Utopia, you are standing in it!

Pro Archia is the shortest of the five speeches contained in the excellent Oxford University Press edition of Defence Speeches of Cicero, edited and translated by D.H. Berry (2000). It’s barely 12 pages long and yet even this slip of a thing requires a detailed three-page introduction from Dr Berry. In it he explains that: Aulus Licinius Archias was born plain Archias in Antioch in Syria in the mid-120s. As a young man he established himself as a poet and travelled round the eastern Mediterranean writing poems to order. In 102 he arrived in Rome and was welcomed into the home of Lucius Licinius Lucullus where he tutored the two young sons. He was sought out by other noble Roman families.

During this period Cicero himself took instruction from Archias (among his other achievements, Cicero was no mean poet) and explains in the speech that gratitude for his old…

At the recent American Economic Association meeting in San Diego, Brad DeLong chaired a panel on ” Stimulus or Stymied?: The Macroeconomics of Recessions“, and has posted a transcript. Paul Krugman was there and picked up my claim that macroeconomics has, on balance, gone backwards since 1958. I’ve extracted his section here. Lots of useful stuff, but I’d stress this:

the whole basis on which we constructed monetary policy during the Great Moderation, which is that stabilizing inflation and stabilizing output are the same thing, is all wrong: you can have a sustained period of low but not negative inflation consistent with an economy operating far below its potential productive capacity. That is what I believe is happening now. If so, we are failing dismally in responding to this economic crisis. This is in contrast to what some central bankers are saying—that we have done well because inflation…

That’s the title of my new column in Independent Australia. I plan to write fortnightly from now on.

Now that quantitative easing is no longer needed, the problem is how to manage the huge increase in money balances that is driving demand. This is not a new problem; it arises every time a lot of spending is needed to handle an emergency, and we know what works and what does not. In the aftermath of World War I, governments in the UK and Australia sought to unwind the inflation created by wartime spending and return to the gold standard. The result was a long period of economic weakness, culminating in the Great Depression. By contrast, after World War II, wages and prices were allowed to rise, as wartime rationing ended and reconstruction gradually removed constraints on production.

As long as the real value of wages is maintained, a once-off…

Majesty (abbreviated HM for His Majesty or Her Majesty, oral address Your Majesty; from the Latin maiestas, meaning “greatness”) is used as a manner of address by many monarchs, usually kings or queens.

Majesty is not a title but a formal term of address.

Where used, the style outranks the style of (Imperial/Royal) Highness, but is inferior to the style of Imperial Majesty. It has cognates in many other languages, especially of Europe.

Origin

Originally, during the Roman republic, the word maiestas was the legal term for the supreme status and dignity of the state, to be respected above everything else. This was crucially defined by the existence of a specific case, called laesa maiestas (in later French and English law, lèse-majesté), consisting of the violation of this supreme status.

Various acts such as celebrating a party on a day of public mourning, contempt of the various rites of the…

I first uncovered the correspondence in which Governor General Lord Aberdeen dismissed Prime Minister Sir Charles Tupper from office in July 1896 all the way back in 2012 while conducting research on something else. The documents have proven more fruitful and given me more ideas than I could ever have imagined at the time. But the material does not end with the correspondence between Aberdeen and Tupper. The Debates in the House of Commons between Tupper, then in opposition, and the new Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier, provided another fascinating take on these questions.

• Sessional Papers (1896), Correspondence Between Lord Aberdeen and PM Tupper
• Tupper’s Apology in the 8th Parliament

This latest article draws together all my analyses on this crucial precedent from 1896 with respect to the Caretaker Convention, when Governors General can dismiss Prime Ministers, the manner in which Governors General appoint Prime Ministers, whether Prime Ministers should…

About this episode from TV Guide

The rise of mass demonstrations in the civil-rights movement in the early 1960s—the largest of which was the march on Washington on Aug. 28, 1963. On that day, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. Also: children’s marches in Birmingham, Ala. Narrator: Julian Bond.

About this series

Wikipedia

Eyes on the Prize is an American television series and 14-part documentary about the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. The documentary originally aired on the PBS network and also aired in the United Kingdom on BBC2. Created and executive produced by Henry Hampton at the film production company Blackside and narrated by Julian Bond, the series uses archival footage, stills and interviews of participants and opponents of the movement. The title of the series is derived from the folk song “Keep Your Eyes…

Today marks the publication of my book onThe Constitutional Legitimacy of Law Officers in the United Kingdom, which contains a detailed analysis of the functions exercised by each law officer in the UK and a conceptual analysis of their constitutional legitimacy. In this contribution, I offer some thoughts on the timeliness of the book and log some notable developments that have taken place just prior to its publication.

The book is coming out at a time when scholarly interest in the law officers is as sharp and lively as it has been for many years. Given the heat that so often surrounds their functions, it often seems like the law officers are inevitably destined for constitutional controversy. Despite that instinctive feeling, however, I do not believe that controversy is in fact an axiomatic corollary of the law officers’ roles.

I believe a clear understanding of the values which…

As we approach next week’s online event celebrating the 150th anniversary of the act which introduced the secret ballot for municipal and parliamentary elections (event details here), it’s perhaps worth looking again at how the public voting system that served Britain for so many centuries worked. We’ve touched on public voting in earlier posts, but our ongoing research on Victorian politics continues to throw up new discoveries.

Public or ‘open’ voting is often associated with the most glaring iniquities of Victorian elections, including the consumption of vast amounts of alcohol, violence and the harassment of electors at the poll, as well as bribery and the intimidation of voters by employers and landlords. In parliamentary elections voters declared their choices orally, stating how they wished to vote in front of election officials and assembled spectators, so that everyone knew immediately what their choices were…

UN AGENDA 2030

“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years since the Industrial Revolution.” – Christiana Figueres (UN Climate Chief Says Communism Is Best To Fight Global Warming)

“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue.
Even if the theory of global warming is wrong,
we will be doing the right thing in terms of
economic and environmental policy.“
– Timothy Wirth,
President of the UN Foundation

***

CLIMATE DEPOT’S Marc Morano nails the true intentions of the UN’s globalist ‘Climate Change’ agenda…

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Watch: Morano on Fox News: France climate rebellion spreading – ‘Global warming’ fears are a tool for ‘political and economic’ change…it has nothing…

Concern about eminent domain has traditionally been a concern of property rights activists, not the environmental community. But that may be changing as conservation easements and voluntarily preserved lands proliferate. Those lands are uniquely vulnerable to the grasping hand of government because conservation lands may contribute little to the local tax base and their lack of development means they can be acquired more cheaply.

This weekend, the Philadelphia Business Journal reported on a Pennsylvania conservation organization that, even as it unveils its newest preserved property, must deal with it being eyed for government seizure.

The steward of a natural preserve in the tony suburb of Villanova is preparing for its public debut this Mother’s Day weekend. Yet in a few years time, visitors to the meadow-like grounds could stroll from the pergola to the sidelines of a soccer field on a seven-acre chunk of land the Lower Merion School District is…