Seminal Californian Punk outfit, the Dead Kennedys seem to have foreshadowed their State’s insane energy policy with their cheery ditty, ‘Kill the Poor’. Because it’s the poor and vulnerable that suffer most from rocketing power prices.

As in South Australia, Ontario, Denmark and Germany, so it goes in California.

After decades of throwing $billions of taxpayer’s money at intermittent wind and solar, Californians now pay 60% more for their electricity than the next most expensive state in the US: power prices have risen more than five times as fast than the other states over the last eight years.

For the unemployed, underemployed and a large proportion of the working poor…

“Colorblind casting” is defined in this New York Times piece by culture critic Maya Phillips as “performers [inhabiting] characters of racial backgrounds that [differ] from their own.” When applied in such a way to ensure “acting justice” (people of all ethnicities getting an opportunity to play anyone) rather than just letting white people play people of all ethnicities—as was often the case in early movies—it would seem to be fine. But in Phillip’s piece she finds several reasons why such casting is problematic.

In a way, Phillips’s counterintuitive take on colorblind casting reminds me of the piece by the paper’s music critic, Anthony Tommasini, urging orchestras to drop blind auditions as a (misguided) way to increase ethnic diversity. And it shows the ability of the op-ed writers at the New Woke Times to justify any action, however crazy, if they can be made to look antiracist.

I don’t find…