Utopia, you are standing in it!

The Reserve Bank’sMonetary Policy Committee has its final meeting for the year on Wednesday, and then they shut up shop. For a long time. The next scheduled announcement is not until 22 February, a full 13 weeks (3 months) away. Nice job if you can get it, and although I’m sure management and staff will still be working for much of the intervening period, the same is unlikely to be said for the three non-executive members, who are generously remunerated by the taxpayer, utterly invisible, and only need to show up when meetings are scheduled.

This strange schedule has been in place for quite a few years now, having been adopted at a time when the OCR wasn’t being moved much at all (and when the Bank was raising the OCR, it often proved to have been a mistake). But having been in place for a while does not…

Germans soon recognised the importance of their coal-fired power plants, forced to reopen them days after shutting them down in January 2021 because, surprise, surprise, the wind stopped blowing. And that big backpedal occurred long before Vlad Putin began putting the squeeze on the gas supplies needed to prop up those occasions when Germany’s 30,000 wind turbines decide to down tools.

In Dan Andrew’s People’s Republic of Victoria, a similar plotline has been laid out, where ideologues have managed to hijack its coal-fired power supply, with a view to shutting down its remaining plants in the very near future.

History may not repeat, but it often rhymes, which leads STT to predict that the Victorians, just like the Germans, will be forced into an embarrassing retreat if they truly are as foolish as they appear to be.

Daniel Wild from the Institute of Public Affairs takes a look at another moment…

I was certain that this Labour Government was going to foist Hate Speech laws on us. There were six specific proposals:

1. Increase the number groups protected under the Human Rights Act, from the status quo protect groups based on their “colour, race or ethnic or national origins” to also include “sex, gender (including gender identity), religious belief, disability or sexual orientation.”
2. Introduce a new offence in the Crimes Act so that hatred is specifically a crime (in place of current laws which forbid intentionally inciting racial disharmony).
3. Make the crime of being a hateful bigot punishable by three years imprisonment or a fine of up to $50,000.
4. If the second proposal was enacted (the criminal offence), at the same time beef up the Human Rights Act so that complaints may be made about hatred under the Human Rights Act (grossly empowering the Human Rights Commission)
5. Make it illegal to…

If you believe that there is a £55 billion ‘black hole’ in the public finances, and if you believe this has to be filled with tax increases and spending cuts in order to reassure the markets, then Jeremy Hunt’s Autumn Statement was a reasonably fair way to go about it. But there are some mighty big ‘if’s in there.

Let’s begin with the positives. First, most of the tax increases and spending cuts do not bite until the later years of the forecast horizon. Spending is actually being increased this year and next, meaning that fiscal policy is providing a little more support to the economy now when it needs it the most.

What’s more, if the economy does better than expected, or other events intervene (including the next General Election), there is still time for the tougher measures to be diluted.

Second, there is more help for the most…

Renewable energy rent seekers and their political enablers keep telling us that wind and solar are free and getting cheaper all the time, but notionally wind-powered Germans, Danes, Californians and South Australians might beg to differ; they already suffer the world’s highest retail power prices, with worse to come.

Nowhere in the world is there a single case where reliance on wind and solar increased and retail power prices fell.

The reality on the ground, suggests that the figures thrown up by the wind and sun cult about the cost of wind and solar power delivered to consumers tend to overlook more than just a few of the more significant items that ought to feature in any fulsome accounting.

William H. Smith, Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Washington University in St Louis (with a PhD from Princeton) is a joint author of a paper ‘Full cost of…

Stardate: 5630.7 (2268)
Original Air Date: October 18, 1968
Writer: Jean Lisette Aroeste
Director: Ralph Senensky

“A madman got us into this and it’s beginning to look as if only a madman can get us out.”

The Enterprise has been assigned to convey the Medusan ambassador to the Federation back to his home planet. The Medusans are unusual alien creatures –their thoughts are said to be the “the most sublime in the galaxy” while their physical appearance is exactly the opposite. They are formless and apparently hideous, causing total madness to any human who simply catches a glimpse. While the Medusans beam aboard the Enterprise, Kirk and the others leave the transporter room as Spock remains behind wearing a unique visor intended to block any maddening effects caused by sight of the Medusan ambassador. A female telepath named Dr. Miranda Jones (Diana Muldaur) beams aboard –she…