Utopia, you are standing in it!

Lady Antonia Fraser published her life of Charles II in 1979. 14 years later she published this big hardback version which is basically a large-format coffee-table book with the text drastically cut back in order to make room for hundreds of beautiful and fascinating full-colour illustrations.

As I have detailed the political events leading up to the civil wars in other blog posts, this review will focus on snippets and insights into Charles’s private life, seeing the events of this turbulent time from his personal perspective.

Birth Charles was born on 29 May 1630, one year into his father’s Personal Rule i.e. determination to rule without troublesome parliaments.

Heredity Charles had a swarthy complexion. He was nicknamed the Black Boy and this is the origin of hundreds of pubs of the same name across England. Through his father Charles I, Charles was one quarter Scots, one quarter Danish (his…

The California State Water Resources Board is going to leave some natural gas plants open in an effort to provide power for state residents. However, the political class will only see this as a minor setback and the real problems will start when Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant is shut down in five years.

California extends lives of aging gas plants as state seeks to prevent blackouts

by Abby Smith, Energy and Environment Reporter, Washington Examiner

California will keep four natural gas plants online for another few years instead of shutting them down, in an effort to guarantee the lights stay on as the state rapidly adds more renewable energy.

The decision, made unanimously Tuesday by members of the State Water Resources Control Board, comes just weeks after California grid operators imposed rolling blackouts on residents during peak electricity load amid a severe heat wave.

Republican politicians, including President…

Our daily check with the Beehive website draw a blank.  Nothing has been announced there since the PM announced the offender responsible for the Christchurch terror attack on 15 March 2019 has been designated as a terrorist entity.

But elsewhere in our monitoring of the political scene we found the Māori Party is hot and bothered about goings-on in the education domain .  The item was headlined Racism In Education, Second Pandemic In Aotearoa

The Māori Party candidate for Te Tai Tonga, Tākuta Ferris, and Waiariki candidate, Rawiri Waititi, said in the statement they “believe institutional racism within the education system is holding this nation back”.

Ferris raged that:

“This week has highlighted the second pandemic taking hold of this nation, the pandemic of racism in Aotearoa – but particularly in the Aotearoa education system.”  

Oh dear. What shameful acts have given risen to this?

Recently, the CDC released data on COVID comorbidities, including data showing that 6% of COVID-19 deaths only listed COVID on the death certificate, while the remaining 94% of COVID deaths also listed other conditions. Many have jumped on this as proof that COVID is far less deadly than previously claimed and are arguing that most reported COVID deaths are actually just people who died of some other condition while happening to have COVID. In particular, I keep seeing an analogy of someone who has COVID getting hit by a car, then the death being attributed to COVID. This is a very bad analogy (and faulty argument in general) that horribly mischaracterizes these data. So, I want to briefly explain what is actually going on.

First, you need to realize that when a patient dies, doctors list all of the factors that contributed to the death. This often includes multiple conditions…