Mark is in Washington resting up in preparation for the resumption of his trial at the DC Superior Court on Monday morning.
In the meantime, here are Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer with their dramatised reconstruction of the last day’s events, including what Powerline’s John Hinderaker described as Steyn’s “bravura performance” of his opening statement.
You Will Live In Pods, Eat Bugs, Own Nothing And You Will Like It
The peasants are revolting: Al Gore made a fortune after losing to George W when he set up a green investment firm now worth $36BN that pays him $2m a month… as he warns about ‘rain bombs’ and ‘boiling oceans.’
Related: Don’t ever stop bitching about it.
Another Zero Percent Interest Miracle!
Despite the official pronouncements, the main concern of central banks is not inflation or unemployment, but rather the solvency of the banks within their purview. When a bank runs into balance sheet trouble, the go-to solution is to quietly extend more credit on easier terms. The public will be the last to know which bank received the bailout just so depositors don’t get spooked.
What The Hell Is Going On At The Bank Of Canada: $30B Just Went Where?
The Bank of Canada has just provided the "Financial System" $30B but where did it go?
6 times recently the BoC has sent $5B somewhere
They won't tell us, they are allowed to keep it secret
2/
— Ron Butler (@ronmortgageguy) January 10, 2024
And How Was Your Year?
Full report at Unusual Whales;
This year, Democrats absolutely dominated their Republican counterparts.
Dems were up 31%, and Republicans 18%.
Meanwhile, the S&P500 itself was up 24%.
Ban All The Things!
Biden Admin Targets Fridges, Freezers In Latest Slew of Appliance Crackdown
Y2Kyoto: Money To Burn
Robert Lyman (Financial Post);
The International Energy Agency, in its reports on energy financing, breaks down global energy investment into investment in fossil fuels, on the one hand, and in “clean energy,” on the other. In 2023, estimated investment in “clean energy” will be close to $2.2 trillion (in C$). That is an almost unimaginable amount of money, made only slightly less daunting when portrayed as $6 billion per day. […]
What has been the result of these gargantuan expenditures? The effects of current investments in electrical energy infrastructure won’t be fully apparent for some time, but we should be able to see the effects of spending that has been rising for more than 20 years. To find out, I consulted the authoritative Statistical Review of World Energy 2023, published by the Energy Institute, the successor to British Petroleum as the producer of the Statistical Review. It works closely with KPMG to produce the report.
The share of the world’s primary energy consumption produced by renewable energy has essentially doubled since 2015, from about 3.5 to seven per cent of the world total. Yet, fossil fuels (oil, natural gas and coal), which accounted for 85 per cent of primary energy consumption in 2015, still accounted for 82 per cent in 2022. At that rate of reduction — three percentage points every seven years — we will not get to full decarbonization (i.e., zero use of fossil fuels) until well into the next century.
As usual, the news is buried in the opinion pages.
Related: Whoppers and moer whoppers in the WSJ
What’s The Opposite Of Diversity?
You’re a man who serves as Chairman of the Board of a large University who led the search for the recently hired president.
Your wife runs a non-profit in the DEI space. She is the only full-time employee of the organization, serving as Founder, CEO, and CFO. You serve as Treasurer. The non-profit ostensibly sells two principal products in the DEI space:
1. “Evidence-based ‘how-to-guides’ and
2. “The most comprehensive intersectional analytics platform of its kind…”but the non-profit has no revenues. It relies entirely on contributions to fund its operations, which principally consist of your wife’s salary and some other ancillary overhead.
There have been only two contributors to the non-profit, the University whose board you chair, which has contributed:
2018 $100,000
2019 $300,000
2020 $150,000
2021 $600,000
2022 $789,000
Khrushchev Would Be So Proud!
During Krushchev’s reign in the Soviet Union, the state embarked on a massive residential building spree which was so ineptly carried out that Russians referred to the buildings as khrushchebys, which is a play on the Russian word for slum. Fast forward to 2023, and the Trudeau government has unveiled its own version of centrally planned housing development.
It’s not that the federal government is going to give you a house, but they will provide you with an architect at taxpayer expense to create pre-approved blueprints which they are certain you will love.
“The catalogue of pre-approved designs, is going to be tied to existing building codes — the National Building Code, which we will seek to make changes to in the future — but will also be designed to mirror the requirements of provincial building codes that are implemented across the country,” he said.
“We’re going to ensure that the pre-approved designs meet the standards to access CMHC programs so we can reduce the administrative barriers on applicants who are seeking to go through the process.”
The Libranos: Greed Fund Whistleblower
Via Mike Barrett;
EXPLOSIVE TESTIMONY
Whistleblower from Trudeau’s $1 Billion Green Slush Fund testifies:
– $150 million in taxpayer money misappropriated.
– Habitual conflicts of interest violations by Liberal appointed board members.
– Coordinated effort by government to coverup.
(Bumped)
We Don’t Need No Flaming Sparky Cars
The stupid rich people market runs dry. (sorry, forgot the link!)
As inventories of electric cars grow faster than sales, car dealers are feeling increasingly discouraged by their prospects, according to a quarterly survey from Cox Automotive, the parent company of Kelley Blue Book. A dealer sentiment index derived from the survey shows sales expectations haven’t been lower since at least 2021, when Cox first started asking about EVs. […]
“We thought we could build a million of them and sell them,” Paul LaRochelle, vice president at Sheehy Auto Stores, a chain of dealerships in the Washington D.C. area, told the Journal.
But his dealerships have a six- to 12-month supply of electric vehicles, and only a month’s worth of gasoline-powered cars and trucks.
Oh no! Canada faces declining EV interest, report shows, despite push to boost sales
Riding Mass Transit Is Like Inviting 30 Random Hitchhikers Into Your Car
And then the car won’t start.
Toronto’s disastrous public transit project known as the Eglinton Crosstown LRT stands as a warning to other cities across Canada to run screaming in the other direction when any politician at any level of government tries to sell you on the joys of so-called light rail transit.
Toronto’s disastrous public transit project known as the Eglinton Crosstown LRT stands as a warning to other cities across Canada to run screaming in the other direction when any politician at any level of government tries to sell you on the joys of so-called light rail transit.[…]
Greenhouse gas emissions would be drastically reduced, we were assured, as thousands of commuters would happily abandon their cars for the convenience of whisking along the designated route of the LRT, free of the city’s chronic traffic congestion and gridlock.
Reality turned out to be years of increased congestion and gridlock at major intersections as construction of the LRT divided the city in half, with those living and working south and north of Eglinton Ave. — a major east–west arterial road in Toronto — having to factor in dramatically increased travel times just to cross Eglinton.
Numerous small businesses along the route folded as the construction choked off access to their customers, combined with the additional financial burden of the pandemic.
Halt construction, park the railcars and convert the mess directly to tent city for homeless druggies and thereby skip the painful middle stage during which innocent commuters are exposed to the risks.
If Women Ran The World
The feminization of higher ed — and of American society as a whole — is a large topic. Here I want simply to note that the repellent jelly of moral confusion that united all three responses was saturated by that feminization. None of those women could give a direct answer to a direct question about a matter of grave moral moment. Instead, they temporized, equivocated, dodged and parried.
More: Claudine Gay first came to my attention about a month ago, when she emerged as the central figure in the Ryan Enos data fabrication scandal, as documented in these 3 articles…
Harvard is holding a board meeting today.
Update:
@realchrisrufo EXCLUSIVE: @RealChrisBrunet and I have obtained documentation demonstrating that Harvard President Claudine Gay plagiarized multiple sections of her Ph.D. thesis, violating Harvard’s policies on academic integrity.
Yes, it would appear so.
Revolutionary Slush Fund
Details are now emerging regarding Google’s decision to pay protection money to the federal government. In something that seems to have come straight out of Atlas Shrugged, only media outlets who are part of a “collective” can get a piece of the action.
Google agreed to provide newsrooms with up to $100 million each year, indexed to inflation, in exchange for an exemption from the law. The company will negotiate those payments through a single collective bargaining group, which will operate much like a media fund.
St-Onge said the law allows any eligible media to join the collective, which could include newspapers and broadcasters, as well as French-language and Indigenous news organizations.
I imagine that Rebel News won’t be eligible or otherwise will never get a dime, but they’re just counter-revolutionaries anyway.
Tory slush fund
There’s only one reason why certain projects need cut-rate financing courtesy of taxpayers: they are chronic money-losers that no private investor would otherwise bother with. It’s unlikely that anyone in Ford’s cabinet considers that the previous avalanche of borrowing is precisely why we are sinking into recession in the first place, and that the fall won’t be arrested with more debt tsunamis.
Ontario is proposing to launch its own infrastructure bank — with an initial $3 billion in public funding — in order to help foot the bill for long-term care homes and transportation projects, as slowing economic growth has the province sinking deeper into the red.
The Ontario Infrastructure Bank, announced Thursday in the province’s fall economic statement, would be an arm’s-length agency enabling pension plans and other institutional investors to help fund what the province says is an infrastructure deficit.
Some good news for a change…
I’m surprised that the federal government has not rushed in to bail out TVA, but in the meantime, it’s nice to see the continuing implosion of the leftist corporate media model.
The TVA Group says it is laying off 547 employees — nearly a third of its workforce — amid restructuring as the company contends with declining audiences and ad revenues.
The Montreal-based broadcaster says the shift involves overhauling its news division, ending its in-house entertainment content production and optimizing its real estate assets — including a reconsideration of the future use of its headquarters east of downtown.
The Libranos: Greed Fund
Breaking: major Liberal scandal…
Opposition Conservatives have obtained leaked secret recordings concerning a billion dollar Liberal “green” slush-fund that was used to funnel “free money” to “well connected Liberals.”
More background here.
An offer he can’t refuse
As the strike by workers at Manitoba Public Insurance drags on, Wab Kinew is finding out that the very people that he thought were carrying water for him during the election are not as grateful as he had hoped. If he didn’t see this coming, then it’s pretty clear that the guy is already in over his head. If he’s not careful, he’ll be the next Bob Rae.
The MPI strike lasting more than two months will continue after the union representing the workers rejected an offer from the employer Monday.
MGEU members voting “overwhelmingly” to turn down the offer, according to union president Kyle Ross.
The Libranos: Performance Bonus
A government of parasitic incompetents, from penthouse to parking garage.
CMHC admits it must “do better” after building 12 homes in eight years under a federal program to convert surplus Crown lands into affordable housing. “That does take some time,” an executive told the Senate banking committee: “We want to do better for sure.”
Last year, the CMHC gave themselves $27 million in bonuses…
We Don’t Need No Stinking Giant Fans
The arc of the renewable universe is long, but it bends toward bankruptcy.
Wind companies losing billions, prompting fears a federal bailout could be coming […]
Mounting financial losses in the wind industry over the last few months are taking a toll on the Biden administration’s clean energy drive. Despite the billions in subsidies that came down the pipeline in 2022 before the Inflation Reduction gave away even more money, energy experts don’t expect that the need for more money will deter the nationwide momentum to build more wind and solar farms.
Writing in his “Energy Absurdity” Substack, David Blackmon, an energy analyst with over 40 years of experience in the oil and gas industry, said that the lobbying for more renewable energy dollars is likely near.
“Everyone should prepare themselves to see an effort in Washington, DC to allocate billions more dollars to bail out Big Offshore Wind developers soon,” Blackmon wrote.
Since the Obama administration, the federal government has been pouring billions into projects to meet environmental goals, only to have the companies go bankrupt.
In 2009, the Obama administration co-signed $535 million in loans to solar panel manufacturing startup Solyndra. Two years later, the company went bankrupt, laying off 1,100 workers.
We Don’t Need No Flaming Sparky Cars
Despite a common perception that electric vehicles are cheaper to own and operate than their internal combustion counterparts, a Texas think tank says the true cost is the equivalent of USD$17.33 per gallon — or CAD$6.32 per litre — over the life of the car, after factoring in subsidies and incentives.
The calculations were based on full cycle costs, including charging equipment, associated incentives and both direct and indirect subsidies in the form of avoided fuel taxes, averaged over 10 years and 120,000 miles.
And that’s not even factoring in emissions.
“Setting aside some of the questionable assumptions used in deriving such favorable economics for EVs, no one has attempted to calculate the full financial benefit of the wide array of direct subsidies, regulatory credits, and subsidized infrastructure that contribute to the economic viability of EVs,” wrote Brent Bennett and Jason Isaac on behalf of the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
“It is not an overstatement to say that the federal government is subsidizing EVs to a greater degree than even wind and solar electricity generation and embarking on an unprecedented endeavour to remake the entire American auto industry.”