Utopia, you are standing in it!

The new leftist website, Vox, has an article by Sarah Kliff on Vermont’s experiment with a single-payer healthcare system.

But I don’t really have much to say about what’s happening in the Green Mountain State, other than to declare that I much prefer healthcare experiments to occur at the state level. Indeed, we should reform Medicaid and Medicare and also fix the tax code so that Washington has no role in healthcare. Then the states can experiment and compete to see what works best.

But that’s a topic for another day. The real reason I cite Kliff’s article is that Ezra Klein tweeted this image from the article and stated that is was “The case for single payer, in one graphic.”

I don’t know if the numbers in the graphic are correct, but I have no reason to think they’re wrong.

Regardless, I certainly don’t disagree with the notion that…

Sanctions are the West’s key weapon in the fight against Putin, but there are signs that Russia’s economy and financial system is weathering the storm better than expected. The rouble has already bounced back and Russia has been able to continue to service its debts, with only minor hiccups. A closer look however reveals that sanctions are biting hard – and that Russia is losing the economic as well as military war.

Take the rouble’s resurgence, which is not what it seems. The ability of Russia’s currency to bounce back reflects the fact that Russian imports have fallen by more than the country’s exports, as local consumers and businesses have cut spending. This means there is less demand to sell roubles to buy foreign currencies.

The central bank has also propped up the rouble, but the measures it has used to do so are unlikely to endure for long. Conventional…

Domestic Air Source Heat Pump [image credit: UK Alternative Energy]
The ill-conceived ‘net zero’ emissions plan born of the UK government’s carbon dioxide obsessions takes another hit. Five-figure radiator installation bills will put people off bigtime.
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Homeowners trying to install eco-friendly heat pumps have been left with surprise £30,000 bills after it emerged millions of radiators are too small to work with the new technology, says The Telegraph.

The Government wants 600,000 heat pumps installed every year by 2028, in line with its “net zero” aims, but the majority of homes may need thousands of pounds worth of upgrades to accommodate them.

Heat pumps need larger radiators to achieve the same heat output as gas boilers, which heat water to much higher temperatures.

Some 99pc of British homes do not have radiators large enough to heat a room on the coldest winter’s day, using a low-temperature…

Most people would say high prices are the biggest problem with health care in the United States. But high prices should be viewed as the symptom of the real problem, which is “third-party payer.”

And what is third-party payer?

It’s the fact that consumers purchase health care with other people’s money. And we should blame government intervention.

To be more specific, the vast majority of purchases are financed by government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, or by insurance policies that are subsidized by the tax code’s healthcare exclusion.

And that means people have very little reason to care about the cost of care – creating a recipe for higher costs and inefficiency.

Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute explains the problem.

One of the reasons that the costs of medical care services in the US have increased more than twice as much as…

Readers will be well aware that my attitude towards the MSM is that that they are, at best, shallow and useless in their reporting and “analysis”, and at worst combine that with massive ideological bias to the Left as well as the occasional bouts of outright partisanship towards, in the case of New Zealand, the Greens, Labour, or the Maori party, depending on how well each of them is doing in supporting a Left wing agenda.

The read I have on the NZ MSM at present is that, as Chris Trotter and Martyn Bradbury have often pointed out, they’ve sold their souls for capitalist money and the “neo-liberal” status quo established since 1984, in exchange for pushing every other piece of Leftist wank. I think those two gentlemen are nostalgic screamers because, at least in the environmentalist world of combating AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) they may get want they want…

Early last year, I shared a video explaining that Karl Marx was a despicable human being. Today, let’s look at a video that further examines him and his hideousideology.

This raises an interesting question of picking the most offensive feature of Marxism.

1. The totalitarian brutality in nations that (so far) have murdered and starved 100 million people?
2. The economic illiteracy of a system that has anywhere and everywhere produced misery and poverty?
3. The moral abomination of an ideology that assumes individuals are abjectly subservient to the state?

The the video above is from the Ayn Rand-inspired Atlas Society, I suspect they might emphasize answer #3.

And that certainly is correct, but the best answer is “all of the above.”

I’ll close with the observation that Marx was a bad person, but he’s not nearly as bad as modern-day Marxists.

That’s because Marx was guilty of coming…

Since more than 100 million people have been killed by communist regimes, should we conclude that Karl Marx is the worst person in world history?

To address that question, let’s start with this video from Prager University, which is narrated by Professor Paul Kengor of Grove City College.

At the risk of understatement, the video is a damning indictment of Marx’s legacy.

His political ideas provided the justification for the genocides of dictators such as Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot.

His economic ideas led to policies that produced mass deprivation, starvation, and immense human suffering.

Now let’s take a closer look at Marx rather than just his ideas.

Was he a good person who simply had some horribly misguided ideals?

Hardly. Everything we know suggests he was a sickeningly despicable excuse for a human being.

Professor Richard Ebeling has some of the sordid details in an…

I’ve long maintained the view that spies never discover anything useful about a country’s foreign enemies, though they are very useful in suppressing domestic opponents. This is a straightforward implication of game theory, but my attempts to explain it haven’t worked in the past, and I don’t know how to do much better. So, I’m going to restate my arguments from 10 years ago, against the massive expansion of spying that was already under way, and make the observation that the evidence since then strongly supports my case.

Despite an espionage and surveillance effort unparalleled in history, the US NSA has been unable to produce any convincing evidence of stopping even one domestic terror plot. Its best case was someone alleged to have sent a few thousand dollars to Al Shabab in Somalia. The NSA not only missed actual terror plotters like those in Boston, but also performed poorly relative…

The relationship between weather-dependent wind/sunshine dependent solar and rocketing power prices is crystal clear, so too the post ‘transition’ phenomenon of power rationing caused by sunset and/or calm weather.

Australia isn’t alone in experiencing a power pricing and supply calamity, all its very own making; Germans, Danes and Californians have enjoyed much the same and for all the same reasons.

Australia’s suicidal obsession with heavily subsidised and chaotically intermittent wind and solar is delivering precisely what this site has been predicting for the best part of the decade. No surprises there.

Wholesale power prices are surging out of control and major energy users are simply being chopped from the grid when wind and/or solar output hits the floor. And this is just the beginning.

For some horrifying numbers, we’ll head to the team from Jo Nova.

Mayhem on the Australian Grid continues — Record prices, factory shutdowns, emergency warnings
Jo…

When the actor Thomas Hulce was preparing to play the film role that defined him, “Amadeus,” he read about Mozart, but he truly studied the tennis star of the day, John McEnroe. Who better to model a precocious brat of a composer on than the player the world nicknamed “SuperBrat?”

“I’m a vulgar man,” Hulce’s Mozart admits in the film, “I assure you my music is not.”

The McEnroe analogy is almost too obvious.

When filmmaker Julien Faraut was plumbing the archives of French sport for a documentary about Gil de Kermadec, the government cinematographer charged with capturing close-up footage of every year’s French Open Tennis Championships in the ’70s and ’80s, he found reels of every great players of the era — Borg, Vilas, Connors and Lendl. And he found reel upon reel of John McEnroe.

Kermadec was putting together instructional films out of this footage, and…

In the years since William Klein’s intimate “all access” tennis documentary “The French” came out, it’s been somewhat displaced as the definitive statement on that glorious era in tennis — the late’70s through the mid-’80s.

“John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection” (2018) is a genre-best dissection of tennis, one player’s game and his psyche during McEnroe’s years attempting “perfection” at Roland Garros Stadium outside of Paris, a movie assembled thanks to an archivist’s obsessive examination of the hours and hours of footage that the French shot of McEnroe’s matches there.

But in 1981, photographer and filmmaker William Klein (“Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee”) was granted the sort of access sports rarely permits today. “The French” allowed him into their tourney, behind the scenes, in the alley with the ballgirls and ballboys, in the locker rooms with the players and in the various courts of the stadium…