Utopia, you are standing in it!

Granville Sharp’s Cases on Slavery

Andrew Lyall

The purpose of Granville Sharp’s Cases on Slavery is twofold: first, to publish previously unpublished legal materials principally in three important cases in the 18th century on the issue of slavery in England, and specifically the status of black people who were slaves in the American colonies or the West Indies and who were taken to England by their masters. The unpublished materials are mostly verbatim transcripts made by shorthand writers commissioned by Granville Sharp, one of the first Englishmen to take up the cause of the abolition of the slave trade and slavery itself. Other related unpublished material is also made available for the first time, including an opinion of an attorney general and some minor cases from the library of York Minster.

The second purpose, outlined in the Introduction, is to give a social and legal background to the cases and…

The age of criminal responsibility is the age which if a child falls beneath it they cannot be held to have committed a crime and cannot be held responsible for their actions.

Before the 13th Century and the medieval times of England, it was a generally held custom that children under the age of 12 could not be convicted of crimes. The reasoning behind this is archaic. From 12 years old, a person was expected to be in frankpledge. This was a sharing of joint responsibility towards your relatives or to a Lord you had given your oath of service.

Being in frankpledge meant that if you committed wrongful actions and were summoned for judgment before your local hundred-court, but did not turn up, your relatives and lord could be fined on your behalf. By necessity this meant a person of 12 years of age had to be responsible for…

Tasmanian Wedge-Tailed Eagle: take a look before it’s sliced to extinction.

Cars, cats and skyscrapers don’t kill Eagles, but 60 m wind turbine blades with their tips travelling at 350 Kph routinely smash them out of existence. In Australia’s designated National Park, Tasmania, its peculiar species of Wedge-Tailed Eagle is both rare and endangered.

Now it faces the existential threat of ever more and even larger giant industrial wind turbines.

Climate cultists claim to be in a rebellion against extinctions and, yet, continue to exhort us that the solution to the annihilation of species is an all wind powered future.

Well, in Tasmania it looks as if they’ll get their wish, as vast tracts of the Apple Isle get carpeted in hundreds more of these giant whirling wonders. However, those that actually give a fig about nature aren’t so happy with the idea of critically endangered species being wiped off…

Now it’s time to boycott the NRA, Ban Guns, Red Flags, all the usual fuss about “assault weapons” and go over all the same old, same old arguments once more.

The NRA is not an evil organization that favors killing people and white supremacy and all of the other current buzz words of this particularly ugly campaign season. It is an organization that defends our Constitutional right to bear arms. There are a lot of ordinary people out there who hunt deer, elk, pheasants and ducks and geese, and depend on filling their freezers with game for the winter. There are all sorts of apartment-living people who have never held a gun in their hands, think killing an animal or bird for food is deplorable, and that no one should be able to own a gun.

There is no such thing as an “assault weapon.” There are military weapons that…

Image credit: thecount.com
H/T The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)

Some stories of Londoners stumbling around in the gloom or stranded on non-moving trains here. Obviously any emergency back-up either wasn’t there or proved ineffective.

Enappsys, an energy consultancy, said the blackout may have been caused by the unexpected shutdowns of the Hornsea offshore wind farm and the Little Barford gas-fired power plant, reports The Guardian.

Large parts of England and Wales have been left without electricity following a major power cut, electricity network operators have said, with a serious impact reported on rail and road services, including city traffic lights.

Harold James has a fascinating piece:

In July 2016 the BBC – as usual – reported both the murder of an Israeli in a drive-by shooting attack and the later operation to apprehend the Hamas-linked operatives who carried out that attack without using the words terror, terrorism or terrorist.

The BBC News website’s report on the attack told readers that:

“…an Israeli man was killed and his wife and two children wounded after their car was fired on near the Jewish settlement of Otniel. […]

The victims of Friday’s attack were members of the same family. Local media named the dead man as 48-year-old Michael “Miki” Mark, a father-of-10.”

BBC audiences were not however told that – as later documented by “local media” – the wounded members of the family were given first aid by a Palestinian resident of the Hebron area and his wife.

“In the moments after the Friday drive-by shooting attack that killed…