Utopia, you are standing in it!

“The Age of Anne is rightly regarded as the greatest manifestation of the power of England which had till then been known,” says Winston Churchill in his History of English Speaking Peoples (396). Despite her plain and sickly disposition, Queen Anne was one of the more consequential reigning English monarchs. Her queenship saw the establishment of a united kingdom of Scotland and England as “Great Britain.” It was a neo-Augustan age of letters from the likes of Addison, Pope, Defoe, Steele, Swift, and others. It was also the era of the Royal Society, which was originally chartered under Charles II, and the work of Sir Isaac Newton proliferated. However, despite numerous efforts Anne remained childless and in order to protect the Protestant character of the kingdom, after her death the crown would pass to a distant family from the Continent: the Hanovers.

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The newly introducedDissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill(“the Bill”) – like theDraft Fixed-term Parliaments Act (Repeal) Billwhich preceded it – is a missed opportunity.It has failed to unify and define the scope and exercise of the powers of proroguing and dissolving Parliament, in one statute, which were in need of clarification post-Miller II. Now that the Government has decided on the form which it would like the Bill repealing the Fixed-term Parliaments Act to take, the moment has gone and, as a niche of constitutional law, it is unlikely to garner enough political capital for these issues to be deemed worth addressing for the meantime.

Ironically, by foregoing the opportunity to require the consent of a simple majority of MPs for a premature dissolution and/orprorogation,the Government has missed out on the simplest method for it to achieve either or both of these goals…

For two decades after the end of WWII, economists, bureaucrats and politicians were pretty sure that they’d nailed the problems of controlling a capitalist economy.

The ruling theory was Keynesianism, named after the famous economist John Maynard Keynes, whose key insight in the 1930’s was that in times of economic recession, and especially depression such as The Slump of the 1930’s, governments should not cut back on their spending but increase it.

Prior to that governments had always taken the same attitude towards a shrinking economy that households and businesses did: you cut spending in line with your falling revenues, tax in the case of government. Keynes argued that this was the wrong thing for governments to do; they were different because they controlled the creation of credit so debt was not the same threat to them. They could go into debt, perhaps quite a lot of debt, and…

[image credit: latinoamericarenovable.com] Wishful thinking is the new climate policy for fantasy planet savers. John Kerry told the BBC technologies that don’t yet exist will play a huge role in stabilising the climate. But ‘Craig Bennett from the UK Wildlife Trusts told BBC News Mr Kerry’s remarks were “frankly ridiculous”.’ How much more worthless baloney do we have to endure from hypocritical globe-trotting alarmists?
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America’s climate envoy John Kerry has been ridiculed for saying technologies that don’t yet exist will play a huge role in stabilising the climate.

Speaking on the BBC’s Andrew Marr show, he said the US was leading the world on climate change – and rapidly phasing out coal-fired power stations.

But he rejected a suggestion that Americans need to change their consumption patterns by, say, eating less meat.

In the interests of transparency, and to provide a window to some of the ugliness found in climate science, here in PDF is a copy of my deposition in the case of Mann vs. CEI/National Review, which is into its 8th year.

You can find some various documents related to the case here and here. Here is an update on the most recent actions in the case.

Another setback for the doomsayers, as some inconvenient truths flow in their direction. Meanwhile the US ‘climate envoy’ comes up with the useless claim that “You don’t have to be a scientist to begin to feel that we’re looking at a trend line.” A trend of ever-increasing vacuous climate sales talk?
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The Washington Post has published an enlightening opinion piece on climate alarm and climate realism, says The GWPF.

Its weekly columnist Mark Thiessen bases his column on an interview with Steve Koonin and his new book ‘Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters’ which is making quite a splash due to its matter-of-fact, no-nonsense approach.