Utopia, you are standing in it!

From The Emperor’s Desk: Prior to the Coronation of King Charles III of the United Kingdom I had been working on my series “Are They A Usurper?” aand my topic had been King Richard III of England. I would like to conclude my evaluation of King Richard III.

My verdict, quite simply, is yes I believe King Richard III usurped the throne from his nephew, and the rightful King, Edward V.

As previously mentioned the case hinged on the legality of the marriage of King Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville. It is alleged that Edward IV had a pre-contracted betrothal to Lady Eleanor Butler. There is no evidence of such a pre-contract.

The Richard III Society has an excellent article online addressing this topic.

“The fact of the pre-contract cannot now be proved, although it could have been known to many persons in 1483, but there is no doubt…

I have given a semi-public lecture on the Israeli judicial reforms in comparative-institutional perspectives three times since late March. Now, with the permission of the hosts, I have uploaded one of them to YouTube.

In this lecture I offer my perspectives on the proposed judicial overhaul in Israel, speaking as a specialist on constitutional design of democracies around the world, as well as someone who has followed and taught about–and sometimes published on–Israeli democracy for years. I gave this for Congregation Beth Israel in Ann Arbor, Michigan, at the invitation of my friend, Rabbi Nadav Caine, who also serves as host of the lecture.

Queen Anne, pregnant, in 1536, was aware of the dangers if she failed to give birth to a son. With Catherine of Aragon recently dead, Henry would be free to marry without any taint of illegality. At this time, Henry began paying court to one of Anne’s maids-of-honour, Jane Seymour, and allegedly gave her a locket containing a portrait miniature of himself. While wearing this locket in the presence of Anne, Jane began opening and closing it. Anne responded by ripping the locket off Jane’s neck with such force that her fingers bled.

Later that month, the king was unhorsed in a tournament and knocked unconscious for two hours, a worrying incident that Anne believed led to her miscarriage five days later. Another possible cause of the miscarriage was an incident in which, upon entering a room, Anne saw Jane Seymour sitting on Henry’s lap and flew into a rage…

Credit: Robert A. Rohde @ Wikipedia
Re. the well-known 100,000 year problem, the researchers propose new climate-related evidence for ‘the shift from the 40,000-year cycles to the 100,000-year cycles we experience today’.
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Approximately 700,000 years ago, a “warm ice age” permanently changed the climate cycles on Earth, says Phys.org.

Contemporaneous with this exceptionally warm and moist period, the polar glaciers greatly expanded.

A European research team including Earth scientists from Heidelberg University used recently acquired geological data in combination with computer simulations to identify this seemingly paradoxical connection.

There have been a few posts here recently about Professor Caroline Saunders, whose initial term on the Reserve Bank MPC expired at the end of March and who was eventually, belatedly, and with no announcement at all, appointed by the Minister of Finance to a short second (and final) term on the MPC. The most recent of those posts was here.

When there was no announcement before the Saunders term expired, I had lodged OIA requests with both the Reserve Bank and the Minister of Finance for material relating to her reappointment (or otherwise). Responses to both emails have now come back.

If it is now clear that the bottom line reason why Saunders was not reappointed before her term was expired was administrative slackness (between the Minister’s office and Treasury mainly), the documents that were released don’t put any of those involved in a particularly good light.

My…

Serfs attacking Climate Establishment

Phys.org sounds the alarm: Meteorologists targeted in climate misinfo surge.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Once trusted faces on the news, meteorologists now brave threats, insults and slander online from conspiracy theorists and climate change deniers who accuse them of faking or even fixing the weather.

Users on Twitter and other social media falsely accused Spain’s weather agency of engineering a drought, Australia’s of doctoring its thermometers and France’s of exaggerating global warming through misplaced weather stations.

“The coronavirus is no longer a trend. Conspiracy theorists and deniers who used to talk about that are now spreading disinformation about climate change,” Alexandre Lopez-Borrull, lecturer in Information and Communication Sciences at the Open University of Catalonia, told AFP.

“These scientific bodies are seen as part of the establishment, so anything they say may get disputed on social networks.

“They are providing…

As wind and solar capacity increases, it becomes increasingly evident they are hopelessly incapable of delivering power as and when we need it.

Back in January 2021, Germany shut down 11 coal-fired power plants (with a total capacity of 4.7 GW). That shutdown lasted eight days, with most of the plants up and running by February that year.

Australia is hellbent on committing the same form of suicide; ideologues cheered as another large, perfectly operable 2,000 MW coal-fired power plant (Liddell in NSW) was shut down earlier this month. Power consumers were less enthusiastic, as wholesale power prices jumped 80%, almost overnight.

Australia’s big pumped hydro scheme, Snowy 2.0 has turned into a ludicrously costly fiasco, which is unlikely to be completed anytime between now and kingdom come. Snowy 2.0 was meant to act like a big battery and make up for routine total collapses in wind and…