Utopia, you are standing in it!

David Farrar has agreed to post this over at Kiwiblog and since that has happened I figure I’ll pull this back from when I posted it late in 2021, with a couple of updates to allow for the time that has passed.
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I doubt that the Labour government will be willing to do it but there must be a Royal Commission on this subject. Perhaps it’s best delayed until 2024 anyway; as time removes us from this situation there will be fewer concerns about criticising poor decisions by both government and its bureaucracy. People will feel able to speak up and be heard.

As Lord Sumption, a British historian and former Supreme Court judge, said about instilling fear back in April while Britain was still in the grips of another lockdown:

David Lewis Schaefer reports on the attempted political takeover of the profession in his American Mind article A Sad New Epoch.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Even the field of geology is rejecting science in the name of making political statements.

The Anthropocene Working Group of geologists, featured on the front page of the New York Times, is poised to announce the discovery/invention of a new epoch in the Earth’s history, beginning in the middle of the 20th century. Whereas seven previous epochs ranged from 4.6 billion to the most recent one, the “Holocene” (11,700 years since the end of the last ice age), during which homo sapiens evolved, scientists in the working group claim that no broad numbers are needed to date the Anthropocene since developments caused by humans, such as the increased use of nitrogen fertilizers, global warming, “the proliferation of plastics, garbage, and…

Beiji Village in Mohe, China’s northernmost city [image credit : china.org.cn] The reporter here says it’s ‘so cold it feels uncomfortable in your lungs’ then goes on to speculate on possible/imagined links to global warming aka climate change. ‘Research suggests’…etc. The freezing cold air coming south from Siberia gets billed as an ‘extreme weather event’.
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Mohe is known as China’s North Pole for a good reason, says Sky News.

It is the country’s most northern city and is a very, very cold place.

It’s difficult to describe what temperatures this low feel like.

On Sunday it hit -53C, a new low for the coldest temperature recorded in the country since modern monitoring began.

The National Meteorological Centre confirmed the previous record of -52.3C, set in 1969, had been beaten.

There are 30 countries where you’ll find nearly 450 nuclear reactors currently operating – including the French, Americans, Canadians, Japanese and Chinese. Another 15 countries are currently building 60 reactors among them. Nuclear power output accounts for over 11% of global electricity production. But not a lick of it in Australia, thanks to an idiotic legislated ban put in place by a Liberal government back in 1998.

STT promotes nuclear power because it works: safe, affordable, reliable and the perfect foil for those worried about human-generated carbon dioxide gas – because it doesn’t generate any, while generating power on demand, irrespective of the weather – unlike the forever unreliables: wind and solar.

And we are not here to draw divisions on the basis of scale; large or small, nuclear plants that deliver power as and when it’s needed are the natural energy choice, in an energy-starved world.

At the smaller…

The attempt to entrench part of the Five Waters legislation was an abuse of power and an attempt to pervert democracy.

Hansard recorded the debate attempting to undo the mess.

SIMON WATTS (National—North Shore): Thank you very much, Madam Chair. It’s a pleasure to rise to speak on Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 310. And isn’t it ironic that we’re back here in the House when only a few—or literally last week, or the week before, we were in here under urgency undertaking a debate in the committee of the whole House stage lasting nearly 10 hours and a debate that went well into the night and bright and early in the next morning. But the fact is, we’re here today because of, basically, a significant mistake that was made on that evening. And there should be lessons that are taken from what occurred at that point from the…