Utopia, you are standing in it!

From The Emperor’s Desk: in my recent post I discussed how Henry Bolingbroke became King Henry IV of England. Historians consider him a usurper and although he did have a strong hereditary claim to the throne his assumption of the crown was more of a right by conquest than him being the legal heir to King Richard II.

When Richard II was forced to abdicate the throne on September 29, 1399, Henry was next in line to the throne according to Edward III’s entailment of 1376. That entailment clearly reflects the operation of agnatic primogeniture, also known as the Salic law. At this time, it was by no means a settled custom for the daughter of a king to supersede the brothers of that king in the line of succession to the throne.

Indeed, it was not an established belief that women could inherit the throne at all by right:…

The German general election of 2021 has resulted in a situation in which neither major party can form a government without either the other, or more likely, a coalition that takes in both the liberal FDP and the Greens. With the largest party, the social-democratic SPD, under 30% of seats, it is an unusually fragmented result compared to most German elections. Naturally, this being Fruits & Votes, attention turns to how much more fragmented this outcome is than expected, given the electoral system. The answer may be a bit of a surprise: not all that much. I expected this outcome to be a significant miss for the Seat Product Model (SPM). But it is really not that far off.

For a two-tier PR system, of which Germany’s MMP can be thought of as a subtype, we need to use the extended version of the SPM developed in Votes…

Previous post ended with the conclusion of Brakels’ article that the “winner is unclear”. That is quite a surprising conclusion of an article praising the strengths of the batteries while downplaying the weaknesses. These are the two reasons why Brakels thinks that the winner is unclear (my emphasis):

But because Snowy Hydro 2 may come in at less than the $10 billion or so I expect and because I can’t be certain the additional return from the battery setup will be enough to replace them when they fail, I can’t pick a winner.

The second argument is the most interesting. That statement looks rather cryptic and the meaning depends on the definition of the words “return” and “fail”.

“Return” could mean financial return and “fail” could mean end of economical life (additional financial return of the battery/solar scenario is not enough to replace the installation after its economical…

Platoon (1986) Director: Oliver Stone

“I think now, looking back, we did not fight the enemy; we fought ourselves. And the enemy… was in us.”

★★★★☆

Often compared to Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, Platoon is based on Director Oliver Stone’s personal experiences in Vietnam. He created the film, in part, to counter the optimistic pro-war propaganda of John Wayne’s The Green Berets (1968) which was critiqued by many veterans, as well. Platoon became part I of an eventual trilogy of films by Oliver Stone focused on the Vietnam War, followed by Born on the Fourth of July (1989) and Heaven & Earth (1993).

Platoon is a film that explores the nature of courage. How does a soldier act courageously in an unjust war? What is courage in the midst of horrendous savagery? We (the audience) experience the Vietnam War through the eyes of Chris…

The Ministry of Health has released data on the August Delta outbreak updated to as of yesterday. You can access it here .

Some extracts ….

Of the 1,230 cases reported 84.8% were from the 0-59 age group.

65.9% of cases were from those who self identified as Pacifica with a further 16.9% as Maori. Asians came in third at 7.8% with Europeans fourth at 7.5%.

Of the 258 cases requiring hospitalisation 68% were from the 0-59 age group.

What does the data tell us?

You tell me.