Utopia, you are standing in it!

Edward I (June 17/18, 1239 – July 7, 1307), also known as Edward Longshanks and the Hammer of the Scots was King of England and Lord of Ireland from 1272 to 1307.

Edward was born at the Palace of Westminster on the night of June 17–18, 1239, to King Henry III and Eleanor of Provence. Edward is an Anglo-Saxon name, and was not commonly given among the aristocracy of England after the Norman conquest, but Henry was devoted to the veneration of Edward the Confessor, and decided to name his firstborn son after the saint.

Before his accession to the throne, he was commonly referred to as The Lord Edward. The first son of Henry III, Edward was involved from an early age in the political intrigues of his father’s reign, which included an outright rebellion by the English barons. In 1259, he briefly sided with a baronial reform movement…

James Caan, Vito Corleone’s toughest son and Buddy the Elf’s soft touch dad, has died. An old school hardcase who worked pretty much right to the end, he was 82.

“Thief,” “Gardens of Stone,” “The Godfather,” he walked away from good parts and seemed to have as many foibles as anybody who ever attained star status. But he was one of a kind.

Talented people wanted to work with him, even if he wasn’t the nicest guy to deal with on the set. I remember him dismissing “For the Boys,” and keeping Bette Midler, a packed LA cinema and a big band waiting for the premiere, one of a couple of times I interviewed him.

A lot of long “bathroom” breaks in that era in Hollywood.

That British series on movies and the star system that contrasted Caan with gladhander hack Schwarzenegger made Arnold look like a putz and Caan…

There is no doubt that the thumping, grinding, mechanical cacophony generated by giant industrial wind turbines drives neighbours nuts. But trying to explain wind turbine noise to someone who has never had to live with it, is like trying to explain a migraine to someone who has never had a headache.

A study from Flinders University in South Australia found, that there’s a reason why wind turbine noise is so much worse after dark; precisely when people are trying to wind down and, at some point, sleep.

The Flinders University study identified the culprit as the pulsing, thumping nature of wind turbine noise – aka ‘amplitude modulation’ (AM) – which relates to blades passing the tower – that results in peaks and troughs in sound pressure levels – that makes living with wind turbine noise a daily misery for thousands around the world.

Australia’s Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) held that…

Boris Johnson’s time in Downing Street appears to be in its final days, but how it will end remains unclear. Robert Hazell examines the possibilities. How long will a leadership election take? Could there be a caretaker Prime Minister? What happens if Johnson tries to call a snap general election?

If Boris Johnson loses the confidence vote among Conservative MPs, he is not able to stand again. Any other Conservative MP can stand for the party leadership. How long it will take for the party to elect a new leader will depend on the number of candidates standing, and whether the vote goes to a second stage ballot of all party members. Party rules prescribe that Conservative MPs vote initially in a series of ballots to select two candidates, who then go forward to a postal ballot of all party members for the final decision. In 2005 it took two…

The Constitution Unit has today published a new discussion paper entitled Northern Ireland’s political future: Challenges after the Assembly elections. Here the author, Alan Whysall, Honorary Senior Research Associate at the Unit, introduces it. A further paper on longer-term prospects for Northern Ireland will be published later this year.

Northern Ireland voted for a new Assembly yesterday; the results will emerge over the coming hours and days. Thereafter, talks will begin on the formation of a new Executive. What happens in these negotiations matters profoundly for the future of Northern Ireland. It should also be of great concern to ministers in London. The future of the power-sharing arrangements that have brought stability to Northern Ireland for almost a quarter of a century may be at stake.

In current difficulties, there is also the potential to bring about change for the better. The paper explores what renewal of the…

From the Emperor’s Desk: This is the information I discovered.

The Treaty of Union and the subsequent Acts of Union state that England and Scotland were to be “United into One Kingdom by the Name of Great Britain”, and as such “Great Britain” was the official name of the state, as well as being used in titles such as “Parliament of Great Britain”.

The websites of the Scottish Parliament, the BBC, and others, including the Historical Association, refer to the state created on May 1, 1707 as the United Kingdom of Great Britain. Both the Acts and the Treaty describe the country as “One Kingdom” and a “United Kingdom”, leading some publications to treat the state as the “United Kingdom”. The term United Kingdom was sometimes used during the 18th century to describe the state.

Kingdoms

The Acts of Union 1800 were parallel acts of the Parliament of Great Britain…

Anyone with the temerity to tip a bucket on the subsidised wind and solar scam is soon removed from the public square by Big Tech, their online personas “vaporized” and their writings relegated to the “memory hole”.

George Orwell conjured up his nightmare world of malicious bureaucrats engaged in pernicious mind control in his novel, 1984.

At the time 1984 hit bookshelves in 1949, it was largely taken as a warning; directed at avoiding a future dominated by a malign few, at the expense of a pliant and gullible many. As the Iron Curtin descended across Europe, many took it as an analogue of the “how to” manual used by the Iron-Fisted, Communist regimes that ran the Soviet Bloc.

These days – as the great “Greenblob” (just the latest tribe of Neo-Marxists hell-bent on destroying free-market democracy from within) infects every aspect of political life and…

Alan Whysall was a panellist in the session on Northern Ireland at the Unit’s State of the Constitution conference on 23 June. This revision of his talk draws on his paper for the Unit on Northern Ireland’s Political Future, and its accompanying blogpost. He argues that stable power-sharing can only return through good faith inclusive negotiation – which is not a part of London’s current approach – and a reinforcement of the foundations of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement.

It is essential to bring all the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement institutions back as soon as possible: that unlocks the potential for political progress. Without the institutions, polarisation grows; the longer they are away, the harder ultimately the Agreement settlement is to sustain. And there is no alternative as a framework for the stable government of Northern Ireland.

Devolution still has wide popular support and the political class has a strong…

(And other economics agencies of government, but the Reserve Bank should be the highest priority given the extent of the decline and the substantive importance/powers of the institution.)

On Friday my post focused on the (severe) limitations of the members of the new Reserve Bank Board. Together, they look as though they would be a well-qualified (perhaps a touch over-qualified) group for the board of trustees at a high-decile high school……but this is the central bank and prudential regulator.

I had a couple of responses suggesting that, if anything, I was pulling my punches, understating the severity of the situation, when it came to the Reserve Bank. One person, who preferred to remain nameless (having high level associations with entities the Bank regulates), indicated that I was free to use their comments provided it was without attribution. These were the comments:

The situation is parlous: inept, multi-focussed but wrong focus…