Utopia, you are standing in it!

There’s a clamour from retailers for government (you and me) to subsidise their shop rentals.

The Risk-Monger understands that his articles can be long and he often includes a special lexicon with novel vocabulary to develop his ideas. Concerning two related articles, I was asked to just republish several key points so it can be more widely read and understood how the precautionary COVID-19 lockdowns were not risk management at all, but rather a result of the failure and incapacity of western risk managers. It is urgent to understand how ill-prepared our risk managers have been as we are falling into deeper, more serious crises including famines, a deep economic depression and supply chain collapse. It is urgent to understand how we need to stop the activists demanding even more precaution and more lost social benefits in the post-COVID-19 world.

How the Precautionary Principle works

While there are many definitions of the precautionary principle, its most common expression today claims that a practice, substance…

Anne Boleyn (c. 1501 – May 19, 1536) was Queen of England from 1533 to 1536 as the second wife of King Henry VIII. Their marriage, and her execution for treason and other charges by beheading, made her a key figure in the political and religious upheaval that marked the start of the English Reformation.

Anne was the daughter of Thomas Boleyn, 1st Earl of Wiltshire, and his wife, Lady Elizabeth Howard, and was educated in the Netherlands and France, largely as a maid of honour to Queen Claude of France. Anne returned to England in early 1522, to marry her Irish cousin James Butler, 9th Earl of Ormond; the marriage plans were broken off, and instead she secured a post at court as maid of honour to Henry VIII’s wife, Catherine of Aragon.

Anne, Queen Consort of England

Henry VIII and Anne formally married on January 25, 1533, after…

Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.

 A brief recap

Wilde debuted with a volume of slender and derivative poems in 1881 and was promptly invited to undertake a lecture tour of America in 1882 which proved fabulously successful. Throughout the 1880s he established himself via essays, reviews and articles (not least for The Woman’s World magazine which he edited for a spell) as a flamboyant journalist, leading representative of the Aesthetic movement, as well as fashioning himself into one of the London’s most notorious and newsworthy personalities.

Tiring of makepiece journalism, towards the end of the decade he made the transition to becoming a full-time writer of prose with a series of short stories and essays:

• The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888)
• The Decay of Lying: A…

I was going through this old interview of Finn Kydland, 2004 Laureate  alongwith Ed Prescott.

He nicely explains his work and why he got the Nobel Prize:

Maybe the climate alarmist leaders have finally grown tired of being panned for blatant exaggeration and dishonest fearmongering, based entirely on failing climate models. But of course much of the desired psychological damage has already been done.

Scientists should stop using the very worst predictions for carbon emissions, a study suggests – reporting by the BBC.

Referred to as “business as usual”, the scenario assumes a 500% increase in the use of coal, which is now considered unlikely.

Image credit: livescience.com
They might do well to remember that historic climate data always show carbon dioxide rises *following* temperature rises, often with quite a long time lag, never leading them, which raises awkward questions for ‘heat-trapping’ theories and climate models based on them.
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A new study from University of Michigan climate researchers concludes that some of the latest-generation climate models may be overly sensitive to carbon dioxide increases and therefore project future warming that is unrealistically high, says Phys.org.

In a letter scheduled for publication April 30 in the journal Nature Climate Change, the researchers say that projections from one of the leading models, known as CESM2, are not supported by geological evidence from a previous warming period roughly 50 million years ago.

The researchers used the CESM2 model to simulate temperatures during the Early Eocene, a time when rainforests thrived in the tropics of…

The government has replenished another trough and is calling the hogs to get their snouts into an $8 million swill.

No, this one is not under the control of Shane Jones, the Minister of Munificence whose announcements regularly trigger the Point of Order Trough Monitor.

The announcement this time was made by Associate Environment Minister Eugenie Sage, who emulated Jones by emphasising the employment prospects.  

Her press statement begins:

Creating jobs in the vital waste reduction sector is the focus of the latest application round for the Waste Minimisation Fund, which opens today.

The Acts of Union were two Acts of Parliament: the Union with Scotland Act 1706 passed by the Parliament of England, and the Union with England Act passed in 1707 by the Parliament of Scotland. They put into effect the terms of the Treaty of Union that had been agreed on July 22, 1706, following negotiation between commissioners representing the parliaments of the two countries. By the two Acts, the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland—which at the time were separate states with separate legislatures, but with the same monarch—were, in the words of the Treaty, “United into One Kingdom by the Name of Great Britain”.

Elizabeth I, Queen of England and Ireland

Prior to 1603, England and Scotland were separate kingdoms; as Elizabeth I never married, after 1567, her heir became the Stuart king of Scotland, James VI, who was brought up as a Protestant. James was…

Many of you have read about Tara Reade’s claim that Joe Biden assaulted her 27 years ago. Although her story has varied over time, her most serious claims do allege true sexual assault—digital penetration, which the Department of Justice considers rape. As far as I know about the evidence, it’s not sufficient to convict Biden in a court of law—evidence “beyond a reasonable doubt.” But Andrew Sullivan’s point in the first part of his latest column (the other two parts are about the pandemic death toll and a new documentary about Phylis Schlafly) is that according to Biden’s own standards as promulgated in Obama’s Title IX regulations, he’s guilty as hell, or would be found so in a college “trial.”

Click on the screenshot to read the article:

This is a little bit misleading, as Sullivan sees “Biden’s own standards”, as noted above, as those he promulgated in the…

Kangerlussuaq Fjord, Greenland [image credit: notsogreen.com]
Less than a year ago NASA was reporting from Greenland: Jakobshavn Glacier Grows for Third Straight Year, and ‘The glacier grew 22 to 33 yards (20 to 30 meters) each year between 2016 and 2019.’ So this new report may be, to some degree at least, already obsolete since it says: ‘The largest thinning rates were between 4 and 6 m a−1 in Jakobshavn and Kangerlugssuaq glaciers’.
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Sea levels have risen by 14mm since 2003 due to ice melting in Antarctica and Greenland, scientists have said.

Nasa launched a satellite to measure global heights in 2018 and spotted the rise after bouncing laser pulses against sheets of ice, says the London Evening Standard.

The study found that Greenland lost an average of 200 billion tonnes of ice per year, and Antarctica lost an average of 118 billion tonnes.

Today’s blog from Dr Andrew Barclay, senior research fellow for our Commons 1640-1660 project, is the second in a three-part series about the parliament that would restore the monarchy in 1660 (part one available here). In this piece he explores the process that led to the accession of Charles II on 8 May 1660…

When the new Parliament met on 25 April 1660 few doubted that it would restore the monarchy. The real question was whether it would try to impose any conditions on Charles II. Lots of people, including quite a few MPs, still hoped that some variation on the deal discussed with Charles I at Newport on the Isle of Wight in 1648 might be possible. The late king had been willing to make concessions on church government and control of the militia. That his more flexible son might agree something similar seemed…