Utopia, you are standing in it!

Thomas Piketty is a big proponent of class-warfare tax policy because he views inequality as a horrible outcome.

But a soak-the-rich policy agenda, echoed by many other academics such as Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, is fundamentally misguided. If people really care about helping the poor, they should focus instead on reforms that actually have a proven track record of reducing poverty.

The fact that they fixate on inequality makes me wonder about their motives.

And it also leads me to find their work largely irrelevant. I don’t care if they produce detailed long-run data on changes in inequality.

I prefer detailed long-run data on changes in poverty.

That being said, it appears that some of Piketty’s data is sloppy.

I shared some evidence about his bad numbers back in 2014. And, in a column for the Wall Street Journal, Phil Magness of the…

Original Air Date: February 1965/October 14, 1986
Star Date: 2254 (unknown in-universe date)
Writer: Gene Roddenberry
Director: Robert Butler

“There’s a way out of any cage and I’ll find it.”

Once notoriously rejected by NBC for being too “too cerebral,” this now legendary pilot episode of Star Trek offers a panoply of rich, complex ideas worthy of consideration. Rather than easily hooking its audience with flashy effects or explosive gun fights, “The Cage” is a slow-burn prison mystery which forces us to examine the nature of evil. Are the Talosians truly an evil alien species? According to the Talosians, the answer is emphatically “no.” The Talosians believe they are mere investigators and conjurers of innocent but deceptive imagery in order to offer a better world, test humanity’s limits, and hopefully save the future of Talos IV, their own decaying planet. The Talosians are anthropologists and…

Original Air Date: September 8, 1966
Stardate: 1312.4
Writer: Samuel A. Peeples
Director: James Goldstone

“Morals are for men, not gods.”

After NBC initially rejected Gene Roddenberry’s pilot episode for Star Trek entitled “The Cage” (they claimed it was too cerebral) Star Trek was offered the rarest of opportunities: a second chance. This was thanks in part to the earlier efforts of Lucille Ball and her company Desilu Studios which was impressed by the show’s diverse cast, in particular its elevation of women to more prominent roles. Somewhat ironically the series’s second chance removed “Number Two” (Majel Barrett) from the show. Instead of Captain Pike’s character (played by Jeffrey Hunter as featured in “The Cage”) he was replaced by Captain Kirk (played by William Shatner). Shatner had previously made a name for himself in a variety of Broadway productions as well as on The Twilight…

Sheep farming in Wales [image credit: BBC]
Another example of unintended consequences caused by the irrational pursuit of climate obsessions by governments.
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A fifth of Welsh farms are running at a loss and there is a risk that farmers will be priced out of agriculture by big corporations buying up farmland for carbon offsetting schemes, according to a new report on family farms in Wales.

The findings of an inquiry by the Welsh Affairs Select Committee published today (7 April) paint a concerning picture for Welsh agriculture, an industry where the average farm size is just 48ha, compared to 87ha in England, says TW News.

From pressure on incomes and land availability to a lack of opportunity for new entrants, the report highlights some of the key concerns and sets out a series of recommendations to governments to address the issues.

During the Glorious Revolution of November 1688 James II-VII, king of England, Scotland and Ireland was deposed and replaced by his daughter Mary II and her husband, stadtholder William III of Orange, the de facto ruler of the Dutch Republic. The Glorious Revolution
can be seen as both the last successful invasion of England and also an internal coup that toppled the reigning monarch.

William III, King of England, Scotland and Ireland, Stadtholder of the Netherlands with his Imperial State Crown

The Revolution ended a century of political dispute and strife between the Crown and Parliament by confirming the primacy of Parliament over the Crown, a principle established in the Bill of Rights 1689.

English coronations were traditionally held at Westminster Abbey, with the monarch seated on the Coronation Chair. Main elements of the coronation service and the earliest form of oath can be traced to the ceremony devised by…

Death and taxes are certainties, so too the wind and solar industry’s critical dependence on massive and endless subsidies.

Those pushing wind and solar keep telling us that the power they produce is ‘free’ and getting cheaper all the time.

Every so often, rent seekers and their political enablers are faced with the retort that, if wind and solar really are so cheap and, therefore, truly competitive with coal, gas and nuclear, then it’s surely time to do away with the $billions in subsidies directed at the unreliables?

Shortly after the stuttering and spluttering stops, wind and solar scammers then start waffling about subsidies to fossil fuels. For sport, try pressing them on the precise nature those subsidies and their total value, and they’ll flounder some more.

The producers of oil, coal and gas all pay royalties to governments based on the volumes extracted, as well as taxes on the…

Original Air Date: September 8, 1966
Stardate: 1513.1
Writer: George Clayton Johnson
Director: Marc Daniels

“The last of its kind. Earth history, remember? Like the passenger pigeon, or… the buffalo.”

The year is 2266. We are introduced to the USS Enterprise, a starship working under Starfleet of the United Federation of Planets. It is on a five-year mission “to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.” The ship arrives at a planet called M-113, a red and arid place inhabited by Dr. Robert Crater, an archaeologist (played by Alfred Ryder who actually suffered a severe arm injury just prior to filming this episode hence why he appears somewhat stiff if you pay close attention). Dr. Crater resides on this remote planet with his wife Nancy. They have been conducting a nearly five-year survey of the planet’s…

Photosynthesis: nature requires carbon dioxide
Another climate sucker falls for the idea that nature’s life giver carbon dioxide is a threat to human existence which can and should be controlled, when a lack of it would be the real problem.
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A deal between Sweden’s political parties positions the country to take responsibility for the carbon footprint of imported goods, says Climate Home News.

Sweden’s political parties agreed on Thursday to include consumption-based emissions within its climate targets, making it the first country in the world to make the leap into the complex realm of overseas emissions reporting.

National climate targets rely on reporting the emissions that are created on a country’s territory.

An aggressive and ambitious Russian has caused policymakers to reflect on the debacle that is subsidised wind and solar. National security is now taken to equate with energy security; a chap with an insatiable thirst for power has revealed what Europe’s renewable energy transition will ultimately mean for those still pretending an all wind and sun-powered future is in the offing.

Obsessive reliance on wind and solar (and the gas inevitably required to provide power when the sun sets and calm weather sets in) has left Europeans vulnerable to the dictates of an erstwhile dictator. As they say, be prepared to reap precisely what you sow.

Putin’s adventures in Ukraine have thrown up an opportunity for our political betters to get a grip and start unscrambling the suicidal energy policies that beset us, before the power pricing and supply calamity seen in Europe spreads further afield, and ruins us, too.

The availability of new hybrids after 2030 is also thrown into question, as the government puts its foot on the climate obsession accelerator. Sales figures of full EVs will now be part of that policy decision. Basically freedom of choice will end in 2027, well before the government’s latest energy strategy has had much chance to take any effect. This looks over-ambitious in terms of electricity supply, to put it mildly.
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More than half of all new cars sold in the UK must be fully electric by 2028, under detailed government proposals unveiled on Thursday to pave the way for phasing out the sale of traditional petrol and diesel vehicles by the end of the decade, says DUK News.

Ministers want to bring in a China-style sales mandate from 2024, which would force carmakers to increase the proportion of electric cars as a percentage of their…

Walpole secured the support of the people and of the House of Commons with a policy of avoiding war. He used his influence to prevent George II from entering the War of the Polish Succession in 1733, because it was a dispute between the Bourbons and the Habsburgs. He boasted, “There are 50,000 men slain in Europe this year, and not one Englishman.” By avoiding wars, Walpole could lower taxes.

After the general elections of 1734, Walpole’s supporters still formed a majority in the House of Commons although they were less numerous than before. He maintained both his parliamentary supremacy and his popularity in Norfolk, his home county.

In 1736 an increase in the tax on gin inspired riots in London. The even more serious Porteous riots broke out in Edinburgh after the King pardoned a captain of the guard (John Porteous) who had commanded his troops to shoot a…

The race to secure reliable and affordable power is on and nuclear power has already crossed the finish line.

2021 was the year when the inherent unreliability of wind and solar revealed how everything depends upon reliable and affordable power supplies.

The wind and solar ‘industries’ talk a big game; and in their wilder moments even claim to be capable of replacing conventional coal, gas and nuclear generators, altogether. Europe’s months-long wind drought in the last half of 2021 demonstrated otherwise. And the peculiar disappearance of solar power, every day is readily explained by that phenomenon known as “sunset”.

The mega-batteries touted as a solution are nothing but an expensive pipe dream.

Which is why the French, among others, are now talking about nuclear power as if it was their very first love.

Faced with the reality of actually trying to rely exclusively on wind and solar, even