Utopia, you are standing in it!

The above is a montage of aerial combat scenes from the movie “Battle of Britain“, set to the Iron Maiden song “Aces High” (lyrics). Churchill’s immortal words form the intro.

Also in observance of the day, here is an interesting documentary on the Polish RAF squadron during the Battle of Britain.

“The few, the proud…”

Charon’s ‘red spot’ [image credit: space.com]
Scientists have discovered ‘atmospheric transfer’ taking place between Pluto and its binary partner Charon.

In June 2015, when the cameras on NASA’s approaching New Horizons spacecraft first spotted the large reddish polar region on Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, mission scientists knew two things: they’d never seen anything like it elsewhere in our solar system, and they couldn’t wait to get the story behind it, as Phys.org reports.

Over the past year, after analyzing the images and other data that New Horizons has sent back from its historic July 2015 flight through the Pluto system, the scientists think they’ve solved the mystery.

Marco Morucci and Sally Symington test the ‘Shy Tory’ hypothesis that has been mooted as the explanation for the polls’ failure to predict the election outcome and find it unconvincing.

The release of exit polls on 7 May was a moment of shock and awe for political scientists, pollsters and forecasters across the UK: polls and subsequent predictions had grossly underestimated both the vote share for the Conservative party as well as their share of seats.

Hungry for a quick and simple explanation of the phenomenon, the mainstream media and commenting classes were quick in bringing up the ‘Shy Tory’ hypothesis. The adage dates back to 1992 and goes something like this: right-wing voters felt cornered by the adversarial and negative propaganda directed at them by the left wing, prompting them to feel safer in withholding their voting intention on surveys by either answering they’re undecided or won’t vote.

Before the election, it was commonly assumed that the bias in the electoral system would favour Labour, as it has done since the 1990s. But Tim Smith illustrates how the skew on May 7 actually benefitted the Conservatives and contributed to their unexpected victory.

In the wake of the largely unexpected Conservative election victory, it was said that pollsters and political scientists had a lot of explaining to do after so many incorrect forecasts.  However, this author correctly predicted that the Liberal Democrats would do worse than was assumed , and also that the electoral system might well favour the Conservatives for the first time since 1987 which also turned out to be the case.  In this blog piece I will explain what has happened and the consequences for the next election.

At this election the two-party bias (or skew) in the electoral system moved from a pro-Labour bias of 54…

Rasmus Landersø and James Heckman poke holes at the Scandinavian economic model:

Major welfare programs as of 2012

You might think that there are a lot of poor people in America, given the way that Democrats are always talking about the need to take money away from job creating businesses and working families to hand out in welfare to the 47% who pay no income tax. The U.S. Census says that lots of people are poor in America. But is it really true?

Here’s an article from the Daily Signal to explain.

It says:

On Tuesday, the Census Bureau released its annual poverty report declaring that 43.1 million Americans lived in poverty in 2015.

We should be concerned about any American living in real material hardship, but much of what the Census reports about poverty is misleading.

Here are 15 facts about poverty in America that may surprise you.  (All statistics are taken from U.S. government surveys.)

• Poor households routinely report spending…

Today the Guardian reported on a new study that claims a large sale of legal ivory in 2008 actually led to an increase in illegal elephant poaching. Basically in 2008 China and Japan were allowed to pay for a large stockpile of legally-obtained ivory, in the hopes that this would crash the market and drive ivory traders out of business. Instead, the study claims, the sale led to a big increase in poaching – approximately a 66% increase in elephants killed, according to the study. This is interesting because it appears to put a big dent in a common libertarian idea for preserving endangered species – that allowing a regulated trade in them would lead to their preservation. It is also one of those cute findings that puts a hole in the standard just-so story of “Economics 101” that everything is driven by supply and demand. We all know that…