Utopia, you are standing in it!

Overall, I’ve been disappointed with the reporting on the US embargo against Russian oil. The AP reported that the US imports 8% of Russia’s crude oil exports. But then they and other outlets list a litany of other figures without any context for relative magnitudes. Let’s shine some more light on the crude oil data.*

First, the 8% figure is correct – or, at least it was correct as of December of 2021. The below figure charts the last 7 years of total Russian crude oil exports, US imports of Russian crude oil, and the proportion that US imports compose. That 8% figure is by no means representative of recent history. The average US proportion in 2015-2018 was 7.8%. But the US share as since risen in level and volatility. Since 2019, the US imports compose an average of 11.9% of all Russian crude oil exports.

As an exogenous shock…

Crash (2004) Director: Paul Haggis

Crash is a bleak, depressing, sappy socio-political “message” movie. At the time of its release it was widely praised, even winning Best Picture at the Oscars in 2005. While I can appreciate a film with an anti-bigotry message, Crash just gets more ridiculous and overtly sentimental with time. It does not rank among the greatest of the Best Picture winners in my view.

Crash is a panorama-film. It tells the story a variety of parallel lives, people living empty, broken lives in Los Angeles, people filled with prejudice and hatred and, above all, distance from one another. So they come violently crashing into one another in a string of car accidents, robberies, and gun violence. The plot concerns a struggling Iranian family who runs a shop with a broken door, so they call a Latino locksmith who has already been accused of being…

When Charles II died in 1685, Anne’s father became King James II of England and Ireland and also King James VII of Scotland. To the consternation of the English people, James began to give Catholics military and administrative offices, in contravention of the Test Acts that were designed to prevent such appointments.

Anne shared the general concern, and continued to attend Anglican services. As her sister Mary lived in the Netherlands, Anne and her family were the only members of the royal family attending Protestant religious services in England. When her father tried to get Anne to baptise her youngest daughter into the Catholic faith, Anne burst into tears. “The Church of Rome is wicked and dangerous”, she wrote to her sister, “their ceremonies—most of them—plain downright idolatry.” Anne became estranged from her father and stepmother, as James moved to weaken the Church of England’s power.

In early 1687, within…

Reliance on intermittent wind and solar guarantees rocketing power prices and chaotic supply. Price spikes and/or power rationing when the sun sets or calm weather sets in are the death knell for a range of energy-hungry businesses and industries. Manufacturing and mineral processing are usually the first to disappear, when the true costs of running with the unreliables start to bite.

The State of Virginia provides the perfect example, with a push for an all wind and sun powered future in the not-too-distant future.

David Stevenson adds up the whopping costs and the non-existent benefits of Virginia’s plans to run on sunshine and breezes below.

Cost and Reliability Implications of the Virginia Clean Economy Act
Caesar Rodney Institute
David T Stevenson
10 January 2022

Virginia legislation requires electric power to come 100% from renewable sources by 2045. Specific targets are set for the amount of solar and onshore wind, offshore…

Having addressed Biden’s track record on subsidies, inflation, protectionism, household income, and fiscal policy, let’s finish our series by reviewing the president’s record on regulatory issues.

The first place to start is the Federal Register, which is Uncle Sam’s official site for new rules.

Though it gives us conflicting information. The number of pages (a crude measure of regulatory zeal, as I noted a few years ago) actually decreased during Biden’s first year. But only compared to Trump’s last year.

To understand what’s really going on, let’s look at the Forbesarticle from which the above table was taken.

Clyde Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute sifts through the data and concludes that Biden is a fan of expanded red tape.

The Federal Register is the daily depository of rules and regulations produced by hundreds of federal departments and agencies. …Under Biden, the regulatory…

In November 1677, Anne’s elder sister, Mary, married their Dutch first cousin Willem III of Orange, at St James’s Palace, but Anne could not attend the wedding because she was confined to her room with smallpox. By the time she recovered, Mary had already left for her new life in the Netherlands. Lady Frances Villiers contracted the disease, and died. Anne’s aunt Lady Henrietta Hyde (the wife of Laurence Hyde) was appointed as her new governess. A year later, Anne and her stepmother visited Mary in Holland for two weeks.

Anne’s father and stepmother retired to Brussels in March 1679 in the wake of anti-Catholic hysteria fed by the Popish Plot, and Anne visited them from the end of August. In October, they returned to Britain, the Duke and Duchess of York to Scotland and Anne to England. She joined her father and stepmother at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh from…

The House of Lords has amended the government’s Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill to require House of Commons approval for early general elections. Tom Fleming and Meg Russell explore what MPs should consider when the bill returns to the Commons. They argue that the Lords amendment deserves support, as it provides an important limit on Prime Ministers’ power to call early elections, and avoids drawing either the monarch or the courts into political controversy.

Background

The Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill seeks to change how early general elections are called in the UK. Specifically, it aims to restore the Prime Minister’s control of election timing, by repealing the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 (FTPA).

Before 2011, general elections were required at least every five years. However, the Prime Minister could ask the monarch to dissolve parliament during that period, resulting in an earlier election. The FTPA removed this…

Gas producers love wind power because of its hopeless intermittency, which drives demand for gas and raises prices across the board.

No better example has been Europe’s months-long wind drought, when wind power output was little more than pitiful and the demand for gas, accordingly, went through the roof.

Craig Mackinlay explains the relationship below.

Green energy cannot save us
The Critic
Craig Mackinlay
10 February 2022

Amid the furore surrounding “birthdaycakegate”, “cheeseandwinegate” and “proseccogate”, which could still derail the premiership of Boris Johnson, the risks in Ukraine are looming large and the certainty of a cost of living crisis lies dead ahead. The government must deal with it. To restore trust with the wider public and the new voters who, perhaps for the first time voted Conservative in 2019, Boris Johnson has to show that he is the one with the solutions to the problems Britain is facing.

While…

Our series on the failure of Bidenomics has touched on four topics.

• Biden’s subsidy agenda will lead to higher prices and economic inefficiency.
• Biden’s inflation policy is mocked even by senior Democratic economists.
• Biden’s so-called Buy America policy hurts taxpayers and means fewer jobs.
• Biden’s statist agenda means families lose as prices rise faster than income.

For our fifth edition, let’s turn our attention to the president’s misguided fiscal policy.

This means analyzing three pieces of legislation.

First, his so-called stimulus was approved last year, adding $1.9 trillion to the nation’s fiscal burden. The president and his team claimed it would lead to four million additional jobs, but the net result was a drop in employment compared to the White House’s own projections.

Second, his costly infrastructure plan also was approved last year, though only a small fraction of new spending was actually for roads and…