Utopia, you are standing in it!

Matthew Hooton joins the chorus pointing out the government’s stupidity:

. . .If her positioning of the new taxes as a world first was designed to prop up her base, it underlined to everyone else the complete idiocy of her move. New Zealand dairy farmers have the lowest GHG emissions per unit of production of any in the world. The same is broadly true of sheep and beef farmers.

Their climate efficiency is such that a block of New Zealand butter sold in London has a smaller climate footprint than one produced in the UK. Every time a Chinese consumer buys New Zealand milk powder over an American, European or Australian equivalent, the climate is theoretically better off.

Yet, right now, government policies mean our dairy herd is declining while the US herd is growing. Every time there is one less cow in New Zealand and one more…

As we all now know there are “good” protests and “bad” protests. The recent Van Gogh protest was so “good” that it was actually enabled by the museum, who did nothing to stop these vandals.

The litmus test is whether the protest is against something that the TPTB support (bad) or in favour of (“good”), and while the former got lots of MSM support from the 1960’s to about the 2000’s, it’s notable that with the demise of the old, square, conservative world and its replacement by the Counter-Culture, the MSM continues to align with the latter and no longer afflicts the comfortable or speaks truth to power – and all those other Nineteen Eighty Four’ish slogans that were chanted by the Left.

The latest is seen in the picture opposite and naturally receives the high praise of none other than one…

The things some people will go to avoid watching the damned Yankees.

Stumbling across “Eight Men Out” last night brought back memories of the film, what it represented — a turn towards mainstream by indie film icon John Sayles — and how it came off in an era when “Bull Durham,” “Field of Dreams” and “The Natural” put America’s game on the screen as a backdrop for all manner of screen stories.

I remember thinking at the time that the play of the cast was about two thirds to three-quarters the speed of “real” big leaguers. It’s generally a mistake to assume athletes of the past were wholly inferior — conditioning standards notwithstanding — to their modern counterparts. But that seems to matter less, seeing it now.

Sayles found an excellent “Shoeless Joe” Jackson for this account of the 1919 World Series-fixed by gamblers crime that came to be called

“Climate Activism is a Religion” – Marian Tupy.  H/T Raymond.  Excerpted transcript below in italics with my bolds and added images.

“The planet is infected with us we’re all gonna die. Isn’t that all true and and correct?

It’s certainly not true and actually the history of the relationship between population growth and abundance of Natural Resources is much more complex than people realize. It’s very interesting to see how extreme environmentalism maps onto Christian theology. On the one hand you’ve got your Garden of Eden: that’s the world before industrialization. You have your Devils: fossil fuel CEOs and people like that. You have your Saints, Greta Thunberg. Your Priesthood is the IPCC scientists. And of course you even have indulgences like back in the days before Reformation. Where you are allowed to fly around the world on a private jet, so long as you give…

In demand
Soothing words about electricity supplies from power bosses and politicians are not fooling the public. If the wind doesn’t blow on a cold winter evening they need to be prepared. Net zero ideology matters more than people’s well-being it seems.
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Britons are snapping up large batteries costing up to £1,400, as concerns grow over winter power cuts, reports The Telegraph.

A large manufacturer of portable batteries, Anker Innovations Technology, has said that sales were up to three times higher in October than in the previous month.

Normally, it sells power station products to the US where power cuts are more common, while UK customers have traditionally only bought them for camping.

But Britons who worry about blackouts this winter are now stocking up, PR manager Lorna Smith told Bloomberg.

The 757 Powerhouse model, which costs around £1400 and can recharge a portable fridge for…

Morgenthau: Power, Privilege, and the Rise
of an American Dynasty
by Andrew Meier
1,072 pages
Random House
Published: Oct 2022

Andrew Meier’s long-awaited biography of the Morgenthau dynasty was released October 11.  Meier was a journalist for two decades and is the author of “The Lost Spy: An American in Stalin’s Secret Service” and “Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall.”

Covering four generations of the Morgenthau family, and spanning more than 150 years of consequential world history, Meier’s magisterial biography is epic in scale, impressive in scope and remarkably engrossing.

More than a decade of research underpins the 892-page narrative; the book’s notes and bibliography total nearly 100 pages. Meier interviewed more than four-hundred people and that list often reads like a Who’s Who of historians, politicians, former judges and prosecutors and, of course, Morgenthau family members, friends and colleagues. In addition, Meier…