Utopia, you are standing in it!

Catherine Howard (c. 1524 – February 13, 1542) was Queen of England from 1540 until 1542 as the fifth wife of Henry VIII.

Catherine had an aristocratic ancestry as a granddaughter of Thomas Howard, 2nd Duke of Norfolk (1443 – 1524), but her father, Lord Edmund Howard, was not wealthy, being the third son of his father – under the rules of primogeniture, the eldest son inherited all of the father’s estate.

Catherine Howard

Catherine’s mother, Joyce Culpeper, already had five children from her first husband, Ralph Leigh (c. 1476 – 1509) when she married Lord Edmund Howard, and they had another six together, Catherine being about her mother’s tenth child. With little to sustain the family, her father often had to beg for the help of his more affluent relatives.

Her father’s sister, Elizabeth Howard, was the mother of Anne Boleyn. Therefore, Catherine Howard was the first cousin of Anne Boleyn…

Introduction

On the 7 December 2022, the judgment of the UK Supreme Court in theReference by the Attorney General for Northern Ireland – Abortion Services (Safe Access Zones) (Northern Ireland) Bill(‘SAZ’) affirmed the legality of a measure aimed at strengthening the exercise of the right to abortion in Northern Ireland (NI). The case concerned a challenge to the legislative competency of the Northern Ireland Assembly (‘the Assembly’) to introduce a Bill curbing the right to protest outside of abortion clinics, which the Attorney General for Northern Ireland (‘AG’) contented to be incompatible with guarantees under the European Convention on Human Rights (‘ECHR’ or ‘the Convention’). The Bill intended to protect those accessing abortion clinics from harassment by creating“safe access zones” around the clinics, within which it would be an offence to influence a protected person, whether directly or indirectly[Clause 5(2)(a)]. This measure was considered necessary to…

From the Emperor’s Desk: I took a short break so I am posting the anniversary of this event today.

Victoria (Alexandrina Victoria; May 24, 1819 – January 22, 1901) was Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 20 June 1837 until her death in 1901. Her reign of 63 years and 216 days was the second longest reign in British history and was known as the Victorian Era.

Victoria was the daughter of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn (the fourth son of King George III), and Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, who was born in Coburg on August 17, 1786 in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation and was named Marie Louise Victoire.

She was the fourth daughter and seventh child of Franz Friedrich Anton, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, and Countess Augusta of Reuss-Ebersdorf. One of her brothers was Ernst I, Duke…

Big battery fire [image credit: reneweconomy.com.au
The so-called savings come from *not* paying some of the constraint costs of excess wind energy production. The Sky News headline about saving ‘billions’ turns out to mean some unknown time in the future when many more such installations might be online. They ignore the fact that batteries have a limited life span and, being lithium-ion types, can suffer expensive or even disastrous overheating problems.
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It looks like a self-storage park: rows of shipping containers in a patch of Merseyside waste ground, says Sky News.

But appearances can be deceptive as this is the first step in saving billions of pounds off bills and millions of tonnes of carbon.

It’s a mega-battery.

Demonising coal-fired power is a sport played by smug, well-fed Westerners – who’ve never lived a day without power, in their cosseted lives.

For the poorest energy-starved billions, a day with affordable power is a dream worth fighting for. The West’s prosperity was won with coal, a fact seemingly recognised by wind and solar-obsessed Brits and Germans, as they fire up the coal-fired plants that they had only recently deemed redundant.

Those same plants are central to the growth in prosperity among Asian economies, not least India.

With a population of 1.3 billion – and hundreds of millions of those screaming out for reliable and affordable electricity – which promises to lift them out of grinding agrarian poverty – India’s government is on a perfectly pragmatic path. Shunning intermittent and chaotic wind and solar, in the knowledge that the only way to deliver power 24/7, at a price that their…

More evidence that petulant climate obsessives are a drag on society and the UK economy.
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The UK government is being urged to sack one of its trade advisers after he joined a thinktank that has denied the scale of the climate crisis and campaigned against net zero, says The Guardian.

Tony Abbott, a former Australian prime minister, announced this week that he had joined the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF).

Abbott has been a member of the UK government’s Board of Trade since 2020, advising on post-Brexit deals, with Australia now a key trading partner since the UK left the EU.

In March 1984 the British Ska band ‘the Special AKA’ released a song titled “Free Nelson Mandela” It was written by British musician Jerry Dammers.

Dammers told Radio Times: “I knew very little about Mandela until I went to an anti-apartheid concert in London in 1983, which gave me the idea for ‘(Free)Nelson Mandela’. I never knew how much impact the song would have”

Released under the band name Special A.K.A. due to various legal wrangling occurring within the band at the time, “Free Nelson Mandela” roars, and taps into South African rhythms with pure celebratory spirit. The polar opposite of a lament such as Gabriel’s “Biko,” “Free Nelson Mandela” is one of the great protest songs of the era. However it would take another 6 years before Nelson Mandela was released from Drakenstein Correctional Centre.

On 11 January 1962, using the adopted name David Motsamayi, Mandela secretly left South…

Top Gun: Maverick (2022) Director: Joseph Kosinski

“It’s not the plane, it’s the pilot.”

Bucking the trend of recent years, 2022 was actually a pretty extraordinary year for movie-making. There were some real classics like the rebirth of the dark knight in The Batman, a gripping reimagining of Hamlet in The Northman, an arthouse meditation on the death of crumbling communities in The Banshees of Inisherin, a harrowing new German version of All Quiet on the Western Front, and the highly-anticipated sequel to Top Gun (1986), Top Gun: Maverick (2022). Emerging from what felt like an endless pandemic, Top Gun: Maverick is the film that enraptured a beleaguered public –it presents a story that is hopeful, nostalgic, triumphant, emotional, heroic, exhilerating, and aspirational. It would have been easy for Paramount to take the low road with yet another Hollywood deconstruction…

Seriously?

This is how you want to go out? A plotless, sexually-neutered piffle of a stripper movie, barely-scripted, with hardly enough “film” to fill a trailer, much less close to two hours of screen time?

No, I didn’t like it. No, it doesn’t appear that Steven Soderbergh was all that crazy about it, either. At least his lunkheaded “Logan Lucky” had a funny character or two, and was stupid enough that it dared to offend.

The third and final “Magic Mike” movie is just stupid. What “Staying Alive” is to “Saturday Night Fever,” “The Last Dance” is to the gritty, sexy, hustling beefcake that was “Magic Mike.”

If Soderbergh was a musician, we’d call this a “contractual obligation album” and shake our heads about the money we just wasted supporting his “art.”

Even Channing Tatum seems a little embarrassed by all this by the time the third act rolls around.