Utopia, you are standing in it!

If economic suicide was the object, then our current obsession with chaotically intermittent and heavily subsidised wind and solar will surely deliver it.

Rocketing power prices, power rationing and rolling blackouts are all part and parcel of any serious attempt to run on sunshine and breezes. Ask a Californian or South Australian: both suffer power prices at the top of their respective countries’ league ladders; both have suffered serious power rationing and mass blackouts whenever the sun sets and/or calm weather sets in.

Given the choice, no properly informed voter would give any political party licence to do what’s being done in the name of ‘saving the planet’. Sure, loaded surveys suggest that the proletariat is all in favour of wind and solar power. But, when the question turns to what power consumers might be prepared to pay for it, the great majority won’t pay a nickel more for so-called…

FYI, here are some hard data on UK poverty, with links to the original sources (unfiltered by pro/anti-Tory newspapers, think tanks, or UN rapporteurs…).

First, trends in inequality and child poverty in the UK (before the pandemic, obviously, but also before the surge in government spending on job subsidies and welfare payments). (Source)

Second, a bit more from the ONS on different measures of income inequality. (Source)

Third, the same again for wealth inequality (a small increase overall, with rising property wealth inequality and a smaller increase in financial wealth inequality largely offset by a reduction in pension wealth inequality). (Source)

Fourth, an international comparison of income inequality, using the OECD’s definition of ‘child poverty rates’ (the ratio of the number of people in a given age group whose household income is less than half the median income of the total population). (Source

Forty-four public schools in San Francisco have been advised that their names are polluted by association with slavery, colonization, oppression, genocide, abuse, or homophobia, and are likely to have their names changed late this year. This, of course, is part of the nationwide frenzy of renaming anything named after someone who offends the Woke. Now perhaps some renaming might be in order, but in this case the names scheduled for erasure include those of Abraham Lincoln, Roosevelt (not sure whether Teddy or FDR), James Monroe, Herbert Hoover, George Washington and even Dianne Feinstein (one of California’s progressive Senators), for crying out loud.  I’ll give some of the rationales for renaming below.

The whole story appears in the San Francisco Chronicle, which you can access by clicking on the screenshot below. If you’re paywalled, judicious inquiries might yield you a copy.

The S.F. school board has been pondering name changes…

Although all liberal media sites are getting woke, sites like Salon and HuffPost have gone beyond the pale, while Slate always seemed to retain more sanity. After all, that was where Hitchens often wrote—though I’m not sure he’d be welcome there now were he still alive.  At any rate, there’s a new Slate piece that not only indicts classical music and its pedagogy as racist and sexist, but argues that this bigotry is instantiated in using “mononyms”—last names only—for famous classical white male composers (“Mozart,” “Beethoven,” etc.), but demeans female and nonwhite composers by using both first and last names.

The author, Chris White (an assistant professor of music theory at the University of Massachusetts Amherst), suggests that to rectify this disparity, we “fullname” all composers, putting them on a level playing field of respect. What I’m trying to figure out is how much of what he says carries some…

A warning was sounded at the beginning of a recent New Zealand Herald report about the crimes of a couple of blokes who – according to the  Indigenous Pacific Uprising – should not be imprisoned.

The warning was in capital letters.

GRAPHIC CONTENT WARNING – THIS STORY CONTAINS DESCRIPTIONS OF VIOLENT CRIME.

The two blokes in question were jailed for their part in what the Herald described as

“ … a brutal kidnap where the victim was tortured over 12 hours – his pinky finger cut off with secateurs, both feet shot and his naked body burned with a blowtorch while he was tied up and gagged.

“His attackers, who believed he had robbed another person of “thousands of dollars”, burned his eyes with cigarettes, urinated on him and beat him for hours in a bid to get him to disclose where the money was.”