Utopia, you are standing in it!

Image source : The Liberty Conservative

“The greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever levelled in modern times. One sure to stick in the craw of the Soviet propaganda machine with increasing discomfort until it has done its work.” — George F. Kennan (American diplomat and scholar)

“It is impossible to name a book that had a greater effect on the political and moral consciousness of the late twentieth century.” — David Remnick, New Yorker

“Best Nonfiction Book of the Twentieth Century” — Time magazine

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JORDAN PETERSON’s forward to the abridged version of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s epic The Gulag Archipelago is a literary masterpiece. Lucid, instructive and powerful. Who, having enjoyed the experience of reading it, would doubt Peterson’s claim that “If there was any excuse to be a Marxist in 1917… there is absolutely and ­finally no excuse now.” For history is littered with diabolical examples of…

I am finishing up a first draft of a paper on fiat money, bitcoins and cryptocurrencies that will be included in a forthcoming volume on bitcoins and cryptocurrencies. The paper is loosely based on a number of posts that have appeared on this blog since I started blogging almost nine years ago. My first post appeared on July 5, 2011. Here are some of my posts on and fiat money, bitcoins and cryptocurrencies (this, this, this, and this). In writing the paper, it occurred to me that it might be worthwhile to include a comment on Modern Monetary Theory inasmuch as the proposition that the value of fiat money is derived from the acceptability of fiat money for discharging the tax liabilities imposed by the governments issuing those fiat moneys, which is a proposition that Modern Monetary Theorists have adopted from the chartalist school of…

I was asked to offer some remarks on current “instability” in Israeli politics.* Instead, I am going to argue that Israeli politics suffers from too much stability—at least at the level of party and electoral politics. The fact that Israel underwent three elections between April, 2019, and March, 2020, might seem to imply political instability. So might the government recently formed, with its unwieldy power-sharing provisions and the parties’ need to reform constitutional provisions (Basic Laws) in order, at last, to prevent what could have been a fourth election within two years.

However, if we go a little deeper, there are two aspects of fundamental stability that have led the country’s politics to this current situation. First is the fact that a right-wing nationalist bloc of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party and the two Haredi (ultra-orthodox) parties, usually also joined by an ultra-nationalist and religious-Zionist party (currently Yamina), has…

Twenty-one eminent constitutional lawyers expressed this view in a letter to the Times (3 4 19): ‘Any attempt to advise refusal of Royal Assent to a Bill passed by Parliament would stand constitutional principle on its head. It would presume a governmental power to override Parliament, yet it is in Parliament, not the Executive, that sovereignty resides’.

But it is the eminent-21 who stand constitutional principle on its head.  The true principle is: it is in Parliament (not the Executive, and not the Legislature) that sovereignty resides.

The name Parliament, or parliamentum, came (from the Old French: parlement, parler) into use in England in the 14^th century (the Modus Tenendi Parliamentum, probably 1321), but by the 15^th century it had come to mean a legislature (OED 3^rd edition, 2005); and, indeed, that’s what it was.  The movement from an absolute monarch to a legislative Parliament…

What greens claim is powering Germany ….

Renewables zealots tout Germany as the benchmark for the ‘inevitable transition’ to wind and solar, but its energy system is a complete debacle.

Germany’s so-called Energiewende (energy transition) has turned into a power pricing and supply calamity. Which was as perfectly predictable as it was perfectly avoidable.

Germany’s obsession with intermittent wind and solar was never going to end well. Power prices are now the highest in Europe, if not the world. But paying for power is only a problem for those Germans who are lucky enough to be supplied with it.

As Francis Menton points out below, anyone claiming that we’re well on our way to an all wind and sun powered future has probably spent too much time in the sun. Moreover, those relying on Germany to bolster their claims about an ‘inevitable transition’ to wind and solar should start…

Artist’s rendering of the Colosseum during a naumachiae. The Water Battles at the Colosseum were documented by Ancient Roman writers who recorded that the Colosseum was used for naumachiae (the Greek word for sea warfare) or simulated sea battles.

The greatest structure erected during the age of the Flavian emperors (69-96 A.D.) and arguably the finest architectural achievement in the history of the Roman Empire. The Colosseum was originally called the Flavian Amphitheater, but it became known as the Colosseum after a colossal statue of Nero that once stood nearby. Its origins are to be found in the desire of the Emperor VESPASIAN to create for the Romans a stadium of such magnitude as to convince both them and the world of Rome’s return to unquestioned power after the bitter civil war.

Construction began in 72 or 75 A.D. Vespasian chose as the site a large plot between the Caelian…

German submarine designs exerted a major influence, either directly or indirectly, on most of the world’s submarine development in the years between the two world wars-except in Britain and, to a lesser extent, the Soviet Union. All the major navies of the victorious Allies-Britain, France, Italy, Japan, and the United States-received examples of the latest German U-boats under the terms of the Armistice and the Treaty of Versailles. They intently examined and analyzed these German craft to determine the applicability and suitability of their features for incorporation into their own types and, in several instances, commissioned former German submarines into their own services to acquire operational experience in their use. Both Italian and French designers were very much influenced by studying and operating examples of the later Mittel-U and UB-III types prior to developing their first new postwar boats. The big U-cruisers had even more impact. The first French oceangoing…