Utopia, you are standing in it!

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…

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…