Utopia, you are standing in it!

I know that looking back on history with a retrospective view always comes with a 20/20 vision, nevertheless it is important to understand that it was widely know what was happening to the Jewish population in Europe throughout World War 2. Too often I have heard the argument that no one knew until after the war. There were regular reports issued to the governments of the allied forces and to newspapers.

The picture above is a cutting from the Daily Worker newspaper of an open letter – also published in the Times – by well-known figures appealing for action against the mistreatment of Jews in Europe. It was issued in February 1943.

Transcript
DAILY WORKER

Cutting dated …17 Feb 1943 … 194

Britain Urged To Act Now and Save Jews

The following letter appeared in the Times yesterday: –

We have noted with satisfaction the Joint Declaration of the United…

Claims that wind and solar are cheap, simply don’t add up. Glaring examples such as Germany, Denmark and South Australia tell the tale.

Like night follows day, add heavily subsidised and chaotically intermittent wind and solar to your grid, and power prices are bound to spiral out of control.

California led America in the race to wreck its power grid with chaotically intermittent wind and solar. As a result, power prices are rocketing, with Californians paying the highest rates in the US, by a country mile. But, as the subsidised wind and solar cancer spreads across the United States, consumers are starting to understand the truly crippling cost of their ‘inevitable’ wind and solar transition.

As John Hinderaker points out below, with millions of Americans faced with power bills that they simply cannot pay, something has to give.

A Tsunami of Shutoffs
Powerline
John Hinderaker
28 August 2022

Tens…

With accession of HM King Charles III of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland there is some confusion as to the title of his wife, the former Duchess of Cornwall.

His Majesty the King

The late Queen, Elizabeth II, in a statement marking her platinum jubilee, said she wants Prince Charles’ wife, Camilla, to be known as the “Queen Consort” when he takes the throne.

Previously, when Charles, as Prince of Wales, married Camilla in 2005 she took the title Duchess of Cornwall (Duke of Cornwall being one of her husband’s secondary titles) instead of Princess of Wales, which she legally had but did not use out of respect for the late Diana, Princess of Wales.

It was also stated at the time that when Charles became King his wife would adopt the title Princess Consort instead of Queen. So the late Queen Elizabeth II stating her…

According to polling data, President Biden is not getting good grades for economic policy.

Part of that is because of inflation, though I’ve repeatedly pointed out that the blame belongs with the Federal Reserve rather than Biden. And the big mistake from the Fed took place before Biden even took office.

Unfortunately, the President is not trying to make things better. His appointments to the Fed suggest he doesn’t understand the need for good monetary policy.

And all of his major legislative initiatives (the so-called stimulus, the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, the pork-filled infrastructure legislation, and the cronyist handouts to the semiconductor industry) have increased the size and scope of government.

For what it’s worth, I think Biden’s big challenge – both politically and economically – is that Americans are losing ground. Simply stated, prices are increasing faster than incomes.

But that isn’t stopping the Administration…

If you are looking for a reasonably compact review of Russian history encompassing the last three decades of the twentieth century, Princeton University historian and fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, Stephen Kotkin’s book ARMAGEDDON AVERTED, THE SOVIET COLLAPSE 1970-2000 should be considered.  Published in 2008 it foresaw some of the problems we are experiencing today with Russia and looking back fourteen years later Kotkin would not be shocked by Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.  Kotkin has written two volumes of his biographical trilogy of Joseph Stalin; STALIN: PARADOXES OF POWER, 1878-1928 and STALIN: WAITING FOR HITLER, 1929-1941, one of which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.  Kotkin is an exceptional historian blessed with a pleasing writing style and the ability to synthesize vast amounts of historical information and documentation that the general reader along with professional colleagues can admire and enjoy.  With the war raging…

The Listener magazine this week reported the results of a caption contest they’d run for a photo of Reserve Bank Governor Adrian Orr.

I’d suggested what seemed to me a rather more apt caption.

One good thing about the Reserve Bank is that they do report their balance sheet in some detail every month, and yesterday they released the numbers for the end of August. August was not a good month for the government bond market: yields rose further and the market value of anyone’s bond holdings fell. And thus the Reserve Bank’s claim on the government, under the indemnity the Minister of Finance provided them in respect of the LSAP programme, mounted.

This is the line item from the balance sheet

A new record high at just over…

The old saying that a ‘week is a long time in politics’ can rarely have been more apt. The changes in Westminster have been overshadowed by the transition in the Monarchy. But the new Prime Minister has also begun to tackle the challenges facing the UK economy.

The first big policy announcement was a freeze on energy bills. The ‘Energy Price Guarantee’ will cap the unit price of energy for households for two years, with the government compensating suppliers for any additional costs. Similar support is also being offered to businesses and other non-domestic energy users, such as schools, initially for a period of six months.

This is a dramatic turnaround from Liz Truss’s apparentdismissalof more ‘handouts’ in the early days of her leadership campaign. The Energy Price Guarantee is another massive state intervention in the markets which will subsidise the energy bills of every household…

Ever since I’ve been writing about house prices – more or less the life of this blog – one of the things that has struck (and sobered) me is that I do not know of (and no one has ever been able to point me to) an example of a country or even a region that having once messed up its housing and urban land regulation, generating absurdly high house price to income ratios has undone things and returned to sustainably low price to income ratios (perhaps fluctuating around three times). There are, of course, many places in the United States where price to income ratios never went crazy. But never having dug a deep hole is a different matter than getting out of one once dug. One reads occasionally – even briefly on this blog – of how easy it is to build in Tokyo (and a culture of…

As Germans and Brits stock up on woollen blankets and candles, the world has a chance to avoid the perfectly avoidable.

In both cases, an obsession with chaotically intermittent and heavily subsidised wind and solar has them scrambling for reliable energy – as if thousands of lives depend on it – which they literally do.

In Germany and the UK, electricity prices are truly punitive – such that power is now out of reach for low-income households; thousands of small businesses are under pressure, like never before.

Oh, and low-margin energy-hungry businesses – like mineral processing and metal fabrication – will simply disappear off the map. No doubt destined for China, where power costs are a tiny fraction of those suffered in the virtue-signalling West.

Australia, a first-rate country run by third-rate people, has been overrun by lunatics from the hard green left. Its Federal Government, a Green/Labor Alliance, has…

There are numerous biographies of Sigmund Freud, the best ones I have read include Peter Gay’s FREUD: A LIFE FOR OUR TIMES, Joel Whitebrook’s FREUD: AN INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY, and an earlier work, Ronald W. Clark’s FREUD: THE MAN AND THE CAUSE.  The latest monograph SAVING FREUD: THE RESCUERS WHO BROUGHT HIM TO FREEDOM by Andrew Nagorski is not a complete biography but one that focuses on how Freud and fifteen of his followers managed to escape Austria in 1938 as Hitler and his Nazis achieved their Anschluss with Austria triggering a wave of anti-Semitic violence.  While Nagorski provides biographical details of Freud’s life, his main thrust is the years leading up to World War II.  Nagorski tells an engrossing tale of how there was little margin for error for Freud as he escaped Nazi persecution.

Nagorski a former Newsweek correspondent has written a number of…