Utopia, you are standing in it!

Lincoln was the third American president to die in office, and the first to be murdered.An unsuccessful attempt had been made on Andrew Jackson 30 years prior, in 1835, and Lincoln had himself been the subject of an earlier assassination attempt by an unknown assailant in August 1864. The assassination of Lincoln was planned and carried out by the well-known stage actor John Wilkes Booth, as part of a larger conspiracy in a bid to revive the Confederate cause.

Booth’s co-conspirators were Lewis Powell and David Herold, who were assigned to kill Secretary of State William H. Seward, and George Atzerodt, who was tasked with killing Vice President Andrew Johnson. By simultaneously eliminating the top three people in the administration, Booth and his co-conspirators hoped to disrupt the United States government.

In the turmoil that followed the assassination, scores of suspected accomplices were arrested and thrown into prison. Anyone discovered…

US President Abraham Lincoln was the third American president to die in office , and the first of four presidents to be assassinated. The other three were James Garfield (1881), William McKinley (1901) and John F. Kennedy (1963). Lincoln’s death came in the closing days of the American Civil War, and a day after he was shot by John Wilkes Booth, an American stage actor.

Booth was the 9th of 10 children born to the actor Junius Brutus Booth. John Wilkes Booth was outspoken in his advocacy of slavery and his hatred of Lincoln.

The original plan of Booth and his small group of conspirators was to kidnap Lincoln, and they later agreed to murder him as well as Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William H. Seward.

On the morning of April 14, 1865, Booth had found out that Abraham Lincoln was going to to attend an…

Hubris and arrogance are essential character traits for those pretending that we’re well on our way to an all-wind and sun-powered future. Helpfully, the terrible events unfolding in Ukraine have exposed that whopping lie, for all to see.

Energy self-reliance is back on the agenda, with a vengeance, and that means fossil fuels and nuclear power are back in vogue, like long-lost relatives.

But, not for want of trying, the Democrats and their senile leader would have Americans believe that all is well with their Great Green Reset aka the Green New Deal.

Jerry Shenk retorts in fine style, below.

Sow the wind (power), reap the whirlwind
The Mercury
Jerry Shenk
14 March 2022

The Law of Supply and Demand is as consistent as gravity.

Americans who understand the benefits of ample supply — seventy percent — favor producing more domestic oil and gas.

Nonetheless, President(ish) Joe Biden, his administration…

I still think Emmanuel Macron will win reelection, but it is going to be a closer fight than most prognosticators expected before this past Sunday’s first round. In the results of that vote, Macron has the expected plurality, and it was a few percentage points higher than he got in 2017 (27.8% vs. 24.0%). His runoff opponent in both 2017 and later this month, Marine Le Pen, also improved a bit over last time (23.3% vs. 21.3%). What is new–or really accelerating a trend that was already there–is the total collapse of older established parties. The Republican (mainstream right) got 20% in 2017 but only 4.8% this time, fifth place. The Socialists were already in dire shape in 2017 with 6.4%, but did even worse this time, 1.75%, despite (or because?) of running the mayor of Paris. Jean-Luc Mélenchon of La France Insoumise, a far left group, made the race…

Folks on the left tell us that they want to help the less fortunate.

I sometimes wonder if their real motive is to penalize success and punish the “rich,” but let’s be charitable and assume that many of them truly wish to help the poor.

That’s a noble sentiment, to be sure, but this is why it’s also important to look at the consequences of policy, not just the intentions.

I explained last year that certain left-wing fiscal, regulatory, and monetary policies actually harm the poor and help the rich, and I augmented that analysis earlier this year by showing how farm policies line the pockets of upper-income people.

Let’s now add to this research by looking at a new study (h/t: Tyler Cowen) from Mario Alloza of University College London. Here are some of the key findings from the study’s abstract.

Household panel…between 1967 and 1996 is employed…

Thomas Piketty is a big proponent of class-warfare tax policy because he views inequality as a horrible outcome.

But a soak-the-rich policy agenda, echoed by many other academics such as Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, is fundamentally misguided. If people really care about helping the poor, they should focus instead on reforms that actually have a proven track record of reducing poverty.

The fact that they fixate on inequality makes me wonder about their motives.

And it also leads me to find their work largely irrelevant. I don’t care if they produce detailed long-run data on changes in inequality.

I prefer detailed long-run data on changes in poverty.

That being said, it appears that some of Piketty’s data is sloppy.

I shared some evidence about his bad numbers back in 2014. And, in a column for the Wall Street Journal, Phil Magness of the…