Utopia, you are standing in it!

In the face of Napoleon’s assumption of the title “Emperor of the French” in 1804 and the Austrian defeat at the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805, the Habsburg monarchy began contemplating whether the imperial title and the empire as a whole were worth defending.

Many of the states nominally serving the Holy Roman Emperor, such as Baden, Württemberg and Bavaria, had openly defied imperial authority and sided with Napoleon. Even then, the significance of the empire was not based on actual control of resources, but on prestige.

The main idea behind Franz II’s actions in 1806 was to lay the groundwork needed to avoid additional future wars with Napoleon and France. One concern held by the Habsburg monarchy was that Napoleon might aspire to claim the title of Holy Roman Emperor.

Franz II-I, The Last Holy Roman Emperor and First Emperor of Austria

Napoleon was attracted to Charlemagne’s legacy; replicas…

The ultimate cost of renewable energy virtue signalling is truly crippling, wind and solar-obsessed Britain is a case in point. Power prices have doubled over the span of a few months and will quadruple as energy demand spikes again in winter.

Attempting to ditch its coal-fired power plants (and converting them to run on wood pellets imported from the US) was never going to end well.

The first sign of trouble in wind-powered paradise began in September last year when (and for months following) Britain’s much heralded wind-powered future ran headlong into reality when the Big Calm struck. Wind power output was reduced to a risible trickle across the continent. The Brits were forced to fire up their mothballed coal-fired power plants, and wholesale power prices went through the roof.

Natural forces continued to conspire into November: on 2 and 3 November, wind power output across the UK once…

My recent post about the heroic-journalist myth of Watergate prompted a few blinkered, ahistoric observations.

Among was this comment, posted at Romenesko‘s feedback site:

“Who cares?” the comment reads. “Watergate was in the early 1970s. …  Arguing the point now about what role a paper played almost 40 years later in a presidency that a significant number of people have no recollections of? Ya gotta admire those authors willing to tackle cutting-edge topics.”

So why does it matter? Why is addressing and debunking the heroic-journalist myth of Watergate — the notion that intrepid reporters for the Washington Post brought down Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency — still important?

Several reasons present themselves, not the least of which is the vigor that characterizes the Watergate myth: It lives on in textbooks, in classrooms, in newsrooms. It’s a very robust myth, little-restrained in its reach and infiltration.

A hint of its reach…

Back in 1983 the American Wind Industry Association claimed that solar and wind would be “competitive and self-supporting on a national level by the end of the decade if assisted by tax credits and augmented by federally sponsored R&D”. That was 39 years ago. Over that span of time, there has been no lack of assistance in the form of tax credits and federally sponsored R&D, along with a raft of punitive mandates and targets designed to cripple conventional generators and favour chaotically intermittent wind and solar.

Now, as then, bold claims from renewable energy rent seekers about wind and solar being truly competitive with nuclear, coal or gas turn to water as soon as talk turns to cutting subsidies to wind and solar.

With their 40^th birthdays approaching, the wind and solar ‘industries’ are a pair of perpetual infants who – like Peter Pan – are determined to…

I don’t like big-government Republicans in the United States, so it naturally follows that I don’t like big-government Tories in the United Kingdom.

Indeed, I wrote just a few days ago about the new leadership race for the Conservative Party in the U.K. and wondered whether either of the candidates has what it takes to reverse Boris Johnson’s failedstatism.

I hope one of them is the reincarnation of Margaret Thatcher (just as I’ve been waiting decades for another Ronald Reagan).

We will find out relatively quickly. The race for Prime Minister will be decided next month and I will be very interested to see whether the winner fixes two very foolish energy policies.

The Wall Street Journal has a pair of excellent editorials this month.

On August 18, the paper opined about a bone-headed policy to cap energy bills.

Britain’s ruling Conservatives have imposed some awful energy…

In 1943, the village of Imber on Salisbury Plain began to be used as a Second World War training ground. The residents were ordered to leave by the War Office and, despite promises to the contrary, have never been allowed to return.

The comments made earlier remain relevant, but in the light of both the Jerry Sadowitz cancellation and proposed regulation of speech in the UK and elsewhere I have reposted this item once again.

Here is some additional relevant commentary re the Jerry Sadowitz issue. I have never seen Sadowitz, but what he says and does is controversial. However, nobody is compelled to see him. This incident serves to illustrate the free speech threats are multiplying.

As posted previously

I have decided to repost these previously posted item once again. My reason for doing this is the current furore over a joke made by Jimmy Carr.
Frankly, Carr’s humour does not appeal to me. Consequently I do not watch him. Therefore, nothing he says offends me.

Having watched the clip of Carr, see end of post below I have to say I did not find the item offensive. In fact the…

The West’s obsession with the unreliables, wind and solar was guaranteed to end in tears – the weather-driven power rationing and rocketing power prices were as perfectly predictable, as they were perfectly avoidable.

Every country that has hitched its energy future to sunshine and breezes is facing both a powr pricing and supply calamity.

Wind and solar ‘powered’ Germans are being softened up for major energy rationing and further price hikes – bureaucrats are working overtime to come up with new ways of depriving their compatriots of the electricity they once enjoyed like running water. With winter approaching, one cunning plan is to get energy-starved Germans to bunch up in commonly heated exhibition halls to prevent them from freezing to death when temperatures plummet.

In Britain, equally obsessed with subsidised and intermittent wind and solar, power prices are rising at astronomical rates. Last October, the average annual energy bill was…

November 04,2021

The National Archives is delighted to announce ‘The Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations under the magnifying glass with Michael Portillo in conversation with Professor Marie Coleman’, the second talk in our commemorative lecture series for autumn–winter 2021. The talk will see Michael Portillo (broadcaster and former British cabinet minister) discuss with Professor Marie Coleman (Professor in Modern Irish History, Queen’s University, Belfast) the Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations held in London from 11 October–6 December 1921. Michael Portillo and Marie Coleman will debate what was at stake for both delegations and their respective governments and will consider the wider implications the Treaty had, not just for future Anglo-Irish relations but also for Britain’s allies and empire.

Back in 2014, I shared a meme with a motto that was perfect for Washington, DC.

Today, let’s do something similar. But instead of a motto specifically for America’s unsavory capital, how about one sentence that summarizes the mentality of all governments.

I used a fill-in-the-blank format because there are so many possible answers.

After all, people in government value taxes more than growth, jobs, competitiveness, and all sorts of other factors.

And one of those other factors is public health, as we can see in this report by Rachel Pannett and Julia Mio Inuma in the Washington Post.

Japanese officials, worried about shifting demographics and a sharp decline in sintax revenue, have come up with an unusual fix for their fiscal woes: encouraging young people to drink more. …Liquor tax revenue in the fiscal 2020 year was about $8.4 billion, a plunge of…

Goldilocks was evidently the brains behind the ‘engineering’ of wind and solar power, which only operate when conditions are “just right”.

When the weather turns nasty, giant industrial wind turbines simply turn off. When there’s no wind, they produce nothing; when winds hit gale force, they produce nothing.

Solar panels aren’t any more resilient.

A few fluffy clouds give them grief.

Hailstones make short work of them; a blanket of snow and ice cuts their production to nothing, even when the sun is shining.

A hurricane or tornado soon tears them to worthless shreds.

Shredded panels after a storm in Puerto Rico.

But, counterintuitively, it’s when solar energy is at its zenith that the output they occasionally produce starts to drop off, very dramatically.

In Australia, summertime temperatures are routinely 35° C and above with heatwaves of 40° C and above, that can last for a week at a stretch…

From the Emperor’s Desk: although I dealt with the Confederation of the Rhine in yesterday’s post, I thought today I would dig a little deeper.

After the Battle of Austerlitz, Napoleon established the Confederation of the Rhine in 1806. A collection of German states intended to serve as a buffer zone between France and Central Europe, the creation of the Confederation spelled the end of the Holy Roman Empire and significantly alarmed the Prussians.

The brazen reorganization of German territory by the French risked threatening Prussian influence in the region, if not eliminating it outright. War fever in Berlin rose steadily throughout the summer of 1806. At the insistence of his court, especially his wife Queen Louise, Friedrich Wilhelm III decided to challenge the French domination of Central Europe by going to war.

The founding members of the confederation were German princes of the Holy Roman Empire. They were…