Utopia, you are standing in it!

The Crown Prosecution Service has withdrawn an anti-bullying guidance pack for schools developed with Stonewall and Gendered Intelligence, after a 14-year-old girl brought a legal action.

The pack, which has been withdrawn for review, encouraged schools to tell girls to ignore their discomfort and not object to males entering single sex spaces such as toilets and changing rooms.

One of its teaching exercises features a video scenario where an adult male presenting in a feminine style enters the women’s toilets. Two young women at the sinks whisper their discomfort: “What’s he doing in here? This is the Ladies”. The next time the person uses the Gents’ where two middle-aged men shout abuse and bang on the door.

The classdiscussion guidance says

“Ask the students what happened in the clip. Thinking about how the girl in the clip was treated, can the class understand why she might have felt…

Fall from power (1326–1327)

Isabella, with Edward’s envoys, carried out negotiations with the French in late March. The negotiations proved difficult, and they arrived at a settlement only after Isabella personally intervened with her brother, King Charles IV of France. The terms favoured the French Crown: in particular, Edward would give homage in person to Charles for Gascony. Concerned about the consequences of war breaking out once again, Edward agreed to the treaty but decided to give Gascony to his son, Edward, and sent the prince to give homage in Paris.

Edward now expected Isabella and their son to return to England, but instead she remained in France and showed no intention of making her way back. Until 1322, Edward and Isabella’s marriage appears to have been successful, but by the time Isabella left for France in 1325, it had deteriorated. Isabella appears to have disliked Hugh Despenser the Younger…

People can agree or disagree with the government and its official agencies on the various numerous specifics of the handling of the coronavirus, up to and including yesterday’s decisions.  But whether you, or I, agree with individual choices that have been made –  and I’m sceptical of more than a few of them – isn’t the point of this post, which is about the serious lack of transparency of official advice etc through this period of wrenching dislocation, in which lives were at risk, civil liberties shredded, the ability of people to earn their living badly disrupted, Parliament suspended and so on.   Perhaps most or even all those decisions were the right ones –  something that will probably be debated for the next 100 years, as aspects of the 1918 flu or much about the Great Depression still is-  but no one can argue they were normal, routine or…

We have just had a new paper accepted for publication:

McAneney, J., B. Sandercock, R. Crompton, T. Mortlock, R. Musulin, R. Pielke, Jr., and A. Gissing. (2020, in press). Normalised Insurance Losses from Australian Natural Disasters: 1966-2017, Environmental Hazards.

Here is the bottom line: When aggregated by season, there is also no significant trend in normalised losses. This is also true if only weather-related event losses are considered; in other words, after we normalise weather-related losses for changes that we know to have taken place, no residual signal remains to be explained by changes in the occurrence of extreme weather events, regardless of cause. In sum, the rising cost of natural disasters is being driven by where and how we chose to live and with more people living in vulnerable locations with more to lose, natural disasters will remain an important problem irrespective of a warming climate.

Details after…

BIRTH OF THE B-17

In the early summer of 1934, the US Army Air Corps released a requirement for a multi-engined medium bomber intended primarily for the coast-defence role. The requirement called for the ability to deliver a 2000 lb (907 kg) bomb load over a range of at least 1020 miles (1641 km) but preferably 2200 miles (3540 km) at a speed of at least 200 mph (322 km/h) but preferably 250 mph (402 km/h). Boeing had already developed its Models 214, 215 and 246 series of closely related monoplanes for limited use as the B-9 series of twin-engined experimental and service test bombers, and fully appreciated that the monoplane layout of these aircraft offered little scope for improvement in its twin-engined form given the relative lack of power available from contemporary radial piston engines, or those foreseeable in the immediate future. The design team therefore chose to construe…

If you’re looking for a definition of ‘hopeless joke’, look no further than the daily contribution of Australia’s 6,960 MW industrial wind power fleet.

One hackneyed myth relied upon by the wind cult in this country (everywhere, really) is that the “wind is always blowing somewhere”. Which is complete and utter bollocks.

Spread from Far North Queensland, across the ranges of NSW, all over Victoria, Northern Tasmania and across South Australia its entire capacity routinely delivers just a trickle of its combined notional capacity.

Depicted above – courtesy of Aneroid Energy – is the output delivered by Australian wind power outfits to the Eastern Grid on 13 April.

Between Noon and 6pm output ranged between 110 and 170 MW, representing between 1.58% and 2.44% of the fleet’s combined notional capacity. That’s what we mean by “hopeless joke”.

Set out at the end of this post is the output, so far…

The Despenser War

The long-threatened civil war finally broke out in England in 1321, triggered by the tension between many of the barons and the royal favourites, the Despenser family. Hugh Despenser the Elder had served both Edward and his father, while Hugh Despenser the Younger had married into the wealthy de Clare family, became the King’s chamberlain, and acquired Glamorgan in the Welsh Marches in 1317.

In early 1321, Lancaster mobilised a coalition of the Despensers’ enemies across the Marcher territories. Edward and Hugh the Younger became aware of these plans in March and headed west, hoping that negotiations led by the moderate Earl of Pembroke would defuse the crisis. This time, Pembroke made his excuses and declined to intervene, and war broke out in May.

The Earl of Lancaster held a high-level gathering of the barons and clergy in June which condemned the Despensers for having broken the…

Get me onto interwar economic history and I can get a little carried away.  I don’t like to think quite how many books on the Great Depression – in all manner of countries – and events either side of it I bought when I first got fascinated by it, and my interest continues.  New Zealand is a fascinating subset of that history/experience, although it is still the case that there is no single comprehensive economic, and economic policy, history for New Zealand in the interwar period, even though so much of interest/importance was going on.

Anyway, after yesterday’s post a reader kindly sent me a copy of a new NBER working paper by two prominent economic and monetary historians, Michael Bordo and Christopher Meissner.  Their topic is “Original Sin and the Great Depression” –  no nothing theological, but rather referring to the difficulty most countries long had (many still have)…

Alexander Hamilton
by Ron Chernow
818 pages
The Penguin Press
Published: April 2004

Ron Chernow’s “Alexander Hamilton” was published in 2004 and remains one of the most popular biographies of all time. It was a New York Times best-seller and served as the inspiration behind Lin-Manuel Miranda’s award-winning musical “Hamilton.” Chernow is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Washington: A Life.” His most recent biography “Grant” was published in 2017.

Few books come with higher expectations than this biography of America’s most brash, self-assured and hyperkinetic Founding Father. But not only does Chernow’s narrative of this intriguing Revolutionary-era figure surpass lofty expectations, it may well set the standard for the nearly perfect biography.

Meticulously researched and brilliantly composed, this biography contains 731 pages of text and covers Hamilton’s entire life: from his tantalizingly chaotic early years to his untimely death at the age of…

Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination
by Neal Gabler
851 pages
Vintage (Random House)
Published: October 2006

“Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination” by Neal Gabler was published in 2006 and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography. Gabler is an author, journalist and former film critic whose previous books include a biography of Barbra Streisand and a behind-the-scenes look at Hollywood. He is currently working on a biography of Edward Kennedy.

This biography of Walt Disney is one of two recent, compelling works reviewing the life of a man whose lasting impression on American culture is indisputable (the other being Michael Barrier’s 2007 “The Animated Man.”) Biography aficionados will quickly discover that Gabler’s hefty book – with 633 pages of text and about 200 pages of notes and bibliography – provides much to enjoy.

To suggest this book is…

In various posts over the years I’ve mentioned how countries finally got out of the Great Depression.  Generally that involved breaking the link between their respective currencies and gold and then being able to adopt more-expansionary macroeconomic policies.  That was relatively easy to do as a purely technical matter, but it took a long time for countries to get there (a handful of significant countries not until 1936).  I’ve worried aloud that given how low the starting point for nominal interest rates was going to be that in the next serious downturn the refusal of central banks –  and it is simply a refusal –  to take policy rates deeply negative would end up as much the same sort of fetter as gold once was.

The definitive book-length of this angle on the Great Depression is Berkeley professor Barry Eichengreen’s  Golden Fetters.  It was published in 1992 – decades…

Ordinances of 1311

Following his return, Gaveston’s relationship with the major barons became increasingly difficult. He was considered arrogant, and he took to referring to the earls by offensive names, including calling one of their more powerful members the “dog of Warwick”. Henry, 3rd Earl of Leicester and Lancaster and Gaveston’s enemies refused to attend parliament in 1310 because Gaveston would be present. Edward was facing increasing financial problems, owing £22,000 to his Frescobaldi Italian bankers, and facing protests about how he was using his right of prises to acquire supplies for the war in Scotland. His attempts to raise an army for Scotland collapsed and the earls suspended the collection of the new taxes.

The king and parliament met again in February 1310, and the proposed discussions of Scottish policy were replaced by debate of domestic problems. Edward was petitioned to abandon Gaveston as his counsellor and instead adopt…

This Episode

The platoon is selected to attend a weekend camp run by a tough Spanish captain.

Wikipedia

Dad’s Army is a BBC sitcom about the British militia called the Home Guard during the Second World War. It was written by Jimmy Perry and David Croft, and broadcast on the BBC from 1968 to 1977. The sitcom ran for nine series and 80 episodes in total; there was also a radio version based on the television scripts, a feature film and a stage show. The series regularly gained audiences of 18 million viewers, and is still repeated worldwide.

The Home Guard consisted of local volunteers otherwise ineligible for military service, either because of age (hence the title Dad’s Army) or by being in professions exempt from conscription. Dad’s Army deals almost exclusively with men over military age, and featured older British actors, including Arthur Lowe, John Le Mesurier, Arnold Ridley…