Utopia, you are standing in it!

I’ve already shared the “feel-good story” for 2022, so today I’m going to share this year’s feel-good map.

Courtesy of the Tax Foundation, here are the states that have lowered personal income tax rates and/or corporate income tax rates in 2021 and 2022. I’ve previously written about these reforms (both this year and last year), but more and more states and lowering tax burdens, giving us a new reason to write about this topic.

The map is actually even better than it looks because there are several states that don’t have any income taxes, so it’s impossible for them to lower rates. I’ve labelled them with a red zero.

And when you add together the states with no income tax with the states that are reducing income tax rates, more than half of them are either at the right destination (zero) or moving in that direction.

But the usual cherrypicking of weather events, which proves nothing, will no doubt continue in attempts to blame humans.
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A systematic review of climate trends and observational data by an eminent climate scientist has found no evidence to support the claim of a climate crisis, says The Global Warming Policy Foundation.

Ole Humlum: State of the Climate 2021 (pdf)

The State of the Climate 2021 – The Global Warming Policy Foundation

The notion that we’ll soon be exclusively powered by wind and solar is an appalling delusion, but one which comes with a staggering price tag.

Sure, the wind and sun are free, but attempting to rely upon chaotically generated wind and solar power is an altogether different prospect.

Adding wind turbines and solar panels to an integrated system that was perfectly capable of delivering power as and when power consumers need it, and at prices that all comers could afford, was always going to end in tears.

While subsidised wind and solar might interrupt the delivery of power from reliable sources, those reliable sources have to be maintained to compensate for the inherent unreliability of wind and solar.

The simple and unassailable fact is that for every MW of wind or solar there has to be a MW of coal or gas or nuclear or hydro ready, willing and able…

 The Ardern Government risks the emergence of what political commentator CHRIS TROTTER calls a “super-narrative” in which all the negatives of co-governance, media capture, and Neo-Tribal Capitalism are rolled into one big story about the deliberate corruption of New Zealand democracy. The guilty parties would be an unholy alliance of Pakeha and Māori elites determined to keep public money flowing upwards into protected private hands. Here’s what he posted on  his Bowalley Road blog ….  

WHETHER NANAIA MAHUTA followed the conflict-of-interest rules set out in The Cabinet Manual hardly matters. A dangerous political narrative is forming around the appointment of, and awarding of contracts to, Mahuta’s whanau in circumstances that, at the very least, raise serious questions about this Government’s political judgement. Enlarging this narrative is the growing public perception that the mainstream news media is refusing to cover a story that would, in other circumstances, have attracted…

Edward VIII (Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David; June 23, 1894 – May 28, 1972) was King of the United Kingdom and the Dominions of the British Empire, and Emperor of India from January 20, 1936 until his abdication in December of the same year.

Edward was born during the reign of his great-grandmother Queen Victoria as the eldest child of the Duke and Duchess of York, later King George V and Queen Mary.

Edward was created Prince of Wales on his 16th birthday, seven weeks after his father succeeded as king. As a young man, Edward served in the British Army during the First World War and undertook several overseas tours on behalf of his father. While Prince of Wales, he engaged in a series of sexual affairs that worried both his father and then-British prime minister Stanley Baldwin.

Upon his father’s death in 1936, Edward became the…