Utopia, you are standing in it!

The Alhambra Decree (also known as the Edict of Expulsion) was an edict issued on March 31, 1492, by the joint Catholic Monarchs of Spain (Isabella I of Castile and Fernando II of Aragon) ordering the expulsion of practising Jews from the Crowns of Castile and Aragon and its territories and possessions by July 31, of that year.

King Fernando II of Aragon and Queen Isabella I of Castile.

The primary purpose was to eliminate the influence of practising Jews on Spain’s large formerly-Jewish conversion New Christian population, to ensure the latter and their descendants did not revert to Judaism. Over half of Spain’s Jews had converted as a result of the religious persecution and pogroms which occurred in 1391.

Due to continuing attacks, around 50,000 more had converted by 1415. A further number of those remaining chose to convert to avoid expulsion. As a result of the Alhambra decree…

Believe that we can run on nothing but sunshine and breezes, then you’ll believe anything.

No country has ever run itself on wind and solar power, alone. No country ever will. Even mythical mega-batteries can’t change that equation.

The truly delusional belief that we can eradicate our reliance upon fossil fuels of all descriptions, kill off nuclear power plants and rely exclusively on wind and solar.

Then, the unhinged zealots tell us, we can totally ‘electrify’ our economies, with tales about all-electric households and all-electric vehicles doing away with the need for the gas, petrol and diesel that presently fuel our safe and comfortable lifestyles.

As the adage has it, if it sounds too good to be true, it surely is.

Ben Pile sorts energy fact from ideological fantasy, below.

The green industrial revolution is a lie
Spiked Online
Ben Pile
22 February 2022

The Office for National Statistics (ONS)…

Dr. Menzie Chinn of Wisconsin-Madison hypothesizes that Democrats may have opposed FTAs not because they have protectionist sentiments, but because they prefer multilateralism:

In the wake of the midterm elections, and the failure to renew Vietnamese PNTR, there has been a lot of talk about how more protectionist Democratic lawmakers are…While the rhetoric from some quarters of the Democratic Party is more protectionist than from the Republican Party, I think the story is a little more complicated than initially appears to be the case, although I will not claim to have the answer to the question…

[I]t’s wrong to equate all FTAs with freer trade. Indeed, the proliferation of FTAs poses a number of well-known problems for the global economy…

So, just because American business interests favor these pacts, while labor often opposes, it’s not clear free trade is enhanced by such initiatives; in other words, one should not confuse…

It’s likely been more than a decade since a Trade Diversion blog post actually mentioned trade creation and trade diversion. Having missed numerous opportunities in recent years, I won’t pass up commenting on the following paragraph in Noah Smith’s recent post about experts and public policy:

Nor was this the only form of deception that economists employed in defense of free trade. Economists have known for many decades that some countries as a whole can be hurt by free trade. If a multilateral trade agreement — like the WTO, for example — admits new member countries, existing countries who compete directly with the newcomer nations can become poorer. This is called “trade diversion”, and it follows directly from the same simple classical economic theories of comparative advantage that economists typically use to justify free trade.

That paragraph is neither the most important nor most interesting part of his recent…

David Ricardo:

Under a system of perfectly free commerce, each country naturally devotes its capital and labour to such employments as are most beneficial to each. This pursuit of individual advantage is admirably connected with the universal good of the whole… It is this principle which determines that wine shall be made in France and Portugal, that corn shall be grown in America and Poland, and that hardware and other goods shall be manufactured in England…

If Portugal had no commercial connexion with other countries, instead of employing a great part of her capital and industry in the production of wines, with which she purchases for her own use the cloth and hardware of other countries, she would be obliged to devote a part of that capital to the manufacture of those commodities, which she would thus obtain probably inferior in quality as well as quantity.

The quantity of…

Ivan IV Vasilyevich (August 25, 1530 – March 28, 1584), commonly known in English as Ivan the Terrible, “Ivan the Formidable” or “Ivan the Fearsome” was the Grand Prince of Moscow from 1533 to 1547 and the first Moscow ruler to be crownedTsar of all Russia from 1547 to 1584.

Ivan was the first Moscow ruler born after its independence.

Early life

Ivan was the first son of Grand Prince Vasili III of Moscow and his second wife, Elena Glinskaya, Elena was born in 1510 as the daughter of Prince Vasili Lvovich Glinsky (d. 1515), a member of a Lipka Tatar clan claiming descent from the Mongol ruler Mamai, and Serbian Princess Ana Jakšić from the Jakšić noble family.

Elena’s mother was a Serbian princess and her father’s family, the Glinski clan (nobles based in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania), claimed descent both from Orthodox Hungarian nobles and the Mongol…