Utopia, you are standing in it!

Decades ago I worked for a central bank in another country. I woke up one morning to learn that the Governor had been sacked, and by the time I got to work he was clearing his desk. He hadn’t done a bad job – and was one of the more inspiring people I ever worked for – but had fallen foul of the government (Minister of Finance and his colleagues/bosses). The law as it was meant that Governor could be removed whenever the government felt like it. for whatever reason the government felt like. It wasn’t a good model.

In the numerous attempts to capture just how independent various central banks are, one of the dimensions that usually appears is something around the dismissal provisions for key decisionmakers (in these days of committees and board, not just the Governor). Many older pieces of central banking legislation make it very hard…

The image might be the way most of us remember that consummate showman, the entertainer’s entertainer, Sammy Davis Jr.

He’s laughing, often as not surrounded by white actors, singers, comics or politicians — some of them his peers — most of them less dazzling in at least one of the singer/dancer/actor and funnyman’s proficiencies.

Somebody — a fellow Rat Packer (Sinatra, Dino, Lawford or Bishop), Nixon, this comic or that Civil Rights icon — has said something funny, maybe only mildly amusing, maybe faintly/comically racist in the case of his Vegas/”Ocean’s 11″ Pack. And Sammy D’s laugh would consume his face, doubling him over, eyes closed, making you think you’d missed the best joke or quip this showbiz legend had ever heard.

But if you listen to audio of such occasions, as Yale professor and cultural historian Matthew Frye Jacobson did, you won’t “hear” that laugh. It was, often as…

From The Emperor’s Desk: One week from today, May 6, 2023, is the coronation of Their Majesties King Charles III of the United Kingdom and his Queen Camilla.

From today until next Saturday I will be posting on some historic aspects of past coronations and the current coronation.

The coronation of Charles III and his wife, Camilla, as King and Queen of the United Kingdom and the other Commonwealth realms is scheduled to take place on Saturday, May 6, 2023, at Westminster Abbey. Charles acceded to the throne on September 8, 2022, upon the death of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, during her Platinum Jubilee Year celebrating a record 70 years on the throne.

Compared with previous coronations, the ceremony will undergo some alterations to represent multiple faiths, cultures, and communities across the United Kingdom, and will be shorter than his mother’s coronation in 1953.

The ceremony will begin with…

When I began examining whether or not King Richard III was a usurper it seemed pretty cut and dried given the fact that Richard’s reputation as a usurper is well known. I’d even go as far to say that Richard III is the best known super in history.

As I’ve researched this topic I’ve realized that it’s isn’t as cut and dried as generally thought. I actually could drag this topic out over many more entries. In this entry I will examine the “pro-Richard III” stance. Then in the following entry next week I will examine the “anti-Richard III” stance. After that I will give you my assessment.

As I said in previous entries the legality of Richard III’s reign, as mentioned in the Titulus Regius document, rests on the core claim that when Edward IV married Elizabeth Woodville, he was already promised in marriage to Lady Eleanor Butler. This…

Figure 1. Graph showing the number of volcanoes reported to have been active each year since 1800 CE. Total number of volcanoes with reported eruptions per year (thin upper black line) and 10-year running mean of same data (thick upper red line). Lower lines show only the annual number of volcanoes producing large eruptions (>= 0.1 km3 of tephra or magma) and scale is enlarged on the right axis; thick red lower line again shows 10-year running mean. Global Volcanism Project Discussion

Update April 28, 2023

I am prompted by a discussion at WUWT regarding the role of SO2 in causing climate variabiity.  There are some voices claiming that reduced SO2 from smaller vocanic activity in the Middle Ages caused warming, leading to droughts, crop failures, etc.  And that we could be causing global warming by removing SO2 from the air in modern times.  As the research cited below explains…