Introduction

This month sees the publication of our book The Role of Monarchy in Modern Democracy: European Monarchies Compared, published by Hart. This two part Blog reflects on some of its main conclusions.

Our comparative study looked at seven other constitutional monarchies in Europe, in addition to the UK. In 1900 every country in Europe was a monarchy, save for just three: France, Switzerland and San Marino. By 2000 most countries in Europe had become republics, with the only exceptions being the Scandinavian monarchies of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, the Benelux countries of Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, Spain and the UK. These monarchies have survived partly for geopolitical reasons, most of the other European monarchies having disappeared at the end of the First or Second World Wars. But they have also survived by continuously adapting to the needs of modern democracy: monarchy depends ultimately on the support of…

I guess I’ll have to post twice on a race-related topic today, though I’m trying to avoid too much of this kind of stuff. Yet people keep sending me links to overly Woke initiatives, and this one was too good to pass up. It’s just one example of how every academic subject is being racialized these days. It’s certainly happening to evolutionary biology, but you’d think that math would be immune to identity politics.

Think again. The Seattle Public School system is planning an initiative that will fuse math education with Critical Race Theory from kindergarten through high school, effectively turning math class into Ethnic Studies class. (This initiative apparently comes from a branch of scholarship called “ethnomathematics.”)  If you think I’m exaggerating, have a look at the official math standards framework (below) and the two articles below that.

The new curriculum;

The first piece is from Education Week…

I confess that I watched only 45 minutes of last night’s Presidential debate. At that point I couldn’t take the fracas any longer: Trump interrupting both the moderator, Chris Wallace, and Joe Biden; the simultaneous talking so that nothing could be made out;  the failure of both candidates to answer questions (typical in these debates); and, of course, Trump’s Mussolini-like posturing.  As I expected, there was no light and a lot of heat, but the heat wasn’t even entertaining. It was a slugfest, and a very ugly one. I missed some bits in the second half that are reported in today’s news, including Trump’s reported refusal to condemn white supremacists.

Although I think Biden came off better, he seemed a bit timorous and shaken and sometimes went off topic. And at times even he couldn’t contain himself, calling Trump a “clown” and telling him to “shut up”. Biden refused to…

What follows is one of the most ridiculous and embarrassing instantiations of wokeness I’ve seen anywhere, much less in colleges.

If you want to see the equivalent of a full, self-abasing confession in the religion of Wokeness, then read the second article below from Inside Higher Ed. When I initially read it, without reading the forerunner article, I thought it was a joke—so over the top and groveling was it.

But it wasn’t at all a joke. It was from a professor who had written a pretty innocuous article (with a grad student co-author) on the education website, an article that simply called for college football to resume (with proper pandemic precautions) as a way of bringing people together. Though I’m not a fan of college football, it didn’t ruffle my feathers a bit, as I know many people—especially Ohio State fans—are rabid addicts to college football.

It turns…

Today is International Blasphemy Day, and there’s a special new Jesus and Mo strip, called “lurid”, in honor of the occasion. (Blasphemy Day is the day in 2005 when the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published the infamous Muhammad cartoons.)

The strip also came with an email message, to wit:

Oops. Sorry I’m a bit late with the mailout this week. I forgot. I also forgot it was Blasphemy Day today, but that’s forgivable because every day is Blasphemy Day at Jesus and Mo dot net!

Help keep this hideous blasphemy going by becoming a patron here: https://www.patreon.com/jandm

You can also buy the latest J&M collection, with a foreword by Jerry Coyne, here. 

I remind you that I don’t get any dosh from either writing the intro or from sales of the books; my foreword was a labor of love. But do throw some love toward the creator of this…

Australia has its former PM, Malcolm Turnbull to thank for its largest and most expensive renewable energy boondoggle, the Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro project.

Touted by the patrician and aloof Turnbull and his hapless sidekick, Josh Frydenberg as the Nation’s mega-battery, the heavily-hyped pumped hydro scheme (shelved in the 1970s because it was uneconomic then) has been heralded as the saviour for the Australian wind and large-scale solar ‘industries’.

The line goes something like this: if we use 3 MWh of wind or solar power to pump water through 27 km of tunnels, over an elevation of 900m, later, when power consumers actually need it, Snowy Hydro could return 2 MWh to the grid.

Never mind squandering 1/3 of the electricity originally generated; never mind that with the inclusion of the $85 per MWh REC the cost of the wind or solar power involved exceeds $110 per MWh; never mind…

In the 21st century, monarchies remain pivotal parts of several democratic countries across Europe, including the UK. In a new book, edited by Unit founder Robert Hazell and Bob Morris, contributors from across Europe consider the constitutional and political role of monarchy, its powers and functions, how it is defined and regulated, the laws of succession and royal finances, relations with the media, its popularity, and why it endures.

Monarchy has a long history in Europe, being the predominant form of government from the Middle Ages until the First World War. At the turn of the twentieth century every country in Europe was a monarchy with just three exceptions: France, Switzerland and San Marino. But by the start of the twenty-first century, most European countries had ceased to be monarchies, and three quarters of the member states of the European Union are now republics. That has led to…

Well, there’s only one letter in the “exchange” so far: from Sarah Haider (co-founder and development director of Ex-Muslims of North America) to Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The exchange will appear bit by bit at the Letter site (click on screenshot below, and you may want to subscribe):

The exchange will not be about Islam, as you might expect (both Haider and Hirsi Ali are vocal ex-Muslims, critical of the faith), but about “wokeism”, which intersected—pardon the word—with Haider’s criticisms of Islam to inspire the coming dialogue.  We all know that although Islam is, in general, an oppressive religion, seeing gays as immoral and women as inferior (this of course is not true of all Muslims), it is still defended by the Woke, who regard criticism of the faith’s tenets as “Islamophobia”. The Left’s defense of Islam is based on one reason only: Muslims are seen as “people of color”…

Snow and Steel: Hitler’s Last Gamble in the West Examined

On November 28, 2014, the Oxford University Press published Snow and Steel: The Battle of the Bulge, 1944-45, an in-depth book about Operation Autumn Mist (Herbstnebel, which can also be translated from German as “Autumn Fog”), the last counter-offensive launched by Nazi Germany on the Western Front and, to date, the biggest land battle in U.S. Army history. It was written by Peter Caddick-Adams, a respected lecturer on military history and defense matters who served in the British Army for 30 years and has written several well-received books about World War II battles, including Monte Cassino: Ten Armies in Hell and Sand and Steel: The D-Day Invasion and the Liberation of France.

In Snow and Steel, Caddick-Adams gives readers an immensely detailed and impeccably researched look at…

by Mercedes Galíndez, University of Cambridge

This blog is based on research funded by a bursary from the Economic History Society. More information here

Seventeen years passed between Edison patenting his revolutionary incandescent light bulb in 1880, and Poul la Cour’s first test of a wind turbine for generating electricity. Yet it would be another hundred years before wind power would become an established industry in the 2000s. How can we explain the delay in harvesting the cheapest source of electricity generation?

In the early twentieth century wind power emerged to fill the gaps of nascent electricity grids. This technology was first adopted in rural areas. The incentive was purely economic: the need for decentralised access to electricity. In this early stage there were no concerns about the environmental implications of wind power.

The Jacobs Wind Electricity…

A self-induced shortage of reliable electricity generation is the real issue in California but its leaders can’t accept that, for mistaken ideological reasons supposedly related to the climate of the Earth. Instead they create their own problems due to unworkable energy policies, then discover they can’t solve them. Other leaders with similar ideas should take note and learn, but probably won’t, preferring to parrot ‘net zero’.

H/T The GWPF
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Problem is there aren’t enough of these massive batteries to go around right now, says Bloomberg Green.

As the threat of blackouts continues to plague California, officials are pointing to battery storage as a key to preventing future power shortfalls.

Solving Australia’s power pricing and supply calamity means killing subsidies for wind and solar and kickstarting nuclear power, by removing the ban that prohibits it.

As Rafe Champion details below, there are three easy steps that would resolve the current debacle: killing off the subsidies for intermittent power generation; adding a capacity market to the National Electricity Market to encourage the appropriate deployment of capital; and removing Australia’s ludicrous ban on nuclear power generation.

Comparative costs of power
Catallaxy Files
Rafe Champion
13 September 2020

In November last year a group of consultants tabled a report in the NSW Parliament with the results of some elaborate modelling work to generate  the  total System Levelised Cost of Energy (SLCOE) which is defined as —

“…the average cost of producing electric energy from the combination of generation technologies chosen for the system over its entire lifetime, discounted back to today at 6% per annum.“