Written By:
notices and features - Date published:
5:30 pm, July 28th, 2022 - 18 comments
Categories: Daily review -
Tags:
The current rise of populism challenges the way we think about people’s relationship to the economy.We seem to be entering an era of populism, in which leadership in a democracy is based on preferences of the population which do not seem entirely rational nor serving their longer interests. ...
The server will be getting hardware changes this evening starting at 10pm NZDT.
The site will be off line for some hours.
Just now watched the live interview with Andrea Vance and Luke Malpass and found her much better than her previous Q&A effort. Kinda interesting, that National Party dirty-laundry airing, but we've moved on…
Bryan Gould alerts us to Luxon's potential for harm:
"For Luxon to demonstrate his lack of judgment and probity in this way is bad enough for a Leader of the Opposition – the only ones to suffer are his party and supporters. But for a Prime Minister to show similar weaknesses is worrying for all of us. Mistakes such as these could have a major impact on the lives of all of us and on our country as a whole.
The only comfort is that he has demonstrated his deficiencies in time for us to take the action needed to avoid being affected by them."
https://bryangould.com/luxons-undoing/
Watch this, or we all die 🙂
Oh dear, how sad, never mind.
/
A federal judge has dismissed libel lawsuits against five media companies that a Kentucky student filed over an incident at the Lincoln Memorial in January 2019 in Washington D.C. which generated national news coverage.
Nick Sandmann, who was a 16-year old student at Covington Catholic in Northern Kentucky at the time of the incident, was the center of videos that went viral which showed Sandmann and Nathan Phillips, a Native American man, standing face to face as Phillips beat a drum and sang a traditional song while Sandmann smiled.
The five lawsuits were thrown out by United States District Eastern Kentucky Court Judge William O. Bertelsman, according to documents filed on Tuesday. The complaints were against media outlets The New York Times, CBS, ABC, Gannett Co. Inc, and Rolling Stone. Sandmann filed the lawsuits in federal court in Kentucky.
https://www.kentucky.com/news/state/kentucky/article263868652.html
On gas substitution by German companies who discovered they could make do with a lot less when faced with mandatory cuts.
https://twitter.com/ben_moll/status/1548004141049425920
[…]
https://twitter.com/ben_moll/status/1552206045539360770
What they say,and do are very different.This morning electricity generation in Germany is close to 60% fossil due to low offshore wind,and solar.Gas generation is 15% of total generation.
Read a piece the other day, and of course I can't find it, saying winter is coming and Russia's gas industry is unlikely to be equipped to stop pressure and flow restrictions causing plant to freeze solid. And if not, because re-starting frozen well heads and pipelines is no easy thing production has to continue and the gas has to go somewhere.
That would make sense over winter,though there is some discussion also that Russian internal gas use is down due to sanctions on Russian industry exports,so there should be some site closures.
Just reading that Germany has no mechanism to throttle back gas supplies, either to companies or to individual households, so they only control they have is pricing.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11058375/Germany-turns-hot-water-Hanover-ban-hot-water-response-Russian-gas-crisis.html
Also other EU countries are unlikely (in practice) to bail out Germany from their position with over-reliance on Russian gas. (quote from article above)
More widely, many of the EU countries are likely to protect their own population/industries, rather than penalizing them to help Germany – which is seen has having dug this hole for itself.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11053097/EU-diplomats-admit-gas-cut-deal-holes-Emmental-cheese.html
And, lots of pressure from the US for Germany to reverse the mothballing of the nuclear plants – which is seen as ideologically driven, rather than pragmatic.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2022/jul/27/uk-energy-bills-forecast-to-hit-3850-pounds-russia-cuts-gas-supply-further-europe-pipeline
'
French Government to continue to freeze Energy prices.
https://www.thelocal.fr/20220530/french-government-to-continue-energy-price-freeze-until-at-least-2023/
Italy:
there is not a single country in the EU or in Europe for that matter that will not feel the pinch.
The good news is however that a lot of housing – private and public housing – is insulated, double glazed etc. What may be an issue to some households is the electricity costs to charge that EVcar, the gadgetry that needs charging, and of course the cost of working from home if hte companies balk at the prices that the end consumer pays and thus calls its force back to work in offices were electricity costs are generally cheaper as commercial rates are better then residential.
Good luck for us that we have had this good rain over the last few weeks and our dams are full – yei!
Never mind though that if we are wanting to have E cars for all, we really need to invest in Electricty generation, and i have yet to hear smart words from anyone with access to power and decision making.
Germany and a few others in Europe will have to ask themselves if a war in Ukraine on behalf of the US hiding behind Nato against Russia really was such a good idea, and if a different solution might not needed to be found. In the meantime the Russians will be warm this winter.
The Germans are still struggling to accept that their much vaunted Energiewende has been a catastrophic mistake. Over the past two decades the Germans have almost doubled their installed nameplate generation capacity – mostly wind and solar – for a miserable 5% increase in net generation. All the while doubling electricity prices, dramatically increasing their carbon emissions and leaving Europe geopolitically vulnerable to Russian warmongering.
At every single point – failure.
And i hope this failure serves to remind people that what we have right now is about the best we will ever have.
Ditto, Sri Lanka.
and is it not nice that we here are importing cheap coal from elsewhere so that we can pretend to be green, and have a renewable 'energy supply'.
Lol, can you see all the E cars charging on that overseas coal that we import by the boat load, or would that be to rude to mention?
Germany will do alright, not because of the politics but because of the people. Ask yourself if you can confidently state this in regards to us here or in OZ?
Never mind that pesky war that the US wages till the last Ukrainian (who has not yet fled) has been fed into the meat grinder.
There is but one person who can stop this war tomorrow. That is Putin.
Nah, there is but one country who can stop that war. That would be the warmongering nation of the US and its idea of posting nuclear warheads on the Ukrainian / Russian border and insisting that it is nothing to worry or fret about.
So Russia has to do absolutly nothing, it can continue to do what it does now, fight a bit, keep them busy, take over one little town after the other until soon enough they have re-occupied the country, keep that gas and oil and grain to themselves or sell it to the BRICS countries and wait for the west to freeze to death in winter. Cause with Russia comes General Frost and whilst we might want to fear ourselfs silly with 'global' warming – more people will die this winter in Europe/UK for lack of heating and food then this summer.
But its ok, these 'unfortunates' are collateral damage – that is people like you and me – and that is a completely acceptable price to pay for the wankers in high offices – what ever clown is selected in the UK, the old man from the US, the pretend wanna be's from the rest of Europe and also OZ and NZ.
Russia has time. All the time. They have the grain, the oil, the gas, now trade in rubels only, and well it seems that there are quite a few countries that will trade with them, cause they actually have goods that people want/need/.
Nek Minute, China………doing its own thing. LOL
If Germany has any brains left, and considering the current configuration of the German Government they don't have any brain cells to them, they will find a way to tell the US to get the fuck back to the US (unless that country implodes on its on before that) and Germany will try with the rest of the European Union to come to the understanding that Russia will always be a neighbourgh that is not even that far away, whilst the US and its vassal states are far far away.
It will come soon enough. Chances are after this winter and a few thousand dead people in central Europe and the UK.
and its idea of posting nuclear warheads on the Ukrainian / Russian border and insisting that it is nothing to worry or fret about.
While the Russian weapons that have been pointed towards the West for decades were just harmless nothings?
It is all very well for Lavrov to demand Europe disarm itself and remove all their nuclear capacity like Ukraine did in the 1990s – but then some might think this would be a silly thing to do.
there are still enough nukes in the west to kill all of europe several times over.
neither one of them – russia or europe or the us or the uk comes out of this looking good. They are all wankers, and we – he tangata – the world over will pay the price. The ukrainians as refugees and war dead. The africans/Egyptians and others because they will not get the grain they need. The russians cause Russia. The poor in Europe who have a good chance freezing to death. And so on and so forth.
You want to blame russia? Lol. Seriously. Lol. Again. Lol. It ain't Russia who is in talks with Canada to put nukes pointing at Washington on the Canadian / US American border in the name of safety. And for some reason the old dude in the US thought that Putin would not call Natos bluff. As of today still, i am waiting for Nato to put boots on the ground and fight the russians in the defense of the Ukraine.
It ain't Russia who is in talks with Canada to put nukes pointing at Washington on the Canadian / US American border in the name of safety.
It is not the US who has invaded Canada, brutally grinding it's way through Ottawa with artillery. Nor has it ever seriously posed such a threat.