Utopia, you are standing in it!

Liz Truss is apparently mulling the ‘nuclear’ option of cutting the standard rate of VAT by five percentage points to support the economy. This has triggered a predictable backlash from my fellow policy wonks, led by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS). However, in these extraordinary times, every lever may have to be pulled.

The case for a temporary cut in VAT is straightforward. The UK is on the brink of a massive economic and social crisis. Lowering VAT would be a simple and quick way to boost spending power. The annual saving would average out at around £1,300 per household, returning some of the extra tax that people are paying as a result of higher nominal incomes and prices.

Headline inflation would also be lower as a result, albeit just for one year. And even if the VAT cut is not passed on in full to customers, struggling businesses…

Remember all that guff about ‘cheap’ wind and solar power? No? That’s probably because every country that throws buckets of subsidies at the unreliables ends up suffering off-the-charts power prices.

The wind and sun are free, we’re told. But, somehow, the promises of cheap power at the end of the renewable energy transition rainbow keep failing to materialize.

Germany set the pace when it comes to plastering the countryside with solar panels and spearing these things far and wide (more than 30,000 of them, so far).

So, if there was ever an opportunity to prove the point about how cheap wind and solar can be, Germany provided it.

As Pierre Gosselin points out below, however, there’s little joy and a whole lot of suffering in store for wind and solar ‘powered’ Germans.

German Electricity Prices Spiraling Out Of Control…Tripling Since 2000… Blackouts, Unrest Loom
No Tricks Zone
Pierre Gosselin
19…

Hitler: A Biography
by Ian Kershaw
1,072 pages
W. W. Norton
Published: Nov 2008

“Hitler: A Biography” is Ian Kershaw’s 2008 abridgment of his masterful two-volume series on Adolf Hitler.  Kershaw is a British historian focused on 20th-century Germany and is a noted expert on Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany.

The volumes underlying this abridgment (“Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris” and “Hitler: 1936-1945 Nemesis“) were published in 1998 and 2000, respectively. The series was originally conceived as a study of power – much like Robert Caro’s series on Lyndon B. Johnson – but grew into something even deeper and more substantial than expected. Kershaw was convinced to condense the series in order to make it accessible to a wider group of readers.

Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) is one of history’s most horrifying and unfathomable demons. Not surprisingly, there are a large number of excellent books focused on…

What’s really powering Australians around the clock.

The infantile mentality of the renewables cult is on vivid display when they crow about wind or solar adding something meaningful to the grid. Always brief and fleeting, the 60 minutes when solar or wind did something special, is always trumpeted as if no one else cares about their power needs for the other 23 hours in a day. It’s a little like cheering on the plucky disabled kid, knowing he’ll never win the race but he should get full credit for trying.

A week or so back, it was solar’s time to shine (for a brief 30 minutes, anyway).

As Eric Worrall reports, the hubris was short-lived, as Australia coal-fired power plants picked up the yoke and kept the power coming after the Sun set, as they’ve done faithfully for the best part of a century.

Aussie Triumph? Solar Briefly Overtook Coal, then…

The world is much freer today than when I was born, largely because the “Evil Empire” collapsed.

The Soviet Union was awful. It killed at least 20 million of its own people (some say as many as 60 million). It enslaved and impoverished its own citizens, as well as those who languished behind the “Iron Curtain.”

Ronald Reagan deserves the lion’s share of the credit for the collapse of communism – in part because he restored America’s economic vitality and built up the nation’s military, but also because he directly condemned the immorality of Marxism (often using humor).

But since the last dictator of the Soviet Union just died, let’s examine Mikhail Gorbachev’s role.

An editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal is worth reading because it explains that his biggest achievement was not using bloodshed to preserve communist rule.

Mikhail Gorbachev…rose through the Communist ranks but…

Act in stupid haste and there’s plenty of time to repent in leisure; with the insane renewable energy rush, there comes a veritable lifetime of regret.

Britain’s power prices have risen to astronomical levels, thanks to its obsession with heavily subsidised and chaotically intermittent wind and solar. Trashing its coal-fired power fleet and failing to keep up its nuclear plants now looks positively suicidal.

As reality bites, the proletariat are starting to work out that this was the plan, all along. The powers that be didn’t want you to have power to be – anything like prosperous, safe and, heaven forbid, comfortable. No, power rationing and weather-dependent wind and solar were always going to be synonymous.

Daniel Hannan reaches the pretty obvious conclusion.

The miserable truth is that our leaders don’t want us to have cheap energy
The Telegraph
Daniel Hannan
6 August 2022

No, the energy crisis is not…

Guest post by Hannah Wygiera, 31 August 2022.

The boundaries between orthodoxy and heterodoxy changed repeatedly throughout the English Reformation. Despite changes to what constituted a heretical belief, what remained constant was the ability to punish heresy as a crime. However, in 1677 members of Parliament, motivated by anti-Catholic fears, abolished the centuries-old punishment for heresy: death by burning.

Heresy had been a long-standing religious concern in England and in 1401, it also became a criminal offence with the creation of the writ de Heretico cumburendo.[1]This writ looked back at the precedents for burning people deemed heretics and made it the punishment for heresy at common law. The writ lasted until 1677, when Parliament abolished it and effectively decriminalized heresy. This was not an act of toleration. It was an act of self-preservation by members…