Utopia, you are standing in it!

A new memoir by former Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan praises the newspaper’s Watergate reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, for having “lit the kindling” that set off investigations that brought down Richard Nixon’s presidency.

Sullivan

Such praise is misplaced. Exaggerated. A way to sidestep the tenacious media-driven myth that Woodward and Bernstein brought down Nixon while insisting their reporting had significant effects nonetheless.

The Woodward-Bernstein agenda-setting effect in Watergate was weak at best. The influence of their reporting, if it much existed at all, was shared influence.

After all, Woodward and Bernstein had plenty of company in reporting on the emerging scandal in the summer and fall of 1972. They very much were not alone in directing attention to suspected misdeeds of Nixon, his top aides, and officials of his reelection campaign.

While Woodward and Bernstein did some commendable reporting during those early days — such as…

One of the many reasons that the Democrat Party is in trouble in the USA is not just the short-term effects of inflation and a looming recession, but a longer term one where their grip is slipping on their traditional voting groups of Working Class Whites, Hispanics and even (to a much smaller degree) American Blacks.

By contrast, university educated Whites, who used to majority vote for the GOP, are now a very important part of the Democrats: probably too important since they’re the primary group that has swallowed whole the insanity of Identity Politics and now it’s even more diseased cousin, Woke ideology, both of which are playing a role in driving away the groups mentioned in the first paragraph.

Working class Whites are increasingly a lost cause for the Democrats, Hispanics are slipping fast, and Blacks may be next, especially when you’ve got Black Republicans increasingly pop up…

While the other day we had the three year anniversary of the start of Covid Lockdown insanity in America, there’s also a twenty year anniversary of another huge event – the start of the Invasion of Iraq.

Some might argue that it is even bigger in terms of global impact than Covid-19, and it certainly seemed huge at the time, but in hindsight I don’t think it can compare, whether in terms of deaths, restrictions on our civil liberties or the global aftermath.

Okay, I have to admit – once again – that I supported it.

I don’t suppose there’s much purpose in digging up the layers of reasoning now, but all I can say is that, while I thought it was a waste of time to try and build Afghanistan into a liberal democracy, I figured Iraq was worth a shot and might steer the rest of the…

Back in 2012, I wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal to highlight the success of Switzerland’s spending cap (also known as the “debt brake”).

Swiss voters voted for this spending cap in 2001 and ever since it took effect in 2003, government spending has increased by an average of 2.2 percent annually, only about half as fast as it was growing in the decades before the cap was imposed.

To show the ongoing success of the debt brake, here’s a map comparing changes in the burden of spending in Switzerland and its four major neighbors (France, Germany, Italy, and Austria). As you can see, IMF data reveals that Switzerland has been more responsible.

I even calculated changes in national spending burdens since the start of the pandemic.

You can see that all governments used the virus as an excuse for more spending, but the fiscal damage was…

Norwegian hydro-electric site
Norway wants to limit the use of its own plentiful fossil fuels, so the Scotland link is a dead duck. One in the eye for ‘net zero’ obsessives.
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Norway’s government on Thursday rejected plans for an undersea electricity cable with Scotland amid a debate on the Scandinavian country’s energy independence and whether it should be exporting electricity, says The Local (Norway).

The Norwegian oil and energy ministry said it was saying ‘no’ to the NorthConnect project because the country needed to meet its own energy needs at competitive rates.

“It is important for the government to ensure that we have a power system that can at all times fulfill the basic needs of power supply,” Oil and Energy Minister Terje Aasland said in a statement.

“We need this hydro power and do not want to open it up for more exports,” he said.

In another, ‘we told you so’ moment, retail power prices in Australia will jump by 20% to 30% in June, following annual, double-digit increases every year, for the best part of a decade (see above).

$60 billion in subsidies (so far) to chaotically intermittent wind and solar was designed to wreck our conventional coal-fired power generation fleet, and true to purpose, that’s exactly what happened.

Now, politicians are working out cannot simply conjure up electricity out of nowhere; and you certainly can’t do it by praying to the wind and sun gods.

A few of them are retreating from their earlier plans to permanently shut down and wreck large coal-fired generating plants, recognising that the proles will be less than pleased. Pain a king’s ransom for power and then being left freezing in the dark is unlikely to be met with amusement among potential voters.

We’ll start with a…

I wrote last week about President Macron’s very modest effort to slow down the growth of the welfare state and started with a chart showing that France has the highest overall burden of government spending in the developed world.

The good news (relatively speaking) is that France is in third place, based on this chart from the OECD, when looking at the burden of government-provided retirement benefits.

To be sure, having the third-highest burden of retirement spending is hardly something to celebrate. And it is not exactly a big achievement to be slightly less worse than Greece and Italy.

This is why President Macron is pushing to increase the retirement age from 62 to 64.

But French voters and French lawmakers have an entitlement mentality and Macron’s initiative was faltering. So the government used executive authority to unilaterally impose the law.

Needless to say, this has triggered a lot…