Utopia, you are standing in it!

Courtesy of the lovely Maggy Wassilieff over at Kiwiblog comes the result of her investigation into all the wonderful new ideas from our Education Experts.

Maggy has a PhD in Biology and spent decades working on New Zealand environmental issues, as well as teaching.

She’s found a link to their new plans to revamp the School curriculum and strengthen Maths and Literacy teaching – or at least half of it:

Common Practice Model-2023 (Phase 1)

• Kaiako (teachers) will *recognise that the artefacts, concepts, and ideas of maths are cultural
• but Ākonga (students) areare encouraged to interrogate dominant discourses and assumptions, including that maths is benign, neutral, and culture-free.
• This will include terms such as Data sovereignty, humanising mathematics, teaching maths for social justice (TMfSJ),, ethnomathematics,maths + {conscientisation, equity, ethics, citizenship}.

Which is all funny enough but it was the following that caught my eye as Maggy bolded it:

Ākonga:

Wind and solar have justly earned the tag ‘unreliables’: sunset and calm weather are inevitable, whereas the so-called ‘inevitable renewable energy transition’, is anything but.

The Germans call it ‘dunkelflaute’ – meaning a period of gloomy, windless weather and a total collapse in output from their more than 30,000 wind turbines and millions of solar panels.

As Andrew Montford outlines below, the unreliables are destined to remain that way, despite all the fast and loose talk about mythical mega-batteries and ‘green’ hydrogen hype.

Why the intermittency problem can’t be solved
Net Zero Watch
Andrew Montford
15 February 2023

I often ask renewables enthusiasts to explain what we are supposed to do when the wind isn’t blowing if we can’t fall back on fossil fuels. The other day, I pressed James Murray, the editor of Business Green magazine, what forms of storage he thought we could use, and this is what…

James VI- I (June 19, 1566 – March 27, 1625) was King of Scotland as James VI from July 24, 1567 and King of England and Ireland as James I from the union of the Scottish and English crowns on March 24, 1603 until his death in 1625.

James was the son of Queen Mary I of Scotland, and a great-great-grandson of Henry VII, King of England and Lord of Ireland, and thus a potential successor to all three thrones. He succeeded to the Scottish throne at the age of thirteen months, after his mother was compelled to abdicate in his favour.

Four different regents governed during his minority, which ended officially in 1578, though he did not gain full control of his government until 1583

The Union of the Crowns followed the death of James’s cousin, Queen Elizabeth I of England, the last monarch of the Tudor dynasty, and…

A small fight broke out as Parker made her way through the barricade to speak to the crowds. She was escorted out again shortly before 11.30am, as crowds booed at her. She appeared to have been pelted by paint.

A Stuff reporter at Albert Park said from the moment Parker entered the barricade, tension between the groups, separated by a ring of barricades, started to boil over.

It took just 3-4 minutes before every side of the barricade had collapsed and counter-protesters had made their way through to surround Parker.

No police could be seen inside where the barricades had stood, and less than 10 security guards worked to keep the crowd from overrunning the band rotunda.

It took only a few more minutes before crowds managed to climb over and Parker was surrounded on all sides.

A group of four security guards formed a human shield around her for…

In Part I of this series, I documented the dramatic decline in living standards ever since socialists took power in Venezuela.

In Part II, I compared Venezuela’s decline to the other Latin American nations, particularly the success story of Chile.

Initially, I planned on this being a two-part series. After all, what else needs to be said when a nation does so poorly that even other socialists try (and fail) to disavow its policies.

But I decided to add Part III because of a remarkable report in the New York Times.

Authored by Isayen Herrera and Frances Robles, it actually acknowledges that socialism has created massive problems. Here are some excerpts.

…a socialist revolution once promised equality and an end to the bourgeoisie. Venezuela’s economy imploded nearly a decade ago, prompting a huge outflow of migrants in one of worst crises in modern Latin American history. …Conditions remain dire…

• Chris Trotter writes –

The Crown is a fickle friend. Any political movement deemed to be colourful but inconsequential is generally permitted to go about its business unmolested. The Crown’s media, RNZ and TVNZ, may even “celebrate” its existence (presumably as proof of Democracy’s broad-minded acceptance of diversity).

Should the movement’s leader(s) demonstrate a newsworthy eccentricity, then they may even find themselves transformed into political celebrities. The moment a political movement makes the transition from inconsequentiality to significance, however, then all bets are off – especially if that significance is born of a decisive rise in its parliamentary representation.

Te Pāti Māori (TPM) is currently on the cusp of making that crucial transition from political novelty to political threat. The decision of the former MP for Waiariki, Labour’s Tamati Coffey, to step away from his parliamentary career at the end of the current term will be welcome news to…