Utopia, you are standing in it!

The High Court of Justice was the court established by the Rump Parliament to try King Charles I of England. This was an ad hoctribunal created specifically for the purpose of trying the king, although the name was used for subsequent courts.

After the first English Civil War, the parliamentarians accepted the premise that the King, although wrong, had been able to justify his fight, and that he would still be entitled to limited powers as King under a new constitutional settlement. By provoking the second Civil War even while defeated and in captivity, Charles was held responsible for unjustifiable bloodshed. The secret “Engagement” treaty with the Scots was considered particularly unpardonable; “a more prodigious treason”, said Oliver Cromwell, “than any that had been perfected before; because the former quarrel was that Englishmen might rule over one another; this to vassalize us to a foreign nation.” Cromwell up to this…

Run on ‘real’ electricity: the City of Light,
brought to you courtesy of the Atom.

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After the Paris Climate Jamboree, the wind industry, its parasites and spruikers are licking their chops at the prospect of having the rich world fund the construction of millions of these things in the dark corners of the Planet. Sensible first world economies have tumbled (albeit, belatedly) to the fact the wind power is patent nonsense.

Paris, aka ‘The City of Light’ has been lit up by nuclear power for over 50 years, and that’s not about to change any time soon.

Britain has seen the light and has scrapped subsidies to wind power, with the number of threatened wind farms going from a roar to a whimper:

UK Wind Industry Collapses as David Cameron Slashes Subsidies for Wind Power

The Spanish were beguiled for a while by the wind industry’s promises of millions…

There’s something altogether cynical about well-healed nations forcing the impoverished to embrace expensive and unreliable wind and solar. It is, of course, all done in the name of ‘saving the planet’. [Note to Ed: Not to mention saving the manufacturers of industrial wind turbines and solar panels, who are struggling back home].

As any economist specialising in development will eagerly tell you, the first step out of poverty for the Third World’s unfortunates is access to reliable and affordable energy. Relieving households of the daily drudgery of gathering sticks and dung to cook and heat homes; providing light and electricity to those homes by which the children might read and become educated; pumping and purifying the water they use; and giving a reliable source of power to miners, manufacturers, food processors and the like is – if you’re serious about creating a path out of poverty – all to the…

Andrew Sullivan’s “Intelligencer” column is a breath of fresh air in an increasingly woke New York Magazine. His Friday pieces are usually in three parts, and this week’s (click on screenshot below) is no exception. The three topics are, in order, the progress we’ve made in gay rights and women’s rights, and those who deny it (Sullivan doesn’t mention the demonization of Steve Pinker for his progressivism), the Democratic candidates with Sullivan’s assessment, and a bit of “shade” thrown at Meghan Markle for marrying into the royal family, knowing what she was getting into, and then kvetching about it. (“Sorry, but if you choose to marry into royalty, you have to take the rough with the smooth: The fame and luxury of being a princess comes packaged with bad press, intrusive photographers, and constant public duty. If Meghan didn’t expect this, it’s hard to understand how not.”)

Surprisingly, Andrew…

From the team at CFACT ~

How many doomsday predictions about the Earth’s climate must fail before they finally get broadly ignored and dismissed out of hand? Considering the track record of climate predictions that turned out to be false, we are well passed the moment of ridicule.

The latest climate prediction fiasco, about glaciers disappearing in Glacier National Park by 2020, is the latest reminder of the falsity of the man-made global warming movement.  It’s 2020; the glaciers remain.

Predictions of climate catastrophe drone on, and get more hysterical, including many from the same people whose credibility was destroyed long ago. Yet, the climate alarmists remain undaunted and impervious to embarrassment. Instead, they simply move the goal posts by predicting more planetary weather Armageddon in the future and proposing more insanely expensive solutions to “address” it (notice they rarely promise to reverse assumed man-made warming).

It is not just…

Redistribution has a corrosive impact on both ends. Recipients are harmed because they get trapped in dependency, and workers are harmed because taxes discourage productive behavior.

Yet young people seem susceptible to this ideology, even when they are among the main victims.

While it might be tempting to shrug and assume they’re hopelessly clueless, this video shows young people are quite capable of grasping why redistribution is a bad idea.

I’ve previously shared a similar video, as well as a couple of written versions of this redistribution challenge.

In this case, though, we have some additional analysis.

Here are some excerpts from the accompanying article.

…for the first time ever, more young people say they’d prefer to live in a socialist country over a capitalist one. Whether it’s free healthcare, free college tuition, or universal basic income, students around America increasingly support higher…

I started fretting about the socialist tendencies of young people early last decade.

And when Sanders attracted a lot of youth support in 2016, I gave the issue even more attention, and I’ve since continued to investigatewhy so many young people are sympathetic to such a poisonous ideology with a lengthy track record of failure and deprivation.

Some of the recent polling data is very discouraging.

And if you want to be even more depressed, here are some tweets with the most-recent data about the the views of young people.

It’s not just that they have warm and fuzzy thoughts about so-called democratic socialism.

I’m completely horrified to learn that more than one-third of young people even have a positive perception of communism.

The future king and emperor was born Wilhelm Friedrich Ludwig of Prussia in the Kronprinzenpalais in Berlin on March 22, 1797. As the second son of Louise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz and King Friedrich Wilhelm III, himself son of King Friedrich Wilhelm II, Wilhelm was not expected to ascend to the throne. His grandfather died the year he was born, at age 53, in 1797, and his father Became the King of Prussia.

Ever since the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved in 1806 uniting the German lands into a modern Nation State, a new empire, was the goal of many statesman as well as the populace of the multi German states that had made up the Holy Roman Empire.

The first attempt to create the Second German Reich occurred in 1848. In the wake of the revolutions of 1848 that swept across Europe, where the people of the many autocratic monarchies demanded…

Hoppit, Julian (1986) “Financial Crises in Eighteenth-Century England”, The Economic History Review, 39/1, 39-58.

Introduction

“Because the financial system in the 18th century was evolving and becoming more sophisticated, […] the nature of crises developed and changed”. Historians have long disagreed on the very definition of what constituted a crisis in early modern England (p.40). The author defines a crisis as a moment when expectations change leading owners of wealth to abandon a type of asset for another leading to the falls in prices of the former. The more widely available the newly-sought asset is, the lesser the crisis.

Juliana et al. Vs US Federal Government is Dismissed.

A federal appeals court on Friday threw out a lawsuit by children and young adults who claimed U.S. government climate policy put their future in jeopardy, a major blow to the high-profile case after a string of failed similar bids.

In a 2-1 decision, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the plaintiffs, who were ages 8 to 19 when the lawsuit began, lacked legal standing to pursue their case, and that the issues they raised should be decided by other branches of the federal government.

The decision derails the potentially far-reaching case, one of more than half a dozen similar cases filed in state courts, from Washington to Alaska, by an Oregon-based youth advocacy non-profit called Our Children’s Trust.

The lawsuit had first been filed in an Oregon federal court in 2015, charging that the U.S. government’s environmental…