Utopia, you are standing in it!

Superb cast and drama

Smiley’s People was a 1982 drama miniseries in six parts, made for the BBC. Directed by Simon Langton, produced by Jonathan Powell, it is the television adaptation of the 1979 spy novel of the same name by John le Carré. Starring Alec Guinness, Michael Byrne, Anthony Bate and Bernard Hepton. It was first shown in the United Kingdom from 20 September to 22 October 1982, and in the United States beginning on 25 October 1982.

Wikipedia

Smiley’s People is a spy novel by John le Carré, published in 1979. Featuring British master-spy George Smiley, it is the third and final novel of the “Karla Trilogy”, following Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Honourable Schoolboy. George Smiley is called out of retirement to investigate the death of one of his old agents: a former Soviet general, the head of an Estonian émigré organisation…

Saturday and Sunday, 21 & 22 January 2023 (9am – 4pm)

Location:Levin Show Grounds, Victoria Street, Levin

ACT will have a stand at the Fair (inside the “Stadium Trade Sites”), so come along and have a chat to ACT MPsNicole McKeeandMark Cameronabout the real issues affecting you.

This should be a fabulous Fair, with typically, over 10,000 people attend over the 2 days.

Apart from our wonderful MPs at the ACT stand, there will also be a spectacle of stock competitions, equestrian events, wood chopping, shearing, dog trials, sideshows, and a range of entertainment on stage for all the family.

For details about ACT’s policy and MP profiles, click herehttps://www.act.org.n

For further details on the AP&I show, please clickhere.

National, NZ First and Labour will also be there. National tell us their tent will be near…

Depriving your economy of reliable and affordable power is the fastest way to wreck it. Which is the very thrust of the policy that has been adopted by every country currently obsessed with subsidised wind and solar.

The rent-seekers behind the greatest economic and environmental scam in history, still contend that there are millions of groovy Green jobs in the offing, if only we keep shovelling billions of dollars’ worth of subsidies in their direction. Although, all the evidence suggests otherwise.

The concept of destroying wealth (and indeed entire functioning cities) to ‘create’ new jobs is known in economics as the ‘broken window fallacy’. The notion being that, if every window in a city were simultaneously smashed, there will be thousands of new jobs for glassmakers and glaziers created by reason of the urgent necessity of their replacement.

Michael Munger details how the same woolly-headed thinking is being applied…

Gough Whitlam died today at the age of 98. His death comes just a few weeks shy of the thirty-ninth anniversary of his dismissal at the hands of the Governor-General. This momentous event was one of the defining moments of Australian politics, but what exactly happened back in November of 1975, and why is it significant?

Whitlam became Prime Minister of Australia in 1972, and although his Australian Labor Party had a small majority in the House of Representatives, the Senate was controlled by the Opposition Coalition.[1] One of the quirks of the Australian constitution is that, unlike most Westminster systems, their upper house has the roughly the same powers as the lower house,[2] and the Coalition was not shy about using its Senate majority to frustrate the Whitlam Government. In 1974, Whitlam sought a double dissolution (i.e., a dissolution of both the Senate and the House of…

Recently, the Queen stated her wish that the Duchess of Cornwall should become ‘Queen Consort’ when the Prince of Wales ascends the throne. But what, exactly, does that mean?

A Queen Consort is distinct from a Queen Regnant. The former is the wife of a King,[1] while the latter is sovereign in her own right.[2] Although she generally doesn’t have any constitutional functions,[3] a Queen Consort is entitled to certain privileges.[4] Most notably, she is often crowned alongside her husband, though this is not a matter of right (George IV infamously barred Caroline of Brunswick from his coronation in 1821).

A Queen Consort has her own Household headed by a Lord Chamberlain, as well as her own Attorney General and Solicitor General. She is also exempt from paying any toll, fine, or amercement, and she is entitled to the tails of whales captured near the coast…

I had to return to Daniel Day Lewis‘ Oscar acceptance speech from the spring of 1990 — God Bless Youtube — to make sure I was remembering it right, that he saluted the Academy for “providing me with the makings of one helluva weekend in Dublin” followed by a tribute to the young actor who played the even-younger Christy Brown in the early scenes of “My Left Foot.”

That Day Lewis, the oft-nominated, three-time Oscar winner who is basically the Brando, DeNiro and Streep of his generation of actors, could transform himself into the memoirist, poet, painter and novelist Christy Brown — born with cerebral palsy — seems like a given today. He’s simply the very best at what he did before he retired and gave the rest of the Screen Actor’s Guild a chance.

But watching the film anew, I was stunned at how good young Hugh O’Conor

Fascinating bed-time reading.

In my post about the problems with the Canadian Succession to the Throne Act 2013, I referred to the Crown’s status as a corporation sole. Since then, I’ve been asked about the nature of corporations sole, so I thought a brief explanation might be in order.

To quote Sir William Blackstone:

Corporations sole consist of one person only and his successors, in some particular station, who are incorporated by law, in order to give them some legal capacities and advantages, particularly that of perpetuity, which in their natural persons they could not have had (Commentaries on the Laws of England, vol. 1, pg. 469).

Because of the Crown’s status as a corporation sole, it is often said that “the king never dies” (rex nunquam moritur). When one monarch dies, their heir immediately succeeds to the throne without any kind of interregnum, and the new…

Last week, the Cabinet Office announced the creation of a Coronation Claims Office that will decide who gets to perform certain ceremonial services connected with the King’s coronation. They have three sources:[1] hereditary rights, appanages to an office or title, or land tenure by grand serjeanty.[2] The last category is by far the most common.[3]

Coronation services can be quite varied. The right to present the Sovereign with three maple cups, the right to make wafers, the right to present a glove for the Monarch’s right hand, and the right to present the Sovereign with a towel when they wash before the Coronation Banquet have all been the subject of coronation claims.[4] However, modern monarchs have generally dispensed with services related to the Coronation Banquet or the Coronation Procession. Performing a coronation service is traditionally seen as a matter of prestige, and people have gone to…

You know policymakers have lost the plot when they start waxing lyrical about battery storage and ‘green’ hydrogen; neither of which exist at any scale; neither of which are even vaguely economic, even with massive taxpayer-funded subsidies to prop them up.

English dictionary doyen, Samuel Johnson reckoned that patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, which might have been the case in 1775, but these days it’s waffle about storing wind and solar generated electricity at grid-scale, to account for total and totally predictable collapses in their daily output; aka sunset and calm weather.

While the scoundrel of today helps propagate the lie that the only thing standing between us and an all-wind and sun-powered future is a few giant Teslas, the reality back on Earth is altogether different, as this report from GB News testifies.

‘We are on the brink of disaster’ – Net Zero Watch says power from…

If you look at the long-run trends in labor markets, one of the most obvious changes is the decline in working hours. The chart from Our World in Data shows the long-run trend for some countries going back to 1870.

Hours of work declined in the US by 43% since 1870. In some countries like Germany, they fell a lot more (59%). But the decline was substantial across the board. One thing to notice in the chart above is that for the very recent years, the US is somewhat of an outlier in two ways. First, there hasn’t been much further decline after about the mid-20th century. Second, average hours of work in the US are quite a bit higher than many of developed countries (though similar to Australia).

But the labor market in the US (and in other countries) is in a very unusual spot at the present moment…