Utopia, you are standing in it!

Downfall

Catherine may have been involved during her marriage to the King with Henry’s favourite male courtier, Thomas Culpeper, a young man who “had succeeded [him] in the Queen’s affections”, according to Dereham’s later testimony. She had considered marrying Culpeper during her time as a maid-of-honour to Anne of Cleves.

Culpeper called Catherine “my little, sweet fool” in a love letter. It has been alleged that in Spring 1541 the pair were meeting secretly. Their meetings were allegedly arranged by one of Catherine’s older ladies-in-waiting, Jane Boleyn, Viscountess Rochford (Lady Rochford), the widow of Catherine’s executed cousin, George Boleyn, Anne Boleyn’s brother.

People who claimed to have witnessed her earlier sexual behaviour while she lived at Lambeth reportedly contacted her for favours in return for their silence, and some of these blackmailers may have been appointed to her royal household.

John Lassels, a supporter of Cromwell, approached the Archbishop of…

… you’ve got to give that up. There’s just no doubt about it that its real and its happening. I believed that from my previous life in business. I believe that in the world I see now through political life”

That’s National Party leader, Chris Luxon, speaking on Radio New Zealand this morning. He also endorsed Parliament being closed for the week so that Government Ministers can really focus on doing their jobs

The one saving grace is that he talked almost entirely of adapting to Climate Change, mitigating its impacts – which actually is the smartest thing that we can do in the face of this:

In other words Luxon is at least vaguely aware of the damage that could be caused to this country by going all the way down the “Climate Change Crisis” rabbit hole. Unfortunately when pinned on that by the interviewer, Luxon doubled back…

Catherine Howard (c. 1524 – February 13, 1542) was Queen of England from 1540 until 1542 as the fifth wife of Henry VIII.

Catherine had an aristocratic ancestry as a granddaughter of Thomas Howard, 2nd Duke of Norfolk (1443 – 1524), but her father, Lord Edmund Howard, was not wealthy, being the third son of his father – under the rules of primogeniture, the eldest son inherited all of the father’s estate.

Catherine Howard

Catherine’s mother, Joyce Culpeper, already had five children from her first husband, Ralph Leigh (c. 1476 – 1509) when she married Lord Edmund Howard, and they had another six together, Catherine being about her mother’s tenth child. With little to sustain the family, her father often had to beg for the help of his more affluent relatives.

Her father’s sister, Elizabeth Howard, was the mother of Anne Boleyn. Therefore, Catherine Howard was the first cousin of Anne Boleyn…

Introduction

On the 7 December 2022, the judgment of the UK Supreme Court in theReference by the Attorney General for Northern Ireland – Abortion Services (Safe Access Zones) (Northern Ireland) Bill(‘SAZ’) affirmed the legality of a measure aimed at strengthening the exercise of the right to abortion in Northern Ireland (NI). The case concerned a challenge to the legislative competency of the Northern Ireland Assembly (‘the Assembly’) to introduce a Bill curbing the right to protest outside of abortion clinics, which the Attorney General for Northern Ireland (‘AG’) contented to be incompatible with guarantees under the European Convention on Human Rights (‘ECHR’ or ‘the Convention’). The Bill intended to protect those accessing abortion clinics from harassment by creating“safe access zones” around the clinics, within which it would be an offence to influence a protected person, whether directly or indirectly[Clause 5(2)(a)]. This measure was considered necessary to…

From the Emperor’s Desk: I took a short break so I am posting the anniversary of this event today.

Victoria (Alexandrina Victoria; May 24, 1819 – January 22, 1901) was Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 20 June 1837 until her death in 1901. Her reign of 63 years and 216 days was the second longest reign in British history and was known as the Victorian Era.

Victoria was the daughter of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn (the fourth son of King George III), and Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, who was born in Coburg on August 17, 1786 in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation and was named Marie Louise Victoire.

She was the fourth daughter and seventh child of Franz Friedrich Anton, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, and Countess Augusta of Reuss-Ebersdorf. One of her brothers was Ernst I, Duke…

Big battery fire [image credit: reneweconomy.com.au
The so-called savings come from *not* paying some of the constraint costs of excess wind energy production. The Sky News headline about saving ‘billions’ turns out to mean some unknown time in the future when many more such installations might be online. They ignore the fact that batteries have a limited life span and, being lithium-ion types, can suffer expensive or even disastrous overheating problems.
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It looks like a self-storage park: rows of shipping containers in a patch of Merseyside waste ground, says Sky News.

But appearances can be deceptive as this is the first step in saving billions of pounds off bills and millions of tonnes of carbon.

It’s a mega-battery.

Demonising coal-fired power is a sport played by smug, well-fed Westerners – who’ve never lived a day without power, in their cosseted lives.

For the poorest energy-starved billions, a day with affordable power is a dream worth fighting for. The West’s prosperity was won with coal, a fact seemingly recognised by wind and solar-obsessed Brits and Germans, as they fire up the coal-fired plants that they had only recently deemed redundant.

Those same plants are central to the growth in prosperity among Asian economies, not least India.

With a population of 1.3 billion – and hundreds of millions of those screaming out for reliable and affordable electricity – which promises to lift them out of grinding agrarian poverty – India’s government is on a perfectly pragmatic path. Shunning intermittent and chaotic wind and solar, in the knowledge that the only way to deliver power 24/7, at a price that their…

More evidence that petulant climate obsessives are a drag on society and the UK economy.
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The UK government is being urged to sack one of its trade advisers after he joined a thinktank that has denied the scale of the climate crisis and campaigned against net zero, says The Guardian.

Tony Abbott, a former Australian prime minister, announced this week that he had joined the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF).

Abbott has been a member of the UK government’s Board of Trade since 2020, advising on post-Brexit deals, with Australia now a key trading partner since the UK left the EU.