Utopia, you are standing in it!

Derek Birkett is a retired grid system control engineer with two decades of experience under both nationalization and private ownership. He has had project responsibility on installation and commissioning at five major coal and nuclear power stations across the UK from which chartered status was awarded.

In this talk he delivered during January for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Derek Birkett outlines some of the problems created for the grid by an increasing amount of renewable generators.

by Fred E. Foldvary

A “canon” is a set of items which are regarded by the chiefs of a field to be the accepted elements of the domain. Every religion, for example, has a canon of accepted ideas and documents such as the established books of the Bible. Every scientific field has a canon of propositions and facts accepted as genuine by the experts and by those in authority such as editors of the major journals and most members of the departments of the prominent universities.

The canon of economics consists of the propositions, methods, and historical facts accepted as true and applicable by most scholarly economists. This canon appears in textbooks and in the articles of the prominent journals. The ideas and methods outside the canon are referred to as heterodox economics, in contrast to the mainstream or orthodox canon. There have been articles and organizations about the mainstream…

1 March 2018
Submission on the Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Bill

To the Governance and Administration Select Committee,

I am making this submission to the above committee as an individual. My submission is in response to the opening up of the Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Act (BDMRRA) for amendments through a Bill before the House.

My submission seeks to ensure that the BDMRRA is made consistent with Section 21(1a, 1m) of the Human Rights Act (HRA) 1993, which lists sex as well as sexual orientation (heterosexual, homosexual, lesbian or bisexual orientation) as prohibited grounds for discrimination. My submission seeks to ensure that the BDMRRA is also made consistent with Section 19 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act and with the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), particularly Article 1, which reads:

For the purposes of the…

Feedback on the recommendations from New Zealand’s third Universal Periodic Review (UPR) at the Human Rights Council in Geneva

The governments of Iceland and Australia have recommended that New Zealand amend Section 21 of our Human Rights Act (HRA) 1993, by adding “gender identity” as a prohibited ground for discrimination.

The concept of “gender identity” should not be introduced into the HRA. There are several reasons for this, and this submission will focus on two:

1. The HRA needs to be clear and evidence-based, but the concept of “gender identity” is both vague and ideological.
2. The concept of “gender identity” is at odds with the HRA Section 21 (1)(a) and 21(1)(m), which prohibit discrimination on the grounds of sex and sexual orientation.

1. The concept of “gender identity” is vague and ideological

New Zealand’s Human Rights Commission (HRC) defines “gender identity” as “A person’s internal, deeply felt sense of being male…

Yesterday I described the situation of Ronald Sullivan, a professor of law at Harvard University who is also resident head (“faculty dean”) of Winthrop House, an undergraduate residence hall where students live for their first three years in college. Like many law professors, Sullivan has a private practice, as well as a long history of social-activist legal work. These include, as the New Yorker interview below describes, “director of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School and previous [service] as the director of the Washington, D.C., Public Defender Service. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, he helped free thousands of Louisianans who had been incarcerated without due process.”

He’s also the first black faculty dean at Harvard and has other social-justice cred for defending minorities (including the family of Michael Brown) and women.

None of this mattered after Sullivan signed on as a member of Harvey Weinstein’s defense…

Dr Robin Eagles, Editor of the House of Lords 1660-1832 project kicks off our new series, ‘Named Parliaments’. Here, whilst highlighting a number of Named Parliaments in the seventeenth century, he explores the debate of parliament versus convention or assembly in the early modern period…

The
question of what is and is not a Parliament might seem a simple one, but on two
occasions during the reign of James I, efforts were made to reclassify
unsatisfactory Parliaments as mere ‘conventions’. This was true of the 1614
‘Addled Parliament’, as it had failed to pass any legislation, and James I also
attempted to downgrade the 1621 Parliament, insisting it had not been one either.
Doubt might also be expressed about the status of some of the experimental
bodies that met during the turbulent years of Civil War and Interregnum, the
‘Nominated Assembly’…

Image credit: emeraldmedia.co.uk
How about a ban on endless international climate conferences that lead to hundreds of flights – including many long-haul – but produce little of value, ‘to save emissions’? In fact the ’20 flights in a lifetime’ proposed here would probably have that effect anyway. The report ends with an apparent claim that particulates in the air are a ‘climate problem’.

Leading German climate scientist Hans Joachim Schellnhuber has called for a substantial shift in strategy for the tourism industry to make sure that its carbon footprint does not contribute to the sector’s possible demise.

“Tourism bites the hand that feeds it if it contributes to climate change,” the former director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) said at the ITB international tourism fair in Berlin.

If beaches around the world are flooded due to a global rise in temperature of 4 or 5 degrees…

Barfe Khalaf Farho said she felt like she was born again after setting her veil on fire Credit: Sam Tarling for the Telegraph

Liberated Yazidi women burn their veils as Islamic State crumbles by By Raf Sanchez, Hassakah Province, Syria, 8 March 2019, the Daily Telegraph:

As she emerged from five years captivity inside the Islamic State, Barfe Khalaf Farho wanted one thing more than anything else: fire.

The 26-year-old Yazidi had been forced to wear a niqab every day of her slavery in the homes of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) fighters and their wives.

So when she reached the Western-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) last week the first thing she did was tear off her veil and set it aflame. The Kurdish fighters cheered her on as the black garment twisted in the fire.

Andrew Coates reports (atTendance Coatesy):

ISIS militants overran Nadia…