Utopia, you are standing in it!

This essay was first published at the Conversation news siteon June 14, 2022, and appears here slightly edited.

In their dogged reporting of the Watergate scandal, Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernsteinuncovered the crimes that forced Richard Nixon to resign the presidency in August 1974.

That version of Watergate has long dominated popular understanding of the scandal, which unfolded over 26 months, beginning June 17, 1972.

It is, however, a simplistic trope that not even Watergate-era principals at the Post embraced. The newspaper’s publisher during Watergate, Katharine Graham, pointedly rejected that interpretation during a program 25 years ago at the now-defunct Newseum (the “museum of news“) in suburban Virginia.

“Sometimes, people accuse us of ‘bringing down a president,’ which of course we didn’t do, and

Nixon quits: Not the Post’s doing

shouldn’t have done,” Graham said. “The processes that caused [Nixon’s]…

Felipe II (May 21, 1527 – September 13, 1598) was the son of Emperor Charles V and Isabella of Portugal. Felipe II inherited his father’s Spanish Empire and was the King of Spain from 1556, and succeeded as King of Portugal in 1580 following a dynastic crisis. Felipe II was King of Naples and Sicily from 1554 until his death in 1598.

Felipe II was also jure uxoris King of England and Ireland during his marriage to Queen Mary I of England and Ireland from 1554 until her death in 1558. He was also Duke of Milan from 1540. From 1555, he was Lord of the Seventeen Provinces of the Netherlands.Upon Mary I of England’s death, the throne went to her half-sister as Queen Elizabeth I. Felipe had no wish to sever his tie with England, and had sent a proposal of marriage to Elizabeth.

However, she delayed in…

Stan Laurel was born Arthur Stanley Jefferson on the 16th of June in Ulverston, Lancashire in England, 1890. His father was a vaudeville performer and this led Stan to being a stage performer too. He didn’t get much schooling and this resulted to the joining of Fred Karno’s Troupe where Stan understudied the future star, Charles Chaplin. In 1912 they went on a tour to America where Chaplin remained, but Stan went straight back to England. In 1916 he returned to the States and did an impersonation of Charlie Chaplin and the act was called “The Keystone Trio” and it was quite successful. What I find ironic is that although there is no doubt that Charlie Chaplin was a genius, his comedy dated badly. Whereas Stan Laurel’s comedy, and especially as part of the comedic duo Laurel and Hardy, it still is fresh today. It was actually quite progressive. The…

That Australia’s Eastern Grid is on the brink of collapse with a complete ‘system black’ on the cards comes as no surprise.

The $7 billion in annual RET subsidies pocketed by wind and solar generators were designed to allow them to underbid Australia’s reliable and affordable coal-fired generators, destroying their profitability and, ultimately, driving them off the grid. As a direct consequence, Australia’s Eastern Grid (that covers QLD, NSW, Victoria, Tasmania and SA) is literally on the brink of collapse. The new Federal Labor government is in a flat panic, using Stalinist bully boy tactics in the vain hope of undoing the inevitable consequences of the so-called ‘inevitable transition’ to wind and solar. The market for electricity has been co-opted by governments, and taxpayers will be left to foot an enormous bill to compensate generators forced to dispatch power at a loss, on top of the $billions in subsidies already…

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Throughout the nearly four years of its existence, the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia (which called itself Democratic Kampuchea) invited a number of Western sympathisers to observe the regime and (hopefully) provide eyewitness accounts back in the West. Infamously, this ended in tragedy for British academic Malcolm Caldwell, who was killed in the dying days of the Khmer Rouge’s time in power. After four members of the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) from the United States travelled to Kampuchea in 1978, one of the leading members of the party, Daniel Burstein, became disillusioned with what he saw there. Although he initially wrote defences of the regime, by 1980 he was walking back from this initial assessment, which led to internal divisions and soul searching within the CP(M-L). As…

As you drive, walk, or bike around your city, what do you think about as you see the various buildings and other structures? Perhaps you think about the lives of the people in them, or the architecture of the buildings themselves, or the products and services that the businesses offer for sale. For me, lately I’ve been thinking about one thing as I make my way around town: zoning. It’s not something I had thought about before very much, but after reading Nolan Gray’s new book Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It, I’ve been thinking about zoning a lot more.

(Disclosure: I know the author of the book, but I paid for my own copy and got it in advance through the luck of the Amazon-pre-order draw.)

The book does a wonderful job of explaining what zoning is (and importantly, also what…

Today marks the 807th anniversary of the Magna Carta. The full name is Magna Carta Libertatum, which translates into “The great charter of Freedoms”, but in common use it is known as the Magna Carta. It was agreed by King John of England at Runnymede, near Windsor, on 15 June 1215.

The document is basically the foundation of the British constitution. The Magna Carta still forms an important symbol of liberty today, often cited by politicians and campaigners, and is held in great respect by the British and American legal communities, Lord Denning describing it as “the greatest constitutional document of all times—the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot”. Ironically the anniversary of the Magna Carta comes a day after the British Government was suppose to send a group of refugees to Rwanda. It is only because of the intervention of the…

This week is the inter-round period in the French two-round assembly elections. The first round was on 12 June. The French way of electing members of the National Assembly is not top-two majority-runoff, like the country’s presidential elections (or most elections in California). Rather, it is majority-plurality. That is, it is possible to have more than two candidates in the second round in any given single-seat district, and when this happens, the winner is the one with the most votes, even if it is less than 50%+1.

In any system within the broader family of two-round systems, there need to be threshold provisions for both (1) determining whether a runoff is required, and (2) deterring who is eligible to participate. Under typical majority runoff, the provisions are (1) 50%+1 in the first round, or else (2) there must be a second round in which only the top two…

Yes, you read the headline correctly. Ever since the current broad-yet-narrow coalition government in Israel was formed, it has been something of a sport for various journalists covering Israeli politics to predict its early demise. I cautioned otherwise at the time.

It may be that the coalition really is in its death throes, even as it has only just passed the one-year mark of its planned three-year term. I have lost count of the number of individual members of coalition parties who have announced a “strike” or a “freeze” whereby they stop voting with the coalition for a period of time to try to get some measure they favor passed (or something they oppose stopped). Most of them have made clear that they would not defect to the opposition or vote to call an early election. But some (I think three dating back to the original investiture vote) have…