John T. Reed’s news blog

The Wall Street Journal today reports that “housing wealth flowed to the affluent in the last decade.” That is supposed to be news..Housing wealth flowing is a strange way to describe home prices rising. They generally rise every year, That is not news. And who owns homes? The affluent or the poor. By definition, the affluent own houses. The poor do not because they cannot afford to own a home. The affluent had to be affluent to buy a home. And the normal annual rise in property values makes them more affluent. Duh..The Journal headline implies there are times when...

I spoke to Bjorn Lomborg last night after he gave a talk to the Pacific Research Institute. He is the author of the climate change book False Alarm which I recently finished reading..The book says there is climate change and it is man caused. I am not convinced of man caused. Looks more like normal variations that caused such things as ice ages and thawing out before humans existed..He says the optimal thing for humans to do is to takes some modest steps to lower the likely temperature increase from about 7.5% to about 6.5% or something like that. .He...

Given its population, Russia is a relatively poor country on a per capita basis. .The large explosions happening more or less constantly in Ukraine are quite expensive. In Vietnam, I was a platoon leader in a mixed heavy artillery battalion (self-propelled 8-inch and 175mm cannons http://www.quanloi.org/OtherBatteries/Charlie%20Battery/BillPoseyPhotos/Gallery%202/BIllPoseyVNPhotoGallery2Page.htm) for a while. Every round they fired costs a bunch. Around $1,000 each nowadays. The most expensive US artillery shell the Excalibur, costs $140,000 each. The self-propelled cannons cost about $1,000,000 each and I am guessing they need lots of maintenance because the violence of what they do every time they fire has to wear...

Ukraine President Zelensky now says he has cooled to joining NATO and he is willing to discuss letting Russia have two eastern provinces that they have been fighting over since 2014..Both of these positions reward Putin’s misbehavior. That must never happen anywhere. If he is rewarded for these invasions, he will do it again.  This got a name in 1938: appeasement. The Brit who signed it said it achieved “Peace in our time.” In the event, it got precisely 324  days of peace. On teh 325th day, Hitler invaded Poland starting WW II. The consequence of it was WW II in...

The eventual inevitable has arrived. That green energy is a fraud has finally hit the low-information voters in the face at the pump. Green energy is now a dirty word. .America has more energy than any nation on earth, yet our president is now begging hostile nations—Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and UAE—who have less fossil fuels than we do—to produce more oil so that Biden does not get yelled at by the woke children of the Democrat party..The claimed reason to oppose fossil fuels is they put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Biden essentially is somehow arguing that fossil fuels from outside...