Utopia, you are standing in it!

‘The Lamps Are Going Out All Over Europe’

Germans have never struck me as being stupid people. It may be cliched to picture them as sober, serious, stolid citizens who make machines and systems that work, but that’s because cliches often derive from basic truths.

But there is that whole German Political Party That Must Not Be Named thing, which often seemed to be both led and run by hysterics, so perhaps there’s some flaw in the German national character that just bursts out from time to time.

Begging also does not seem to be them either.

Oh dear:

German Chancellor…

Apparently, Germans are not looking forward to a winter sitting freezing in the dark when the sun sets and/or calm weather sets in. One ‘plan’ is to encourage energy-starved Germans to bunch up in commonly heated exhibition halls to prevent them from freezing to death when temperatures plummet.

The (hopeful) German power consumer is, quite rightly, unamused.

The nonsense of attempting to run on weather-dependent wind and solar has been revealed. As has the insanity of mothballing coal-fired power plants and the idiocy of axing Germany’s enviable fleet of nuclear power plants.

As to the latter, much to the horror of the anti-progress, anti-human Greens, Germans are becoming increasingly vocal in their demands to undo Germany’s suicidal anti-nuclear policies.

Amazing what the reality of not having power, as and when you need it, can do to improve the powers of applied critical thinking.

Melanie Amann gives us an insight on…

Let’s revisit the issues of Bidenomics.

Previous editions of this series have focused on Biden’s dismal record with regards to subsidies, inflation, protectionism, household income, fiscal policy, and red tape.

The assessment has not been positive, which shouldn’t be very surprising since Biden is basically a slow-motion version of Bernie Sanders.

Today, we’re going to look at Biden’s record on jobs…and that’s not going to improve the assessment.

The problem is employment rather than unemployment.

In a column for the Wall Street Journal, Nicholas Eberstadt writes about the millions of Americans who have disappeared from the labor force.

Never has work been so readily available in modern America; never have so many been uninterested in taking it. …For every unemployed person in the U.S. today, there are nearly two open jobs, and the labor shortage affects every region of the country. …Why…

Landfills are the final destination for millions of worn-out wind turbine blades, where their toxic plastics will be left to rot for the ‘benefit’ of generations to come. These 10-20 tonne, 40-60m long chunks of plastic, fibreglass, balsa wood and resins can’t be recycled, so the wind industry has been dumping them quietly for years now; often illegally (see above).

Even before they hit the dump, wind turbine blades are shedding their toxic plastic residues far and wide.

That the plastics in the blades are toxic is without doubt. With a few images added by STT, Dr Eric Blondeel provides a timely (and frightening) analysis of what the wind industry has in store for you and yours.

Will Bisphenol A be the PFOS of Wind Energy?
Great Lakes Wind Truth
Dr Eric Blondeel
18 August 2022

PFOS
Poly- and perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are chemicals that are man-made. They do not…

The Herald’s Jenée Tibshraeny had a follow-up piece this morning on the Reserve Bank Board, with some interesting new information and (what appears to be) some ministerial spin and simply avoiding straight answers.

First we learn that Byron Pepper, appointed to the Board in late June, has now stepped down from his position as a director of an insurance company (Ando) that – by the vagaries of the details of the insurance legislation – is not an institution regulated by the Reserve Bank but is nonetheless substantially owned by another insurance company which is regulated, and which provides insurance on behalf of that regulated company. Again, it wasn’t illegal for Pepper to have held those two roles simultaneously, but it was quite improper, and it reflects poorly on him, on The Treasury (which made the appointment recommendations), on the Bank (Governor and key Board members), and on the Minister of…

This post is part ofFifty Shades of Republic, a series of overviews of US political institutions at the state level

While the Federal Constitution is arguably the world’s oldest national constitution, the states were the ones that began the practice of having ‘written’ constitutions – entrenched laws with a higher status than regular laws, establishing the main features of the system of government. Since I’ve been doing some work on constitution amendment rules (of both national and US state constitutions) for my dissertation, I thought I’d do this topic next (it is also closely related to the topic of a podcast I am currently preparing for Leviathan’s Couch).

The amendment procedure has far-reaching effects. John Burgess, one of the 19^th century pioneers of political science, argued it to be the most important part of a constitution. Constitutional amendment procedures entrench written constitutions, making them harder (or…

Liz Truss is apparently mulling the ‘nuclear’ option of cutting the standard rate of VAT by five percentage points to support the economy. This has triggered a predictable backlash from my fellow policy wonks, led by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS). However, in these extraordinary times, every lever may have to be pulled.

The case for a temporary cut in VAT is straightforward. The UK is on the brink of a massive economic and social crisis. Lowering VAT would be a simple and quick way to boost spending power. The annual saving would average out at around £1,300 per household, returning some of the extra tax that people are paying as a result of higher nominal incomes and prices.

Headline inflation would also be lower as a result, albeit just for one year. And even if the VAT cut is not passed on in full to customers, struggling businesses…

Remember all that guff about ‘cheap’ wind and solar power? No? That’s probably because every country that throws buckets of subsidies at the unreliables ends up suffering off-the-charts power prices.

The wind and sun are free, we’re told. But, somehow, the promises of cheap power at the end of the renewable energy transition rainbow keep failing to materialize.

Germany set the pace when it comes to plastering the countryside with solar panels and spearing these things far and wide (more than 30,000 of them, so far).

So, if there was ever an opportunity to prove the point about how cheap wind and solar can be, Germany provided it.

As Pierre Gosselin points out below, however, there’s little joy and a whole lot of suffering in store for wind and solar ‘powered’ Germans.

German Electricity Prices Spiraling Out Of Control…Tripling Since 2000… Blackouts, Unrest Loom
No Tricks Zone
Pierre Gosselin
19…

Hitler: A Biography
by Ian Kershaw
1,072 pages
W. W. Norton
Published: Nov 2008

“Hitler: A Biography” is Ian Kershaw’s 2008 abridgment of his masterful two-volume series on Adolf Hitler.  Kershaw is a British historian focused on 20th-century Germany and is a noted expert on Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany.

The volumes underlying this abridgment (“Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris” and “Hitler: 1936-1945 Nemesis“) were published in 1998 and 2000, respectively. The series was originally conceived as a study of power – much like Robert Caro’s series on Lyndon B. Johnson – but grew into something even deeper and more substantial than expected. Kershaw was convinced to condense the series in order to make it accessible to a wider group of readers.

Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) is one of history’s most horrifying and unfathomable demons. Not surprisingly, there are a large number of excellent books focused on…

What’s really powering Australians around the clock.

The infantile mentality of the renewables cult is on vivid display when they crow about wind or solar adding something meaningful to the grid. Always brief and fleeting, the 60 minutes when solar or wind did something special, is always trumpeted as if no one else cares about their power needs for the other 23 hours in a day. It’s a little like cheering on the plucky disabled kid, knowing he’ll never win the race but he should get full credit for trying.

A week or so back, it was solar’s time to shine (for a brief 30 minutes, anyway).

As Eric Worrall reports, the hubris was short-lived, as Australia coal-fired power plants picked up the yoke and kept the power coming after the Sun set, as they’ve done faithfully for the best part of a century.

Aussie Triumph? Solar Briefly Overtook Coal, then…

The world is much freer today than when I was born, largely because the “Evil Empire” collapsed.

The Soviet Union was awful. It killed at least 20 million of its own people (some say as many as 60 million). It enslaved and impoverished its own citizens, as well as those who languished behind the “Iron Curtain.”

Ronald Reagan deserves the lion’s share of the credit for the collapse of communism – in part because he restored America’s economic vitality and built up the nation’s military, but also because he directly condemned the immorality of Marxism (often using humor).

But since the last dictator of the Soviet Union just died, let’s examine Mikhail Gorbachev’s role.

An editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal is worth reading because it explains that his biggest achievement was not using bloodshed to preserve communist rule.

Mikhail Gorbachev…rose through the Communist ranks but…