Utopia, you are standing in it!

Although Henry VIII caused the upheaval of many lives in trying to secure a male heir, he ended up leaving a sickly male child on the throne. King Edward VI was only 9 years old when he mounted the throne. Because of his age he ruled under a Regency Council.  The Council was first led by his uncle Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset, (1547–1549), and then by John Dudley, 1st Earl of Warwick, from 1551 Duke of Northumberland.

Edward did not live long and died at the age of 15 from consumption (Tuberculosis). His death saw another struggle for the crown. A new element was introduced for the struggle for the crown that had not been an issue in other battles for the throne. The issue was religion. In trying to secure a male heir and a divorce from Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII broke from the Roman…

Edward VI (October 12, 1537 – July 6, 1553) was the King of England and Ireland from January 28, 1547 until his death in 1553. He was crowned on February 20, at the age of nine.

Edward was the son of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour by his third wife, Jane Seymour. Throughout the realm, the people greeted the birth of a male heir, “whom we hungered for so long”, with joy and relief. Te Deums were sung in churches, bonfires lit, and “their was shott at the Tower that night above two thousand gonnes”. Queen Jane, appearing to recover quickly from the birth, sent out personally signed letters announcing the birth of “a Prince, conceived in most lawful matrimony between my Lord the King’s Majesty and us”.

Edward was christened on October 15, with his half-sisters, the 21-year-old Lady Mary as godmother and the 4-year-old Lady Elizabeth carrying the…

I came across a fascinating, sad article today about the “post-Covid” world of Britain’s population, The Most Frightened Nation.

It lists a number of the things done in that country over the last two years in The War Against Covid-19.

First up are some examples of the propaganda used by the Tory government:

No wonder other health care experts began getting worried about patients not turning up to hospitals, even when they had urgent problems.

Try living a day without a reliable power supply; then try living a life-time without it. If the doomsday cult that’s thrusting hopelessly unreliable and insanely expensive wind and solar down our throats had its way, then that’s what a future ‘civilisation’ will look like.

For those not willing to make an immediate sacrifice to get a handle on what’s coming, look no further than continental Africa and India and a range of other places where the poorest billion on our planet reside. People whose daily energy needs are met with whatever wood they can scrounge from their locality, twigs and dung.

It’s pretty easy for well-healed Westerners to pontificate about energy use, when it’s always available to them and price is not an issue.

These characters couldn’t care less about their fellow citizens; those at the bottom of the economic heap, for whom energy costs have become a crippling…

Blade Runner (1982) Director: Ridley Scott

★★★★★

Loosely based on Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Sheep?, Blade Runner is an extraordinary neo-noir dystopian detective film that was under-appreciated in its day but is now hailed as a classic. Watching Blade Runner offers a unique kaleidoscope of carefully crafted scenes that nevertheless appear effortless and unplanned. Philip K. Dick did not live long enough to see the film released but the early scenes he witnessed impressed him. After releasing the monumental film Alien (1978), Ridley Scott started work on a cinematic adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune, but he soon moved on to Blade Runner. It was a film fraught with trouble from the outset. Ridley Scott battled with producers, studio budgets, script-writers, and lead actors especially Harrison Ford who did not appreciate how little direction he received and he despised his character’s moody…

Europe’s ‘green’ energy transition has turned into high farce, with wind power output collapsing across the continent. The wind Gods are clearly angry. Britain and Germany have been in the doldrums for weeks; the gas needed to plug the gaps is in short supply, with the price of both gas and electricity, skyrocketing. The power market is nothing short of perfect pandemonium.

A while back, Boris Johnson – promoting his push for an all wind powered future – claimed that “it’s easy being green”. Now, at the mercy of the wind Gods, his grid managers are in a constant state of dread and panic, waiting for the moment when the entire UK power grid collapses into a full ‘system black’.

And Boris’ concept of “being green”, apparently includes firing up old coal-fired power plants, as the only reliable generation system, in town.

However, as The Australian’s Economics Editor, Judith Sloan…

It’s not an overstatement that our Universities are in trouble when it comes to the ability to exercise academic freedoms. If you put your name to a letter that argues that Maori indigenous knowledge “falls far short of what we can define as science”, you are forced to resign.

But it seems it’s quite acceptable to publish an article in a medical journal claiming that University meritocracy is a result of white supremacy.

Merit should be redefined and universities should take greater notice of indigenous self-determination and “a lived understanding of socioeconomic adversity”, academics from the University of Otago argue.

White supremacy, privilege and “meritocracy” were stubborn hurdles to a more just approach to student selection, public health specialist Prof Peter Crampton and colleagues contend in the New Zealand Medical Journal today.

The authors argued principles of meritocracy and the ideology of white supremacy had ensured barriers to…

I have been to Munich several times over the last 15 years or so, and every time I visited the city I planned to take the short train journey to Dachau.But for some bizarre reason I never got there.It was as if fate didn’t want me to go there, maybe it was afraid I wasn’t ready to face the horrors that were committed there, for I am an emotional man,not whiny but emotional.

I can not even fathom the disgust and hate the allied troops must have felt when they liberated the camp this day 72 years ago.

Below are pictures if what they found when they arrived on 29 April 1945, subsequently the same day Adolf Hitler married Eva Braun.

Polish survivors celebrating the liberation of Dachau

Walenty Lenarczyk, a prisoner at Dachau, stated that following the camp’s liberation “prisoners swarmed over the wire and grabbed the Americans and…

The Boston Herald published an odd commentary the other day, one that scoffed at core elements of the media myth of the “Cronkite Moment” of 1968 while repeating the dubious elements anyway.

Cronkite in Vietnam

Such can be the appeal of media-driven myths, those apocryphal or improbable tales about powerful media influence: They can be too compelling to resist and as such invite comparisons to the junk food of journalism.

The Herald’s commentary discussed the mythical “Cronkite Moment” as historical context in considering the lies told about the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, which may have permanently damaged Joe Biden’s beleaguered presidency.

The commentary asserted:

“Back in 1968 widely respected CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite reported that the controversial war in Vietnam, which had so divided the country, was lost, hopelessly ‘mired in stalemate.’

“Coming from Cronkite, a battle-hardened World War II…