Utopia, you are standing in it!

Chancellor Otto von Bismarck was sixteen years older than Emperor Friedrich III. Therefore, Bismarck did not expect he would live to see Emperor Wilhelm II ascend to the throne and thus had no strategy to deal with him. All of that changed with the early death of Emperor Friedrich III in June 1888?and the accession of his son Emperor Wilhelm II.

Conflicts between Wilhelm II and Bismarck soon poisoned their relationship. Their final split occurred after Bismarck tried to implement far-reaching anti-socialist laws in early 1890. The Kartell majority in the Reichstag, including the Conservative Party and the National Liberal Party, was willing to make most of the laws permanent.

However, it was split about the law granting the police the power to expel socialist agitators from their homes, a power that had been used excessively at times against political opponents. The National Liberals refused to make this law permanent…

Note: This is a revised version of an older post (originally 15 Jan. this year). The electoral system changes changes (with some modifications) have now been passed. Rather than make a new planting I am just re-upping this older one, as the comment thread has continued to grow with useful information. I particularly recommend a new comment by Thomas D for good detail. In addition, see the post by Verfassungblog for background and Twitter thread by Heinz Brandenburg which has both background and excellent detail on the final version. (The Verfassungblog post refers to an earlier version of the draft; in the finally passed version the 3-districts alternative threshold is indeed being abolished.) The law is sure to be challenged before the Constitutional Court, and some or all if it may fail the constitutional test. As Thomas notes, the law could be a mortal threat to the CSU as…

Last week, French President Emmanuel Macron invoked Article 49:3 of the constitution, under which a bill proposed by the premier is considered passed unless the National Assembly majority votes no confidence in the premier and cabinet. The bill in question is a package of pension reforms, which have provoked widespread street protests and strikes. In the first no-confidence motion since Macron invoked the 49:3 procedure, the government has narrowly survived. The motion attained 278 votes, where 287 were needed. This motion was brought by a group of centrist deputies. Another has been put forward by the National Rally and is even less likely to pass.

The current government is a minority cabinet, due to the underwhelming performance Macron’s legislative allies had in the assembly election of 2022–relatively weak, that is, in comparison to a typical honeymoon election (one held shortly after the election or reelection of a president).

A new memoir by former Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan praises the newspaper’s Watergate reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, for having “lit the kindling” that set off investigations that brought down Richard Nixon’s presidency.

Sullivan

Such praise is misplaced. Exaggerated. A way to sidestep the tenacious media-driven myth that Woodward and Bernstein brought down Nixon while insisting their reporting had significant effects nonetheless.

The Woodward-Bernstein agenda-setting effect in Watergate was weak at best. The influence of their reporting, if it much existed at all, was shared influence.

After all, Woodward and Bernstein had plenty of company in reporting on the emerging scandal in the summer and fall of 1972. They very much were not alone in directing attention to suspected misdeeds of Nixon, his top aides, and officials of his reelection campaign.

While Woodward and Bernstein did some commendable reporting during those early days — such as…

One of the many reasons that the Democrat Party is in trouble in the USA is not just the short-term effects of inflation and a looming recession, but a longer term one where their grip is slipping on their traditional voting groups of Working Class Whites, Hispanics and even (to a much smaller degree) American Blacks.

By contrast, university educated Whites, who used to majority vote for the GOP, are now a very important part of the Democrats: probably too important since they’re the primary group that has swallowed whole the insanity of Identity Politics and now it’s even more diseased cousin, Woke ideology, both of which are playing a role in driving away the groups mentioned in the first paragraph.

Working class Whites are increasingly a lost cause for the Democrats, Hispanics are slipping fast, and Blacks may be next, especially when you’ve got Black Republicans increasingly pop up…

While the other day we had the three year anniversary of the start of Covid Lockdown insanity in America, there’s also a twenty year anniversary of another huge event – the start of the Invasion of Iraq.

Some might argue that it is even bigger in terms of global impact than Covid-19, and it certainly seemed huge at the time, but in hindsight I don’t think it can compare, whether in terms of deaths, restrictions on our civil liberties or the global aftermath.

Okay, I have to admit – once again – that I supported it.

I don’t suppose there’s much purpose in digging up the layers of reasoning now, but all I can say is that, while I thought it was a waste of time to try and build Afghanistan into a liberal democracy, I figured Iraq was worth a shot and might steer the rest of the…

Back in 2012, I wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal to highlight the success of Switzerland’s spending cap (also known as the “debt brake”).

Swiss voters voted for this spending cap in 2001 and ever since it took effect in 2003, government spending has increased by an average of 2.2 percent annually, only about half as fast as it was growing in the decades before the cap was imposed.

To show the ongoing success of the debt brake, here’s a map comparing changes in the burden of spending in Switzerland and its four major neighbors (France, Germany, Italy, and Austria). As you can see, IMF data reveals that Switzerland has been more responsible.

I even calculated changes in national spending burdens since the start of the pandemic.

You can see that all governments used the virus as an excuse for more spending, but the fiscal damage was…

Norwegian hydro-electric site
Norway wants to limit the use of its own plentiful fossil fuels, so the Scotland link is a dead duck. One in the eye for ‘net zero’ obsessives.
– – –
Norway’s government on Thursday rejected plans for an undersea electricity cable with Scotland amid a debate on the Scandinavian country’s energy independence and whether it should be exporting electricity, says The Local (Norway).

The Norwegian oil and energy ministry said it was saying ‘no’ to the NorthConnect project because the country needed to meet its own energy needs at competitive rates.

“It is important for the government to ensure that we have a power system that can at all times fulfill the basic needs of power supply,” Oil and Energy Minister Terje Aasland said in a statement.

“We need this hydro power and do not want to open it up for more exports,” he said.

In another, ‘we told you so’ moment, retail power prices in Australia will jump by 20% to 30% in June, following annual, double-digit increases every year, for the best part of a decade (see above).

$60 billion in subsidies (so far) to chaotically intermittent wind and solar was designed to wreck our conventional coal-fired power generation fleet, and true to purpose, that’s exactly what happened.

Now, politicians are working out cannot simply conjure up electricity out of nowhere; and you certainly can’t do it by praying to the wind and sun gods.

A few of them are retreating from their earlier plans to permanently shut down and wreck large coal-fired generating plants, recognising that the proles will be less than pleased. Pain a king’s ransom for power and then being left freezing in the dark is unlikely to be met with amusement among potential voters.

We’ll start with a…

I wrote last week about President Macron’s very modest effort to slow down the growth of the welfare state and started with a chart showing that France has the highest overall burden of government spending in the developed world.

The good news (relatively speaking) is that France is in third place, based on this chart from the OECD, when looking at the burden of government-provided retirement benefits.

To be sure, having the third-highest burden of retirement spending is hardly something to celebrate. And it is not exactly a big achievement to be slightly less worse than Greece and Italy.

This is why President Macron is pushing to increase the retirement age from 62 to 64.

But French voters and French lawmakers have an entitlement mentality and Macron’s initiative was faltering. So the government used executive authority to unilaterally impose the law.

Needless to say, this has triggered a lot…

Jack Hellner poses the issue in his American Thinker article. A single multiple choice question for the ‘green’ energy pushers.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Here is one burning question for scientists, entertainers, journalists, politicians,
bureaucrats, and others who claim they can control the climate:

Which of the following has caused the reservoirs to fill up rapidly in California and elsewhere in the West?

A. The Paris Climate accord.

B. The misnamed “Inflation Reduction Act” in which the Democrats claimed they can control the climate by handing out huge amounts of money to “green” pushers.

C. All the United Nations gabfests where people fly in private jets to stump about the need to cut emissions.

D. Shuttering coal and natural gas utility plants.

E. Transitioning the peasants to cricket and mealworms as “food” to control cow flatulence.

F. Making people buy inefficient, expensive, impractical electric…

The shocks that occasionally batter the UK economy seem to be coming thicker and faster. The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) blew up in 2008. The Brexit vote followed eight year later. But we then only had to wait four years for Covid, and just two more for the cost-of-living crisis. At this rate we are already due another one.

A candidate has already emerged in the shape of a new financial crisis, again originating in the US. The GFC was prompted by a meltdown in the sub-prime mortgage market. This time the focus is on banks that mainly service the tech sector, notably the aptly-named Silicon Valley Bank.

The rosy view is that Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was an outlier. There is something in this: the circumstances that led to its collapse may not have been unique, but they were at least relatively unusual.

In a nutshell, SVB took large…