Utopia, you are standing in it!

The best discussion comes from Josh Blackman’s article at Newsweek The Supreme Court Could Not ‘Block’ Texas’ Fetal Heartbeat Law | Opinion. Josh Blackman is a constitutional law professor at the South Texas College of Law Houston and the co-author of An Introduction to Constitutional Law: 100 Supreme Court Cases Everyone Should Know. He explains why the ruling is more about overinflated expectations of judicial authority than about the issue of abortion itself.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene in a challenge to S.B. 8, Texas’ new abortion law. This unique statute empowers private citizens to sue those who perform or facilitate abortions. President Biden ripped the 5-4 decision, charging that the conservative justices followed “procedural complexities” “rather than use its supreme authority to ensure justice.”

© Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images A person walks on the steps of the U.S…

It won’t be quite like September, 2005, back when the virtual orchard was just a sapling, but somewhat like that September sixteen years ago featured several interesting elections, this month also looks great for election watchers.

In September, 2005, we had elections in three major examples of mixed-member systems: Japan, New Zealand, and Germany. (As I look back, I see I wrote several times about Afghanistan’s election that month; I am guessing there will no longer be a need for new Afghanistan elections plantings. I also see lost of posts about a hurricane disaster in New Orleans. Some things do recur, though fortunately in this case not on as horrific a scale, though bad enough.)

In September, 2021, we have the California recall. I don’t have anything at the moment to say about that beyond what I’ve already said. We have Germany, again, with its general election on…

Working for King Leopold, 1879 to 1885

The biggest blot on Stanley’s reputation is that he devoted the longest single part of his working life to working for King Leopold II of Belgium helping to map out and establish the core infrastructure for what would become the notorious Congo Free State. This was the enormous area, corresponding to the modern Democratic Republic of Congo, which Leopold managed to get assigned to his own personal rule at the Congress of Berlin in 1885. Leopold posed as a great philanthropist, a promoter of civilisation and Christianity and doughty abolisher of the widespread Arab slave trade which Stanley and all the other explorers had discovered.

It took until the late 1890s for news to leak out of the atrocities Belgian soldiers and overseers were committing on the native population, which slowly brewed up into an international scandal, which led Leopold to hand over…

Following the report of its Working Group on Unification Referendums on the Island of Ireland, the Unit will in the coming weeks publish a discussion paper on the wider political options for Northern Ireland. In the first part of this blog, Alan Whysall, the author of the paper, sets it in the current political context, and discusses the public policy challenges facing Northern Ireland. The second part, which will be published later today, considers longer term destinies, and what can be done to encourage more realistic debate, and ultimately constructive politics, in Northern Ireland.

Introduction

Politics will resume in Northern Ireland after the summer in deep conflict. But much of the political debate is totemic, neglecting the realities of public policy in Northern Ireland now.

The unreality of the debate reflects the unwinding of constructive politics, such as was seen in the better days following the Good Friday/Belfast…

There’s no such thing as “free energy”: both wind and solar generators start their productive life with substantial energy deficits. Of course, their owners and operators are only interested in the subsidies they generate. But others are keen to take full account of the amount of energy employed before wind turbines or solar panels get to (occasionally) generate their first watt of electricity.

In the parlance it’s a thing known as the ‘Energy Return On Investment’ EROI. As to which see our post here.

Solar panels are the product of strip-mined quartz which gets converted to silica using coal-fired furnaces. But that’s just the ‘dirty’ fossil-fuel energy used to create the PV cells themselves.

Then, as Vic Furman details below, there’s the tremendous amount of energy used to create the aluminium frames used to house and support the panels.

Solar Framing Is A Problem No Matter How One…

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Mothers are aggrieved by what some say is a racist policy instituted by New Zealand’s most cherished parenting organisation. Graham Adams argues it is just one example of growing dissatisfaction over preference granted on grounds of ethnicity.

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In terms of the nation’s traditional iconography, it’s hard to decide whether Sir Edmund Hillary or Plunket nurses rate more highly in the popular imagination.

For many New Zealanders, Hillary represents the epitome of individualistic adventure while Plunket nurses looking after anxious mothers and vulnerable babies represent the best of community spirit.

Nevertheless, news came this week that Plunket is a “white supremacist” organisation, for which root-and-branch regeneration will be inadequate. (See Cate Broughton’s Plunket takes on its history, and future, to be ‘a better Treaty partner’, and a response to this by Linda Bryder: Plunket founder driven to reduce high infant mortality rate.)

This assault on Plunket’s reputation…