Utopia, you are standing in it!

Lots of coal in Australia
Goodbye landmark. Yet another attempt to use the courts to try to establish the myth that governments can somehow control the climate bites the dust, for now at least.
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An Australian court on Tuesday threw out a landmark legal ruling that the country’s environment minister had a duty to protect children from climate change, reports Phys.org.

Last year’s legal win by a group of high school children had been hailed by environmental groups as a potential legal weapon to fight fossil fuel projects.

But the federal court found in favour of an appeal by Environment Minister Sussan Ley, deciding she did not have to weigh the harm climate change would inflict on children when assessing the approval of new fossil fuel projects.

The Ides of March is the 74th day in the Roman calendar, corresponding to March 15. It was marked by several religious observances and was notable for the Romans as a deadline for settling debts. In 44 BC, it became notorious as the date of the assassination of Julius Caesar, which made the Ides of March a turning point in Roman history.

The Death of Julius Caesar (1806) by Vincenzo Camuccini

Ides

The Romans did not number each day of a month from the first to the last day. Instead, they counted back from three fixed points of the month: the Nones (the 5th or 7th, nine days inclusive before the Ides), the Ides (the 13th for most months, but the 15th in March, May, July, and October), and the Kalends (1st of the following month).

Originally the Ides were supposed to be determined by the full moon, reflecting the…

French election season is upon us. In four rounds of elections over the next three months France will choose their President and National Assembly. The presidency is elected by two-round majority (10 and 24 April), followed closely by the assembly using two-round majority-plurality (12 and 19 June). Predictably, the news media are already starting to suggest that President Emmanuel Macron, while likely to be reelected, might be at risk of losing his assembly majority (e.g., The Economist). Will he?

What is almost as predictable as the media expressing this outcome as a real possibility is that presidents–just elected or reelected–see their parties do really well in honeymoon assembly elections. You can’t get much more honeymoon-ish than the French cycle. The assembly election occurs with approximately 1/60 of the time between presidential elections having elapsed. It just so happens that we have a formula for this.

R_p=1.20–0.725E,

where

Figuring out who was the first King of Prussia or the first King of Bavaria was, is pretty easy given the fact that these kingdoms developed late in European history, early 18th and 19th to be precise. However, there are other kingdoms that stretch way back into history and figuring out who the first king of that nation or kingdom was, is rather difficult and subject to opinion. I am beginning a short series where I will identify the first king of England, Scotland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden. I’m going to do something special with France and also ask who was the last King of the Franks? I may have touched on this before but I will also examine who was the first Holy Roman Emperor?

Alfred the Great: King of the West Saxons & King of the Angles and Saxons.

The reason why it can be hard for historians to determine…

Imagine being so devoted to Planned Parenthood that you volunteer for years, donate professional services and money, and even write a will leaving the organization a major portion of your assets—only to find yourself shunned and the CEO dismissed because of a single taboo word you uttered during a private conversation.

That is Jane Smith’s story. (Note: Smith is a pseudonym.) In this interview, Smith talks about the conversation that led to the firing of a Planned Parenthood CEO and her own ostracism from the progressive nonprofit she had always considered “her people.”

Jane Smith has long studied human flourishing and how people are harmed by injustice and bigotry, especially histories of the marginalized in the United States including enslavement, emancipation, suffrage and civil rights. After looking into similar patterns across human history and cultures, she came to understand racism within the broader concept of caste—systems by which societies divide…

Anne’s final pregnancy ended on January 25, 1700 with a stillbirth. She had been pregnant at least 17 times over as many years, and had miscarried or given birth to stillborn children at least 12 times. Of her five liveborn children, four died before the age of two.

Anne suffered from bouts of “gout” (pains in her limbs and eventually stomach and head) from at least 1698. Based on her foetal losses and physical symptoms, she may have had systemic lupus erythematosus, or antiphospholipid syndrome. Alternatively, pelvic inflammatory disease could explain why the onset of her symptoms roughly coincided with her penultimate pregnancy.

Other suggested causes of her failed pregnancies are listeriosis, diabetes, intrauterine growth retardation, and rhesus incompatibility. Rhesus incompatibility, however, generally worsens with successive pregnancies, and so does not fit the pattern of Anne’s pregnancies, as her only son to survive infancy, Prince William, Duke of Gloucester, was…

Europe’s ‘inevitable’ transition to wind and solar is in tatters, as Vlad Putin rips up Ukraine and delivers an energy pricing and supply calamity to shellshocked Europeans.

The idea that got them there was fairly simple: carpet Europe with millions of solar panels and wind turbines and use Russian oil and gas to keep the lights on whenever the sun sets and/or calm weather sets in.

So confident were Europe’s energy intelligentsia on the merits of the plan, that the Germans mandated an ignominious end for not only their coal-fired power plants, but their perfectly functional nuclear plants, as well.

It’s almost as if Vlad and his gang of KGB thugs had free rein to set the ground rules, with an eye on a very lucrative and steady income stream.

As Queensland Nationals Senator, Matt Canavan points out below, the events in Europe have caused a dramatic shift in thinking…

Recent reports suggest that the Scottish government plans to pardon people convicted under the terms of the Witchcraft Act of 1563—mostly women—in response to a petition organized by Claire Mitchell, Queen’s Counsel.[1] The proposal prompts questions about the histories of both witchcraft and posthumous pardoning. What are such pardons for in the present and what might they do to popular understandings of the past?

Despite some news reports’ references to pardons for British ‘witches’, and arguments that people condemned for the crime in England ought to be pardoned, too, the current proposal relates to those convicted in Scotland alone. Both Scottish and English parliaments passed measures against witchcraft in 1563; in 1735/6, the post-union British parliament abolished the death penalty for ‘any kind of witchcraft, sorcery, inchantment or conjuration’ both north and south of the border. But the histories differed in the two jurisdictions in the years in between…

Credit: Uwe Dedering @ Wikipedia
Another crater controversy ends as two different dating methods produced the same result.
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Danish and Swedish researchers have dated the enormous Hiawatha impact crater, a 31 km-wide asteroid crater buried under a kilometer of Greenlandic ice, says the University of Copenhagen.

The dating ends speculation that the asteroid impacted after the appearance of humans and opens up a new understanding of Earth’s evolution in the post-dinosaur era.

Ever since 2015, when researchers at the University of Copenhagen’s GLOBE Institute discovered the Hiawatha impact crater in northwestern Greenland, uncertainty about the crater’s age has been the subject of considerable speculation.

Could the asteroid have slammed into Earth as recently as 13,000 years ago, when humans had long populated the planet? Could its impact have catalyzed a nearly 1,000-year period of global cooling known as the Younger Dryas?

Posted by Coleman A. Dennehy, 13 March 2022

Whilst many aspects of the state as we would understand it today were more likely under-developed if they existed at all, the gaol was actually a reasonably prominent and regular feature of the medieval English state in Ireland. Places of strength, designed to hold an individual before their trial or after their trial whilst they awaited punishment, are likely to have been a feature of most English towns, cities, and counties in Ireland since the earliest decades of the development of English law in the early years of the thirteenth century, if not earlier.[1]

However, it is noteworthy that places of incarceration or detention were not a prominent feature of medieval Gaelic law in Ireland. The brehon legal system dealing with what we might today consider crime was one which was primarily a system of torts, whereby those wronged (or their…

Stuttering and shy, Prince Albert Frederick Arthur George “Bertie” was named after his great-grandfather, Prince Albert. As a child, he was nervous and sickly, facing numerous physical limitations. The one thing he longed for was affection from his stoic, and emotionally distant parents. In 1913, Bertie began serving in Royal Navy, even serving at the Battle of Jutland (the largest naval engagement in World War I), but chronic gastric troubles and a painful ulcer sent Bertie home where he became bedridden in Buckingham Palace. Despite the pain, the on-call doctor was dismayed to find minimal affection from Bertie’s parents toward their suffering son.

After the war, Bertie spent a year studying at Cambridge University. He then fell into an affair with a married Australian socialite, Lady Loughborough, but his father persuaded him against pursuing marriage with this mistress (any more affairs with married women would surely bring scandal upon the…