Utopia, you are standing in it!

Seated: R. William Moore and Allan Pinkerton. Standing: George H. Bangs, John C. Babcock, and Augustus K. Littlefield

The problem with journalists ‘spying’ on armies continued in the American Civil War (1860–65). Up to 150 war correspondents followed the Union Army, along with photographers and artists, serving the big Northern dailies. War was being reported faster than at any time in history and in much more detail. Troop movements, plans and orders of battle were served up to a news-hungry public back home. They also became one of the Confederate Army’s main sources of information. The Washington and Baltimore newspapers were arriving on the desk of Confederate President Jefferson Davis within 24 hours of being printed, while those of New York and Philadelphia arrived a day later.

Attempts were made to limit the damage, with sometimes farcical results. On 2 August 1861, General McClellan made Washington correspondents agree not to…

The Supreme Court has come under significant criticism for its handling of the Shamima Begum case, decided on 26 February. Much has already been said in relation to the deference that the court showed to the executive, with some arguing that it was improper or even a complete abdication of the judicial role itself. This post seeks to clarify what precisely the court did and did not do in relation to the exercise of its constitutional duty to review the legality of executive action. It will suggest that the Court did not engage in any strong deference as to the nature of Begum’s rights nor to the balance to be struck between those rights and the common good. Such questions remained wholly within the purview of the Court. While the Court did pay due respect to the executive’s authority to determine and pursue the common good, this was subject…

Hoping to be powered by sunshine and breezes is like musical chairs: the game designed to ensure that someone always misses out.

Increasing reliance on the ‘unreliables’ means, however, that hundreds of businesses and hundreds of thousands of households get to miss out.

Think wind and solar ‘powered’ Texas during its Big Freeze.

Or think South Australia (Australia’s wind and solar capital) on those dozens of occasions when the grid manager chopped power supplies to thousands – following sudden collapses in wind power output: Déjà Vu (All Over Again): Yet Another Wind Power Output Collapse Plunges 200,000 South Australian Homes into the Dark Ages

Well, with news that the Federal Government’s lavish subsidies to wind and solar will cause the early closure of a Victorian coal-fired power plant, two things follow: retail power prices will continue on their spiralling ascent; and summer-time power rationing will become the norm, not only…

Jakobshavn glacier, West Greenland [image credit: Wikipedia]
This article asserts that climate changes, namely warm periods that it tells us have happened many times before in recent history, can now be attributed to humans if they happen again.
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In 1966, US Army scientists drilled down through nearly a mile of ice in northwestern Greenland—and pulled up a fifteen-foot-long tube of dirt from the bottom, says the University of Vermont.

Then this frozen sediment was lost in a freezer for decades. It was accidentally rediscovered in 2017.

In 2019, University of Vermont scientist Andrew Christ looked at it through his microscope—and couldn’t believe what he was seeing: twigs and leaves instead of just sand and rock.

The last Tudor monarch, Queen Elizabeth I, was known for many things, but her main legacy is that she never chose to marry anyone. She was the infamous “Virgin Queen”. However, there were those around her who manage to capture her attention and her admiration for a time. The most famous of these men was Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. He was a massive supporter of the arts and the Protestant faith, gaining prestige and praise from his highly exalted monarch. Yet, his life and his relationship with his wives, his enemies, and Elizabeth I was full of dangers and numerous scandals. Who was this man who wooed the heart of the most eligible woman in all of 16th century Europe? Robert Stedall investigates the relationship between these two lovers destined to never marry each other in, “Elizabeth I’s Secret Lover: Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester”.

I would like to…

Cue football stadium quips. We seem to be living in an age of IPCC-generated mass delusion, whipped up by the media, as far as the climate is concerned.
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SOME 60,000 Belgians are suing the government for inaction in the fight against global warming in a case that opened today in a civil court in Brussels, reports thejournal.ie.

Launched in 2015 by the association Klimatzaak (the climate case, in Dutch), the procedure follows a similar one in the Netherlands that led to a ruling against the Dutch government.

The cases attack governments for not respecting the greenhouse gas emission reduction targets set by the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

Following on from yesterday’s post looking at what the IMF had advised the government on housing issues in the Concluding Statement from the recent Article IV consultation, I got curious about how that advice had evolved over the years. I could recall some bits and pieces, but I thought something a little more systematic might be in order.

I had hoped to look at the Concluding Statements going back 20 years, to encompass at least the house price surge in the 2000s, but the Concluding Statements I could find on the IMF’s website go back only as far as the (March) 2009 consultation. But at least starting from there encompasses a full economic cycle. In March 2009 all the attention was on the recession, the global crisis pressures, and so on. House prices had been falling, but not dramatically so and so got little attention.

Productivity issues are not the…

In today’s blog Dr Stephen Roberts concludes his three-part blog series discussing parliamentary reactions to the 17th century transatlantic slave trade. Here Dr Roberts considers the case of a group of political prisoners who had been transported as indentured servants in 1655.

As noted in the first blog, the transportation of slaves from West Africa grew proportionally with the development of the Caribbean as an important component of the English colonial economy; and as noted in the second, there was a lively political discourse in 1640s and 50s England centred on liberties and slavery, even if much of it was rhetorical. Only on occasion did the compartmentalized worlds of English liberties and overseas slavery collide in Parliament, much to the discomfort of MPs.

One such episode came in March 1659. Unhelpfully to the Cromwellian government, the chairman…

The reign of Mary I is perhaps best summarized by Winston Churchill in his History of English Speaking Peoples: “The woman who now became Queen was probably the most unhappy and unsuccessful of England’s sovereigns… Mary had all the obstinacy of the Tudors and none of their political sense. She was now on the threshold of her dreams – a Catholic England united in intimate alliance with the Catholic Empire of the Hapsburgs” (257-258).

Mary was a sickly child but she was born into the prospect of one day becoming Queen. She was the first child to survive from Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Those lofty hopes of succession were soon dashed when Henry voided his marriage to Catherine in 1533. At the time, various European princes had lined up as potential suitors for Mary, but they were immediately discarded when her mother’s marriage to Henry VIII ended…

One of the most fascinating families in history are the Borjas/Borgias; a family that produced a series of controversial characters from Pope Alexander VI, Cesare, and Lucrezia.  The story that encompasses the Spanish family that would dominate the Italian Renaissance is said to involve barbarity, rape, misinformation, political and religious machinations, and possibly incest.  The questions surrounding the family have baffled historians for centuries and it appears that much of their reputation can fall into the category of myths.  Historian, G. J. Meyer has taken on the task of unraveling these myths in his family biography, THE BORGIAS: THE HIDDEN HISTORY as he argues that the Borgia problem began in the early 16^th century as Reformation propagandists depicted the papacy in less than positive terms and blamed the Borgias for every conceivable crime.  Meyer’s approach is to ask, “long neglected questions” and a refusal to accept judgements…

North Sea oil platform [image credit: matchtech.com]
The UK is getting more like California every day in terms of an obsession with phony climate virtue signalling, with its drive to weaken the energy industry wealth creators and subsidise their so-called ‘renewable’ competitors.
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Ministers are considering declaring the beginning of the end for the North Sea oil industry with a ban on new exploration licences, says The Sunday Telegraph (via The GWPF).

The radical move is on the table as part of a decisive shift away from fossil fuels and as part of preparations for the crucial climate summit the Government is due to host in Glasgow in the autumn.

Britain is already legally bound to deliver “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050.

Aerial view of opposing trench lines between Loos and Hulluch, July 1917. German trenches at the right and bottom, British at the top-left.

The trench systems of 1915, 1916 and early 1917 became increasingly sophisticated as time, the lack of any significant advances or withdrawals and lengthy periods of inactivity allowed the soldiers abundant opportunities to improve the environment in which they lived and fought. Emplacements were routinely dug to depths of ten or twelve metres and included command and observation posts, bombardment shelters, sniper, machine-gun and sentry positions and suchlike, as well as field kitchens, medical aid posts and all manner of storage facilities (including often large quantities of ammunition and explosives). In early 1915 a typical basic dugout or shelter was constructed up to one metre wide (but no wider, in order to minimize the consequences of a direct hit by a shell), their sides reinforced with planks…