Utopia, you are standing in it!

Last Friday the Reserve Bank Governor, Adrian Orr, gave a keynote address to the Waikato Economics Forum. This event seems to have become part of the annual economic policy calendar, with Waikato University boasting that

The forum will bring together an outstanding lineup of top economists, business leaders and public sector officials, who will share their expertise on how we can address the major challenges facing our country today.

Sold that way, you might have thought that when a really senior and powerful public official turns up for a keynote address to an assembled economically literate audience he’d have delivered some fresh and interesting insights, going rather deeper than he might to, say, a provincial Rotary Club. Doubly so when in that official’s area of policy responsibility things have proved so challenging in the last few years, when so much taxpayers’ money has been lost, and when core inflation…

On 5 March 1933, the Nazi Party won nearly 44 per cent of the vote, which gave them 288 seats in the Reichstag. Hitler formed a coalition with the National Party (8 per cent). The Communist party won 81 seats.

There were 44,685.764 entitled to vote. The voter turnout was 88.74 %. Invalid vote was 0.79%. The total valid votes was 39,343.331. Of those votes 43.9% went tp the NSDAP, the Nazi party. This means that 19,617.022 voted for the Nazis.

The 1933 election followed the previous year’s two elections (July and November) and Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor. In the months before the 1933 election, SA and SS displayed terror, repression and propaganda across Germany,  339  Nazi organizations “monitored” the vote process. In Prussia 50,000 members of the SS, SA and Der Stahlhelm were ordered to monitor the votes by acting Interior Minister Hermann Göring, as auxiliary police.

In spite…

Rocketing power prices and routine blackouts are the inevitable consequence of the ‘inevitable’ wind and solar ‘transition’ – California is no exception.

Indeed, thanks to their deranged leaders’ obsession with chaotically intermittent wind and solar, Californians will be lucky to have power, at all. Putting aside the question of whether all but the elite will be able to pay their bills, as and when power might be delivered.

Notwithstanding the evidence that’s well and truly stacked against their utopian belief that all you need are sunshine and breezes, their Governor, Gavin Newsom is determined to wreck what’s left of his state’s power supply, as Thomas Calenacci details below.

California’s grid faces collapse as leaders push renewables, electric vehicles, experts say
Fox News
Thomas Calenacci
14 February 2023

California’s electric grid faces years of potential blackouts and failure as state leaders continue pushing aggressive measures to transition to renewable energy sources

A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy
by David M. Oshinsky
597 pages
Free Press (Macmillan)
Published: January 1983

“A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy” was published in 1983 and is widely considered to be the definitive biography of McCarthy. Oshinsky is a professor of history at NYU, a director at the NYU School of Medicine and the author of nearly two-dozen books including the 2005 Pulitzer Prize winning “Polio: An American Story.”

Joseph R. McCarthy (1908-1957) is infamous as the most prominent face of America’s anti-communist “Red Scare” movement in the early 1950s.  His actions were so conspicuous and controversial that the term “McCarthyism” was coined early in his rise to notoriety.

Oshinsky’s biography of McCarthy is almost exactly what sophisticated readers expect from a serious political biography: a sober, reflective, dispassionate and interesting exploration of the facts…