Human beings can be remarkably dense. The practice of bloodletting, as a medical treatment, persisted despite centuries of abundant evidence that it did more harm than good.

The practice of communism, or political bloodletting as it should perhaps be known, whose centenary in the Bolshevik revolution is reached this year, likewise needs no more tests. It does more harm than good every time. Nationalized, planned, one-party rule benefits nobody, let alone the poor.

The diseases that Marxism-Leninism was intended to treat, poverty and inequality, were ancient scourges just beginning to fade, even in Russia. Higher living standards were starting to reach ordinary people, rather than just the feudal elite, for the first time.

Along came Karl Marx with essentially the opposite suggestion.  The progressive left rather suddenly fell in love with the idea of expanding, rather than limiting, state power.  Here’s a quick history of Marxist horrors from Lenin to Obama.

The UN Security Council vote last Friday (12/23) condemning Israel was not about “settlements.”  It was an Arab subterfuge, a trap into which the United States, the UK, New Zealand and other naïve or cynical diplomats took an active role.

It was all smoke and mirrors, a con trick holding up the settlement issue to dazzle the voters while the real intent was to disown Israel of territories to which they have genuine claim and turn them into “illegally occupied Palestinian territory.”

For certain, President Obama latched on to the idea. It was pay-back time, a golden opportunity not to be missed to hit back at Bibi before handing in the keys to the White House. For shame!

Now we know that he was cooking up this evil brew back in November.

“I’ve waited 40 years for this moment.”

In a congressional meeting room, somewhere on Capitol Hill, one of the world’s leading skeptical climate scientists, Dr. Tim Ball, is toasting the advent of the Trump administration.

“I don’t want to use the phrase tipping point because that’s a phrase that has been abused in the scientific area. But I think we’re on the verge of a dramatic shift,” Ball tells the small invited audience of journalists, scientists, think-tankers, lawyers and DC politicos. He’s talking about the war on the Green Blob.

Most of them are scarred veterans of the decades-long battle to expose the man-made global warming scare as what another speaker, Tony Heller, describes as “the biggest scientific deception in history.” Many have suffered personally and professionally for speaking out against the so-called “consensus.”

But with Trump’s inauguration it will be the beginning of the end for the Green Blob—that sinister cabal of corrupt politicians, UN and EU technocrats, bent scientists, shrill activists, rent-seeking corporatists, blood-sucking lawyers and gullible journalists which has held the world to ransom these last four decades by promoting the man-made climate change scare story and other, related environmental scams.

Donald Trump's assault on trade is escalating. First the foes were China and Mexico. Now it is the world.

The Trump transition team is now mooting an import tariff of 10% across the board, doubling down on earlier talk of a 5% duty. This is a sobering demarche. Such thinking is of a different character to Mr. Trump's campaign rhetoric, which mostly hinted at trade sanctions to force concessions.

A catch-all tariff is a change of belief systems. It overthrows the free trade order that has been upheld and policed by Washington since the 1940s.

Markets are still behaving as if they will get the "good Trump" (tax cuts and fiscal stimulus) rather than the "bad Trump" (trade wars), despite mounting evidence to the contrary.

In fairness to the Trump camp, we should not be beguiled too easily by free trade pieties, or fall for the canard that the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 caused the Great Depression. It could not possibly have done the damage so often claimed.

Nonetheless, it may be that Mr. Trump and his coterie in Washington are walking straight into the "Thucydides Trap" in their handling of China.

When former Texas governor Rick Perry ran for president in 2012, he promised he'd abolish the U.S. Department of Energy (at least when he could remember it). Liberals wrote this off as typical conservative stupidity.

Why would anyone want to abolish the DOE? According to one liberal commentator, it was because the department "was established during Jimmy Carter's administration and it perhaps sounds like it might have something to do with solar panels."

Jimmy Carter created it, all right, but solar panels were only a symptom of the real problem. The DOE was conceived in dark and pessimistic beliefs and forecasts that have proven totally wrong. As Obama might say, the DOE is on the wrong side of history.

Thanks to the DOE, we've endured wasteful, panicked policies such as massive subsidies for the wind and solar power, and electric cars.  Worst of all, Congress has saddled consumers with ethanol subsidies and mandates.

These boondoggles cost us billions of dollars, and none of them are commercially viable in their own right.  The DOE isn’t viable either.  It’s time to get rid of it.