Utopia, you are standing in it!

August 04, 2022

Douglas Murray, The Spectator’s associate editor, speaks to Kate Andrews about Drag Queen Story Hour, and the right’s response to it. Have they gone too far?

Read Douglas’s piece here – https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/w…

Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar, was first produced, in all probability, in 1599. The plot is based entirely on three of Plutarch’s biographies of eminent Romans, which Shakespeare found in Sir Thomas North’s translations into English of The Lives of the Most Noble Greeks and Romans, first published in 1579. The three lives he drew from are those of:

• Julius Caesar, chapters 61 to 69
• Mark Anthony 12 to 22
• Marcus Brutus 7 to 53

As you can see, whereas the assassination only takes up the last tenth of Caesar’s life, and the period from the assassination to the Battle of Philippi only takes up ten of Antony’s 87 chapters, the assassination and aftermath constitute almost all of Plutarch’s life of Brutus which may, at a very basic level, explain why Brutus emerges as the hero’ of Shakespeare’s play.

Brief synopsis

The figure the play is named after, Julius…

Smoke from a California wildfire [image credit: BBC]
There’s a ‘fundamental design problem’, namely that the forests have an unfortunate tendency to burn down. Research finds it ‘incredibly unlikely’ that such schemes will work, and not only in California.
– – –
Researchers have found that California’s forest carbon buffer pool, designed to ensure the durability of the state’s multi-billion-dollar carbon offset program, is severely undercapitalized, says Eurekalert.

The results show that, within the offset program’s first 10 years, estimated carbon losses from wildfires have depleted at least 95% of the contributions set aside to protect against all fire risks over 100 years.

This means that the buffer pool is unable to guarantee that credited forest carbon remains out of the atmosphere for at least 100 years.

Wisdom comes with experience: people soon wise up to the reality of the wind and solar ‘transition’ once they’ve spent time freezing or boiling in the dark.

Over time, the experience will be shared by more of our compatriots on planet Earth. Obsessive, indeed maniacal, renewable energy policies are a guarantee of crippling power bills and routine power rationing; maintaining grid stability is now an expensive affair for power users and a hair-raising experience for grid managers, used to power generation sources that could be dialled up in an instant to satisfy increases in demand.

Unable to control the weather and make the sun shine on queue, the first resort is to start chopping heavy energy users from the grid under the euphemistic tagline “demand management”, where “chaotic mismanagement” would be a more accurate description of the response to routine collapses in output directly connected to sunset and/or calm weather.

Charles X’s reign of almost six years proved to be deeply unpopular from the moment of his coronation in 1825, in which he tried to revive the practice of the royal touch. The governments appointed under his reign reimbursed former landowners for the abolition of feudalism at the expense of bondholders, increased the power of the Catholic Church, and reimposed capital punishment for sacrilege, leading to conflict with the liberal-majority Chamber of Deputies.

Charles X also initiated the French conquest of Algeria as a way to distract his citizens from domestic problems, and forced Haiti to pay a hefty indemnity in return for lifting a blockade and recognizing Haiti’s independence.

He eventually appointed a conservative government under the premiership of Prince Jules de Polignac, who was defeated in the 1830 French legislative election. He responded with the July Ordinances disbanding the Chamber of Deputies, limiting franchise, and reimposing press censorship.

The capital gains tax is double taxation, and that’s a bad idea (assuming the goal is faster growth and higher wages).

Let’s consider how it discourages investment. People earn money, pay tax on that money, and then need to decide what to do with the remaining (after-tax) income.

If they save and invest, they can be hit with all sorts of additional taxes. Such as the capital gains tax.

If you want to be wonky, a capital gain occurs when an asset (like shares of stock) climbs in value between when it is purchased and when it is sold.

But stocks rise in value when the market expects a company will generate more income in the future.

Yet that income gets hit by both the corporate income tax and the personal income tax (the infamous double tax on dividends).

So a capital gains tax is a version…