Utopia, you are standing in it!

Juan Carlos I (Spanish: Juan Carlos Alfonso Víctor María de Borbón y Borbón-Dos Sicilias, born January 5, 1938) is a member of the Spanish royal family who reigned as King of Spain from November 22, 1975 until his abdication on June 19, 2014. In Spain, since his abdication, Juan Carlos has usually been referred to as the Rey Emérito (“King Emeritus”).

Juan Carlos is the grandson of Alfonso XIII, the last king of Spain before the abolition of the monarchy in 1931 and the subsequent declaration of the Second Spanish Republic. Juan Carlos was born in Rome during his family’s exile. Francisco Franco took over the government of Spain after his victory in the Spanish Civil War in 1939, yet in 1947 Spain’s status as a monarchy was affirmed and a law was passed allowing Franco to choose his successor.

Juan Carlos’s father, Juan, was the third son of King…

“War is a business in which a lot of people watch a few people get killed
and are damn glad it wasn’t them.”

Just as important as exploring the particular qualities that constitute a successful leader, Herman Wouk’s Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece The Caine Mutiny examines the situations that inspire men to commit grave revolutionary acts –like the act of mutiny. Often compared to 1932’s Mutiny on the Bounty, The Caine Mutiny is a truly wonderful novel. Thus far in my quest to read the Pulitzer Prize-winners, I have been stuck in a string of novels offering mostly plotless portraits of struggling rural farmers, and so it was a delight for me to shift into a bit more levity with 1951’s The Caine Mutiny, a rare bestseller on top of being a Pulitzer Prize-winner. The tone is light, playful, almost satirical a la Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, even though…

You would think that after the recent election losses in Virginia and the fright they got in New Jersey, not to mention the underwater polling of “President” Biden and the Democrat Party across the nation and across seemingly all issues, that they would be learning from their mistakes and trimming their sails as Bill Clinton did after the 1994 mid-terms elections booted his Democrats from power in both the Senate and, for the first time in forty years, from the House.

Admittedly he and his party didn’t trim until after that catastrophe so perhaps we’re looking at the same thing here.

But I suspect it’s worse than that. Back in those days representatives from Deep Blue districts were not extreme in their approach, despite having majorities the GOP couldn’t touch. Now we’ve got the likes of AOC, who feels she can push the edge of the envelope on policy and…

Wind power has no economic value simply because it cannot be delivered as and when power consumers need it. Hence the massive and seemingly endless subsidies to a power source which is meaningless and, accordingly, worthless. In the absence of subsidies, there would be no wind industry, at all.

But worthless does not mean ‘cheap’ – pointless ‘virtue’ signalling comes with a staggering price tag.

Now that Jo Biden has got the cash to implement the Green New Deal (at its heart a self-destructive energy policy heavily promoted by Bernie Sanders and the Squad) the prospects for renewable energy rent-seekers have improved.

Which, is as good as time as any, to calculate the true costs of what’s coming.

Thomas Stacy does just that below.

Virginia’s Blackout Energy Plan (‘bloody expensive,’ says E&E News)
Master Resource
Thomas Stacy II
2 November 2021

“Get ready, blackouts and brownouts are coming,” [Glenn] Youngkin…

I recently wrote a short piece for Adam Smith Works, on the influence of David Hume on Adam Smith, in the field of trade and international politics.

You may find it here: https://www.adamsmithworks.org/speakings/van-de-haar-insights-of-david-hume

Earlier in the week I did a post that included economist (and former Victoria University academic) Martin Lally’s sketch outline of an approach to thinking about applying cost-benefit analysis techniques to Covid vaccine “mandates”. In that post I included a few suggestions, questions, and thoughts on aspects of Lally’s note and the wider issue of coercion in a Covid context.

Since then, Lally has extended his note into a fuller short paper. I offered to make it more widely available here

A COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS OF COVID-19 VACCINE MANDATES by Martin Lally

Here is his Abstract

Abstract

Covid-19 vaccine mandates for the general population must trade off the rights of those who object to being vaccinated against the costs that the unvaccinated impose upon the vaccinated, most particularly the increased risk to vaccinated people of death by covid-19.  This paper provides a methodology for doing so.  It is then applied to…

Greenland drink break [image credit: leisurelylifestyle.com] As a bonus in today’s climate obsessed times, carbon credits could come into play for farmers to sell with this discovery. Even Danish brewers can benefit. Why fear glacier melt if it makes life better?
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On a shore near Greenland’s capital Nuuk, a local scientist points to a paradox emerging as the island’s glaciers retreat: one of the most alarming consequences of global warming could deliver a way to limit its effects, says Reuters (via Yahoo News).

“It’s a kind of wonder material,” says Minik Rosing, a native Greenlander, referring to the ultra-fine silt deposited as the glaciers melt.

Known as glacial rock flour, the silt is crushed to nano-particles by the weight of the retreating ice sheet, which deposits roughly one billion tonnes of it on the world’s largest island per year.

Professor Minik Rosing and his team at…