Utopia, you are standing in it!

Charles I (19 November 1600 – 30 January 1649)[a] was King of England, King of Scotland, and King of Ireland from March 27, 1625 until his execution in 1649.

Charles was born into the House of Stuart as the second son of King James VI of Scotland, but after his father inherited the English throne in 1603 (as James I), he moved to England, where he spent much of the rest of his life. He became heir apparent to the three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland in 1612 on the death of his elder brother Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales. An unsuccessful and unpopular attempt to marry him to the Spanish Habsburg princess Maria Anna culminated in an eight-month visit to Spain in 1623 that demonstrated the futility of the marriage negotiations. Two years later he married the Bourbon princess Henrietta Maria of France, the youngest daughter of Henri IV…

As  New Zealand   faces the  most brutal   recession in  living memory,  the  battle  to preserve   the core  of the  economy deepens.  Companies  are  cancelling  dividends  to protect what cash they have, others  are  reaching  for  financial  aid  from  their banks or  the government.

Yet for   some   businesses, notably  the  big  supermarket  chains,  the crisis  is accelerating    their  cash   flows.

Point of Order   has surveyed an array of   companies listed on  NZX, particularly in  several sectors—food  production, health and pharmaceutical  supplies, transport, agriculture  services—   which  have issued  updates. These should provide   comfort  to  their shareholders, and the market generally.

Latest  to  do so  is   King  Salmon,  the world’s largest aquaculture producer of the premium King salmon species.   Employing 500 people,  it operates  within the primary industry food producer category which has been included in the government’s list of essential services.

In its update to the  NZX, it  says :

The proposition that our Police are paving the way for a partnership in which former MP Hone Harawira and other iwi leaders police communities within the borders they define went unchallenged when put to press officers working for the Prime Minister and the Police.

The picture painted in the preceding paragraph was drawn from Deputy Police Commissioner Wally Haumaha’s statement on road blocks Harawira set up in Northland to check tourists’ health.  He declared:

” … we want to model what it looks like when iwi, police, councils and other agencies work in partnership”. 

But nether the Police nor the Prime Minister’s Office directly answered questions put to them by Point of Order about the legality of Harawira’s blocking public roads while policing the a border which he presumably established.

At the Trust, yet verify blog, Michel has written a couple of posts about the Hornsdale Power Reserve.  I had intended to do a post on this energy storage facility for a while and commented that I was planning to do a post but hadn’t gotten around to it.  When I said would not have to produce a post Michel said his was only one way to look at it and there are other possible views.  After reading the second post I decided to make a point about this system as it relates to New York State energy policy.

Background

According to the Hornsdale Power Reserve website “At 100MW/129MWh, the Hornsdale Power Reserve is the largest lithium-ion battery in the world, and provides network security services to South Australian electricity consumers in concert with the South Australian Government and the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO).  The Hornsdale Power Reserve is…

This piece is the result of a collaboration between the Economic History Review, the Journal of Economic History, Explorations in Economic History and the European Review of Economic History. More details and special thanks below.

Exhibit depicting a miniature from a 14th century Belgium manuscript at the Diaspora Museum, Tel Aviv. Available at Wikimedia Commons.

As the world grapples with a pandemic, informed views based on facts and evidence have become all the more important. Economic history is a uniquely well-suited discipline to provide insights into the costs and consequences of rare events, such as pandemics, as it combines the tools of an economist with the long perspective and attention to context of historians. The editors of the main journals in economic history have thus gathered a selection of the recently-published articles on epidemics, disease and public health, generously made available by publishers to the public, free of access, so…

During World War II a debate raged among allied strategists as to how much civilians should be targeted to defeat the Nazis.  As the Germans wreaked havoc on civilian populations throughout Europe and the United Kingdom the defeat of Hitler’s henchmen was deemed a necessity no matter the cost.  Max Hastings, a British journalist and historian, the author of numerous volumes ranging from World War I, the Battle of Britain, World War II, Winston Churchill and Vietnam tackles the issue of civilian casualties in his latest effort, OPERATION CHASTISE: THE RAF’S MOST BRILLIANT ATTACK DURING WORLD WAR II.

By May 1943 the British had accomplished little against the Nazis when compared to the effort and suffering of the Soviet Union which was finally making its push from Stalingrad westward.  Further, Winston Churchill was under a great deal of pressure to produce victories to stir the English people.  The allied…

The Coronavirus Act 2020, the UK’s most substantial legislative response to the Covid-19 pandemic, received Royal Assent yesterday after a fast-tracked procedure through both Houses. Indisputably, the pandemic falls within the range of situations under which it is constitutionally acceptable for Bills to be fast-tracked. While there is no corollary between an expedited piece of legislation and a bad piece of legislation, fast-tracking the Coronavirus Bill carries important implications for the constitutional relationship between Government and Parliament. Not least, parliamentarians had limited time to scrutinise legislation containing measures that have been described by the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law as ‘the most sweeping powers ever taken by the UK Government outside of wartime’. But, in this context, the implications for the balance between Government and Parliament extend beyond the immediate passage of the Act. Therefore, while Tierney and King stressed the dilemma between safeguarding public health and…

On 11 January 1979, the front-page of the Sun covered a press conference given by the prime minister, James Callaghan. The headline – ‘Crisis? What crisis?’ – was one of the most memorable and enduring. On the fortieth anniversary, this is an extract from Alwyn Turner’s Crisis? What Crisis? Britain in the 1970s (Aurum, 2008)…

It was, to start with, bitterly cold, the coldest January since 1963. Weeks of frost, freezing fog, hailstorms, sleet and snow were followed in early February by a combination of a sudden thaw and heavy rain that produced widespread flooding. And then came yet more blizzards. In Scotland there were reports of beer freezing in pub cellars and of frozen waves in Oban harbour as the temperature plunged to –25º Celsius, while the whole country’s transport system struggled to cope.

Edward Heath had at least been lucky with the weather in 1973–74; in 1979, James…

In the second half of her series on exiting the English Republic (part one available here) Dr Vivienne Larminie, Assistant Editor of the Commons 1640-1660 project, explores the dissolution of the Long Parliament…

On 16 March 1660 the Parliament which had begun nearly twenty years earlier, on 3 November 1640, agreed to dissolve itself. After well over 3,000 days of sitting, several forcible interruptions and a lengthy gap from 1653 to 1659, a great volume of unprecedented legislation, countless hours of novel executive committee meetings, many heated debates and much praying and listening to sermons, the assembly which had stood up to Charles I and defeated his forces in battle voted for its own demise. It did so explicitly in anticipation of fresh elections and the calling of a new representative body, to convene at Westminster on 25 April.

The end of the Rump Parliament on 21…

Robert I (July 11, 1274 – June 7, 1329), popularly known as Robert the was King of Scotland from 1306 until his death in 1329. Robert was one of the most famous warriors of his generation, and eventually led Scotland during the First War of Scottish Independence against England. He fought successfully during his reign to regain Scotland’s place as an independent country and is today revered in Scotland as a national hero.

Several members of the Bruce family were called Robert, the future king was one of ten children, and the eldest son, of Robert de Brus, 6th Lord of Annandale, and Marjorie, Countess of Carrick, and claimed the Scottish throne as a fourth great-grandson of David I of Scotland. His mother was by all accounts a formidable woman who, legend would have it, kept Robert Bruce’s father captive until he agreed to marry her. From his mother, he inherited…

The wind industry was founded on lies, built on myth and runs on subsidies. ‘Propaganda’ was conjured up by a Catholic Pope, employed with devastating effect by the Nazis and still maintains control over the masses in China. But it wasn’t until the wind industry switched into gear that propaganda really hit its straps. Being able to turn out lines such as “the wind is always blowing somewhere” and “the wind is free” was a mere doddle for the spin doctors and PR masters, who’ve worked overtime for nearly 20 years in an attempt to present wind power as part of an “inevitable transition” to an all wind and sun powered future.

As Dr John Constable details below, the wind industry has employed every euphemism, neutered every noun, assaulted every adjective and invalidated every verb in the English language. Or, as George Orwell put it, these propaganda masters have managed…