Utopia, you are standing in it!

From the Emperor’s Desk: Today and Tomorrow I will assesses the reign of Richard the Lionheart.

Character and sexuality

Contemporaries considered Richard as both a king and a knight famed for personal martial prowess; this was, apparently, the first such instance of this combination. He was known as a valiant, competent military leader and individual fighter who was courageous and generous. At the same time, he was considered prone to the sins of lust, pride, greed, and above all excessive cruelty. Ralph of Coggeshall, summarising Richard’s career, deplores that the King was one of “the immense cohort of sinners”. He was criticised by clergy chroniclers for having taxed the clergy both for the Crusade and for his ransom, whereas the church and the clergy were usually exempt from taxes.

Richard was a patron and a protector of the trouvères and troubadours of his entourage; he was also a poet himself…

For quite some time there was considerable derision hurled at Sweden by people who should have known better – Democrats, Greens, Laborites and Labourites.

‘Those brainless buggers are going to have a yuuuuuge death toll because they haven’t locked down and trashed their economies like we have’ they screamed.

Well, looky here, Mabel!

From this afternoon’s The Australian:-

Sweden ‘vindicated’ as Covid cases ease

Sweden has registered its lowest rate of positive coronavirus tests yet even after its testing regime was expanded to record levels in what one health official said was a vindication of its relatively non-intrusive Covid-19 strategy.

Over the past week the country carried out more than 120,000 tests, of which only 1.3 per cent identified the disease.

At the height of the pandemic the…

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) had a fascinating podcast that was done earlier this year that describes not just what the anti-vaccine movement is all about, but it’s overall underpinnings. Among them are environmentalist influences which include overlap with animal rights groups. U.C. Berkeley’s Dr. Elena Conis was among the historians interviewed in which she notes the backlash against the measles vaccine helped laid the groundwork for today’s opposition to immunization that intertwined with the Woodstock years.

Running time is almost 30 minutes and you can listen to the podcast here. The New York Times also published a very good article last year about how the backlash against vaccines got started in the United States as well.

PHOTO CREDIT:A cartoon from a December 1894 anti-vaccination publication

According to both the New York Times and Variety, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which awards the annual Oscars, has set new diversity standards for the Best Picture award. The standards, though they don’t apply to other categories like Best Actor, could apply to other awards like Best Animated Feature and Best International Feature, and, according to Variety (which has the better of the two articles), these categories will be addressed later.

The action is a response to the outcry about the lack of diversity in awards as well as the composition of the Academy, which led to the well known #OscarsSoWhite campaign in 2015. In response to the lack of diversity (racial diversity, though the adjective is rarely mentioned), the Academy did make and fulfill a promise to double the number of women and minority members between 2016 and 2020. This new initiative is meant…

Californians & South Australians know the drill: when the sun sets and/or calm weather sets in, be sure to have flashlights and diesel generators at the ready.

The first few minutes of a mass blackout can be kind of exhilarating; the candles come out, adding romance to the evening Uber Eats dining experience and, with TVs inoperable, the potential for a little uninterrupted conversation.

Then the portable devices run flat – mobile phones and tablets run out of juice and, should the blackout last more than a couple of hours, the mobile phone network itself runs dead.

Dimly lit romance, soon turns to a “what do we do, next?” form of panic.

Before we started our love affair with wind and solar, it would take a violent (often electrical) storm to deliver mass blackouts. Now a burst of calm and/or cloudy weather will do the job.

Of course, windmills and…

President Trump has recently ordered federal agencies to stop teaching critical race theory. While Trump’s order is a good move, unfortunately, there are other critical theories the Left has in its quiver that they can utilize. The president’s next step should be to prohibit federal funding of schools that teach critical race or any Marxist-oriented critical theory.

As it turns out, the Marxist indoctrination of students using Marxist-based critical theories went into overdrive thanks to Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama. As Thomas Sowell explains in the video below, Harvard Professor Derrick Bell was not only a racist but also the ideology’s incubator to Obama.

NOTE: Despite being ethnically Jewish, Karl Marx was a rabid anti-Semite.

See the French translation

How is it that some  environmental NGOs can continually distort facts (lie), misrepresent themselves (deceive) and relentlessly promote idealistic policies widely known to be environmentally, economically and societally disastrous without losing public support? Not only are these horrible people still welcome at the policy table in Brussels, they are often leading the meetings and directing the debates (over a cliff).

In this third part of my State of the NGOs series I’ll try to understand how this activist Teflon veneer continues to breed a socially-accepted hypocrisy. I’ll consider how the NGOs know they do not have to follow the same rules as everyone else, and how they profit from it. Like Part 1 of this series, which looked at the need to scrutinise how NGOs waste public funds with no accountability nor transparency, and Part 2, which considered how the wily social media upstarts and…

Richard I (September 8, 1157– April 6, 1199) was King of England from 1189 until his death. He also ruled as Duke of Normandy, Aquitaine and Gascony, Lord of Cyprus, and Count of Poitiers, Anjou, Maine, and Nantes, and was overlord of Brittany at various times during the same period.

Richard was the third of five sons of King Henry II of England and Duchess Eleanor of Aquitaine and seemed unlikely to become king, but all his brothers except the youngest, John, predeceased their father. Richard is known as Richard Cœur de Lion (Norman French: Le quor de lion) or Richard the Lionheart because of his reputation as a great military leader and warrior. The troubador Bertran de Born also called him Richard Oc-e-Non (Occitan for Yes and No), possibly from a reputation for terseness.

By the age of 16, Richard had taken command of his own army, putting down…

In September of 2003, Britain’s Channel 4 TV network began airing The First World War, a 10-part series based on historian Hew Strachan’s eponymous book about the cataclysmic conflict that broke out in the summer of 1914 and ended on the “11^th hour, of the 11^th day, of the 11^th month” in 1918. Produced and narrated by Jonathan Lewis (The Boer War, Stalin), the 500-minutes-long documentary is an engrossing overview of World War I that explodes many of the clichés and myths about the conflict that shaped the 20^th Century and whose repercussions echo well into the 21^st.

The series’ writing credits include Strachan and various historical figures from whose memoirs and other writings much of the narrative is drawn, including Karen Blixen (Out of Africa)…

A quick sample of the insanity of Antifa / Burn Loot Murder, the shock troops of today’s Democrat Party in the USA.

As their VP candidate Kamala Harris said:

“This is a movement, I’m telling you. And they’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop. And they should not“

Well at least not until Joe Biden is elected President. These people are basically trying to intimidate others to agree with them using – as Biden has repeatedly said – “peaceful protests“.

• Their tactics seem to be attracting many criminals thrilled by the prospects of beating people up (“Punch A Nazi“), smashing stuff and burning shit down. (“Everycity,everytown,burnthe precincts to the ground“).
• More than a few of them seem to be mentally ill.
• Intimidation is the primary goal; having already committed violence, Antifa / BLM’s future targets can’t be sure they’ll…

The First World War began in August 1914. Despite the German aim of a swift victory, their plans were thwarted. By the end of the year, the German army and its opponents, on both Western and Eastern Fronts, were stuck in trenches and the war seemed to have reached a stalemate. Given allied naval superiority and victories in the world outside Europe, matters looked unpromising for Germany. Therefore, in May 1915, the Germans decided to attack London from the air, in order to destroy the nerve centre of the British economy. It was thought that if the City — the financial heart of the country, replete with the Stock Exchange, the Bank of England and numerous warehouses — could be knocked out, then a victory for Germany would be all the closer. Initially, on 5 May 1915, the decision was taken to restrict bombing to the part of London east…

A quick sample of the insanity of Antifa / Burn Loot Murder, the shock troops of today’s Democrat Party in the USA.

As their VP candidate Kamala Harris said:

“This is a movement, I’m telling you. And they’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop. And they should not“

Well at least not until Joe Biden is elected President. These people are basically trying to intimidate others to agree with them using – as Biden has repeatedly said – “peaceful protests“.

• Their tactics seem to be attracting many criminals thrilled by the prospects of beating people up (“Punch A Nazi“), smashing stuff and burning shit down. (“Everycity,everytown,burnthe precincts to the ground“).
• More than a few of them seem to be mentally ill.
• Intimidation is the primary goal; having already committed violence, Antifa / BLM’s future targets can’t be sure they’ll…