Utopia, you are standing in it!

Guest post by Ian Williams, 15 October 2019

Wager of law was a central part of a serious disagreement between the courts of King’s Bench and Common Pleas in the last decades of Elizabeth I’s reign. The dispute concerned the availability and acceptability of the writ of assumpsit being used to sue for debts when those debts could also be recovered using the writ of debt.[1] The writ of debt was the long-established remedy for such claims and it permitted a defendant to wage her law or have the case tried by a jury. The insurgent writ of assumpsit permitted only trial by jury.

A defendant sued using a writ of debt could successfully defend their claim by completing the formal process of waging their law. Coming before the judges in Westminster Hall, the defendant would have to swear an oath denying their liability. Oath-helpers would then swear to…

The narrative that the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by extremist Yigal Amir killed the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is advanced in the headline of an Oct. 11th Guardian review of a new Israeli film on the 1995 tragedy:

It’s also included in the opening paragraph of the review, written by Anne Joseph:

The murder of an Israeli prime minister by an Orthodox Jew was inconceivable,” says American-Israeli film-maker Yaron Zilberman. “For anyone who was pro-peace, it was beyond anything that we could fathom.” The assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by the religious ultra-nationalist law student Yigal Amir, at a peace rally on 4 November 1995, was one of the most traumatic events in Israel’s history. Rabin’s death buried the prospect of peace, further divided an already riven society and left an indelible mark on Israel’s politics.

The Guardian claim doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

First, shortly after Rabin’s assassination, Likud leader…

This is the kind of question that arises when you adopt full-blown intersectionalism. It’s apparently been decided that it’s okay to culturally “appropriate up“, i.e., Chinese people can wear jeans, and Africans suits, but it’s not okay to “appropriate down“, so that white people can’t wear cornrows or play jazz—at least not without explicitly acknowledging the borrowing and, as this article by Bianca Lambert, a freelance beauty writer, maintains, studying all the nuances of that borrowing.

The article at hand is, of course, at PuffHo, and the answer to the question in the title is a clear “yes: it’s appropriation for minorities to adopt black culture.” But it’s apparently not wrong for blacks to adopt Hispanic or Hindu culture. Click on the screenshot to read:

Most of the article is the usual culture-protection and calling-out of appropriators, and not worth commenting on again; but the thesis…

Heather MacDonald, on how the Delusion of Diversity Destroys Our Common Humanity. Well, yes. “Diversity” has become one of the big judgemental words. You have to measure up! But why and who is doing the measuring?

I would suggest that you can find more real diversity among groups of all one race, or all one ethnic origin than among a university’s sophomore class, But it’s always valuable to question one’s assumptions! That’s one of Heather MacDonald’s greatest skills.

The BBC’s Middle East editor recently gave a long interview to Paul Blanchard at ‘Media Masters’.

“Jeremy Bowen is the BBC’s Middle East editor. One of Britain’s best-known war correspondents, over the last 35 years he has brought the region’s most important stories to our screens – despite being shot, robbed at gunpoint, threatened, arrested and even thrown in jail. In this in-depth interview, Jeremy relives some of his most pivotal moments, from his first foreign assignment covering the invasion of Kuwait in 1990 to his recent battle with cancer; discusses the practical challenges of reporting impartially on issues like Israel, when both sides complain every report is biased and even the choice of individual words have to be taken carefully; and takes us behind the scenes of his interview with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.”

Listeners to that podcast (transcript available here) may have been surprised by the extent…

by Judith Curry

International climate agreements like the Kyoto Protocol may discourage much-needed investment in renewable energy sources, and hence be counterprodutive, according to new research.

As presidential election results in Afghanistan are being counted one must ask the question; how much better off is Afghanistan today, as compared to the period before the American invasion following 9/11?  Further one must ask; what is the future outlook for Afghanistan as the United States and its NATO allies are about to withdraw by the end of the year?  Carlotta Gall, a New York Times reporter who has worked in Afghanistan and Pakistan for more than ten years attempts to answer these questions and many others in her new book, THE WRONG ENEMY, AMERICA IN AFGHANISTAN 2001-2014.  A number of  books have been written about America’s role in Afghanistan and its relationship with Pakistan the best of which are Steven Coll’s GHOST WARS, Ahmed Rashid’s DESCENT INTO CHAOS, and Barnet R. Rubin’s AFGHANISTAN FROM THE COLD WAR THROUGH THE WAR ON TERROR, but what sets Gall’s apart is…

By Anton Lang ~

This Post details the daily wind power generation data for the AEMO coverage area in Australia. For the background information, refer to the Introductory Post at this link.

Each image is shown here at a smaller size to fit on the page alongside the data for that day. If you click on each image, it will open on a new page and at a larger size so you can better see the detail.

Note also that on some days, there will be a scale change for the main wind power image, and that even though images may look similar in shape for the power generation black line on the graph when compared to other days, that scale (the total power shown on the left hand vertical axis) has been changed to show the graph at a larger size to better fit the image for that…

I picked up the Dominion-Post newspaper from the front step this morning to find this blaring back at me.

The second page was entirely green, with a little Kiwibank logo and the twee marketing  line “Kiwis backing Kiwis”.  (I guess advertising must have been more expensive in the Herald, where it is “just” wrapped round the sports section).

Rarely had I ever been more glad that I’d never been tempted to shift my banking business to the state-owned Kiwibank.  The crude nationalism on display today was at possibly an even more inane level than the last such NZ-owned bank’s advertising campaign I wrote about

That one was on display at the heart of New Zealand’s “globalist-central” (if there were such a place), just over the road from the New Zealand Initiative, and a few hundred metres from places like MFAT, MBIE and The Treasury.   If it had any merit…