Utopia, you are standing in it!

Julius Caesar’s own account of the civil war he fought against Gnaeus Pompeius (Pompey) and his successors from 49 to 45 BC is divided into three parts. I have previously summarised parts one and two. This is a summary of the third and final part.

Part 3: The great confrontation (112 sections)

1 to 6: Caesar in Italy – Pompey’s preparations

Caesar returns to Italy where he temporarily takes the title dictator in order to carry out the legal functions of the absent consuls and senate. He oversees elections in which he is elected consul for the next year, 48 BC. Caesar adjudicates legal cases, solves bankruptcy cases, officiates at the Latin religious festivals, then relinquishes the dictatorship and hurries to Brundisium.

Here he is presented with an ongoing shortage of ships. Pompey has had a whole year in which to gather forces in Greece and Asia, which Caesar…

The Northern Ireland Protocol is part of the Withdrawal Agreement, designed to set out the legal parameters of the withdrawal of the UK from the EU.  The Government proposes to introduce legislation to unilaterally change the Protocol.  On the face of it, this would appear to place the Government on the highway to a breach of international law.  But are there any off-ramps which allow it to avoid this destination?  This blog post examines one possible off-ramp, that this course of action is consistent with the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties 1969.

Legal justification for unilateral amendment of the NI Protocol

The Foreign Secretary Liz Truss MP stated in Parliament on17 May 2022that “we are very clear that this is legal in international law, and we will be setting out our legal position in due course.”This legal position has not yet been set out.Emily Thornberry MP, the Shadow…

Subsidised and intermittent wind and solar infiltrate and destroy power grids like an aggressive cancer. But, unlike cancer, the cause of Australia’s power pricing and supply debacle is precisely known, and was as perfectly predictable, as it was perfectly avoidable.

The massive subsidies to wind and solar were deliberately designed to knock reliable and affordable generators off the grid. This they have done – with a vengeance. With a grid literally on the brink of collapse, the political brains trust are trying to undo what their policies were destined to do, with desperate moves to keep Australia’s remaining coal-fired power plants up and running using “capacity payments” – ie taxpayer subsidies paid to the owners of coal-fired plants as an antidote to the $7 billion in annual RET subsidies already being pocketed by wind and solar generators, that allow them to underbid Australia’s based load generators.

STT predicts that we…

Posted by Sara M. Butler, 13 May 2022.

Discovering that the Supreme Court of the United States of America, now dominated by an ultra conservative majority of chiefly white men, is planning to overturn Roe v. Wade (1973) was not as unexpected as one might imagine. At least, for any woman who has been living in this country for the past decade it was something we could see coming. For those who work at religious institutions or in conscientiously-Christian businesses, the ruling in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014) already took away our right to use our health plans to pay for birth control.[1] (This happened to me when I worked at Loyola University New Orleans, a Catholic university). Access to a legal abortion did seem like the next logical provision to disappear.

What was surprising, however, is to discover that Justice Samuel Alito’s leaked draft majority opinion (it can…

I’m currently in Tanzania as part of a speaking tour in Africa. My remarks today largely repeated the message I gave to an audience last week in Nigeria.

So I won’t bother sharing anything from my presentation. Instead, I want to highlight some numbers from a presentation by Professor Ken Schoolland.

He shared some data showing how the “Asian Tigers” grew far faster than major Latin American nations between 1950 and 2000.

These are very impressive examples of convergence (as the Asian Tigers caught up with Latin America) followed by divergence (as the Tigers then continued to grow much faster).

I’ll be adding this data to my “anti-convergence club.”

But I also noticed that Professor Schoolland was sharing some old data from 1995.

So I went to the Maddison website and created some new charts based on the latest-available data.

As you can see, the Latin American nations…