Utopia, you are standing in it!

(The bombing of London during the WWII “Blitz”)

Living at a time when leadership seems to be severely lacking with a president who enacts his personal agenda seemingly on a daily basis when people are dying is eye opening and ultimately a tragedy.  In times like this it is important to examine historical leadership that is grounded in fact and strength of personality.  Leadership during times of crisis is of the utmost importance be it a pandemic, wartime, economic or weather-related catastrophes.  The public needs to rely on someone to step up and provide honest and factual information with direction to mitigate people’s anxiety and provide hope for the future.  Examining the aerial atrocities committed by the Germans during World War II over London, Coventry and other English cities in late 1940 and early 1941 is a case in point.  Winston Churchill the newly appointed Prime Minister would rise to…

Richard I (September 8, 1157 – April 6, 1199) was King of England from 1189 until his death. He was the second king of the House of Plantagenet. He also ruled as Duke of Normandy, Aquitaine and Gascony, Lord of Cyprus, Count of Poitiers, Anjou, Maine, and Nantes, and was overlord of Brittany at various times during the same period. He was the third of five sons of King Henry II of England and Duchess Eleanor of Aquitaine and seemed unlikely to become king, but all of his brothers except the youngest, John, predeceased their father. Richard is known as Richard Cœur de Lion or Richard the Lionheart because of his reputation as a great military leader and warrior.

By the age of 16, Richard had taken command of his own army, putting down rebellions in Poitou against his father. Richard was a central Christian commander during the Third Crusade, leading…

Here’s the headline of an article published in the Mail on Sunday (sister site of the Daily Mail) on March 29, written by their chief political correspondent Ian Gallaghar.

The Invictus Games, launched by the Duke of Sussex – himself a veteran – in 2014, allows wounded or sick military personnel and veterans to compete in sporting events.  The inclusion of wounded Israeli veterans in the next biennial (in 2022), the Mail on Sunday article claims, echoing the headline, has caused a “backlash”.

However, as blogger Elder of Ziyon noted in a post that day, when you read the article, you learn that the only “backlash” Prince Harry received was by one Arab journalist with a history of supporting violence and antisemitism: Palestinian-born Abdel Bari Atwan

For instance, Atwan enthusiastically supported a brutal 2008 Palestinian terror attack which killed eight Jewish religious students in a Jerusalem Yeshiva, saying it…

What happened? When? To whom? and Why?

On 19 March, screened by the draft Corona: Defence of the Realm Bill, the long awaited  Windrush: Lessons Learned Report (hereafter Lessons Learned) was published. For those who have missed out on the considerable publicity generated by the Windrush Generation scandal, a short account is in order. The  Windrush Generation broadly comprises Commonwealth citizens who have indefinite leave to remain in the UK or “settled status” on the basis of having  settled in the UK before 1973 when the Commonwealth Immigration Act 1971 came into force, and not since 1988 having left the UK for more than two years. Many of these elderly British citizens were unable to prove their right to live here to the satisfaction of the Home Office (perhaps because they entered the country on a parent’s passport or had lost their papers in the ensuing forty-odd years since…

Ever since the 2016 referendum, economists have attempted to estimate what Brexit ‘has already cost’ the UK economy and households. It won’t be a surprise to see some of the most depressing numbers dusted off this week to mark the departure from the EU. But all these studies should be taken with a large pinch of salt. It would certainly be wrong to regard these numbers as gospel truth, or a reliable warning of (even) worse to come.

There are two main approaches to answering the question of what impact the referendum result has already had. One is ‘top-down’, which looks at the overall performance of the UK economy compared to its peers, usually measured by headline GDP growth. The other is ‘bottom-up’, which focuses instead on specific indicators, notably inflation and business investment, where it is relatively clear that the vote to leave has had a negative impact.

I’m…

On March 17 I noted that I’d made a $100 bet with a friend that Donald Trump would lose his bid for a second term come November.  My reasons were these:

Now that Trump has bungled the handling of the epidemic, makes daily statements about it so palpably stupid that even a “deplorable” can see through them, and gives himself a ten out of ten in handling the crisis, I think his chances of victory are even slimmer. And that’s on top of the economy, which is heading south so fast it will reach Antarctica before the summer.

Since then Trump has screwed up even more, repeatedly making dumb and even harmful assertions (“I might take chloroquine”), backtracking (pews filled by Easter!), praising himself, denigrating others (including governors) and generally looking like the narcissistic moron he is. It’s on view daily.  And yet. . . his approval rating is as…

Parliament is currently in recess but its work continues, with select committees moving to remote hearings, and the Speaker promising to move, if only temporarily, towards a ‘virtual parliament’. David Natzler, who spent almost 40 years working in the House of Commons, draws on his experience to suggest how issues relating to the remote conduct of oral questions, voting, committees, and other key matters, might be resolved before parliament returns in late April.

In my blog of 23 March, I suggested that parliament would be judged on how well it had dealt with COVID-19. Over the past fortnight parliament has passed the Coronavirus Act and Commons select committees have held several hearings (see below) in procedurally unique circumstances. Developments in other parliaments and institutions have given an indication of how Westminster might adapt in the coming months. And there have been growing calls for business – in …

The wind and solar industries face an existential threat, with governments throwing every available resource at resuscitating their economies, instead of pandering to the renewable energy sector. The Draconian measures adopted to prevent the spread of COVID-19 mean that governments have a choice.

Throw taxpayer’s dollars at filthy rich wind and solar power outfits (which have wallowed in hundreds of $billions in subsidies over the last 20 years).

Or to provide general economic stimulus – in the form of welfare to the masses of recently unemployed and subsidies and support to keep businesses afloat and their workers employed – that might allow their countries to recover from state enforced lockdowns, with some degree of dignity.

No prizes for guessing which choice is the more palatable from a political perspective.

Proving themselves, yet again, to be tin-eared mouthpieces for the wind and solar lobby, US Democrats pulled out all stops in…

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has a new book, her fifth, and the fourth to have a one-word title (the others are The Caged Virgin, Nomad, Infidel, and Heretic, and I’ve read all but the first). The last one, Heretic, was subtitled Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now, and was her manifesto not to destroy Islam (which many think is her agenda), but to reform it from within. I wrote about it previously, and thought that while the motivation was good, Muslims would never accept Hirsi Ali’s five suggestions for reforming the faith (example: “Muslims must not take the Qur’an literally”).

If Islam is to be defanged, making the extremist and violence-prone segments go away, it not only has to be from within, but there’s no good program for doing it—even from Hirsi Ali, who spent much of her life as an ardent believer.

And…

With coronavirus sucking all the air out of room globally, I got interested in looking at how the Canadian national flu seasons compare with the new Wuhan virus. The analysis is important since there are many nations at higher latitudes that are in equilibrium relative to infectious diseases, but vulnerable to outbreaks of new viruses. Where I live in Canada, we have winter outbreaks every year, but are protected by a combination of sanitary practices, health care system and annual vaccines, contributing to herd immunity.

For example, 2018-19 was a slightly higher than typical year, with this pattern:
The various flu types are noted, all together making a total of 48,818 influenza detections during the 2018-19 season. A total of 946 hospitalizations were reported by CIRN-SOS sentinels that season (age = or >16).  Source:  Annual Influenza Reports

A total of 137 (14%) ICU admissions and 65 (7%) deaths were reported. …