Utopia, you are standing in it!

When a cult loses its grip on a person, a form of reawakening takes place. It involves having to return to a society not managed by guru slogans, children chanting or all information managed via a dogmatic funnel into a simplified worldview. Many young people in the West are reawakening from an experience with the Extinction Rebellion cult which had gripped them for an intense period for most of 2019.

There are many emotions to manage in a post-cult reawakening: bitterness at the deception, embarrassment over the personal vulnerability, apologetic to those close who may have been hurt, concern for those still held in the grips of the gurus, fragility about re-entering society. Should the experience be blocked out, explained away or assessed? A catharsis may be necessary to come to terms with the power the cult had held in dominating the individual’s freedom.

For around a year Extinction Rebellion…

The wars of three kingdoms

I found Kishlansky’s account of the Wars of Three Kingdoms very persuasive, probably the best thing in this book. When you write history you have a choice of the level you want to pitch the narrative, the levels being something like:

• superficial
• good summary
• summary with some detail
• lots of detail
• too much detail

As I explained in my review of Peter H. Wilson’s book about the Thirty Years War, Wilson definitely goes into ‘too much detail’, drowning the reader in specifics and failing to point out important turning points or patterns.

Kishlansky, by contrast, hits what, for me, was the perfect level of description, ‘incisive summary with some detail’.

For example, it is illuminating to be told that, put simply, the first three years of the war in England (1642-5) consisted mostly of smallish regional armies engaging in small skirmishes or sieges of local…

The reign of Charles I

The 1620s

King James I died on 25 March 1625 and was succeeded by his son, Charles I. A month and a half later Charles married the French Princess Henrietta Maria (sister of King Louis XIII) by proxy in a ceremony in Paris. She was then sent to Kent where they met and spent their marriage night.

Charles was crowned in Westminster in February 1626 but Henrietta’s Catholicism prevented her from being crowned with him and this lack of a formal coronation, along with her overt Catholicism and the stipulation that she be allowed to practice her Catholicism in the royal court, were all to build up popular animosity against her.

In fact, the French stipulation that she be allowed to bring up her children in the Catholic religion lay the seeds of the overthrow of her son James II in 1685. It’s odd that…

Heather Roy

27 August 2020

Congratulations James Shaw! I never thought I would be complimenting the Green Party co-leader for his support of school choice for parents and students. But we are of course living in very strange times.

The Green Party endorsement of a private school in Taranaki is one of those unexpected election year surprises. Who would have thought the Greens would support a private school, in complete contradiction of their education policy which explicity states “Public funding for private schools should be phased out and transferred to public schools”?. Flexible ethics are alive and well, including in the Green Party.

In fact James Shaw has announced more than an endorsement of the Taranaki private school – it’s more like a lotto style win of $11.7 million for the Green School, with the funding coming from the Government’s $3 billion shovel-ready projects fund. Much as I object…

When I give talks about why Americans reject evolution so frequently, I refer to Steve Stewart-Williams’s excellent book from 2010: Darwin, God, and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything you Though You Knew.  It goes through reason after reason why evolution not only undermines our ideas, but why that undermining makes people resistant to evolutionary biology and its conclusions. It explained to me, for instance, why 27% of American Catholics are creationists, embracing Biblical literalism despite the fact that the Church itself explicitly accepts evolution. Those people, like many, just can’t get past the naturalistic and non-human-centric implications of evolution. The book is like a bucket of cold water tossed on the idea that evolution doesn’t conflict with religion.

Steve has a newer book, published in 2018 (click on screenshot below to go to Amazon site). I haven’t yet read it, though it’s coming to me…

Drake’s map of his attack on Cádiz.

DRAKE’S ATTACK ON CADIZ, 1587, BY WILLIAM BOROUGH

Elizabeth I of England and Philip II of Spain formally went to war in 1585, ensuring that Spain had an enemy that could only be decisively defeated at sea. Spain could deploy significant naval strength before, as in the conquest of Portugal in 1580 and then in 1582–83 off the Azores, in which an opposing French fleet was defeated at Ponta Delgada in 1582. The Spanish fleets used a combination of galleons and galleys, but the planned invasion of England was of a totally new order of magnitude for Spain and for Atlantic expeditions, and its scale and ambition helped mark a major extension in naval operations. It was postponed because of the English spoiling attack under Sir Francis Drake on the key Spanish naval base at Cadiz. The lack of reconnaissance capabilities made surprise…

An obsession with intermittent wind and solar is delivering rolling Summer blackouts to Californians, once again. That same obsession – in the form of the Democrat’s New ‘Green’ Deal – promises to deliver much more of the same across the USA, should Sleepy Joe Biden, AOC and her Squad get the keys to the White House this November.

With the disaster playing out in the Golden State, one might expect a little circumspection, if not contrition and remorse from those who’ve been pushing the so-called ‘inevitable transition’ to an all wind and sun powered future. However, clearly untroubled by reality, logic or reason, Biden & Co continue to claim that Americans will all soon be powered by nothing but sunshine and breezes.

Californians left sweltering in the dark over the last week or so might beg to differ.

The Institute for Energy Research takes a look at the causes…

Admitting the problem is a start, but not installing the turbines in the first place is obviously the most effective solution. Reducing deaths and injuries would hardly be a triumph.
– – –
Painting one blade of a wind turbine black could cut wind farms’ fatal bird strikes by up to 70%, reports BBC News.

Painting one blade of a wind turbine black could cut bird strikes at wind farms by up to 70%, a study suggests.

Birds colliding with the structures has long been considered to be one of the main negative impacts of onshore wind farms, the authors observed.

I’ve been moving through the sad list of US cities controlled by Democrats that have been experiencing riots and general criminal mayhem over the last few months and since I started off with my second home, Chicago, a month ago, saw no need to re-visit what’s happening there.

But the events of a two weeks ago cannot be ignored. On the afternoon of Sunday, August 9, after false reports were spread by BLM on social media sites that the cops had shot a 15-year old boy, protests broke out. By the time the truth emerged that it was a 20 year old with a gun who’d opened fire on the cops it was too late. The shooter was wounded but survived.

Having started the “peaceful protests” at the scene of the shooting in the Englewood neighbourhood (the shittiest part of the city and a killing zone in general) the…

by Ross McKitrick

Two new peer-reviewed papers from independent teams confirm that climate models overstate atmospheric warming and the problem has gotten worse over time, not better.

With holidays abroad still a major challenge due to the ongoing coronavirus epidemic, Dr Paul Hunneyball, assistant editor of our Lords 1558-1603 project, considers the risks associated with travel overseas four hundred years ago…

One of the standard clichés of life a few centuries ago is that people tended not to travel very far. While this was broadly true for the bulk of the population, there were in fact more opportunities to explore the world than we generally assume. By the early seventeenth century enterprising mariners and merchants were crossing the Atlantic, and reaching as far afield as Russia and India, in addition to more routine contacts with most coastal areas of continental Europe. For several decades, England had permanent garrisons in the Netherlands, which generated a great deal of traffic across the North Sea. For the privileged classes, the option of foreign travel for cultural or educational purposes…