JCC ROYAL BABY: Today Parliament discusses changing succession laws

I'm not familiar with the proposed law, but is the abolishment of the male-preference actually tied to the allowing the heir to marry a Catholic? Can't they be discussed as two separate laws? Because I think the former should be done before the royal baby is born, but the latter IMHO has bigger issues (the ones you posted above) and there's no rush in that area.

Why does the King/Queen have to be the head of the Church of England? Can't they just make the Archbishop of Cantebury officially take over, since he basically runs the Anglican Church anyways?

Also, I thought the UK already changed the law so that William and Kate's firstborn (whether a boy or a girl) would be the next-in-line after William?

I thought Charles and the Queen changed that law years ago.

so much easier to just build a guillotine...

Hmm. I was ready to yell "King in the Canada!" and pledge my sword. Even though I don't live in Canada. And my sword is made from a plastic tube and a floorball stick.

I have too many broken ones to answer yes. But they give a nice lightsabery sound when hit together. I had to make a few more the summer before last because cousins wanted to play Star Wars and needed a Grievous (that was me since I can whirl them fast and still not hit everyone where it hurts)

I was discussing this with an English friend a couple weeks ago, but this seems very weird to me. I would think that since the Crown has no real power anymore and since there's now such a vast separation between the function of the government and the monarchy, it's surprising to me that Parliament still has that much control over the royal rules of succession - and cares enough to amend them. You would think that since the monarchy is now no more than a symbolic figurehead that Parliament wouldn't give a **** who succeeds or need to be involved in determining it anyway.

Someone has a lot of free time...



http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/02/26...-and-kate-middletons-teenage-child/?hpt=hp_t3

They didn't take into account William's early age baldness did they?

I wonder who will go bald first, Prince William or Marco Rubio?

But seriously, I think that gene is only inherited from the mother's side, so like if Kate has a bald grandfather or bald uncle's.

Btw, why can't Prince William just buy some of that anti-baldness stuff they're always advertising on TV commercials? I think he can afford it

Then it must have been a freak inheritance from his father's side because Diana's brother still has(had? haven't seen recent photos/vids of him lately) a full head of hair while Charles, well pictures speak for themselves with Charles.

The forty years of economic chaos in France until it got back to its pre-Revolution financial position disagrees with you. Les Miserables is set in 1815, 19 years after the period of the French Revolution is generally historically agreed to have ended (in 1796).

Much of the chaos France went through in the "revolutionary" and "Napoleonic" (the line between those is pretty arbitrary) periods is attributable as much to counterrevolutionary (mostly monarchists) forces domestically and abroad as it was to the republicans themselves. Also, the last few kings had put France in an awful financial position and even before the First Republic was declared it's kind of difficult to be in a good financial position when practically an entire continent is mobilized against you. Louis XVI, mind you, was only executed after he made a series of attempts to secure foreign intervention to restore absolutist rule.

All of Les Miserables, by the way, takes place after the Bourbon Restoration and the end is during the Orleanist period.

I said economic chaos, not military. On that Fiat Money Inflation in France by Andrew Dickson White is rather instructive. The reason 1796 is the generally agreed end of the revolutionary period is because that's when its hyperinflated currency was shot between the eyes: July 16, 1796, when France repealed its legal tender laws and thus cancelled its worthless fiat currency outright. Prior to that, there had been heavy financial repression by the "revolution" against its own people: on February 28, 1793, a Paris mob wearing masks first looted bread, then they simply stole everything, progressing from the somewhat sympathetic bread only to take it all, all in the same night. On June 22, 1793, the French federal government employed financial repression, forcing all married men who made more than 10,000 francs and all single men who made more than 6,000 francs to lend money to the government—similar to forcing them to buy government bonds. France later lowered the loan threshold to those who made one thousand francs because so many of the rich fled the country taking their wealth with them.

Those poor, oppressed rich people.

And you just proved that the line is arbitrary. 1796 is early anyway.

Thanks for missing the point: i.e. that when the "rich" fled the country, the "new rich", i.e. those previously known as the "less than rich", i.e.e. anyone with 1,000 francs rather than 6,000, were forced into the same financial repression. I daresay going from demanding money from someone who earns $360,000 per year down to demanding money from people who earn $60,000 per year would be a little objectionable, don't you think? I've established my date for the end of the revolution; if you'd like to disprove White's text and the implications it holds for monetary policy in the present day, be my guest.

EDIT: Unless you're saying it's right to force people to loan money to the government at below market interest rates, of course?

The First Republic was in a desperate situation throughout its whole existence. They also started mass conscription. You'd probably have a much easier time convincing me that was "wrong."

My point is that the First Republic got into that desperate situation there mainly through the same sort of silly economic conduct -- overspending and then hyperinflating your currency to pay for it, thereby causing the destitution of your own people -- as governments have been doing on and off through the last several hundred years or so, with or without a king. Indeed White's accounts of the sort of oratory going on to justify the economic monkeying around have a depressingly familiar sound to them. If you really want to know how a government can utterly destroy its people by playing around with the currency, look up Anna Eisenmeiger's "Blockade". She was a doctor's wife, so obviously a poor, deserving capitalist who entirely got her just rewards as her family died of starvation around her in Austria of 1922-23. You can, if you like, blame the West for Austria "having" to hyperinflate due to the war reparations of World War 1, but the same can't be said of Revolutionary France. And I'd suggest the result is the same: misery as the worth of the people's currency is stolen from them by their own government debasing it.

EDIT: And it might be noted that France did not have the excuse that it had not happened before. John Law almost single-handedly destroying the French currency had happened less than a hundred years before the Revolution.

Now that's an incisive contribution (b-boom tss)

they got in their "desperate situation" by deposing their despot in an age of despots, thereby incurring the enmity of all the surrounding despots, who understandably freaked out and marshalled all the forces and wealth at their disposal to crush a people that had dared to try to overturn the old oppressive order, before their own bourgeoisie developed similar aspirations. but you can go on rambling about fiat currency if that's not obvious enough to you. i suppose haiti got where it is by "overspending" as well, and not by daring to throw off the shackles of racist colonialism in a world run by racist colonialists?

its shocking almost to the point of physical nausea to me that the human mind can tie itself in such fabulous knots as yours has in order to convince itself of the righteousness of not only its own enslavement, but the different forms of enslavement of ages past. are you prince charles? what could possibly be so tantalizing about this absurd belief system for you?