Utopia, you are standing in it!

Read this op-ed by David Brooks in today’s New York Times (click on screenshot) and see if you disagree with it. His fear, which is also is mine, is that the Dems, by moving ever further left in an effort to out-woke each other, will improve the prospects of Trump:

98 years ago today came the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary an act which precipitated the first World War. I cannot do justice in this blog to all the complexities that lead to the start of World War I. I don’t view the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand as the cause of World War I but merely the spark that set off a ticking time bomb. The roots of the war go back a long way in European history. Throughout the 19th century a weakened Ottoman Empire began losing its European territories. As territories were lost they were gobbled up by the larger European powers which often disregarded the ethnic and nationalistic make up of the population. This happened when Austria-Hungary annexed the Bosnian region which had a large population of Serbian nationals.

What also was a large factor was the alliance system that reached its peak during…

by Judith Curry

The House Oversight and Reform Environmental Subcommittee in a Hearing on Recovery, Resilience and Readiness – Contending with Natural Disasters in the Wake of Climate Change begins at 2 pm EDT.

I missed all but the last ten minutes of the first Democratic Presidential debate, as I was out and about. All I saw was a bunch of self-promotion, and some heated moments as the Dems attacked each other. Well, that’s to be expected. Weigh in below with your opinion, though it’s early days. Who did well and who didn’t?

CNN’s analysis is here, with their list of winners and losers. Of course making lists like this is largely for entertainment value, but for what it’s worth:

* Julián Castro: The former San Antonio mayor had been running below the radar — WAY below the radar — until Wednesday night. That is likely to change after his performance, in which he was able to carve out a remarkable amount of speaking time for a candidate polling somewhere between 0% and 1%. (An hour into the debate, Castro had…

Read this and weep.

My company is proud of the reputation it’s built with office tenants, in total circa 400 in the Wellington CBD.

Apart from the obvious attentions such as a much higher standard of maintenance than normal, we provide a number of free services, all greatly appreciated. We specialise in professional tenancies, embassies and what might described as the more prestigious government agencies such as the Ombudsman, judges offices and the like. Needless to say we maintain a full house.

In an official editorial (“The Guardian view on Trump and Israel-Palestine: the reality behind Kushner’s fantasy”) published on June 25, the Guardian predictably lambasted the new US peace plan, particularly its economy-first approach of promoting Palestinian prosperity as a path to a permanent resolution.

Whilst there was little in the editorial that was surprising, one sentence in particular caught our eye, because it says so much about how little the Guardian understands the root causes of Palestinian economic woes.

Many of these initiatives have been proposed before – in some cases, more than a decade ago – and are unachievable under current conditions. The report advocates them nonetheless because it simply refuses to recognise that the biggest obstacle to economic development is the West Bank’s occupation and the blockade of Gaza.

On the same day, the Guardian published another analysis by Mid-East correspondent Martin Chulov which similarly opined that…