Utopia, you are standing in it!

The dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire occurred de facto on August 6, 1806, when the last Holy Roman Emperor, Franz II of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine, abdicated his title and released all imperial states and officials from their oaths and obligations to the empire.

Since the Middle Ages, the Holy Roman Empire had been recognized by Western Europeans as the legitimate continuation of the ancient Roman Empire due to its emperors having been proclaimed as Roman emperors by the papacy. Through this Roman legacy, the Holy Roman Emperors claimed to be universal monarchs whose jurisdiction extended beyond their empire’s formal borders to all of Christian Europe and beyond.

The decline of the Holy Roman Empire was a long and drawn-out process lasting centuries. The formation of the first modern sovereign territorial states in the 16th and 17th centuries, which brought with it the idea that jurisdiction corresponded to actual…

During July we welcomed year 12 student Thomas O’Donoghue to the History of Parliament office, to carry out a work experience placement with our research and outreach teams. During his time, Thomas worked with Dr Robin Eagles, editor of our Lords 1715-1790 project, to explore an attempt in 1741 to topple Sir Robert Walpole from power.Here Thomas writes about the impact of two key speeches given in the Houseduring this year…

On 13 February 1741, Sir Robert Walpole’s enemies made their most daring assault on the man who had dominated British politics for two decades: they proposed a motion in the House of Lords calling for a “Humble Address” to King George II. This address suggested that Walpole should be removed “from His Majesty’s Presence and Councils for ever.” While this motion was ultimately handily defeated – sources agree it was by at least 40 votes – it…

Plenty start out as fans of wind and solar power and turn against it, but it’s hard to find opponents who later become supporters.

Present the facts to reasonable people, and they’ll want to know how the wind and solar scam got started in the first place and why it hasn’t been stopped in its tracks already?

On that score, there has been plenty of ‘road to Damascus conversions’ amongst environmentalists, originally hoodwinked by the allure of energy sources designed to run on nothing but sunshine and breezes, and meant to save the planet from every possible threat, not least a (naturally) changing climate.

Michael Shellenberger – who started out as a passionate eco-warrior – has since become one of the wind and solar scam’s loudest critics, and the most forceful advocate for nuclear power, there is. He has slammed intermittent renewables as worse than useless – and has gone…

Since I went to the archives for a video yesterday, let’s do the same thing today. Here’s my 2009 video about the close link between the size of government and the level of corruption.

I’m recycling this video because President Biden and his allies in Congress are poised to enact a revised version of the “Build Back Better” plan to expand the burden of government.

The legislation has all sorts of awful provisions, such as shoveling more money at a corrupt IRS, hurting jobs with higher taxes on “book income,” price controls on prescription drugs, and green-energy pork.

But today’s column will focus on process rather than policy.

To be more specific, I want to emphasize the video’s message about bigger government leading to more corruption.

And I’m going to cite an unexpected source – a left-leaning news outlet – to make my point.

In an article

The dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire occurred de facto on August 6, 1806, when the last Holy Roman Emperor, Franz II of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine, abdicated his title and released all imperial states and princes from their oaths and obligations to the empire.

Franz II-I, Holy Roman Emperor and Emperor of Austria

The empire was dissolved following a military defeat by the French under Napoleon at Austerlitz. Napoleon reorganized much of the Empire into the Confederation of the Rhine, a French satellite.

Emperor Franz survived the demise of the Holy Roman Empire by continuing to reign as the Emperor of Austria.

Holy Roman Empire in 1806

In 1804 Emperor Franz united his hereditary lands as Archduke of Austria and Kings of Hungary, Bohemia and Croatia into The Austrian Empire. Prior to the creation of this empire the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperors ruled these lands in person union and…

Little Boy was the name of the atomic bomb which was dropped from Enola Gay , over Hiroshima on August 6,1945. at 8.15 AM.The bomb exploded
about 1,500 feet above the city with a force of 15,000 tons of TNT.
The name of the plane was Enola Gay, named after the pilot’s mother.
The pilot, attached to the 509th, was Col. Paul Tibbets. The copilot
was Capt. Robert Lewis.
Little Boy destroyed 5 square miles of the city and caused about 140,000
deaths by the end of 1945.

The gun-type weapon possessed the power of 26,000,000 pounds of high explosives. Nuclear fission was achieved by the collision of two parts of active material (Uranium-235). A U-235 projectile fired down a gun barrel collided with a stationary element, causing a mass increase leading to nuclear fission. Little Boy was dropped untested. Previously, on July 26, the bomb, along with “Fat Man”…

As wind turbines are incapable of generating power on demand and wouldn’t last a second without massive subsidies, there is no ‘right’ place for them. Any power generation source that can’t deliver electricity on demand is pointless, so talk about appropriate siting is pure nonsense. Why bother?

Rent seekers and crony capitalists are the only ones pushing to jam these things in your backyard, but rural America is pushing back.

American farming communities clearly have the upper hand in the fight to save their homes and livelihoods from the wind and solar ‘industries’ intent on destroying them.

Rural Americans are on the warpath and refuse to become roadkill for the profiteers determined to destroy their peaceful and prosperous communities. The scale and success of their resistance has clearly caught the wind and solar ‘industries’ flat-footed.

Faced with their constituents’ growing fury, local governments have sided with them; introducing laws, for…

August 04, 2022

Douglas Murray, The Spectator’s associate editor, speaks to Kate Andrews about Drag Queen Story Hour, and the right’s response to it. Have they gone too far?

Read Douglas’s piece here – https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/w…

Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar, was first produced, in all probability, in 1599. The plot is based entirely on three of Plutarch’s biographies of eminent Romans, which Shakespeare found in Sir Thomas North’s translations into English of The Lives of the Most Noble Greeks and Romans, first published in 1579. The three lives he drew from are those of:

• Julius Caesar, chapters 61 to 69
• Mark Anthony 12 to 22
• Marcus Brutus 7 to 53

As you can see, whereas the assassination only takes up the last tenth of Caesar’s life, and the period from the assassination to the Battle of Philippi only takes up ten of Antony’s 87 chapters, the assassination and aftermath constitute almost all of Plutarch’s life of Brutus which may, at a very basic level, explain why Brutus emerges as the hero’ of Shakespeare’s play.

Brief synopsis

The figure the play is named after, Julius…