Utopia, you are standing in it!

One this date in History: February 13, 1689. William III-II & Mary III declared joint sovereigns of England, Scotland and Ireland.

William III (Dutch: Willem; November 4, 1650 – March 8, 1702), also widely known as William of Orange, was sovereign Prince of Orangefrom birth, Stadtholder of Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Gelderland and Overijssel in the Dutch Republic from 1672 and King of England, Ireland and Scotland from 1689 until his death in 1702. It is a coincidence that his regnal number (III) was the same for both Orange and England. As King of Scotland, he is known as William II. He is sometimes informally known in Northern Ireland and Scotland as “King Billy”.

William inherited the principality of Orange from his father, William II, who died a week before William’s birth. His mother, Mary, was the daughter of King Charles I of England. In 1677, he married his fifteen-year-old first…

James II-VII (October 14, 1633 – September 16, 1701) was King of England and Ireland as James II and King of Scotland as James VII, from February 6, 1685 until he was deposed in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The last Roman Catholic monarch of England, Scotland and Ireland, his reign is now remembered primarily for struggles over religious tolerance.

However, it also involved the principles of absolutismand divine right of kings and his deposition ended a century of political and civil strife by confirming the primacy of Parliament over the Crown.

King James II-VII of England, Scotland and Ireland.

James inherited the thrones of England, Ireland and Scotland from his elder brother Charles II with widespread support in all three countries, largely based on the principle of divine right or birth. Tolerance for his personal Catholicism did not apply to it in general and when the English and Scottish…

I can’t resist a bit of Schadenfreude about the New York Times, as both Andrew Sullivan and I recently criticized it for mixing opinion with news, and becoming unacceptably “woke”. This week, the paper screwed up in its desire to go after a Trump appointee, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. When Kavanaugh was having confirmation hearings, my judgment was that he was probably guilty of sexual malfeasance, but on character issues alone I didn’t think he deserved confirmation. There was no need, then, to adjudicate a “he said/she said” conundrum. Others differed, but I thought Kavanaugh was unfit for the bench.

Last week two authors of a “News Analysis” piece in the NYT, Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, both Times reporters, dropped a few bombshells about unreported or uninvestigated sexual harassment by Kavanaugh; these are detailed in their upcoming book, The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation.

Unfortunately…

Last week the governor of California signed into law a good vaccination bill, Senate Bill 276, which stipulates a standardized procedure for requesting medical exemptions from childhood vaccination:

By Duggan Flanakin ~

For decades, the solar industry benefited from generous federal, state, and local subsidies to increase its footprint. Yet these generous subsidies ignore the costs of disposal of solar panel waste.

Things may be changing. In May 2018, Michael Shellenberger, a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment” and Green Book Award Winner, wrote in Forbes that the problem of solar panel disposal will explode with full force in two or three decades and wreck the environment because it is a huge amount of waste which is not easy to recycle.

Shellenberger was citing comments, published in the South China Morning Post, from Chinese solar expert Tian Min, general manager of Nanjing Fangrun Materials, a recycling company in Jiangsu province that collects retired solar panels. Tian called his country’s solar power industry “a ticking time bomb.”

This is not really news. The Associated Press had reported in 2013…

Steven Crowder reveals how veganism is not only bad for animals and the environment, but actually worse than cannibalism.