Utopia, you are standing in it!

The supreme achievement of the Soviet government in the civil-wars years: the creation of the Red Army. Much of the credit for this has, rightly, been apportioned to war commissar L. D. Trotsky.

The foregoing account of the 1919 campaigns concentrated on the White advances because the Reds tended not to make grand strategic decisions in that year. Rather, they reacted to the probings of their opponents and took advantage when the latter collapsed. That, however, is not to downplay the supreme achievement of the Soviet government in the civil-wars years: the creation of the Red Army. Much of the credit for this has, rightly, been apportioned to war commissar L. D. Trotsky.

The Red Army was born out of the disintegration of the Imperial Russian Army, which the Bolsheviks had done so much to foster (regarding the army as a nest of real and potential counterrevolutionaries). Prior to October…

Coral reef [image credit: Toby Hudson / Wikipedia]
We can’t have effects preceding causes, so something seems to be amiss with the ‘human-caused warming’ dogma, if this study is correct.
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Studies of coral reefs in the Paracel Islands suggest that the South China Sea started warming up in 1825, at the start of the industrial revolution, according to a study by Chinese scientists.

That was the year the world’s first railway began operating in England and most ocean-going ships still used wind power, says The South China Morning Post.

Man-made carbon dioxide emissions could not fully explain such an early rise in the warming trend, they said in a peer-reviewed paper published in Quaternary Sciences on Friday.

The Paracel coral record “will fill in some important gaps in global high resolution marine environment records and help us better understand the history of environmental change in tropical…

“People in Wellington have a good understanding of the Treaty of Waitangi and what needed to be done to honour it.” –Wellington City Councillor, Jill Day, in supporting Maori wards

Honour the Treaty

By Roger Childs

“Honour the Treaty” is a catch cry we hear often these days, but which Treaty? Silly question? No, there is a choice:

• The Treaty of Waitangi (Te Tiriti o Waitangi) in Maori signed at Waitangi on 6 February 6 1840. Nine copies were made and sent to 34 locations around the country. 512 chiefs, including 13 women, signed.
• The Freeman Treaty in English which was signed by 39 chiefs at Waikato Heads and Manakau. This version was needed because Maori versions of the original were not available. Unfortunately Freeman added some flourishes and additions of his own. (See more below.)
• The English draft prepared by British Resident James Busby from Captain…

Today, February 6, 2021 marks the anniversary of the death King George VI of the United Kingdom and marks the beginning of the 69th year on the throne for his daughter and heir, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II (Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, born 21 April 1926) who is Queen of the United Kingdom and 15 other Commonwealth realms.

Elizabeth was born in Mayfair, London, as the first child of the Duke and Duchess of York (later King George VI and Queen Elizabeth). Her father ascended the throne on the abdication of his brother King Edward VIII in 1936, from which time she was the heir presumptive. She was educated privately at home and began to undertake public duties during the Second World War, serving in the Auxiliary Territorial Service. In 1947 she married Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, a former prince of Greece and Denmark, with whom she has four children: Charles…

With Biden and the Squad in the White House, the Californian experience of spiralling power prices will soon be delivered to all Americans, thanks to a raft of suicidal renewable energy policies that are about to be landed across the USA.

The energy hungry businesses and industries that Trump brought home, will soon start packing up and vanish in search of cheaper electricity.

In Australia, the damage has largely been done on that score.

Ludicrous subsidies to wind and solar have left reliable conventional power generators on the ropes, as those subsidies were designed to do. Power is delivered according to the weather, not the demands of businesses; big users, such as aluminium smelters, are forced to shut down when the wind stops blowing and the sun sets. And the power prices they suffer have doubled in a decade.

What appears in the paragraph above would have been inconceivable to…

Was he “Bluff King Hal,” the famous Renaissance Prince, or was he a bloated, arrogant tyrant who put his own interests above those of the kingdom? Do we remember him fondly as an intellectual purveyor of freedom, or rather as a self-seeking opportunist who opened the door to radical change? Who is the true Henry VIII? His persona is at once captivating and elusive. Henry VIII wore many hats throughout his lifetime, but surely his kingship is the most famous and also the most infamous of all English monarchs. Today, we see him proudly standing forth, clad in bright and exuberant colors, dressed as a peacock, donning extravagant Turkish costumes, bombastically shunning clerical Orthodoxy, founding his own church, marrying six different women, executing friends and foes alike. Henry VIII’s legacy remains bold, his stature towering, his life the stuff of legend, his reign consequential beyond a doubt. As a young…

Posted by Sara M. Butler; 5 February 2021.

In Ohio, Governor DeWine’s landmark 8 December 2020 press conference has left the future of felony execution in the state up in the air. The indefinite delay in capital punishment announced back in 2018 has turned into what DeWine is referring to as a “de facto moratorium,” as he instructs lawmakers to find some method of execution other than lethal injection. Since 2015, Ohio, like twenty-eight other American states where the death penalty remains on the books, has been struggling to find an American pharmaceutical company willing to supply sodium thiopental. A nation-wide shortage of the drug springs from the reluctance of drug companies to be openly associated with the death penalty. Past boycotts of their products across Europe have demonstrated that it is bad for business.

Those of us who are residents of Ohio, and not supporters of the death penalty…

The modern ‘green’ worships wind turbines and solar panels in the belief that they’re literally saving the planet, merrily ignoring the wave of environmental destruction wrought by their beloveds.

Solar panels are pitched as the paragon of ‘green’ energy, silently caressing the sun’s rays to give off an occasional burst of power that someone, somewhere just might need at that particular time. Although it’s always tough luck after sunset.

The idea that thousands of 260 m, 300 tonne wind turbines and millions of solar panels are – because of the virtuous energy they occasionally produce – a benign force in the environment is all part of the grand, collective delusion attached to our purportedly ‘inevitable’ transition to renewable energy.

This site, however, is dedicated to always letting the facts stand in the way of a good story. Especially when the facts in question are of the troublesome kind. Such as…

Submissions to Parliament’s Finance and Expenditure Committee on the Reserve Bank of New Zealand bill close today. This is the next stage in the ongoing overhaul of the Reserve Bank legislation, and this particular bill focuses on a new governance structure for the Bank, largely importing for monetary policy the provisions of the amending legislation passed a couple of years ago. In the process, the substantive regulatory powers that were part of the Act are being spun out, unchanged for now, into a separate piece of legislation.

There is a fair amount of sensible stuff in the bill. The single decisionmaker model, flawed and unusual for monetary policy, deeply unsuited to the regulatory functions, will finally be no more. The MPC now makes monetary policy – well at least on paper at does, perhaps it more true that MPC is the venue at which monetary policy is made – and…