Utopia, you are standing in it!

UPDATE: From Block Club Chicago (click on screenshot):

An excerpt:

The action continued into Sunday with yoga, breakfast and organizing workshops. Students will remain there “indefinitely until we hear publicly” from Lee, CareNotCops organizers said in a tweet.

In a statement Monday, organizers said they would remain on the block until Lee agrees to meet their demands.

They’re going to be waiting a LONG time. . . . .

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For some time now, I’ve been anxious about my University becoming more and more woke. That’s clearly happening to the student population, and there are signs it’s affecting some of the administration as well. This would break my heart, but I think the tide is unstoppable. I only hope that the highest administrators—the President and the Provost—will hold the line.

The latest instantiation of student wokeness, as reported by the Chicago Tribune (click on screenshot below) is a…

The study talks about the need for more ‘grid flexibility’, but as one union leader put it: “The political aspiration is for a low carbon future but politicians have no credible way of delivering it”. Despite the ‘cheaper’ claim, it turns out that ‘the costs of managing the grid skyrocketed to a record high’, which looks ominous given existing energy policies.
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Lockdown measures taken to combat Covid-19 in March led to a much greener and cheaper electricity system in Britain in the weeks that followed, but at the same time the increased reliance on renewables made managing the grid far more challenging, offering a glimpse of the UK’s future power requirements as the economy transitions towards net zero emissions.

That is the conclusion of independent research released today by Imperial College London and energy firm Drax, which saw experts assess the tumultuous impact of the coronavirus crisis…

• Introduction
• Timeline of the Restoration
  • 1659
  • 1660
• The reign of Charles II, the 1660s
  • Convention Parliament
  • The Clarendon Code
  • The Corporation Act
  • The Act of Uniformity
  • The Conventicle Act
  • The Five-Mile Act
• Timeline of the 1660s
• The reign of Charles II, the 1670s
• The reign of Charles II, the Popish Plot and after
  • Whigs and Tories
• Death of Charles II

Introduction to the restoration of Charles II

When Oliver Cromwell died on 3 September 1658 there was no immediate sense that the Commonwealth would collapse and the king be restored. Rule passed smoothly to Oliver’s son, Richard – but things quickly started to unravel.

Cromwell’s rule had never reconciled the ever-increasing number of conflicting constituencies or parties or groups within not only England, but the other kingdoms of Scotland and Ireland. His rule rested ultimately on his control of the army, and the loyalty to him of (most) of the…

Renewable energy rent seekers are fuming because Australia’s power grid can’t take any more of their chaotically generated wind and solar power.

The massive daily spikes and collapses in wind and solar power output have made the grid manager’s life a living hell: Hopeless Joke: Australia’s Wind Industry Keeps On Failing to Deliver the Goods

As a result, AEMO has introduced new rules about grid access for intermittent wind and solar and, much to the horror of the wind and solar industries, is actually enforcing them.

Dozens of proposed wind farms and large-scale solar projects have been shelved, simply because they can’t be guaranteed of ever being able to deliver a single watt into the grid.

Their grid troubles also coincide with the fact that the Federal government’s principal RE subsidy scam – the Large-Scale Renewable Energy Target – tops out this year at its ultimate annual target of 33,000 GWh…

Political documents of the civil wars

What follows are summaries of some of the key political documents from the start of Charles I’s conflict with Scotland  in 1637 to the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. Instead of a chronological or thematic approach, this is a different angle from which to consider the history of the period, a record of the proliferation of plans and constitutions cooked up by all sides in their attempts to find a solution to the nation’s deep divisions.

Lining them up like this brings out the collapse of consensus, the collapse of belief in a central set of political and religious values which characterised the era, and the countless attempts made by different political players to rebuild it. In the last few documents you can see the eventual realisation emerging that only some measure of tolerance and pluralism could replace the late-medieval idea of…

The good ship Green is taking on water, the pumps are failing and some of the crew are planning a mutiny. I have been leaked details of the Green Party ‘Come to Jesus’ conference call to discuss Shaw’s championing of the $11.7m grant to a private school that aligns itself with the Green Party kaupapa in contravention of Green Party policy.

A young Green Party activist from Otago University was on the call. She said Shaw came in for a fair amount of stick as you might imagine but the really fascinating piece of information was the line being peddled by Shaw that he was ‘set up’ by Labour to take the bait, he bit and signed off on the deal without reference to the Green Party caucus for which he is really truly, truly, truly sorry and that if he could take the grant back he would, but he…

Today is the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivering his stirring, moving, and infamous I Have A Dream speech during the Civil Rights March in Washington D.C. during 1963. Despite today’s racially divisive March on Washington geared to commemorate the historic event, Dr. King’s speech is an inspirational, welcoming, hopeful message that deserves to be watched again and again.

PHOTO CREDIT: Martin Luther King Jr.delivering the speech at the 1963Washington D.C. Civil Rights March – By Rowland Scherman – This media is available in the holdings of the National Archives and Records Administration, cataloged under the National Archives Identifier (NAID) 542069., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=294345

The Commonwealth 1649-1660

In my life I’ve met plenty of earnest republicans, who think we in the UK should abolish the monarchy because it stands at the apex of the system of power and privilege which entrenches privilege and inequality in British society, that we should disestablish the Church of England – whose only role is to prop up ‘the Establishment’ – and we should abolish the House of Lords, a ramshackle combination of Anglican bishops, hereditary peers and dodgy political nominees given places for ‘services rendered’ to the ruling party.

Anyway, all these steps were carried out 370 years ago, during the English Civil War and Commonwealth, and all modern republicans would do well to study in detail what happened.

Basically, the big constitutional experiment of the English Republic (from the execution of Charles I in 1642 to the restoration of Charles II in 1660) was a failure, because…

It’s Caturday, and you know what that means. (I don’t believe I’ve missed a week in years.)

Reader Peter sent this video of a treed cat being rescued in Sacramento, California, and added his take:

Here’s a short video of the Sacramento Fire Department rescuing a cat from a tree — the cat is fine and the guys have fun with it, but unfortunately the one they sent up the ladder clearly doesn’t know much about cats! He paid the price.

It is nice that some fire departments send out ladder trucks to do this. My one question is this: What happened to the cat after they brought it down? Did it have an owner?

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From ilovelibraries we have an article about what “library cats” (those moggies who actually live in libraries) are doing during a time when nobody can go to libraries. Click on the screenshot to…

I figured that this kind of report was over and done with, as surely airlines know that it’s gender discrimination to ask a passenger to move to accommodate a religiously-based request not to sit next to someone of the opposite sex. Yet, despite lawsuits won by women who complain about being forced to move, the incidents persist. And the situations invariably involve male ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) Jewish men, who consider themselves polluted and violating the dictates of Yahweh should they touch a woman.

The most famous incident even has its own Wikipedia page: the case of Renee Rabinowitz, an American-Israeli psychologist. Flying to Tel Aviv in business class in 2015, she was forced by the El Al flight attendants to change seats at the request of a Haredi male. She sued for discrimination, and won a settlement of 6500 shekels (about $1800) plus a promise from El Al that it…

I’m not sure whether access to Andrew Sullivan’s The Weekly Dish is still free, but you can try by clicking on the screenshot below (I have a paid subscription, which I think is money well spent). It’s only $50 per year, and if it’s not free I can use only very short quotes, which I will start doing. Today, however, I’ll quote Sullivan at some length, though not excessively.

Sulilivan’s thesis is one that I’ve broached before: violent protests racking many cities, and the apparent reluctance of leading Democrats (including Biden) to criticize them publicly, is a “trap” that could play into the hands of Trump.  Now perhaps you’ll contest the claim that the Democrats are reluctant to criticize violent protests, but my impression is that these “crickets” are a real thing. Sure, Biden has lamely criticized them once, but not often, and the denunciation of violence was not even…

Here’s magician Dave Cremin performing a stupendous card trick in Times Square. Don’t miss it! I have no idea how he does the trick, or make the card man, but perhaps a reader knowledgeable about magic can tell us.

The magicians Penn and Teller have a television show called “Fool Us”, in which aspiring magicians do their best tricks in front of the duo. If they can’t figure out how the trick is done, the entrant “wins,” and at least some of them get invited to perform in Penn and Teller’s show in Las Vegas.

Here’s a new video showing a winner: Léa Kyle does the well known “quick change act” in which a full change of clothes appears instantaneously on the magician. You can see how it’s done with just one or two changes by looking for “quick change act” on YouTube, but in this act Kyle instantaneously changes clothes eight times in four minutes, plus does a bunch of other magic stuff.

It’s amazing, and Penn appears especially astonished. I have no idea how she does it.

Industrial wind turbines are perfectly designed to slaughter airborne predators like Eagles, Hawks and Kites: 50-60m blades with their outer tips travelling at over 350Kph make short work of any bird or bat brave or foolish enough to find itself in the middle of what have become giant avian killing fields.

At this point in the discussion, the faux environmentalist shrugs and claims that cars and skyscrapers kill more birds. Never mind the fact that healthy apex predators like Eagles aren’t killed by cars or high-rise buildings. Never mind the fact that even after 30 years and massive subsidies wind power’s contribution to energy demand remains risible, removing any justification for the growing carcass count.

Environmentalists ready to slam unreliable wind and solar are few and far between. Michael Shellenberger is one of them.

Whatever your views on climate change (the apparently existential threat formerly known as ‘global warming’), the…