Utopia, you are standing in it!

Subsidised and intermittent wind and solar infiltrate and destroy power grids like an aggressive cancer. But, unlike cancer, the cause of Australia’s power pricing and supply debacle is precisely known, and was as perfectly predictable, as it was perfectly avoidable.

The massive subsidies to wind and solar were deliberately designed to knock reliable and affordable generators off the grid. This they have done – with a vengeance. With a grid literally on the brink of collapse, the political brains trust are trying to undo what their policies were destined to do, with desperate moves to keep Australia’s remaining coal-fired power plants up and running using “capacity payments” – ie taxpayer subsidies paid to the owners of coal-fired plants as an antidote to the $7 billion in annual RET subsidies already being pocketed by wind and solar generators, that allow them to underbid Australia’s based load generators.

STT predicts that we…

Posted by Sara M. Butler, 13 May 2022.

Discovering that the Supreme Court of the United States of America, now dominated by an ultra conservative majority of chiefly white men, is planning to overturn Roe v. Wade (1973) was not as unexpected as one might imagine. At least, for any woman who has been living in this country for the past decade it was something we could see coming. For those who work at religious institutions or in conscientiously-Christian businesses, the ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014) already took away our right to use our health plans to pay for birth control.[1] (This happened to me when I worked at Loyola University New Orleans, a Catholic university). Access to a legal abortion did seem like the next logical provision to disappear.

What was surprising, however, is to discover that Justice Samuel Alito’s leaked draft majority opinion (it can…

I’m currently in Tanzania as part of a speaking tour in Africa. My remarks today largely repeated the message I gave to an audience last week in Nigeria.

So I won’t bother sharing anything from my presentation. Instead, I want to highlight some numbers from a presentation by Professor Ken Schoolland.

He shared some data showing how the “Asian Tigers” grew far faster than major Latin American nations between 1950 and 2000.

These are very impressive examples of convergence (as the Asian Tigers caught up with Latin America) followed by divergence (as the Tigers then continued to grow much faster).

I’ll be adding this data to my “anti-convergence club.”

But I also noticed that Professor Schoolland was sharing some old data from 1995.

So I went to the Maddison website and created some new charts based on the latest-available data.

As you can see, the Latin American nations…

So, we have the result of the Referendum, and a majority of voters have voted to leave the EU. A mantra of Leave campaigners seems to have been the desire to ‘take back control’. There has been much talk of sovereignty, although less clarity on what it actually means. However, at its most basic, there are at least three notions of sovereignty that are relevant in the context of Brexit, and they are often confused. The first is parliamentary sovereignty, which is said to have particular resonance in the UK because, due to the vagaries of the uncodified UK Constitution, the Westminster Parliament has been recognised as a body with unlimited legislative power. Yet the parliamentary sovereignty of a representative democracy may seem to be at odds with popular sovereignty as exercised in a referendum. Popular sovereignty also has other implications, such as in Scotland, where an indigenous Scottish tradition…