Utopia, you are standing in it!

In a recent comment to the earlier thread on Canada’s dysfunctional electoral system, Wilf Day notes that Prime Minister Stephen Harper has promised that reforms to the Senate will be in place before the next general election. Included in Harper’s plans is a move to an elected Senate.

In many comparative politics texts, Canada is listed among the countries with a weak upper house, but as Wilf notes, technically the Senate is almost as powerful as the lower house. The Senate has not frequently challenged the authority of the lower house and the government that emenates from it, in part because it is an unelected body. I would add that simply being appointed is not enough to render an upper house weak, as the British House of Lords is actually far more influential than is often assumed in many of those same standard comparative politics texts. However, the…

In presidential systems, it is clear who is a candidate for the position of heading government–anyone who enters the election as a formal candidate for president. What about in a parliamentary system? This seems like a trick question. I assume it is straightforward: A person who is the leader of a party can be assumed to be a candidate for prime minister.

We might qualify that definition of candidacy for prime minister by saying it only applies to the leaders of parties expected to be among the largest in the election. Perhaps leaders of clearly minor or sectarian parties can be dismissed as candidates for the post as they are deemed as highly unlikely to claim the post. However, in presidential systems, we would define someone on the ballot as “not a candidate” just because he or she was considered unlikely to win the job. Is the standard different in…

In March 2021, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, gave one of the most extraordinary interviews ever held with a member of the Royal Family. It may have a profound and long-lasting effect on the monarchy, an institution that remains central to the UK’s constitutional arrangements. Already, there are calls for reform. This blog focuses on the section of the interview that discussed the lack of princely status for Archie, the Sussexes’ eldest child.

The aim is not to address the Duchess’s specific points, as the media have scrutinised them in great detail. Instead, the issue of Archie’s status is the key that opens the door to a range of issues that the monarchy faces as a political institution. The fallout from the interview creates the opportunity to reflect on how the titles of prince and princess should be distributed in the future while considering the changing role of the Royal Family…

March 22, 2021: On May 29, 1919, the Moon slid in front of the sun and forever altered our understanding of spacetime. It’s known as “Einstein’s Eclipse.” Using his newly-developed theory of relativity, the young German physicist predicted that the sun’s gravity should bend starlight–an effect which could only be seen during a total eclipse. More than 100 years later, Petr Horálek (ESO Photo Ambassador) and Miloslav Druckmüller (Brno University of Technology) have just released a stunning restoration of the photo that proved Einstein right:

The original picture was taken in May 1919 by astronomers Andrew Crommelin and Charles Rundle Davidson, who traveled from the Greenwich Observatory in London to the path of totality in Sobral, Brazil. They were part of a global expedition organized by Sir Arthur Eddington, who wanted to test Einstein’s strange ideas. Glass photographic plates from the expedition were typical of early 20th century astrophotography, colorless…

To mark Women’s History Month, Dr Paul Hunneyball, assistant editor of our Lords 1558-1603 section, recalls the first public statement by the ‘Virgin Queen’ that she had no plans to marry, and the incomprehension with which her (male) subjects reacted…

The first Parliament summoned by Elizabeth I opened on 25 January 1559 with a packed agenda. Urgent business in the opening days included a new settlement for the Church of England, and a bill recognising the Queen’s right to the throne, a sensitive topic given her periodic removal from the royal line of succession and her supposed illegitimacy – the fruits of her tumultuous early life. However, once the formalities of the state opening were completed, it took just four sittings before another issue entirely was raised in the House of Commons, one which Elizabeth herself did not wish to be discussed. As the Journal records on 4 February…

Israel’s general election is 23 March. To give away the punch line, I will note the subject line calls this the “2021a” election. That’s because the final polls point to continuing deadlock, and a high chance that there will be a 2021b later this year.

Of course, such a result is not inevitable. Maybe the polls will be off just enough to give one of the blocs a majority of seats. Or maybe there will be surprises after the election, with some party or parties willing to join a bloc that they seemed to have ruled out up to now. But we probably should take a second election this year as the most likely outcome, based on current information.

Jeremy’s Knesset Insider offers the summaries of all public polls. I took the average of all the polls released on either the 18th or 19th of March. The average of these…

Jonathan Pie:

With his recall to Moscow Georgy Zhukov’s moment had arrived. The impending battle for the Soviet capital would either bolster or demolish his reputation; much more importantly it would determine the fate of Operation Barbarossa—Hitler’s attempt to conquer Russia in a Blitzkrieg invasion designed to avoid a costly war of attrition on the Eastern Front.

Hitler’s plan had worked well so far, except that the Red Army exacted a heavier than expected toll on the Wehrmacht as it marched across Russia. In summer 1941 alone the Germans suffered twice as many casualties as they had in conquering France in 1940. But the cost to the Soviets was even greater. Although the Red Army had an available personnel pool of millions of former conscripts who had already served in its ranks for a year or two, it would take time to mobilize, retrain, and reequip…

After Texas’s big freeze exposed wind and solar as total failures, the wind and solar cult have been left licking their wounds. Although, to their credit, they have active despite their injured feelings, viciously blaming everything except the 5G network for the mass blackouts that followed total collapses in wind and solar output.

The hard numbers tell the real story (see above and below).

In an effort to resurrect the reputation of renewables, Joe Biden’s Democrats quietly shipped in hundreds of megawatts worth of diesel generators. Apparently, in an attempt to pretend that there was nothing for renewables critics to see in Texas.

The rational and inquisitive, however, have found plenty to see in Texas. Or, more to the point, in the wind and solar obsessed policies that inevitably led to the calamity, that the 4 million Texans freezing in the dark.

Tilak Doshi takes a calm and collected look…

Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson’s accomplishments as Associate Minister of Housing (Homelessness) became an issue that aroused our interest during the past week, although mainstream news media seemed more fascinated by Davidson’s playing of the race card when National’s Nicola Willis linked crime with homelessness.

At Question Time in Parliament, Willis asked Davidson:  

Can she confirm that in the five months since becoming a Minister, she has not taken a single paper to Cabinet committee or Cabinet and has not issued a single press release?

Speaker Trevor Mallard let her off the hook by ruling this did not relate to the primary question.

Davidson was given a chance to answer the question outside the House, when reporters asked her about her achievements as minister.  But as Stuff reported –

 … when questioned about what she had achieved as minister she abruptly left the press stand-up mid-question.

And:

She said…

I suggested on Twitter yesterday that the Green Party’s new housing policy – as articulated on BusinessDesk here by Julie Anne Genter – was absolutely right about the urgency of the issue (actually reform has been overdue for the best part of 30 years) and the need for boldness, but quite wrong about proposed policy responses, which seemed to tackle symptoms while failing to get to the heart of the matter. BusinessDesk invited me to submit a piece offering my solutions. That column came out this afternoon, and is here (not behind the paywall).

Since people tend not to click on links, and I haven’t given the copyright to BusinessDesk who published it a couple of hours ago, I’ve set out my full text below.

Bear in mind that I had only 800 words. That meant I had no chance to do anything much more than set out the key…

No one—and especially not the members of Japanese Imperial General Headquarters or the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff—expected Okinawa to be the last battle of World War II. Why the surprise? The Joint Chiefs, having woefully underestimated enemy striking power at the beginning of the Pacific War, had just as grievously exaggerated it at the end.

Actually, as some perceptive Okinawans were already privately assuring each other: “Nippon ga maketa. Japan is finished.” In early 1945, after the conquest of Iwo Jima by three Marine divisions, the island nation so vulnerable to aerial and submarine warfare had been almost completely severed from its stolen Pacific empire in “the land of eternal summer.” Leyte in the Philippines had been assaulted the previous October by an American amphibious force under General of the Armies Douglas MacArthur, and in the same month the U.S. Navy had destroyed the remnants of the once-proud…

Here are four things to understand about poverty and dependency.

• Throughout most of human history, harsh material deprivationwas the norm for the vast majority of people.
• The development of free enterprise and economic liberty led to dramatic increases in living standards.
• The poverty rate declined significantly in the 1800s and early 1900s when there was no welfare state.
• After the welfare state was created, poverty and dependency stopped declining.

Now let’s add a fifth item.

• The United States adopted welfare reform in the mid-1990s.

Today’s column examines whether this was a bad development or good development.

We’ll start with a harsh critic.

In his column for the New York Times, Charles Blow wants Democrats to repeal Clinton’s welfare reform.

Clinton’s record, particularly with respect to Black and brown Americans and the poor, was marked by catastrophic miscalculation. …the welfare reform bill, …Clinton promised would “end…

Widowhood

The Duke of Kent died suddenly of pneumonia in January 1820, six days before his father, King George III. His widow the Duchess had little cause to remain in the United Kingdom, since she did not speak the language and had a palace at home in Coburg where she could live cheaply on the revenues of her first husband.

However, the British succession at this time was far from assured – of the three brothers older than Edward, the new king, George IV, and the Duke of York were both estranged from their wives, who were in any case past childbearing age. The third brother, the Duke of Clarence, had yet to produce any surviving children with his wife.

The Duchess of Kent decided that she would do better by gambling on her daughter’s accession than by living quietly in Coburg and, having inherited her second husband’s debts, sought…