Utopia, you are standing in it!

Æthelred II (c. 966 – 23 April 1016), was King of the English from 978 to 1013 and again from 1014 until his death.

Æthelred was the son of King Edgar and Queen Ælfthryth. He came to the throne at about the age of 12, following the assassination of his older half-brother, Eadweard the Martyr. His brother’s murder was carried out by supporters of his own claim to the throne, although he was too young to have any personal involvement.

Æthelred II the Unready, King of the English

Name

Æthelred’s first name, composed of the elements æðele, “noble”, and ræd, “counsel, advice”, is typical of the compound names of those who belonged to the royal House of Wessex, and it characteristically alliterates with the names of his ancestors, like Æthelwulf (“noble-wolf”), Ælfred (“elf-counsel”), Eadweard (“rich-protection”), and Eadgar (“rich-spear”).

Æthelred’s notorious nickname, Old English Unræd, is commonly translated into present-day English as “The…

DISASTER divided : Two countries, one island, life-and-death differences

WITHOUT access to fossil fuels, every tree on the planet would have been cut down by now to provide for heating, cooking and industry.

THE greatest threat to the environment is not affluence, it is poverty.

BORDER between Haiti and Dominican Republic, a pristine example…

• ONE country embraces Fossil Fuels 🇩🇴

• THE other, signed up to the UN Paris Accord 🇭🇹

BORDER between Haiti and the Dominican Republic: Guess which country contains eco-criminals that can afford to use fossil fuels, and which country contains nature-lovers who are dependent on natural renewable organic biomass for energy?

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HAITI is almost 99% deforested, as they rely almost entirely on natural ‘biomass’ (wood) for domestic and industrial fuels and building materials.

ON the other side, the forests of the fossil fuel burning, eco-terrorists – the Dominican Republic – remain lush and…

Gabriele Ciminelli and Sílvia Garcia-Mandicó in this voxeu piece:

There are still many unknowns about COVID-19. We don’t know its true mortality rate, nor the speed through which it spreads across communities. This lack of evidence complicates the design of appropriate response policies. The case of the UK is illustrative. The government first opted for the bare minimum in terms of mitigation. It then drastically reversed course after micro-simulations by the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team showed that that strategy could have resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths (Ferguson et al. 2020).

In a new paper (Ciminelli and Garcia-Mandicó 2020), we source daily death registry data for a sample of 1,161 Italian municipalities in the seven regions most severely hit by COVID-19 (Emilia-Romagna, Liguria, Lombardia, Marche, Piemonte, Toscana, and Veneto) and match them to census data to analyse COVID-19-induced mortality. Overall, the dataset covers a population of almost…

It’s been impossible to ignore the calls for the UK government to announce that it will be seeking an extension to the Brexit transition period, or at least to make clear that it’s still keeping its options open, as a result of the coronavirus crisis. Here I review the arguments on both sides – before coming down in favour of sticking to the current timetable.

The background

The UK has, of course, already left the EU. But it remains a member of the single market and customs union, and is still bound by EU rules, during a ‘transition period’ which is due to end on 31^st December. This period is meant to provide time for the two sides to negotiate a new long-term relationship, covering issues such as trade and security cooperation, and to make the necessary preparations to implement the new arrangements.

The Withdrawal Agreement (WA) allows the…

Angela Saini is a British science writer who belongs to what I call the Cordelia Fine School of Science Journalism (CFSSJ): a school whose members have an explicit ideological bias that colors all of their popular writing. In the case of Fine, her ideology is that there is essentially no evolutionary/genetic difference between the brains and neurology of men and women, and so any behavioral differences we see are of purely social origin. Further, hormones play little or no role in behavioral differences between the sexes. Fine’s motive is good—to reduce sexism and bias—but her modus operandus is not, for it involves misrepresenting science.

To buttress Fine’s ideology, her books aim at debunking every study that contradicts her preconceived thesis, even though there is now convincing indication of not only genetically based behavioral and morphological differences based on hormones, but also of differences in the brain. In contrast…