Utopia, you are standing in it!

Winter holiday travel is notoriously frustrating. This year was especially bad if you were flying on Southwest. But that frustration about delayed and cancelled flights seems to have caused a big increase in pundits criticizing the airline industry generally. Here’s one claim I’ve seen a few times lately, that airline prices have “soared” as airlines consolidated.

Reich’s claim that there are 4 airlines today is strange — yes, there are the “Big Four” (AA, United, Delta, and Southwest), but today there are 14 mainline carriers in the US. There have been many mergers, but there has also been growth in the industry (Allegiant…

Despite defeat in the First English Civil War, King Charles I of England, Scotland and Ireland retained significant political power. This allowed him to create an alliance with Scots Covenanters and Parliamentarian moderates to restore him to the English throne. The result was the 1648 Second English Civil War, in which he was defeated once again.

Charles I in Three Positions by van Dyck, 1635–36

Treaty of Newport

In September 1648, at the end of the Second English Civil War, the Long Parliament was concerned with the increasing radicalism in the New Model Army. The Long Parliament began negotiations with King Charles I via the Treaty of Newport intended to bring an end to the hostilities of the English Civil War.

The members wanted to restore the king to power, but wanted to limit the authority he had. Charles I conceded militia power, among other things, but he later…

The post below updates the UAH record of air temperatures over land and ocean.  But as an overview consider how recent rapid cooling  completely overcame the warming from the last 3 El Ninos (1998, 2010 and 2016).  The UAH record shows that the effects of the last one were gone as of April 2021, again in November 2021, and in February and June 2022  Now at year end 2022, we have again global temp anomaly matching zero warming since 1995. (UAH baseline is now 1991-2020).

For reference I added an overlay of CO2 annual concentrations as measured at Mauna Loa.  While temperatures fluctuated up and down ending flat, CO2 went up steadily by ~55 ppm, a 15% increase.

Furthermore, going back to previous warmings prior to the satellite record shows that the entire rise of 0.8C since 1947 is due to oceanic, not human activity.

The animation is an update…

With the usurpation of the throne of England by Henry Bolingbroke as King Henry IV of England and Lord of Ireland this event brought instability to the Monarchy and planted the seeds for further usurpations during the period of the Wars of the Roses.

To get to the reign of King Edward IV of England we need to examine the complex genealogy of the descendants of King Edward III of England and the ancestry of King Edward IV.

The heir presumptive to childless King Richard II of England was Edmund Mortimer, 5th Earl of March, a great-grandson of King Edward III’s second surviving son, Lionel, Duke of Clarence.

Edmund Mortimer, 5th Earl of March

Edmund Mortimer, 5th Earl of March, was born at New Forest, Westmeath, one of his family’s Irish estates, on November 6, 1391, the son of Roger Mortimer, 4th Earl of March, and Eleanor Holland. He had…

Thomas Becket (December 21, 1119 or 1120 – 29 December 29, 1170) is also known as Saint Thomas of Canterbury, Thomas of London and later Thomas à Becket.

He was an English nobleman who served as Lord Chancellor from 1155 to 1162, and then notably as Archbishop of Canterbury from 1162 until his murder in 1170. He is venerated as a saint and martyr by the Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion. He engaged in conflict with Henry II, King of the English, over the rights and privileges of the Church and was murdered by followers of the king in Canterbury Cathedral.

On February 21, 1173 – little more than two years after his death – he was canonised by Pope Alexander III in St Peter’s Church, Segni.

This simple blog post is about his name. When I began studying European Royalty back in the late 1970s and early…

In Part I of this series, I shared a very amusing video from Bill Maher about how colleges and universities have become “luxury day-care centers.”

I then added some of my analysis to show that government subsidies – such as student loans – were the underlying problem.

Simply stated, colleges and universities increased tuition and fees so they could capture the value of the subsidies (as explained by Professor Daniel Lin back in 2012).

To make matters worse, they’ve been spending the money on more bureaucracy rather than anything that would improve educational outcomes for students (or generate spin-off benefits for the overall economy).

But “more bureaucracy” is an understatement. Here’s a sentence that I initially thought had to be satire.

But I’m not joking. This sentence comes from a jaw-dropping story about university bureaucrats trying to micro-manage student social life at Stanford University.

Here are the full details…

Sometimes Bill Maher, the host of Real Time on HBO, says smart things and sometimes he says not-so-smart things.

His recent monologue on the “college scam” was an example of the former. It’s almost as if he was channeling Professor Daniel Lin.

Maher makes great points about how government subsidies for higher education are a backwards form of redistribution, taking money from lower-income people and giving it to higher-income people.

And I love what he says about credentialism, where people can’t climb the job ladder without getting useless degrees like masters in education.

But his monologue wasn’t perfect. He mentioned how tuition costs have exploded, but he didn’t make the should-be-obvious connection between rising costs and government subsidies.

To be more explicit, tuition expenses have skyrocketed because colleges and universities have raised prices to capture all the extra loot politicians are dumping into the system.

Which…

Heysham power station [image credit: Belfast Telegraph]
The UK government is running short of electricity supply options due to net zero policies based on climate obsessions, as well as years of reluctance to believe that renewable energy is, and will always be, too erratic and unreliable. A power supply crunch is looming.
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The Telegraph reports:
Two nuclear power stations crucial to keeping Britain’s lights on risk being closed next year as a result of Jeremy Hunt’s windfall tax, their French owner warns today.

EDF, which operates all five of the country’s serving nuclear plants, said the Chancellor’s raid on power producers will make it harder to keep the ageing Heysham 1 and Hartlepool stations open as long as hoped.

It would mean the sites close in March 2024, potentially removing the “cushion” of spare capacity used by the National Grid to avoid blackouts and reducing nuclear…

The anti-all-things-modern propaganda goes on…and on and on. Relentlessly blaming severe weather on humans, or saying they made it worse, is silly and in any case unscientific. Why do they do it?
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The AP and other outlets made dodgy claims about climate change in 2022, with the AP getting over $8 million from activist groups to do it, says Climate Change Dispatch.

The “Climate Fact Check 2022″ report (pdf), presented by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), the Heartland Institute, the Energy & Environmental Legal Institute, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), and the International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC), stated that “climate alarmists” and members of the media engaged in claims about the relationship between man-made emissions and natural disasters, claims that clashed with “reality and science.”

In February, the Associated Press admitted that they would assign more than 24 journalists across the…

Stardate: 5730.2 (2268)
Original Air Date: January 10, 1969
Writer: Gene L. Coon (pen name of “Lee Cronin”) and Oliver Crawford
Director: Jud Taylor

“There was persecution on Earth once.
I remember reading about it in my history class.”
“Yes, but it happened way back in the twentieth century.
There’s no such primitive thinking today.”

The planet Ariannus is a vital transfer point on regular space commercial lanes, however it has recently been attacked by a bacterial invasion which threatens to render it lifeless unless checked. The Enterprise is presently en route to Ariannus (about three hours and four minutes away) while Lt. Uhura advises the planet’s Ministry of Health that the Enterprise will begin immediate decontamination of the planet’s atmosphere upon arrival in orbit –but suddenly, a Starfleet shuttlecraft appears onscreen (it looks to be a recently stolen Starfleet shuttlecraft). Spock notes there is one…