Utopia, you are standing in it!

 Intriguing trends  can be tracked in the  latest Roy Morgan  poll, taken in June, with  both major parties  losing ground from  the May sampling. The  Greens, perhaps surprisingly, also dipped.

In contrast, both ACT and the Maori Party, gained ground, both moving up 1.5%.

The poll results,  if  they were to carry through to October 14, suggest the outcome  on the  night will be close-run.

Pundits contend that left-of-centre parties will emerge with a majority on the night.

Certainly  Labour with 40,   the  Greens 12,  and Te Pati Maori  9  would  be  ahead  of National 39  and  ACT 20,   but  the question is whether  Te Pati Maori  will  accept a minor role  in a  coalition.  Some pointers  are already being detected of demands from Te Pati that Labour and the  Greens could not stomach.

The Congressional Budget Office has released its new Long-Term Budget Outlook and I will continue a now-annual tradition (see 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022) of sharing some very bad news about America’s fiscal future.

Here’s the most important chart. It shows two unfortunate developments. First, we see that the tax burden is gradually increasing as a share of economic output. Second, we see that the burden of federal spending is increasing even faster.

What happens when spending grows even faster than revenue?

We get more government debt. Or, to be more precise, this next chart shows that we get a lot more debt.

Indeed, the debt is going to reach unprecedented levels over the next 30 years.

I normally don’t fret that much about red ink. After all, deficits and debt are largely symptoms of a much bigger problem, which is excessive government spending.

That…

Richard III (October 2, 1452 – August 22, 1485) was King of England and Lord of Ireland from June 26, 1483 until his death in 1485. He was the last king of the Plantagenet dynasty and its cadet branch the House of York. His defeat and death at the Battle of Bosworth Field, the last decisive battle of the Wars of the Roses, marked the end of the Middle Ages in England.

Early life

Richard was born on October 2, 1452, at Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire, the eleventh of the twelve children of Richard, 3rd Duke of York, and Cecily Neville, and the youngest to survive infancy. His childhood coincided with the beginning of what has traditionally been labelled the ‘Wars of the Roses’, a period of political instability and periodic open civil war in England during the second half of the fifteenth century, between the Yorkists, who supported Richard’s…

George IV (August 12, 1762 – June 26, 1830) was King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and King of Hanover from January 29, 1820 until his death in 1830. At the time of his accession to the throne, he was acting as prince regent for his father, George III, having done so since February 5, 1811 during his father’s final mental illness.

George was born at St James’s Palace, London, on August 12, 1762, the first child of King George III and Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, the youngest daughter of Duke Charles Ludwig Friedrich of Mecklenburg, Prince of Mirow (1708–1752), and his wife Princess Elisabeth Albertine of Saxe-Hildburghausen (1713–1761). Mecklenburg-Strelitz was a small north-German duchy in the Holy Roman Empire.

As the eldest son of a British sovereign, he automatically became Duke of Cornwall and Duke of Rothesay at birth; he was created Prince of Wales and…

May 25, 1659 – Richard Cromwell resigns as Lord Protector of England following the restoration of the Long Parliament, beginning a second brief period of the republican government called the Commonwealth of England.

Richard Cromwell was born in Huntingdon on October 4, 1626, the third son of Oliver Cromwell and his wife Elizabeth. Little is known of his childhood. He and his three brothers were educated at Felsted School in Essex close to their mother’s family home. There is no record of his attending university. In May 1647, he became a member of Lincoln’s Inn; however he was not called to the bar subsequently. Instead, in 1647 Richard Cromwell joined the New Model Army as a captain in Viscount Lisle’s lifeguard, and later that year was appointed captain in Thomas Fairfax’s lifeguard.

In 1649, Richard Cromwell married Dorothy Maijor, daughter of Richard Maijor, a member of the Hampshire gentry. He…

The role of the Church of England in the British state will be front and centre at the coronation of King Charles III, which takes place on Saturday. Catherine Pepinster argues that Charles and his mother, Elizabeth II, have reinvented the monarchy’s relationship to religion in twenty-first century Britain. Quite where that leaves the relationship between the monarchy and the more secular in society remains open to question.

Bit by bit, drip by drip, Buckingham Palace has gradually been revealing the details of the coronation of Charles III and Queen Camilla. There have been announcements about the crowns they will wear and the music that will be played, as well as commentaries from the press about the King not wanting a lavish ceremony and striving for both continuity and change on 6 May. Then in December 2022, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak described it as a unique moment that would…

Everything from the latest opinion polls to the bookies odds points to a crushing defeat for the Conservatives at the next general election. However, if I were a betting man, I would put a few quid on Rishi Sunak remaining in Number 10.

For a start, the next election could be as late as January 2025. This would be five years from when the current Parliament first met in December 2019, plus the 25 working days for an election campaign.

Of course, it is never a good idea to ask people to vote in the depths of winter, so the election will surely be called sooner. But even May 2024 would leave a full year for the government to turn things around. If a week is a long time in politics, this is an eternity – though hopefully it will not feel like one.

This is where the performance…

The mental and physical wounds that emanate from the Vietnam War run very deep for the American and Vietnamese generation that fought.  Today, countless veterans who were sent to Southeast Asia still suffer from their experiences.  “Between 1962 and 1971, the U.S. sprayed an estimated 20 million gallons of herbicides in Vietnam, eastern Laos, and parts of Cambodia, usually from helicopters or low-flying aircraft, but sometimes from backpacks, boats, and trucks.  Agent Orange alone accounted for more than half of the total volume of herbicides deployed. One of its key ingredients, dioxin, is highly toxic even in tiny quantities. Operation Ranch Hand deployed about 375 pounds of dioxin over an area about the size of Massachusetts, contaminating the entire ecosystem and exposing millions of people — on both sides of the conflict — to horrifying long-term effects, including skin diseases and cancers among those exposed, and birth defects in their…

The title of this Newsweek fact check caught my attention:

Fact check: Did Greta Thunberg Delete Claim That Humanity Will End by 2023?

As most of you would probably already know, Thunberg posted a tweet in 2018 with a short-term prediction and deleted it when its end date approached. This resulted in quite some reactions, putting forward that this deletion again shows that her alarmist claims are weak and unsubstantiated, therefor not worth paying attention to.

The Newsweek fact check starts by listing three examples criticizing the deletion of the tweet, stating that they all refer to screenshots of this deleted tweet, but no such screenshot was provided in the fact check, only the text of the tweet was given:

A top climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years.

I almost feel sorry for the union bosses at the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers.

They were upset when West Virginia adopted statewide school choice in 2021 and they got even angrier when Arizona did the same thing in 2022.

So you can only imagine how bitter they are about what’s happened so far in 2023.

• Iowa has approved statewide school choice
• Utah has approved statewide school choice
• Arkansas has approved statewide school choice

But notice I started this column by stating that “I almost felt sorry” for union bosses.

In reality, I’m actually overjoyed that they are having a very bad year. Teacher unions are the leading political force in trying to keep kids trapped in bad schools, an approach that is especially harmful to minorities.

Their bad year just got much worse.

That’s because Florida just expanded its school choice program so…

The townland of Carrickmore in County Tyrone in Northern Ireland is the ancestral home of legendary Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain. It is also near an ancient and beautifully preserved Neolithic court tomb, excavated between 1979 and 1982. Carrickmore was at the heart of a different funerary matter when, on 3 February 2023, the Northern Ireland High Court handed down a judgment with potentially wide consequences for many laws which govern everyday life in the jurisdiction. This post examines the judgment in Re Oliver Hughes’ application for judicial review [2023] NIKB 5 in terms of the administration of Northern Ireland after the suspension and abolition of devolution in 1973, until its restoration in 1999 – the longest period of direct rule since the jurisdiction’s birth.

The facts

Oliver Hughes was interested in establishing a crematorium in the area around Carrickmore. The problem is that crematoria are regulated by the…