Utopia, you are standing in it!

Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus was the fourth Roman emperor. Born in 10 BC, Claudius ruled from the assassination of his predecessor Caligula, in 41, until his own death in 54, a total of 13 years.

Claudius was the son of Nero Claudius Drusus Germanicus (38 to 9 BC) and Antonia the Younger, the younger of two surviving daughters of Mark Antony and Octavia the Elder. He was born at Lugdunum (modern-day Lyons) in Roman Gaul, where his father was stationed as a military legate.

In his boyhood Claudius suffered an illness which left him with a limp and slight deafness. This led to him being ostracised by his family and excluded from public office (unlike most of his male relatives he didn’t hold any public office until he was allotted a consulship when his nephew became emperor in 37).

It was probably these infirmities which saved his life. Under…

The New Nationalism in 21^st-Century Quebec

The recent demise of the Crown from Queen Elizabeth II to King Charles III has made the occasional flare ups of active derision toward constitutional monarchy the new normal state of affairs in Quebec and has merged with the powerful current of unilateral autonomism already flowing through Quebec’s politics. Charles III happened to ascend to the throne and become the King of Canada during Quebec’s most recent provincial general election, which provided nationalists and secessionists long tired of the oath of allegiance to the Crown that MNAs-elect must swear to become full-fledged MNAs the perfect political opportunity. The oath of allegiance to the Sovereign in 128 of the Constitution Act, 1867 has become the latest flashpoint in this New Nationalism in Quebec.

In my view, nationalism in Quebec has gone through three distinct stages since Patriation in 1982. This is how I…

The Brexit process raised questions about how – and in what areas – the royal prerogative should operate. Following a lengthy project, which has resulted in a new book on the subject and a Unit report – published today – on options for reform, Robert Hazell explains why the prerogative matters, and how it might be reformed to strike a better balance between parliament and the executive.

The royal prerogative has long been a mystery to most observers. I have now produced a book Executive Power: The Prerogative, Past, Present and Future to help demystify it. It was written with my former research volunteer (now a barrister) Tim Foot, and covers the whole range of prerogative powers, from going to war and ratifying treaties, appointing and dismissing ministers, regulating the civil service and public appointments, to the grant of honours and pardons and the issue of passports. The book’s 19…

When ideology is all, reality has a nasty habit of undoing the grandest of plans. So it is with the great wind and solar ‘reset’. The economic storage of intermittent wind and solar is a fantastic pipe dream; the colossal expense attached to mythical mega-batteries means that it will remain so.

The minerals required for any kind of wind and solar transition will outstrip the world’s resources 10 times over; hence rocketing prices for base metals, like copper and the rare earths that go into every turbine and solar panel. And the demand for land is already seeing renewable energy rent seekers forced to rub up against real community opposition, which will only increase in its hostility.

Gone are the days when wind power outfits could throw $10,000 a year to spear a turbine into the back paddock of some gullible farmer. These days, they’re aware that the owner of…

Henry VI (December 6, 1421 – May 21, 1471) was King of England and Lord of Ireland from 1422 to 1461 and again from 1470 to 1471, and disputed King of France from 1422 to 1453. The only child of Henry V, and Catherine of Valois was the youngest daughter of King Charles VI of France and his wife Isabeau of Bavaria.

Henry succeeded to the English throne at the age of nine months upon his father’s death, and succeeded to the French throne on the death of his maternal grandfather, Charles VI, shortly afterwards.

Henry inherited the long-running Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453), in which his uncle Charles VII contested his claim to the French throne. He is the only English monarch to have been also crowned King of France, in 1431. His early reign, when several people were ruling for him, saw the pinnacle of English power in France…

The Government is stripping anti-privatisation entrenchment clauses from its Three Waters legislation, admitting that the unexpected amendment was a “mistake”.

I suppose I should not be too cynical since it’s worked for Opposition parties before, especially in New Zealand – see 1990, 1999 and 2008 – though to be fair to both John Key and Helen Clark, the wheels were not falling off her administration in that election year, although any administration in its 3rd term is going to be tired and making mistakes.

But when I read things like Chris Trotter’s scathing take on not just Labour – where he’s been concerned for some time about the implications of the Three Five-Waters legislation, admittedly with Chris’s usual yawing back and forth – in his post,Parliament’s Collective Failure To Defend The Constitution, I feel saddened by the state of The Opposition:

Sherlock Holmes’ famous observation concerning the dog…

The last time I was in hospital was to be in attendance for my youngest son having his appendix removed.

I’ve actually never been in hospital for anything myself; no sickness, no disease, not even any broken bones or dislocated shoulders or …. well anything.

I’ve been remarkably lucky considering years of farm work, tramping, rugby, hunting and fishing and so forth.

After reading this story I’m hoping that my luck holds, ‘Beyond crisis’: A Wellington woman’s harrowing ED ordeal:

“I rang my bell a couple of times and just said look, I’m really haemorrhaging here you need to check and I felt like I was lying in a pool ofblood and really wasn’t being taken that seriously until they tried to give me something to stop the bleeding and I crashed – I literally said to them that I could feel myself going.”

The woman at the heart…

Cut the subsidies to wind power and turbine makers soon fold. Siemens Gamesa has been axing hundreds of jobs in Europe and America as the wheels come off the renewable energy gravy train.

Now, Vestas, Nordex and Enercon are also facing financial ruin, and for all the same reasons.

Some of their travails are caused by the fact that Germany suffers Europe’s highest power prices, which necessarily affects the bottom line. Their Chinese competitors – running on cheap coal-fired power – are able to deliver these things at a fraction of the cost.

But it appears that the main reason for the wind industry meltdown is that with Europe’s grand wind and solar ‘transition’ in tatters, orders for new turbines have simply shrivelled up. Pierre Gosselin has this report.

Germany’s Compounding Energy Woes: Even Wind Power Industry Is “Sliding Into Crisis”
No Tricks Zone
Pierre Gosselin
15 November 2022

Germany’s Blackout News here reports

Political climate obsession has gone way too far with EV ‘mandates’, as the Italian minister implies. Today’s EVs are too expensive and impractical to be a suitable future for private transport.
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Italy’s Transport Minister Matteo Salvini has asked the EU Commission’s Transport Commissioner and his French and German counterparts to review the ban on ICE vehicle sales that is set to go into effect in 2035, reports OilPrice.com.

Salvini told Italian news outlet Ultimore that the proposed ban on the sale of fossil fuel-burning vehicles “makes no economic, environmental or social sense.”

Salvini’s stance on the ICE vehicle sales ban echoes that of carmakers and the European car industry association, ACEA, in the summer of 2021.

Obscene is one way to describe the wind power debacle playing out in Britain; power prices are punitive, in calm weather power rationing is normal. And with a bitter winter looming, the worst is yet to come.

That untold £billions have already been squandered on subsidies directed to chaotically intermittent wind and solar is bad enough, but the level of audacity involved peaks when it’s understood that Britain’s taxpayers are forking out hundreds of £millions each year for wind power outfits to deliver absolutely nothing, at all.

The team from Jo Nova details the depth of the obscenity below.

Soviet electricity: UK faces blackouts, blistering costs and still has to pay wind farms £1b to do nothing
Jo Nova Blog
Jo Nova
12 November 2022

Imagine an energy system so broken that the government forced The People to buy generators that only work (randomly) 30% of the time and told…

The new Sight and Sound magazine “Greatest Films of All Time” list has gotten its once-a-decade updating.

It’s the list that first enshrined “Citizen Kane,” that later critics/voters replaced with “Vertigo,” and so on, down the decades since 1952.

And they picked a film that has long been held in esteem, a 1975 Belgian drama that runs for three hours and 20 minutes, with the pithy title “Jeanne Dielman 23 Quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.”

Say what now?

“An epic of experimental cinema” following a widow (Delphine Seyrig) through her daily routine of housekeeping, cooking and caring for her son. Oh, and she’s a Belgian prostitute, a sex worker “turning the occasional trick.”

It was on the last version of the S&S poll at #36, but magically jumped all the way to the top when the polling sample size was greatly increased, almost certainly to diversify the demographics of those…

‘Poor Rome, doomed to be masticated by those slow-moving jaws.’
(Augustus’s dying comment on his adoptive son and successor, Tiberius, quoted in Suetonius’s Life of Tiberius, section 21)

Tiberius Julius Caesar Augustus was the second Roman emperor. He succeeded his stepfather and adopted father, the first Roman emperor, Augustus, in 14 AD. Born in 42 BC, Tiberius reigned from 14 (i.e. aged 56) until 37 AD, 23 years in total, dying at the age of 78.

Roman texts were divided into short sections, sometimes called ‘chapters’ though most are less than a page long. Suetonius’s biography of the emperor Tiberius is 76 chapters long. Like all the emperors, you can divide his biography into two parts, before he was emperor, and his reign as emperor.

The central fact about Tiberius is that he was a grumpy, unsociable and reluctant emperor who began his reign with exaggerated respect for the…