Utopia, you are standing in it!

I don’t trust The Spinoff, which I regard as the online, 21st century version of The Listener, hitting all the notes of whatever is currently trendy with the Left.

However, they have given space to Danyl Mclauchlan, the man behind the fabulous blog The Dim Post, which has sadly been locked in private limbo since Danyl got proper writing jobs. As much as I enjoy his serious essays, like this one on the Administrative State, his satire was brilliant and biting during the Key era (** see below for three examples). It’s no great surprise to see him now writing for…. The Listener.

And so I was willing to give this lengthy article a crack and I think you should too, as it covers the history of Seymour in ACT from its nadir in the 2017 polls to now: The fall and rise of David…

Last month, our Green Minister of Energy approved the doubling of the grid tariff (a charge for network use that the grid manager charges to the electricity users). The reason for this increase is the massive investment that the grid manager wants to do in the next decade.

These investments are expected to cost around 7 billion euro over the next decade. A big part of the investments goes to a sea cable to Denmarkand and to the UK, also cables to Germany, France and the Netherlands. Another part of the investment is the strengthening of the backbone that brings the Denmark/UK/offshore electricity inland (Ventilus). So, these investments have directly to do with the energy transition.

These costs will be billed to the end users (families and industry). There was some protest against this increase from the energy watchdog, consumer associations and the industry, but the Minister pushes through(translated…

If wind power were delivered at an affordable cost, 24 x 365, the wind industry might just justify the rampant slaughter of millions of birds and bats, including America’s iconic bald and golden eagles. However, given that wind power will only ever be delivered in chaotic fits and spurts all avian carnage is is entirely pointless.

Every butchered eagle is greeted by the wind power cult with a ‘couldn’t care less’ shrug; the wind industry switches to lies and obfuscation and – when the corpses can no longer be hidden and the lying fails – issue court proceedings in an effort to literally bury those facts (see our post here).

Cars, cats and skyscrapers don’t kill Eagles – like the critically endangered Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagle, but 60m wind turbine blades with their tips travelling at 350Kph routinely smash them out of existence.

With thousands more of these things…

The new Three Waters amendment bill is intended to increase the number of water services entities to ten and introduce a Funding Agency but only makes a bad policy worse.

• Thomas Cranmer writes –

 The Three Waters legislation was back before Parliament this week in the form of an amendment bill which is intended to implement changes to the reforms announced by Prime Minister Hipkins and Local Government Minister Kieran McAnulty in April.

Those changes came about as a result of the new Prime Minister’s “policy refresh” which asked McAnulty to consider options for reform of the Three Waters proposal, including timing and sequencing, the number of entities and boundaries and alternative approaches for Māori representation and involvement.

The relevant Cabinet Paper from February suggested that alternative approaches for Māori representation could include replicating in the Regional Representative Groups the structure proposed for the Regional Planning Committees in the…

Stardate: 41235.25
Original Air Date: October 12, 1987
Writers: Katharyn Powers & Michael Baron
Director: Russ Mayberry

“Yours is a different world.”

The Enterprise has arrived at Ligon II, a planet which is the source of a rare vaccine needed elsewhere on a Federation planet called Styris IV, currently suffering from an outbreak of the plague. Starfleet has instructed Picard to make a friendly visit to Ligon II in the hopes of entering into treaty negotiations in order to acquire the needed “medicinal substance.”

When the Enterprise enters standard orbit, a Ligonian party beams aboard the ship using its own technology. They offer Picard a small sample of the material needed for the vaccine. Here, the episode begins to go off the rails –while the Ligonians reside in a highly structured society similar to an ancient society on earth, they are also extremely proud, almost to the point…

Auckland surgeons have been told to prioritise Māori and Pacific Island patients:

Auckland surgeons are now being required to consider a patient’s ethnicity alongside other factors when deciding who should get an operation first.

Several surgeons say they are upset by the policy, which was introduced in Auckland in February and gave priority to Māori and Pacific Island patients – on the grounds that they have historically had unequal access to healthcare.

Health officials stress that ethnicity is just one of five factors considered in deciding when a person gets surgery, and that it is an important step in addressing poor health outcomes within Māori and Pacific populations.

Te Whatu Ora – Health New Zealand has introduced an Equity Adjustor Score, which aims to reduce inequity in the system by using an algorithm to prioritise patients according to clinical priority, time spent on the waitlist, geographic location (isolated areas)…

Cinephiles congregate around the films of Stanley Kubrick the way history buffs are drawn to Alexander, Hitler and Napoleon. They were all-powerful control freaks who set out to remake the world in an image they saw in their own minds, and gained the power to attempt it.

So it was with Kubrick, a chess fanatic who came along too late to have grown up with the world-building games that connect new generations of Kubrick fans to his films and his career. He is admired by fans at least partly because of his dictatorial powers over the worlds he created in his films.

He was an Orson Welles who won absolute power over his career and his movies, a Spielberg with more grandiose visions and ambitions.

“Paths of Glory” was a brisk and biting World War I anti-war film, a politicized combat movie that reset the standard for trench warfare movies…

The big fiscal debate in the United States is whether the United States should become a European-style welfare state, which is something that automatically will happen over the next few decades in the absence of genuine entitlement reform.

Some people even want to accelerate this process.

My response is usually to ask why the United States should copy Europe when there is a wealth of evidence that living standards are substantially lower on that side of the Atlantic Ocean.

Not only are living standards lower, but there is also lots of evidence that Europe is suffering from anemic growth.

Which means the gap in living standards is getting wider every year.

At the risk of understatement, copying European fiscal policy seems like a big mistake.

If you’re still not convinced, here’s some more evidence. In his column for the U.K.-based Financial Times, Gideon Rachman compares the…

• Thomas Cranmer writes –  

They say a new broom sweeps clean, and that is certainly the case with the premiership of Prime Minister Chris Hipkins. However, even he couldn’t have anticipated the rapid exodus of ministers under his premiership. The fallout has left reputations tarnished, with survivors like Kiri Allan grappling after a series of missteps. Meanwhile, Jan Tinetti’s fate hangs in the balance as the Privileges Committee investigates allegations of misleading the House regarding her office’s role in the release of school truancy data.

What has prompted this state of affairs and what does it mean for the next government?

Undoubtedly many of these mini-scandals can be traced back to former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and her more relaxed and permissive approach to managing her ministers. During 2022 it was apparent that problems were beginning to mount.

By her own admission, much of the Prime Minister’s time during the…