Utopia, you are standing in it!

The wind cultist is always ready to spear hundreds of giant 240m (787ft) industrial wind turbines into your backyard, but howls bloody outrage should the ‘favour’ look like being returned. Destroying your patch of paradise is a sacrifice that he is always willing to make. Characters like former Greens leader, Bob Brown and rent-seeking renewables lobbyist, Oliver Yates.

The other ‘joy’ that these hypocrites are keen to deliver (unselfishly) to everyone but themselves are the thousands of kilometres of high voltage transmission lines that are required to collect and deliver the dilute and diffuse power occasionally generated by wind turbines and solar panels scattered all over the countryside, often hundreds of kilometres from the homes and businesses where it might be consumed.

As with their approach to jamming hundreds of giant wind turbines and seas of solar panels into peaceful and prosperous rural communities, the corporates involved in the grand…

In April of 2013, I introduced a Moocher Hall of Fame to “celebrate” some very odious examples of welfare dependency.

Since that time, I keep thinking that it’s time to do something similar for government bureaucrats. This compilation from last December would be a good place to start, though I’d have to figure out whether to have group memberships so that we could include the bureaucrats at the Patent and Trademark Office who get paid to watch TV, as well as the paper pushers at the Department of Veterans Affairs who got big bonuses after creating secret waiting lists that led to the death of former soldiers.

But if we’re creating a Bureaucrat Hall of Fame, I won’t want to discriminate against foreigners.

The U.K.-based Telegraph reports, for instance, that an unnamed doctor from Italy is a very worthy candidate for this award.

The notorious inefficiencies of Italy’s…

In 2022, I did a seven-part series about Bidenomics, focusing on the president’s track record on subsidies,  inflation,  protectionism, household income, fiscal policy, red tape, and labor-force participation.

Let’s take an updated look at his record on household income.

I’m motivated to address this issue because of a Wall Street Journaleditorial featuring this depressing chart showing that inflation-adjusted wages for the average American worker have declined during the Biden presidency.

This is not a happy chart, though at least there’s been some slight improvement over the past 12 months.

Here’s some of the accompanying analysis from the WSJ‘s editorial.

…why are voters so unhappy? The answer can be found in one lesson by looking at the…chart. It tracks average real hourly earnings for all workers in the private economy across the Biden Presidency, and it tells an ugly story about the…

I created the Bureaucrat Hall of Fame to give recognition to government employees who confirm our worst suspicions about being lazy and overpaid. Or worse.

Getting selected is not easy. For instance, the bureaucrats from the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board (the focus of yesterday’s column) did not make it into the Hall of Fame.

This is an “honor” reserved for those who go way above and beyond the call of duty.

Such as Cinzia Paolina De Lio.

Who is this person? What makes her worthy of being inducted into the Bureaucrat Hall of Fame?

She’s an Italian teacher. But she’s a teacher who almost never taught. She missed 20 years of work over her 24-year career.

Here we go again. Do this, don’t do that, and somehow the globe will cool down a bit.
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King Charles III helped activate a “Climate Clock” at a London forum on Wednesday, counting down the time until 2030, the alleged time allotted to avoid the worst effects of climate change, despite the UK King offering several different timetables in years past, says Just the News.

The Climate Clock countdown began at the Climate Innovation Forum during London’s 2023 Climate Action Week. Founder and CEO of Climate Action, Nick Henry, said it serves as a “visual reminder of the urgency of the climate crisis,” according to Fox News.

“TIME IS RUNNING OUT” and “ACT TODAY SAVE TOMORROW” were just a few of the interchanging slogans on the jumbotron that displayed the Climate Clock. The button to activate the clock was pressed by London Mayor Sadiq Khan while…

See Also Virtue Signaling Is a Vicious Circle

One key to understanding much of the bewildering behavior we see around us is to recognize the power and popularity of “virtue signaling.” Keeping virtue signaling in mind will help you understand a lot of behavior that otherwise makes no sense.

What, for example, is the point of removing Confederate statues or attempting to disown the country’s Founding Fathers because some were slave owners? It makes sense if your objective is to be sanctimonious. You make yourself feel better by looking down your nose at Thomas Jefferson.

Virtue signaling is the modern version of what St. Augustine in the 5th century referred to as “outward signs of inward grace.” A major difference, however, is the kind of grace he referred to actually meant something.

A precondition to needing to virtue signal is guilt. Virtue signaling is one of the left’s package deals…

In his most manic comedies, the great “reactor,” the unflappable Alan Arkin, looks like he’s on the verge of cracking up and blowing the take — scene after scene. He can’t wholly hide how tickled he is at what’s going on around him. It’s in his eyes, the barely-controlled grin that’s trying to bust out on his face.

You see it, here and there, in *The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming.” And there’s a moment in “The In-Laws” in which he glances towards the camera in his harrowing ride, clinging to the roof of a taxi he’s just clambered aboard, as if the actor playing the part sees the cameraman laughing at how this looks and wishes he could join him.

Legend has it that Arkin was so broken up by the great character player James Hong‘s improvised chattering Mandarin monologue, adding a magazine to his…

Alan Arkin, who passed away today at the grand old age of 89, was one of the great comic actors of his generation and a couple of generations that followed.

He was one of my all-time favorites, and if he wasn’t one of yours, maybe you need to see a few more of his movies.

An Oscar winner for “Little Miss Sunshine,” he shone even more brightly in his debut film, the comedy classic “The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming.”

He provided old school Hollywood chutzpah in “Argo,” was the long-suffering shrink John Cusack’s hitman worries to death in “Grosse Point Blank,” held down his half of one of the funniest films of all time, “The In-Laws,” and dignified many a big screen and small screen production — “Escape from Sobibor” comes immediately to mind.

He was as good as funnymen get, and scary enough to make…

“The court holds that Harvard and UNC’s admissions programs violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.”

From SCOTUS lips to He Puapua’s ears:

“The solution to our Nation’s racial problems thus cannot come from policies grounded in affirmative action or some other conception of equity,… racialism simply cannot be undone by different or more racialism. Instead, the solution announced in the second founding is incorporated in our Constitution: that we are all equal, and should be treated equally before the law without regard to our race. Only that promise can allow us to look past our differing skin colors.”

That’s language from the decision by the US Supreme Court, which has come through for the Asian-Americans who charged Harvard University with violating their civil rights by not admitting them because of their race in order to meet affirmative action quotas for accepting Blacks. But this is a decision…