Utopia, you are standing in it!

Since I went to the archives for a video yesterday, let’s do the same thing today. Here’s my 2009 video about the close link between the size of government and the level of corruption.

I’m recycling this video because President Biden and his allies in Congress are poised to enact a revised version of the “Build Back Better” plan to expand the burden of government.

The legislation has all sorts of awful provisions, such as shoveling more money at a corrupt IRS, hurting jobs with higher taxes on “book income,” price controls on prescription drugs, and green-energy pork.

But today’s column will focus on process rather than policy.

To be more specific, I want to emphasize the video’s message about bigger government leading to more corruption.

And I’m going to cite an unexpected source – a left-leaning news outlet – to make my point.

In an article

The dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire occurred de facto on August 6, 1806, when the last Holy Roman Emperor, Franz II of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine, abdicated his title and released all imperial states and princes from their oaths and obligations to the empire.

Franz II-I, Holy Roman Emperor and Emperor of Austria

The empire was dissolved following a military defeat by the French under Napoleon at Austerlitz. Napoleon reorganized much of the Empire into the Confederation of the Rhine, a French satellite.

Emperor Franz survived the demise of the Holy Roman Empire by continuing to reign as the Emperor of Austria.

Holy Roman Empire in 1806

In 1804 Emperor Franz united his hereditary lands as Archduke of Austria and Kings of Hungary, Bohemia and Croatia into The Austrian Empire. Prior to the creation of this empire the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperors ruled these lands in person union and…

As wind turbines are incapable of generating power on demand and wouldn’t last a second without massive subsidies, there is no ‘right’ place for them. Any power generation source that can’t deliver electricity on demand is pointless, so talk about appropriate siting is pure nonsense. Why bother?

Rent seekers and crony capitalists are the only ones pushing to jam these things in your backyard, but rural America is pushing back.

American farming communities clearly have the upper hand in the fight to save their homes and livelihoods from the wind and solar ‘industries’ intent on destroying them.

Rural Americans are on the warpath and refuse to become roadkill for the profiteers determined to destroy their peaceful and prosperous communities. The scale and success of their resistance has clearly caught the wind and solar ‘industries’ flat-footed.

Faced with their constituents’ growing fury, local governments have sided with them; introducing laws, for…

August 04, 2022

Douglas Murray, The Spectator’s associate editor, speaks to Kate Andrews about Drag Queen Story Hour, and the right’s response to it. Have they gone too far?

Read Douglas’s piece here – https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/w…

Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar, was first produced, in all probability, in 1599. The plot is based entirely on three of Plutarch’s biographies of eminent Romans, which Shakespeare found in Sir Thomas North’s translations into English of The Lives of the Most Noble Greeks and Romans, first published in 1579. The three lives he drew from are those of:

• Julius Caesar, chapters 61 to 69
• Mark Anthony 12 to 22
• Marcus Brutus 7 to 53

As you can see, whereas the assassination only takes up the last tenth of Caesar’s life, and the period from the assassination to the Battle of Philippi only takes up ten of Antony’s 87 chapters, the assassination and aftermath constitute almost all of Plutarch’s life of Brutus which may, at a very basic level, explain why Brutus emerges as the hero’ of Shakespeare’s play.

Brief synopsis

The figure the play is named after, Julius…

Smoke from a California wildfire [image credit: BBC]
There’s a ‘fundamental design problem’, namely that the forests have an unfortunate tendency to burn down. Research finds it ‘incredibly unlikely’ that such schemes will work, and not only in California.
– – –
Researchers have found that California’s forest carbon buffer pool, designed to ensure the durability of the state’s multi-billion-dollar carbon offset program, is severely undercapitalized, says Eurekalert.

The results show that, within the offset program’s first 10 years, estimated carbon losses from wildfires have depleted at least 95% of the contributions set aside to protect against all fire risks over 100 years.

This means that the buffer pool is unable to guarantee that credited forest carbon remains out of the atmosphere for at least 100 years.

Wisdom comes with experience: people soon wise up to the reality of the wind and solar ‘transition’ once they’ve spent time freezing or boiling in the dark.

Over time, the experience will be shared by more of our compatriots on planet Earth. Obsessive, indeed maniacal, renewable energy policies are a guarantee of crippling power bills and routine power rationing; maintaining grid stability is now an expensive affair for power users and a hair-raising experience for grid managers, used to power generation sources that could be dialled up in an instant to satisfy increases in demand.

Unable to control the weather and make the sun shine on queue, the first resort is to start chopping heavy energy users from the grid under the euphemistic tagline “demand management”, where “chaotic mismanagement” would be a more accurate description of the response to routine collapses in output directly connected to sunset and/or calm weather.