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…

Act in stupid haste and there’s plenty of time to repent in leisure; with the insane renewable energy rush, there comes a veritable lifetime of regret.

Britain’s power prices have risen to astronomical levels, thanks to its obsession with heavily subsidised and chaotically intermittent wind and solar. Trashing its coal-fired power fleet and failing to keep up its nuclear plants now looks positively suicidal.

As reality bites, the proletariat are starting to work out that this was the plan, all along. The powers that be didn’t want you to have power to be – anything like prosperous, safe and, heaven forbid, comfortable. No, power rationing and weather-dependent wind and solar were always going to be synonymous.

Daniel Hannan reaches the pretty obvious conclusion.

The miserable truth is that our leaders don’t want us to have cheap energy
The Telegraph
Daniel Hannan
6 August 2022

No, the energy crisis is not…

Guest post by Hannah Wygiera, 31 August 2022.

The boundaries between orthodoxy and heterodoxy changed repeatedly throughout the English Reformation. Despite changes to what constituted a heretical belief, what remained constant was the ability to punish heresy as a crime. However, in 1677 members of Parliament, motivated by anti-Catholic fears, abolished the centuries-old punishment for heresy: death by burning.

Heresy had been a long-standing religious concern in England and in 1401, it also became a criminal offence with the creation of the writ de Heretico cumburendo.[1]This writ looked back at the precedents for burning people deemed heretics and made it the punishment for heresy at common law. The writ lasted until 1677, when Parliament abolished it and effectively decriminalized heresy. This was not an act of toleration. It was an act of self-preservation by members…

Recent newspaper headlines and reports on cable news have pointed to the threat of a nuclear disaster in the war in Ukraine.  It appears that the Russians have seized the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe.  They have forced Ukrainians to operate the massive complex and have turned it into a military base to fire missiles at enemy positions.  The Russians know full well that using the plant as a “shield” would preclude the Ukrainian army from firing its own missiles at the plant or even trying to retake it.  Western powers have requested that the International Atomic Energy Commission investigate, and finally after obfuscating for days the Kremlin has agreed to let inspectors into the plant today.  As the situation evolves it has placed Ukraine, Europe, and even Russia in a precarious position if a nuclear accident occurs.

In this…

An unflattering analysis of climate models. Using mean values from numerous models is questioned. Climate attribution studies don’t fare any better: “these approaches are likely to be flawed”.
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A team of Australian scientists, financiers and economists have issued a stark warning over the use of “flawed” climate models to predict financial risk, says Net Zero Watch.

Writing in the journal Environmental Research they say building future strategies on information that is not understood and potentially misleading is likely to expose the global financial system to systemic risks of its own making.

Politicians and policy-makers are increasingly seeking to assess the potential risks to the financial system associated with climate change.

The greatest fraud in history started with the idea that you can run an economy on sunshine and breezes.

Sequentially, inevitably, every myth and lie put forward by renewable energy rent seekers and their shrinking band of acolytes gets busted and exposed.

Lines like: wind power is cheaper than coal (it isn’t); the wind is always blowing somewhere (it isn’t); this wind farm will power 30,000 homes (it doesn’t and never will); and that the ‘transition’ to an all renewable energy future is simply inevitable (sure, provided it’s a transition to the Dark Ages that you’re looking for?) – sound even more nonsensical, by the day.

There there’s the central, endlessly repeated lie upon which the wind industry seeks to ‘justify’ the colossal and endless subsidies upon which it critically depends; the destruction of wind farm neighbours’ health, wealth and happiness; and the slaughter of millions of birds and bats…

Fifty years after its release, screed-writing screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky’s dark comedy “The Hospital” still has the power to make your jaw drop.

Released amid growing cynicism about institutions that Vietnam inspired and Watergate proved, with documentaries such as “Titicut Follies” laying bare the stark realities of American medicine, and “M*A*S*H” puncturing the TV-burnished image of doctors as “ministering angels,” “Hospital” must have felt like a kick in the teeth.

The ensuing decades have seen nothing that went this far, with only TV’s “Saint Elsewhere” and a few edgier moments on the soapier “E.R.” or comical “Scrubs” etc. even trying.

That said, the black humor in Arthur Hiller’s “comedy” doesn’t really start to work until late in the picture. And it takes the ears and eyes a while to adjust to any visit to Paddy Chayefskyland. Few conversations sound natural. Characters launch into speeches and others in the scene simply yield…

From the Emperor’s Desk: When I began this blog back in 2012 I initially wrote a series of articles on the various pretenders to vacant thrones of Europe. Many of these articles need an update so today I start with the pretenders to the vacant throne of France.

One of the most interesting battles for the claims to a vacant or non existent throne is that of France. The argument on who is the rightful heir to the French throne rests on the legality of the renunciation of rights to the French throne by King Felipe V of Spain (1700-1746) and his descendents at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1714.

Felipe V of Spain (Philippe Duc d’Anjou) was born a French Prince of the Blood (Prince Du Sang) the second son of Louis the Grand Dauphin and a grandson of King Louis XIV of…

That heavily subsidised and chaotically intermittent wind and solar are driving power prices into orbit has been proved beyond all reasonable doubt.

No country that ‘invested’ in the unreliables (ie threw $millions in subsidies at wind and solar) has ever seen their retail power prices fall. No, the evidence on that score is all to the contrary.

In Europe, wind and solar ‘powered’ Germany and Denmark jockey for top spot on the power prices league table. Australia’s renewable energy capital, South Australia set the benchmark down under for crippling power prices years ago and its denizens still pay prices well above their coal-fired neighbours.

It’s no mystery, really.

The cost of additional transmission lines running from the back of beyond; the staggering cost of running highly-inefficient Open Cycle Gas Turbines (or diesel fuelled ship engines) to cope with total collapses in wind and solar output; and running traditional coal-fired…

If we want to avoid the kind of Greek-style fiscal collapse implied by this BIS and OECD data, we need some external force to limit the tendency of politicians to over-tax and over-spend.

That’s why I’m a big advocate of tax competition, fiscal sovereignty, and financial privacy (read Pierre Bessard and Allister Heath to understand why these issues are critical).

Simply stated, I want people to have the freedom to benefit from better tax policy in other jurisdictions, especially since that penalizes governments that get too greedy.

I’m currently surrounded by hundreds of people who share my views since I’m in Prague at a meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society. And I’m particularly happy since Professor Lars Feld of the University of Freiburg presented a paper yesterday on “Redistribution through public budgets: Who pays, who receives, and what effects do political institutions have?”.

His research produced all sorts of interesting…

This short post is mainly for those readers who don’t follow me on Twitter.

You may recall that a couple of months ago I highlighted as being highly inappropriate the appointment to the new board of the Reserve Bank (and the establishment “transitional board”) of Rodger Finlay, who was also chair of the state-owned enterprise New Zealand Post, which in turn was the majority owner of Kiwibank, the 5th largest bank in New Zealand.

The appointment was not illegal – itself a serious weakness in the new Act – but was clearly highly inappropriate in that the new Board was picking up responsibility for prudential supervision, most notably of banks.

When a couple of journalists got interested in the story, we were given to understand that Finlay’s term as chair of NZ Post would expire on 30 June 2022, and as the new Board only took legal responsibility for the…

Further to my post this morning, I’ve read a few more of the papers a bit more carefully.

It is still clear that when Rodger Finlay was appointed last October to the “transitional board” of the Reserve Bank and (from 1 July 2022) to the full Reserve Bank Board that no one (Treasury, Reserve Bank, Minister of Finance) seems to have been bothered by the stark conflict of interest between his twin roles as NZ Post chair (majority owner of 5th biggest bank in New Zealand) and the proposed role on the Board of the prudential regulatory authority. Any conflict was sufficiently unimportant (in the eyes of officials) that discussions were not documented, and ministers were not even advised of the issue in the relevant Cabinet and Cabinet committee papers.

To be fair, at that point it appears that Finlay’s term as NZ Post chair expired in the first…