Utopia, you are standing in it!

This is a very good video, but there is one vital point missing. Environmentalist groups are phenomenally wealthy and could easily lobby to get the laws mentioned by the PERC representative changed. So the million dollar question is: “Why don’t they?”

PHOTO CREDIT: View along Copper Creek Trail, Kings Canyon National Park, California By Tom Hilton – Flickr, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=62647902

Prime Minister Trudeau advised Governor General Mary Simon to dissolve the 43^rd Parliament of Canada and issue the writs of election on 15 August 2021. The Privy Council Office marked the occasion by releasing another edition of its Guidelines on the Conduct of Ministers, Ministers of State, Exempt Staff and Public Servants During an Election – naturally, in HTML alone, and using the same URL as the earlier editions from 2019 and 2015, now over-ridden and consigned to Internet oblivion. This document contains guidance on the Caretaker Convention.

The Amish community has already declared war on wind power, now it’s solar’s turn.

A more devout and God-fearing bunch, you’d be hard to find. Shunning many of the trappings of modern society, the Amish might seem backward to some. However, when it comes to taking on America’s rent-seeking wind and solar industries, they’re in a league of their own.

Threatened by massive solar projects planned their communities, a group of Amish in upstate New York has said “thanks, but no thanks”. Here’s why.

True solar farmers sound alarm on ‘green energy’ panels
Observer Today
Karen Engstrom
7 August 2021

Sixty Amish signed a letter of concern regarding the threat to their way of life by the many solar projects being imposed on our region by Gov. Andrew Cuomo. They delivered the letter to the Chautauqua Town Board.

Amish farmers lease land from local and absentee landowners to augment…

The Sting (1973) Director: George Roy Hill

“Not only are you a cheat, you’re a gutless cheat as well!”

★★★★★

After Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1969 Director George Roy Hill, Robert Redford, and Paul Newman teamed up again, this time for a faux 1930s gangster film about an elaborate sting operation in Chicago. They researched a variety of old Hollywood gangster films from the 1930s and developed a color scheme of muted browns for the film. The Sting is a wonderfully original movie -throughout the film the audience is giddy to watch down and out grifters become the heroes as they scam a scammer. Each ploy that unfolds in the film is delightful and in the end the audience is the true victim of “the sting” -as our expectations are subverted. The idea for the story came from David S. Ward who was inspired to research and…

Patton (1970) Director: Franklin J. Schaffner

“I love it, God help me, I do love it. I love it more than my life.”

★★★★★

Released at the height of an unpopular war in Vietnam, Patton is a powerful cinematic contemplation of the incredible, albeit controversial, legacy of General George S. Patton. The script was written by Francis Ford Coppola and Edmund H. North, who based their screenplay on Patton: Ordeal and Triumph by Ladislas Farago and General Bradley’s memoir entitled A Soldier’s Story.

George C. Scott delivers one of the great performances in all of Hollywood history as General George S. Patton, “old blood and guts,” the gruff, recalcitrant, disciplined, well-read, profane yet virtuous Allied leader. Apparently the role was offered to numerous other leading men such as Burt Lancaster, Rod Steiger, Lee Marvin, Robert Mitchum, and John Wayne, but it is impossible to imagine anyone else besides George…

This year, 2021, puts us squarely in the midst of the sesquicentennial period of the great marginal revolution in economics that began with the almost simultaneous appearance in 1871 of Menger’s Grundsatze der Volkwirtschaft and Jevons’s Theory of Political Economy followed in 1874 by Walras’s Elements d’Economie Politique Pure. Jevons left few students behind to continue his work, so his influence pales in comparison with that of his younger contemporary Alfred Marshall who, working along similar lines, published his Principles of Economics in 1890. It was Marshall’s version of marginal utility theory that defined for more than a generation what became known as neoclassical theory in the Anglophone world. Menger’s work, via his disciples, Bohm-Bawerk and Wieser, was actually the most influential work on marginal-utility theory for at least 50 years, the work of Walras and his successor, Vilfredo Pareto, being too mathematical, even for professional economists, to become influential…

A parliamentary committee has been established to review the effectiveness of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011. Rather than wait for its conclusions, the government has published a draft bill designed to return control of the timing of general elections to the executive. Robert Hazell examines the issues the committee will have to consider, and proffers some possible improvements to the status quo.

On 1 December the government published its draft bill to repeal the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 (FTPA). This would implement the commitment in the Conservative 2019 manifesto, which pledged: ‘We will get rid of the Fixed Term Parliaments Act – it has led to paralysis when the country needed decisive action’. The bill would revert to the previous system, and restore the prerogative power of dissolution. As the government’s Foreword explains:

The Bill makes express provision to revive the prerogative power to dissolve Parliament. This means once…

The Independent Review of Administrative Law provoked much criticism and concern when it was announced by the government, but its final report was less radical than many predicted. In the last of our series of posts from speakers at our June conference on the government’s reform agenda, Lord Faulks speaks of the work of the review panel, which he chaired, and the government bill that resulted, which went further than the review recommended in terms of limiting judicial review.

The government has now published the Judicial Review and Courts Bill, which has had its first reading in the House of Commons and will proceed through its remaining parliamentary stages in the autumn.

The Independent Review of Administrative Law, which I had the privilege of chairing,will now be a footnote in the development of the law in relation to judicial review. The panel no longer exists and its members…

Writing about federal spending last week, I shared five charts illustrating how the process works and what’s causing America’s fiscal problems.

Most important, I showed that the ever-increasing burden of federal spending is almost entirely the result of domestic spending increasing much faster than what would be needed to keep pace with inflation.

And when I further sliced and diced the numbers, I showed that outlays for entitlements (programs such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare) were the real problem.

Let’s elaborate.

John Cogan, writing for the Wall Street Journal, summarizes our current predicament.

Since the end of World War II, federal tax revenue has grown 15% faster than national income—while federal spending has grown 50% faster. …all—yes, all—of the increase in federal spending relative to GDP over the past seven decades is attributable to entitlement spending. Since the late 1940s, entitlement claims on…

According to leftists like Bernie Sanders, European nations have wonderfully generous welfare states financed by high tax rates on the rich.

They’re partly right. There are very large welfare states in Europe (though I wouldn’t use “wonderfully” and “generous” to describe systems that have caused economic stagnation and high levels of unemployment).

But they’re wrong about how those welfare states are financed. Yes, tax rates on the rich are onerous, but not that much higher than in the United States. Instead, the big difference between America and Europe is that ordinary people pay much higher taxes on the other side of the Atlantic.

Indeed, I’ve previously cited Tax Foundation data showing that the United States arguably has the most “progressive” tax system in the developed world. Not because we tax the rich more, but simply because we impose comparatively modest burdens on everyone else.

And now we have…

I periodically warn that the United States is on a path to become a European-style welfare state.

That sounds good to some people since it implies lots of goodies paid for by other people.

So I always explain that there’s a downside. The economic data clearly show that there’s been less growth in Europe and this has real-world consequences.

• Europe is diverging from the United States economically, not converging.
• The average American enjoys much higher levels of income and better quality of life.
• America’s poor people have incomes equal to middle-class Europeans.

This is why it’s so depressing that Joe Biden has a radical agenda of higher tax rates and much bigger government.

He wants us to copy an approach that has produced inferior outcomes.

The editorial page of the Wall Street Journal has been sounding the alarm.

In a recent column, Professor Josef…

The Departed (1996) Director: Martin Scorsese

“When I was your age they would say we can become cops or criminals. Today, what I’m saying to you is this: when you’re facing a loaded gun, what’s the difference?“

★★★★☆

Based on a reimagining of the Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs, The Departed brings together an all-star cast to deliver one of the best films of the 2000s. Producer Brad Pitt helped acquire the rights to Infernal Affairs, and with Martin Scorsese on board along with a soup of A-List Hollywood talent (Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Wahlberg, Jack Nicholson, Vera Farmiga, Martin Sheen, and many others), The Departed delivers a compelling, intellectually engaging movie that explores deep themes of identity, belonging, upward mobility, and hope. The title The Departed comes from a Catholic prayer for souls in purgatory (Martin Scorsese was raised Catholic) and in many ways…