Utopia, you are standing in it!

Our ‘Named Parliaments’ series continues. Today Paul Seaward, British Academy/Wolfson Research Professor at the History of Parliament Trust explores the Cavalier Parliament, the first Parliament after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660…

The Parliament elected in April 1661 was designed to sweep away the last vestiges of the English Revolution and restore the monarchy to its pre-Civil War glory. It was the Convention of 1660, elected a year earlier, that had brought the Interregnum to an end, summoning Charles II back from his continental exile; but men who had fought for the king and his father had been deliberately excluded from it. As far as the king was concerned, the Convention needed to be replaced as soon as possible with something more vigorously reactionary. His new Parliament fitted the bill: ‘no man’, wrote his lord chancellor and chief minister, the earl of Clarendon, ‘could wish a more active spirit…

I just read John Cochrane’s essay “Inflation and Debt” in the Fall 2011 issue of National Affairs. On his webpage, Cochrane gives this brief summary of what the paper is about.

An essay summarizing the threat of inflation from large debt and deficits. The danger is best described as a “run on the dollar.” Future deficits can lead to inflation today, which the Fed cannot control. I also talk about the conventional Keynesian (Fed) and monetarist views of inflation, and why they are not equipped to deal with the threat of deficits. This essay complements the academic (equations) “Understanding Policy” article (see below) and the Why the 2025 budget matters today WSJ oped (see below).

And here’s the abstract to his “Understanding Policy in the Great Recession” article:

I use the valuation equation of government debt to understand fiscal and monetary policy in and following the great recession…

Mark Levin asks Dr.Patrick Michaels to explain Climate Change and why it seems to be a major crisis just now. AOC claims that we have just 12 years left, which gets lots of attention because she is “click-bait” for the media, largely because she is so ignorant about the Constitution, and how the government works. But we have Climate Marches, lots of people who, never having learned anything about the science, believe that there is a crisis and we have to save the planet or we’re all doomed.

This is what I was trying to explain in my previous post. The internet, and the ability to “surf,” picking up little bits and pieces, has given us the illusion that we know more than we do. We no longer understand things in depth, because we don’t stick around long enough. The talking-heads and the ideas change with a click of the…

Is the government digging itself into a hole as it awaits a solution to the problem of contested land at Ihumatao?

For two days in a row, PM Jacinda Ardern has backed away from questions over a   Crown loan being used to purchase the land where a housing development has been held up because of a long-running protest.

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “safer”, came with the email note, “Burka time again.”

Mo spouts the usual faith-kissing jargon, while Jesus makes some good points about the “protection” of the burqa.  As far as conviction for rape is concerned, most people think that sharia law requires that a conviction of rape requires the testimony of four witnesses is required for a rape conviction, but there’s confusion about this, and some Islamic scholars say the “four witness” rule is for adultery. It appears, though that that rule has been applied for rape, which is a capital crime under Islamic law.  A confession and other forensic evidence, however, will suffice.

But there’s no denying that rape victims in Islamic countries have been punished under the assumption that they must have been willing participants, that it was really a case of adultery or that they have dishonored the family. Such…

H/T The GWPF

All those trees would have absorbed large amounts of the carbon dioxide they claim to be so scared of. Somehow all this is deemed to be ‘sustainable’, using the climate excuse.

The EU wants to save our climate with supposedly green biofuels and has deemed palm oil “sustainable”. Yet on the other side of the globe, rainforests are being clear-cut to produce the 1.9 million tons of palm oil that end up in European fuel tanks every year, says Rainforest Rescue.

The European Union wants to protect the climate and reduce carbon emissions from motor vehicles by blending fuels with increasing shares of supposedly eco-friendly “biofuels”.

Last year, 1.9 million tons of palm oil were added to diesel fuel in the EU – in addition to millions of tons of equally harmful rapeseed and soybean oils.

The plantations needed to satisfy Europes’s demand for palm oil cover…

by Bishnupriya Gupta (University of Warwick and CAGE)

The full paper of this blog post was published by The Economic History Review and it is available here 

Official of the East India Company riding in an Indian procession, watercolour on paper, c. 1825–30; in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Available at <https://www.britannica.com/topic/East-India-Company/media/1/176643/162308&gt;

There has been much discussion in recent years about India’s growth failure in the first 30 years after independence in 1947. India became a highly-regulated economy and withdrew from the global market. This led to inefficiency and low growth. The architect of Indian planning –Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister, did not put India on an East Asian path. As a contrast, the last decade of the 20^th century has seen a reintegration into the global economy and today India is one of the fastest growing economies.

Any analysis of Indian growth and development that…

The fishermen who work off America’s Atlantic coast, are furious over plans to spear thousands of industrial wind turbines into their fishing grounds, destroying not only the seabed (the source of their income and prosperity), but wrecking their fishing grounds, forever.

Trawlermen off the New Jersey coast have already told developers what they can do with their projects: Deepwater in Deep Trouble: Fishermen Tell Off-Shore Wind Farm Developers to F@*#K Off

Trawlermen everywhere face plenty of mortal peril dished up by Poseidon and mother nature. However, for those fishermen braving the elements off the coast of Rhode Island and Massachusetts the prospect of hundreds of these things providing a deadly obstacle course is simply too much.

Fishing For A Living Is Dangerous. Will Offshore Wind Farms Make It Worse?
WSHU
Nadine Sebai
1 August 2019

New England commercial fishermen have one of the most dangerous jobs in the country. Now…

My collection of liberals who are honest on the issue of gun control is expanding.

• In 2012, I shared some important observations from Jeffrey Goldberg, a left-leaning writer for The Atlantic. In his column, he basically admitted his side was wrong about gun control.
• Then, in 2013, I wrote about a column by Justin Cronin in the New York Times. He self-identified as a liberal, but explained how real-world events have led him to become a supporter of private gun ownership.
• In 2015, I shared a column by Jamelle Bouie in Slate, who addressed the left’s fixation on trying to ban so-called assault weapons and explains that such policies are meaningless.
• Most recently, in 2017, Leah Libresco wrote in the Washington Post that advocates of gun control are driven by emotion rather empirical research and evidence.

Now we have another addition to the list.

Alex Kingsbury of…