Utopia, you are standing in it!

According to legend Carthage was founded in 814 BC. Its history came to an end in 146 BC, the year in which Rome defeated and utterly destroyed it. Richard Miles is a young historian whose book, Carthage Must Be Destroyed, sets out to record everything we know about Carthage, from the legends of its founding, through its umpteen wars, up to the final catastrophe.

Carthage Must Be Destroyed is long, 373 pages of text, 77 pages of notes, 34 page bibliography and a 66-page index = 521 pages.

It is not a social or political history. There is hardly anything about Carthage’s form of government, a reasonable amount about its economy (trade and some agriculture), a surprising amount about the evolving design and metallurgy of its coinage (in the absence of other evidence, coins are a good indicator of cultural changes and economic success), and quite a lot about…

Outfits like the Sierra Club ought to be charged with High Treason, for trying to destroy reliable and affordable power supplies – supplies critical to peace, prosperity and the survival of Western civilisation.

As to defence, in a high-tech world of internet surveillance, satellite reconnaissance and remotely controlled drones, try protecting the Realm without electricity available around-the-clock.

Over the last 20 years, so-called ‘green’ groups have given up on saving the environment and have directed their hate towards reliable and affordable power.

Openly committed to the destruction of power sources generated with fossil fuel and fervently dedicated to resisting the CO2 emissions-free nuclear power that ought to placate their doom and gloom forecasts about the climate, it’s as if these characters are intent on destroying their own societies, from within.

With the hapless Joe Biden in the White House, and Bernie Sanders and his Squad intent on directing energy policy…

Some medieval English kings have unfairly gotten a bad rap. Others are deservedly vilified (Richard III, I’m talking to you).

Our modern-day perception of English kings is largely constructed from only a few sources. Of course, we have the writings of Shakespeare which were generally based on the real events of English monarchs but had lots of extra drama added in to spice things up. We also have the writings of chroniclers who actually lived in the middle ages, but they aren’t always reliable. Just imagine if you were hired by Henry VIII to write the history of his reign. You would definitely write it in a way that reflected very well on the king. And we have modern-day historians who try to bring the past to life with new interpretations of English monarchs and their new explanations of their controversial actions.

One of the English kings who has received very…

It is two years today since my first post about pandemics (and the economy). Rereading it, and another the following week, over the weekend and it was interesting to reflect on what issues had (and hadn’t) sprung to mind. But back then, however fearful people might or might not have been initially, few would have supposed that two years on we’d be labouring under new, and even more onerous, restrictions, and that for the best part of two years few of us would have been able to travel.

I was quite supportive of the need for restrictions, especially at the border, for quite a long time. Even last year, when the government was so slow to roll out the vaccine, doing everything possible to keep the virus out would have seemed appropriate (ie more than the government actually did). As for domestic restrictions, in both 2020 and 2021 the…

Victoria (Alexandrina Victoria; May 24, 1819 – January 22, 1901) was Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from June 20, 1837 until her death. On May 1, 1876, she adopted the additional title of Empress of India. Known as the Victorian era, her reign of 63 years and seven months was longer than that of any of her predecessors. It was a period of industrial, cultural, political, scientific, and military change within the United Kingdom, and was marked by a great expansion of the British Empire.

Victoria was the daughter of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn (the fourth son of King George III and Duchess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz), and Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, the fourth daughter and seventh child of Franz Friedrich, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, and Countess Augusta of Reuss-Ebersdorf.

After both her father the Duke of Kent and his father, King George III…

Vast tracts of Australia’s tropical and sub-tropical forests are being destroyed to make way for giant industrial wind turbines. Running like a spine down the east coast of Australia, the Great Dividing Range is prime real estate for renewable energy rent-seekers, keen on spearing 260m high monsters into territory that tree huggers used to hold in sacred reverence.

But that was before saving the planet meant clear-felling and bulldozing every ridgeline exposed to occasional stiff breezes and then, having literally moved mountains, turning newly denuded peaks into 6 lane highways.

Over time, however, the gullible environmentalists who were sucked in by claims about this wind farm powering tens of thousands of homes, with energy lovingly caressed from mother nature, began to wake up that all wasn’t well. Indeed, some of them have reacted with the kind of ‘we’ve been had’ fury expected of unwitting dupes.

The warm inner glow they…

The English Convention (1689) was an assembly of the Parliament of England which met between January 22 and February 12, 1689 and transferred the crowns of England and Ireland from James II-VII to William III and Mary II.

A parallel Scottish Convention met in March 1689 and confirmed that the throne of Scotland was also to be awarded to William II and Mary II.

Royal Standard of William III-II and Mary II

Assemblies of 1688

Immediately following the Glorious Revolution, with King James II-VII of England, Scotland and Ireland in flight and Prince William III of Orange nearing London, the Earl of Rochester summoned the Lords Temporal and Lords Spiritual to assemble, and they were joined by the privy councillors on December 12, 1688 to form a provisional government for England. It is referred to as a Convention Parliament due to the fact it was not summoned by the King.

I’ve only addressed academic bias one time and that was back in 2018.  So let’s thoroughly examine that topic today, starting with this video from Prager University.

Let’s now augment the video with some additional data.

First, let’s confirm that academics lean far to the left. Here’s how professors rate their own ideology.

Even economists lean overwhelmingly to the left, though not quite so bad as the other fields of study.

Meanwhile, professors of tax law overwhelmingly support class warfare, including really punitive policies such as higher death taxes, global minimum taxes for business, and more punitive taxation of capital gains.

By the way, I’m guessing that tax law professors oppose a consumption tax (like the value-added tax) for the wrong reason. They’re not against more revenue for politicians, just against higher taxes that don’t specifically target upper-income taxpayers.

Academic bias is a problem at…

By refusing to back reliable coal-fired power plants, global elites have condemned the world’s poorest to a life of abject and eternal poverty.

The prospect of making $trillions trading in carbon dioxide gas credits – presumably backed by an invisible commodity that will never be delivered – has international bankers salivating. To get there, the money men have engineered so-called net-zero carbon oxide gas emissions targets, and plenty of Western governments have bought in.

The pinstriped beneficiaries thereof, however, couldn’t care less about the billion or so of the planet’s occupants who struggle every day to obtain the merest skerrick of energy for cooking or warmth. And then, often in the form of scavenged twigs and dung.

The ‘Kill the Poor’ attitude was on full display during the Glasgow climate gabfest, as Donn Dears details below.

Banks Agree: No more Coal-fired Power Plants
Power for USA
Donn Dears
14 December 2021

Edward Balliol (c. 1283 – January 1364) was a claimant to the Scottish throne during the Second War of Scottish Independence. With English help, he ruled parts of the kingdom from 1332 to 1356.

Claim to Scotland

Edward was the eldest son of John Balliol and Isabella de Warenne. John Balliol was King of Scots from 1292 to 1296.

As a child, Edward was betrothed to Isabelle of Valois, the eldest daughter of Charles, Count of Valois (1271-1325) and his first wife Marguerite of Anjou (1273-1299).

Charles of Valois was the third son of King Philippe III of France and Infanta Isabella of Aragon, and was a member of the House of Capet and founder of the House of Valois, whose rule over France would start in 1328.

Margurite of Anjou was a daughter of King Charles II of Naples and Mary of Hungary, the daughter of King Stephen V…

Never let the facts get in the way of the ‘green’ cult’s narrative, seems to be the BBC’s new motto. Its official line is that: “trust is the foundation of the BBC. We’re independent, impartial and honest”.

‘Independent’, maybe. But the Beeb is hardly impartial or honest when it comes to reporting on Britain’s wind industry.

One of its number, Justin Rowlatt was recently busted for telling lies about the massive subsidy stream that’s directed to Britain’s offshore wind industry. In another one of his typically ‘puffy’ pieces, Rowlatt made the farcical claim that Britain’s offshore wind farms are “now virtually subsidy-free”.

After Paul Homewood took the BBC to task over Rowlatt’s monstrous howler, BBC’s executive complaints unit gave Rowlatt a wrap on the knuckles – but not without leaving the equally false impression that Britain’s new offshore wind farms are “virtually subsidy-free”. That too is another BBC lie, by…

Star Trek Generations (1994) Director: David Carson

“Someone once told me that time was a predator that stalked us all our lives. But I rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey, and reminds us to cherish every moment because they’ll never come again. What we leave behind is not as important how we lived” -Picard

★★★☆☆

While often critically lambasted by Trekkies, I actually quite enjoyed Generations far more than expected (excluding several key moments). Generations is explicitly a fan-service film as it hands the torch from one generation to the next –James T. Kirk to Jean-Luc Picard –William Shatner plays his delightfully awkward self but the only two other actors from the original series in this film are James Doohan and Walter Koenig (the rest of the original series cast apparently wanted nothing to do with this film). While I thought aspects…

For some reason the other day I was prompted to have a look at how many research papers the Reserve Bank had published in recent years. This chart resulted.

Only one in the last two years, and that one paper – published last February – had five authors, four of whom worked for other institutions (overseas). It was really quite staggering. It wasn’t, after all, as if there had been no interesting issues, policy puzzles or the like over the last two years. It wasn’t as if universities had suddenly stepped up to the mark and were producing a superfluity of research on New Zealand macro and banking/financial regulation issues. It wasn’t even as if the Bank had suddenly been put on tight rations by a fiscally austere government – in fact, the latest Funding Agreement threw money and the Bank and staff numbers have blown out. Rather, or so…