We check the main predictions of the climate models against the best and latest data. Fortunately the climate models got all their major predictions wrong. Why? Every serious skeptical scientist has been consistently saying essentially the same thing for over 20 years, yet most people have never heard the message. Here it is, put simply enough for any lay reader willing to pay attention.

I am a believer in the power of liberty — voluntary relationships — to bring out the best in individuals and, therefore, society. But that well-founded belief makes it painful to see markets (willing exchange) blamed for virtually everything someone can think to object to, in favor of coercion of some by others via government, inspired by some utopian vision that cannot actually be achieved by that coercion.

Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk was an economist, lawyer, finance minister, teacher, and a founding figure of the Austrian School of economics. Born in 1851 in the city of Brno in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Böhm-Bawerk was initially trained as a lawyer at the University of Vienna. During his education, he first read Menger’s Principles of Economics and it immediately transformed him into an economist. Although he never studied economics under Menger directly, he quickly became an adherent of his work.

Philosopher Alexander Moseley offers a straightforward definition of political realism as “tak[ing] as its assumption that power is (or ought to be) the primary end of political action, whether in the domestic or international arena.” Realism thus provides a prism through which to observe and to appraise political phenomena, dispensing with the illusions that have built up around the modern state.

You’ve all heard the story of the Manhattan socialite who expressed shock at Nixon’s landslide 1972 victory because “nobody I know voted for him.” (Attributed variously to Pauline Kael, Katharine Graham, Susan Sontag, and others, and probably apocryphal, but who cares; it’s a great quote.) I was reminded of this by a line in Larry Summers’s confidential 2008 economic policy memo now making the rounds, courtesy of the New Yorker