Utopia, you are standing in it!

Israel has had five elections in just three years.

It’s this sort of thing that has often led dictators and mere authoritarians to sneer at democracy because it’s so unstable and messy.

Moreover, this involved a candidate for Prime Minister who is currently facing trial on charges of “corruption,” former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

And he’s won – again – and unlike the previous four elections it seems this one was decisive:

A resounding victory for opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu and his bloc of right-wing, far-right and religious parties, a result that would end a political crisis that has seen five general elections held in under four years.
…
Israel has been rocked by political turmoil since a Netanyahu-led government fell apart in late 2018. Two rounds of elections, in April 2019 and September 2019, failed to yield a winner, and a short-lived unity government formed after the…

Rent-seekers and the MSM keep telling us the transition to an all-wind and sun-powered future is not only inevitable, it’s a cinch.

The power pricing and supply calamity playing out in renewables-obsessed Germany and Britain stands as a pretty fair counterpoint, to that nonsense.

Then, we’re told, it can all be done, provided it’s “done right”; which, in doublespeak, means more of precisely the same; even more $billions in subsidies gifted to crony capitalists, offering nothing but even more hopelessly intermittent wind and solar, in return.

Call it scaling up on an avoidable calamity, or doubling down on an inevitable disaster.

What’s overlooked in their starry-eyed and far-reaching promises about a ‘green’ Utopia, is the volume of mineral and other resources required to get there.

Every wind turbine and solar panel is the product of scarce resources, and not just the rare stuff mined by 9-year-olds in the Congo.

As…

The Laffer Curve is a very straightforward concept.

It graphically illustrates why politicians are wrong if they think you can double tax revenue by doubling tax rates (or that revenues will drop by 50 percent if tax rates are cut in half).

Simply stated, you also have to look at what happens to taxable income.

In cases where taxpayers have a lot of control over the timing, level, and composition of their income, changes in tax rates may cause big changes in taxable income (or “tax base” in the jargon of economists).

None of this should be controversial. Even Paul Krugman agrees that the Laffer Curve exists.

Today, we are going to see that the pro-tax International Monetary Fund also admits there is a Laffer Curve.

Indeed, a new study authored by David Amaglobeli, Valerio Crispolti, and Xuguang Simon Sheng openly states that politicians should be…

Buzz from the Beehive

Uh, oh.  Earlier this afternoon there was nothing doing in the Beehive.  Or rather, there was nothing doing that they wanted to tell us about.

We therefore drew a blank when we checked the Beehive website to find what our servants are up to.

Nor (when we checked with Scoop) could we find anything new from the Nats or the Greens, although the Nats since then have posted a statement on the rising expense of hiring government  consultants.

ACT was given a free kick,  in effect, and scored with three statements.

First, ACT’s Firearms Reform spokesperson Nicole McKee was braying that relentless pressure from her party has resulted in the Government making much-needed changes to firearms licensing.

Another moral panic against the Notwithstanding Clause has broken out and gripped the salons and cafes of Toronto in a repeat of the previous Panic of 2018;  Andrew Coyne outed himself yesterday as the Geraldo Rivera of this second wave.

Introduction

The constitution cannot be unconstitutional. It follows therefore that one part of the constitution cannot be used to strike down or nullify another part of the constitution. This tautology, fittingly, sounds very obvious and simple – yet it still bears repeating with respect to the Constitution of Canada, a confounding Cherub (like that in the Book of Ezekiel) composed of disparate, even contradictory, parts that ought not fit together yet must fit together and reconcile with one another.

On 10 September 2018, Justice Belobaba of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice struck down the provisions of the Better Local Government Act reducing the size of Toronto City Council by half and using the federal and provincial electoral districts as the basis for the City of Toronto’s new wards, as unconstitutional; Premier Ford, in turn, announced that the government will introduce a bill re-acting these provisions under the Notwithstanding Clause…

The insane cost of the wind and solar ‘transition’ is starting to bite; the wind and sun cult are struggling to shift the blame. While Vlad Putin may be a seriously thuggish dictator, he can’t seriously be held responsible for rocketing power prices in the UK, Europe and Australia, where power prices have been surging northwards for years, and long before the Russians stormed their way across Ukraine.

No, the answer in each case lies much closer to home and rests with the lunacy of attempting to run first world economies on sunshine and breezes.

The Australian’s Nick Cater is, as usual, on the money with this article, albeit that he confuses efficient to operate combined cycle gas turbines with highly inefficient open cycle gas turbines, a minor error that we resolve below.

Labor could pay the ultimate price from electricity shock
The Australian
Nick Cater
30 October 2022

The…

Yes, the headline is a rhetorical question. Because if there’s one thing the 50+ years since “Bullitt” has proven, it’s that most every big screen cop thriller has been in many if not most ways a remake of this Steve McQueen/Peter Yates classic.

We’ve had half a century of the “renegade” “outsider,” “goes his own way” cops, hunting for justice in a broken and/or corrupt system. There have been hundreds of films in which the cop hero drove a “car with character,” and any car buff or film fan knows what you mean when you say “Bullitt Mustang.” The “GT” is understood, the image iconic.

But let’s take that headline literally, shall we? Watching the film again for the umpteenth time last night, I gave it a hard, unsentimental pass for the first time in years.

The story — Lt. Frank Bullitt (McQueen) is tasked by his boss (the…

The votes are not yet final from the 1 November 2022 Israeli general election, but the outcome is quite clear. The right-wing bloc of parties supporting current opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu will have won a manufactured majority.Media are calculating the bloc’s combined seats at 65 out of 120. Yet the bloc currently has just 48.1% of the votes. That is actually lower than the clear majority of the vote they got in April, 2019, yet at that election the result was deadlock while this one will produce a majority coalition government. What explains the difference? Coordination.

The reason for the manufactured majority in this election, despite a nationwide proportional representation electoral system, is coordination failure. The strategic choices of political leaders and voters in both the left and the Arab political camps have made Netanyahu’s impending return to government possible. On the left, Labor has barely cleared the…