Utopia, you are standing in it!

 The strong whiff of “treaty” politicking has accompanied the intense scrutiny of Oranga Tamaraki in recent months, including the Waitangi Tribunal’s announcing an urgent inquiry into the child protection agency’s practices towards Māori children.

No-one, curiously, seems much bothered about the agency’s practices towards other children.

Oranga Tamariki staffers certainly invited closer scrutiny when they tried to take a baby from her mother in Hawke’s Bay in May, a bungled operation that was the subject of a Newsroom investigation.  This prompted howls of outrage, cries of institutional racism and the calling of national hui.

The tribunal’s Chief Judge Wilson Issac  said:

“I conclude there are sufficient grounds for an urgent inquiry into a specific contemporary issue concerning a risk of significant and irreversible prejudice to Māori arising from current Oranga Tamariki policy and practice.”

Karl I (Karl Franz Joseph Ludwig Hubert Georg Otto Maria; August 17, 1887 – April 1, 1922) was the last Emperor of Austria, the last King of Hungary (as Karl IV), last King of Bohemia (as Karl III), and the last monarch belonging to the House of Habsburg-Lorraine before the dissolution of Austria-Hungary.

Karl, Emperor of Austria and King of Bohemia

Karl was born August 17, 1887 in the Castle of Persenbeug in Lower Austria. His parents were Archduke Otto Franz of Austria and Princess Maria Josepha of Saxony. At the time, his granduncle Franz Joseph reigned as Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary. Upon the death of Crown Prince Rudolph in 1889, the Emperor’s brother, Archduke Karl Ludwig, was next in line to the Austro-Hungarian throne. However, his death in 1896 from typhoid made his eldest son, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the new heir presumptive.

Marriage

In 1911, Archduke Karl…

This is a guest post by Monika Bednarek, a linguist who has extensively analyzed US TV series. She is the author of Language and Television Series and the editor of Creating Dialogue for TV, a collection of interviews with Hollywood screenwriters. She has created a companion website at www.syd-tv.com and tweets at @corpusling.

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The use of swear words in US TV series attracts a lot of attention. There are those who revel in creating mash-ups of swearing, and there are those who monitor and oppose swearing (like the Parents Television Council). Rules by the Federal Communications Commission restrict the broadcasting of profane and indecent speech to the evening and night and forbid obscene speech. But these rules don’t apply to subscription-based television such as cable or streaming services. Elsewhere I’ve looked at how frequent swearing is, but here I want to approach swearing…

“Totally Inappropriate”, proclaimed Auckland Mayor Phil Goff about Shane Jones’s response to an Indian migrant’s complaint about the Immigration Department. But inappropriate to what? Phil didn’t tell us, instead preferring to jump on the current fashionable bandwagon, led by the Indian community, with the wearingly wrong cries of racism and hate speech.

It transpired the Department had declined the migrant’s application to bring in an arranged marriage potential bride he’d never met. The Department declined permission for the excellent reason that the rules required it to do so. Specifically, couples must have lived together for a year before their migration applications can be considered.

by Judith Curry

Draft of article to be submitted for journal publication.

Introduction

Under our system of responsible government, the Sovereign or Governor General exercises his prerogative powers on the advice of the Crown-in-Council, and his constitutional powers relating to Parliament on the advice of the Prime Minister alone. Responsible government means that “Ministers of the Crown are responsible for acts of the Crown” and responsible to the House of Commons.[1] The Sovereign or Governor General acts as a neutral figure and remains above partisan politics. The Prime Minister is the Governor General’s principle constitutional advisor, and while his government commands the confidence of the House, the Governor General must carry out the Prime Minister’s advice. Under no circumstances can the Leader of the Opposition, the leader of the third opposition party, or any other government or opposition backbencher offer legitimate, binding constitutional advice to the Governor General.

The Crown-in-Parliament (Tidridge 2011, 63)

We must also situation this constitutional relationship between…

Introduction

Ring of Steel sets out:

1. to explore how popular consent for the First World War was won and maintained in Austria-Hungary and Germany from 1914 to 1918
2. to explain how extreme and escalating violence radicalised both German and Austro-Hungarian war aims, leading to the institution of slave labour and the stripping of agricultural and industrial resources in the occupied territories, and encouraging plans for the permanent annexation of Belgium, northern France and west Russia
3. to describe the societal fragmentation caused by the war, especially in an Austria-Hungary already deeply fissured by ethnic tensions and which eventually collapsed into a host of new nation states; Germany was more ethnically homogenous and had been more socially unified in support of war so the end, when it came, unleashed a flood of bitterness and anger which expressed itself not along ethnic but along class lines, leading to street fighting between parties of…

This is another very short book, one of the popular Seminar Studies in History series. These all follow the same layout: 100 or so pages of text divided up into brisk, logical chapters, followed by a short Assessment section, and then a small selection of original source documents from the period.  It’s a very useful format for school or college students to give you a quick, punchy overview of a historical issue.

This one opens by summarising the central challenge faced by the Austro-Hungarian Empire as it entered the twentieth century: how to take forward a fragmented, multi-cultural empire based on traditional dynastic and semi-feudal personal ties into the age of nationalism and democracy where every individual was, in theory at least, a citizen, equal before the law.

On page one Mason locates four key failures of late imperial governance:

1. the failure to solve the Czech-German conflict in the 1880s…

The 2019 Federal election was billed as a referendum on Climate Change, with Labor’s Bill Shorten pitching up a 50% Renewable Energy Target and a whopping carbon dioxide gas tax, to boot. Bill also promised that he would eradicate Australia’s frequent and punishing droughts, with the aid of windmills and solar panels. Although no one, save Bill, was quite sure how this novel and ingenious ‘plan’ would make it rain on cue.

Instead of the Labor landslide predicted by all and sundry, the proletariat gave a pretty fair indication as to where Shifty Shorten could stick his 50% RET.

The broad mass of the great unwashed in Australia’s suburbs and regions worked out long ago that heavily subsidised and chaotically intermittent wind and solar represent a problem, rather than a solution.

Watching their power prices go through the roof, with much worse to come, the ambitious working classes were clearly…

I had a popular post in 2013 called, “Why taller-wife couples are so rare,” a title given it by my old Atlantic editor, who ran it under a picture of Nicole Kidman (5′ 11″) with her second shorter husband. I also put a version of it in my book Enduring Bonds, and reference it in The Family. In it I used data from the 2009 PSID to show that people are more likely to pair up as taller-man-shorter-woman than would be expected by chance. I’ve now updated it with the 2017 PSID data. This is a revised version of that post with the new data.

Men are bigger and stronger than women. That generalization, although true, doesn’t adequately describe how sex affects our modern lives. In the first place, men’s and women’s size and strength are distributions. Strong women are stronger than weak men, so sex…

Australia, or, more specifically, the ever-infuriating John Howard, wants to impose a test of proficiency in English as a requirement for citizenship (he also wants to test ‘Australian Values’, but the idea is just too ludicrous to spend any more time on).

I remembered reading Mike Carlton’s take on the concept of language proficiency tests in Australian history and stumbled upon a particular case that I thought must have been a joke. Alas, it turns out to be factual.

Australia’s immigration policy while Howard’s hero, Robert Menzies was Attorney General, included a clause (section 3(a) of the Immigration Act of 1901) that immigrants and visitors could be subject to a dictation test in an unspecified European language. If you don’t believe me, here‘s a facsimile of the act itself.

This wasn’t used much, it seems, but in 1934, an anti-fascist, anti-war Czech intellectual by the name of Egon Kisch…

Timothy Egan is a liberal op-ed columnist for the New York Times, and has the credentials to prove it, including a share in the Times’s Pulitzer Prize for its series “How Race is Lived in America”. (He also has a National Book Award for nonfiction for his 2009 book The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America.)

It would be hard, then, for leftists to dismiss Egan as an alt-righter or white supremacist, though I suppose that, as he was born in 1954, he could be denigrated as a “boomer.” (That, of course, is ageism.) But I suppose they’ll try, as is always the case when somebody writes a piece like Egan’s latest for the NYT (click on the screenshot below):

The exemplar of someone who’s turned off by “insufferable wokeness” is Egan’s sister, who works cleaning toilets at Wal-Mart:

No matter how…