Utopia, you are standing in it!

The Conservative government’s response to the IRAL report has raised plenty of alarm bells from UK constitutional scholars. The widespread observation that the government’s judicial review reform plans appear to go well beyond what the Independent Panel recommended points to a more fundamental problem: that the government seems to proceed from a very partial understanding (at best) of the UK ‘constitution’.

In this short blog post, which draws on the account of constitutional democracy I develop in a monograph to be published later this year by Hart, I argue that the government fundamentally misunderstands (or misrepresents) the UK constitutionalist model. It does so especially when it affirms (at paras 24-25 of its response) that the ‘historical developments’ of judicial review are not ‘in any way indicative of how the courts and the UK Constitution “ought” to evolve in the future’, with the result that Parliament is ‘completely free to…

It’s a bog-standard feature of every Labour government that the state will expand, not just in terms of money spent, but people employed.

So I’m not surprised to see this information from a recent post by Don Brash, Do We Need So Many Bureaucrats?:

• Land Information New Zealand, 25.5%
• Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, 30.7%
• Ministry of Education, 32.4% (not teachers)
• Ministry of Defence, 35.3%
• Ministry of Primary Industries, 36.7%
• Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, 38.9%
• Oranga Tamariki, 40.7%
• Ministry of Transport, 40.8% (not including NZTA)
• Ministry for the Environment, 41.0%
• Public Service Commission, 42.6%
• Ministry for Women, 45.8%
• Ministry for Maori Development, 69.8%
• Ministry for Pacific Peoples, 81.1%

As Brash points out, this would not be so bad if there was evidence that the government was getting stuff done with all these extra people. But as is increasingly obvious to anybody who ignores the NZ MSM, it’s…

Two cousins fighting for the right to rule England during the 16th century. One was the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn who fought tooth and nail to rule without a man by her side. The other was the daughter of Mary of Guise and King James V of Scotland whose marriage record would prove to be fatal. Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots, may have been sister queens, but the way they were treated in their own countries differed completely. While Elizabeth I was praised and protected from harm in England, Mary was a scapegoat for so many in Scotland. The way that Mary was used as a pawn even though she wore a crown was nothing short of extraordinary. The story of how these two queens came on a collision course that would leave one queen beheaded and the other forever changed has been told in…

The anti-energy/anti-civilisation squad keep predicting the end of coal and coal-fired power. But in China and India the demand for the black stuff – and the cheap and reliable power it delivers – is insatiable, and rising.

Notwithstanding a global economic wind down during the Covid-19 outbreak, Chinese demand for coal is about to reach unprecedented levels, with a further 4.5% increase year-on-year expected during 2021. So much for all that cheap talk about China becoming a renewable energy superpower.

Sky News’ Chris Kenny reports on how, despite the pundit’s predictions, coal continues its dominance, as China’s energy source of choice.

Coal demand is ‘bouncing back’ from pandemic, IEA report finds
Sky News
Chris Kenny
19 May 2021

Demand for coal consumption will increase by 4.5 per cent despite green-left politicians and media arguing the phasing out of fossil fuels is necessary to achieving net-zero emissions, according to Sky News…

In my previous post I wrote about the mistakes made by Arthur Burns after Nixon appointed him Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Here are the critical missteps of Burns’s unfortunate tenure.

1 Upon becoming chairman in January 1970, with inflation running at over 5% despite a modest tightening by his predecessor in 1969, Burns further tightened monetary policy, causing a downturn and a recession lasting the whole of 1970. The recession was politically damaging to Nixon, leading to sizable Republican losses in the November midterm elections, and causing Nixon to panic about losing his re-election bid in 1972. In his agitation, Nixon then began badgering Burns to loosen monetary policy.

2 Yielding to Nixon’s demands for an easing of monetary policy, Burns eased monetary policy sufficiently to allow a modest recovery to get under way in 1971. But the recovery was too tepid to suit Nixon. Fearing the inflationary…

Aeromagazine has a superb article that deals with twelve such arguments that are commonly heard.

While the whole thing is worth your time to read I wanted to extract two in particular.

First up is the classic one about shoutingfire!in a crowded theatre;

Answer: Anyone who says “you can’t shoutfire!in a crowded theatre” is showing that they don’t know much about the principles of free speech, or free speech law—or history.

This old canard, afavourite referenceof censorship apologists, needs to be retired. It’s repeatedly and inappropriately used to justify speech limitations. People have been using this cliché as if it had some legal meaning, while First Amendment lawyers roll their eyes and point out that it is, in fact, as Alan Dershowitz puts it, “a caricature of logical argumentation.”Ken White has already penned a brilliant and thorough takedown of this misconception. Please…

Charles II (May 29, 1630 – February 6, 1685) was King of Scotland from 1649 until 1651, and King of Scotland, England and Ireland from the 1660 Restoration of the monarchy until his death in 1685.

Charles II was the eldest surviving child of Charles I of England, Scotland and Ireland and Henrietta Maria de Bourbon France, daughter of King Henri IV of France and Navarre and Marie de Medici.

After Charles I’s execution at Whitehall on January 30, 1649, at the climax of the English Civil War, the Parliament of Scotland proclaimed Charles II king on February 5, 1649. But England entered the period known as the English Interregnum or the English Commonwealth, and the country was a de facto republic led by Oliver Cromwell.

Cromwell defeated Charles II at the Battle of Worcester on September 3, 1651, and Charles fled to mainland Europe. Cromwell became virtual dictator of…

Wind and solar are an all or nothing kind of prospect; when the Sun’s at its zenith and the wind’s blowing just right, wind and solar generators actually start to look like ‘industries’. But, a spell of calm weather and/or sunset soon buries that notion. Power delivered when it’s not needed is worthless, as are part-time power generators who simply cannot deliver power when it is needed.

The three big renewable energy fanatics in Europe, Germany UK and France have had plenty of time to prove the purported merits of wind and solar.

Charles Rotter takes a look at the (miserable) scorecard, to date.

Weather Dependent Renewable power performance in Europe DE UK FR: 2020
Watts Up With That
Charles Rotter for edmhdotme
7 May 2021

In 2020, Weather Dependent Renewables (Wind and Solar Power) made up 58% of all power generation installations in the three Nations: Germany (DE), the…

The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) Director: David Lean

★★★★★

David Lean has made a lot of great movies including Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, A Passageto India, Great Expectations, and others. However The Bridge on the River Kwai stands alone as a uniquely slow-paced exploration into the nature of courage, honor, and duty. It won seven Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director (David Lean), and Best Actor (Alec Guinness).

Set against the backdrop of World War II in 1943, the story is based on the French novel “The Bridge over the River Kwai” by Peter Boulle. It was developed by two Hollywood blacklisted writers exiled in England at the time (Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson). It was the era of extreme communist paranoia in Washington and Hollywood was purged of all potential “threats.” Thus neither writer appears in the credits for the…

Michael Shellenberger writes at Forbes Why Biden’s Climate Agenda Is Falling Apart.  He suggests that there are multiple forces opposing it,  not only political but also laws of physics. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

The Gathering Storm

Since taking office in January, President Joe Biden and Democrats have projected confidence that they will be able to pass climate infrastructure and budget legislation to expand renewables.

But in recent weeks, that confidence has rapidly faded. “I don’t think the votes are there in a reconciliation bill for the climate infrastructure-type issues,” an insider told the Washington Post.

Senate Democrats are not likely going to be able to use this year’s budget resolution to put together what is known as a reconciliation package. “Senior Democrats privately don’t believe they can finish work on a second reconciliation package,” noted a political reporter, “using the 2021 budget resolution by the end…

As David Starkey writes, “For much of the eighteenth century, the monarchy veered between deep unpopularity and a national joke” (420). The new “Georgian” age lacked the conquests of the Plantagenets, the wild religious extremism of the Tudors and the Stuarts, and all the industriousness and sophistication of the Victorians. It was an age of liberty, new ideas, Georgian-style architecture (in contrast to the ornate French style) and the rise of the novel. The power of the monarchy was in decline but under the careful administration of a clutch of “cabinet” ministers, Britain became a more liberal and cosmopolitan empire. The last gasp of the Stuarts had ended with the death of Queen Anne (followed by her husband William of Orange), and in order to avoid the threat of a despotic Catholic monarch (per the Act of Succession) the crown skipped numerous blood relatives and was handed down to the…

Fake news has a meaning, and its found in the presentation style of mainstream media journalists and their singular group think far left or “progressive” mind set, at the expense of every other reasonable perspective.

This mindset was never so brazenly displayed than in their rabid interrogation of National Party leader Judith Collins after Question Time today. Not only was their questioning rude and ignorant, they completely failed to grasp Ms Collin’s point, even though she voiced it over and over to them.

The press gallery basically acted as a very loud megaphone for the anti-free speech opinions and invalid accusations of the 2 MP Maori party that only achieved 1.2% of the vote.

Judith tried again and again to say she was questioning Jacinda Ardern in an effort to establish just what is in train with the govt and radical Maori as described in the He Puapua document. Her…

Benjamin Zycher at Real Clear Markets takes the NYT to task for its stupid article about fossil fuel infrastructure, awarding it The Dumbest New York Times Op-Ed of 2021.  Of course there are many months left for NYT to publish even worse inanities this year.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds. I have reorganized the content to juxtapose the wild claims with sober facts.

Summer still is weeks away, but already we have a winner in the fierce competition for the coveted title of “Dumbest New York Times opinion column of 2021.” The envelope please… and the winner is “Why Charles Koch Wins When Our Energy System Breaks Down,” by someone named Christopher Leonard. One really does have to read this column to grasp — actually, to marvel at — the inanity of Leonard’s argument, which can be summarized as follows.

Claim:
Our fossil-fuel infrastructure — pipelines in particular…