Utopia, you are standing in it!

This week Shadow Secretary of State for Women and Equalities Marsha de Cordova asked a good question about the single sex exceptions in the Equality Act.

Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch gave a good and clear answer.

It is worth reflecting that she talked about “restricting the use of spaces” on the basis of sex.

How do you do this? A service provider sets a rule which applies to the space, based on sex: male or female only. And they communicate it.

Usually they do this with a simple pictogram like this:

This picture is not just a commonly understood cultural image, it is standardised internationally as part of ISO Standard 7001 . It explicitly means…

I haven’t found the latest few installments of Andrew Sullivan’s The Weekly Dish terribly exciting, and, truth be told, they haven’t been as thoughtful or engaging as his old tripartite column for New York Magazine. I know his readers enjoy the ability to publish their “dissents”, which is good, and like to guess “where was this photo taken?”, but I prefer his serious, longer-form pieces.

There’s only one such piece per week now, and this week’s is about Joe Biden. It’s pretty good, but I’m wondering if my $50 subscription was well spent. I’m hoping that, after the election, Sullivan will find new and interesting things to write about. I’m not giving up yet.

I think The Weekly Dish is now pay-only, but if you subscribe you can see the post by clicking on the screenshot below. I’ll give a few excerpts, but I have little to say about…

Zhou Enlai’s famous quote, made during Nixon’s groundbreaking visit to China in 1972, in response to a question about French revolts, was actually not referring to the French Revolution of 1789 but the revolts of 1968.

I was reminded of this while watching the following scenes of people fleeing Paris just the other day before the commencement of a new curfew and lockdown process in response to a second wave of Chinese Lung Rot cases and deaths.

The reason is contained in this graph.

That chart is more than a month old and things have not improved since then…

Here’s a 10½-minute video produced by an extraordinarily courageous woman bucking the wokeness of her employer, Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.  This is the first of several videos promised by staff member Jodie Shaw, an alum who works as a student support coordinator. Her picture has disappeared from the staff page—only the first step in the inevitable demonization that will happen to her. She is toast: after just this video—the first one—she will be shunned, harassed, and, ultimately, will have to resign because she’ll have nothing to do (they can’t fire her).  She’ll never be able to get a job at another college.

Shaw doesn’t try to hide her name or her background, and she’s suffering from a common malaise: race exhaustion. Smith is one of the wokest American colleges, something that seems to correlate positively with the prestige and priciness of a college. (Smith is very prestigious and…

For members of my generation the name Henry Kissinger produces a number of reactions.  First and foremost is his “ego,” which based on his career in public service, academia, and his role as a dominant political and social figure makes him a very consequential figure in American diplomatic history.  Second, he fosters extreme responses whether your views are negative seeing him as a power hungry practitioner of Bismarckian realpolitik who would do anything from wiretapping his staff to the 1972 Christmas bombing of North Vietnam; or positive as in the case of “shuttle diplomacy” to bring about disengagement agreements between Israel and Egypt, and Israel and Syria following the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the use of linkage or triangular diplomacy pitting China and the Soviet Union against each other.  No matter one’s opinion Thomas A. Schwartz’s new book, HENRY KISSINGER AND AMERICAN POWER: A POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY…

The Spectator has published a SAGE paper outlining a ‘reasonable worst case’ scenario leading to an additional 85,000 Covid deaths in the UK, even with some partial mitigation. It’s hard to know what to make of this figure without a better understanding of what would happen if the government did nothing. (The paper assumed that ‘policy measures are put in place to reduce non-household contacts to half of their normal … levels’, which sounds pretty draconian to me.) But on the basis of what we do know, it is also hard to justify tightening restrictions any further, especially if this means another full national lockdown.

There have already been several independent attempts at a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of prolonged Covid lockdowns. I think it fair to say there is an emerging consensus that the welfare costs – not just the economic damage but also other social harms –…

Patrizia Baudino, Diarmuid Murphy and Jean-Philippe Svoronos in this BIS WP:

This paper covers the banking crisis in Ireland that started in 2008, which stemmed from a combination of macroeconomic developments, risky bank practices and unsustainable fiscal policies. In line with the scope of this series, the paper focuses on the policy response. This involved the restructuring of the banking sector, requiring measures to restore bank capital, address asset quality issues and ensure the provision of funding.

Several rounds of stress tests, deleveraging plans and the provision of central bank liquidity, as well as the creation of an asset management company, were among the key measures put in place.

The Irish banking crisis offers important lessons. One is the need to recognise the limits of emergency liquidity assistance and the boundary between such assistance and fiscal support. Others concern bank restructuring and the best modalities for it. Finally, some…

Plans to erect thousands more of these things around Britain’s coasts, spell the death knell for millions of seabirds, with several species under threat.

While Greta frets about global incineration and mass extinctions, the wind industry is doing a very fine job of extinguishing millions of birds and bats, every year. Indeed, entire species are under threat, including Europe’s Red Kite and Tasmania’s Wedge Tailed Eagle.

More generally, there’s a wave of avian carnage wherever the wind industry plies it subsidy-soaked trade; and offshore is no exception.

The offshore wind industry is already exacting a phenomenal toll on a whole range of seabirds in the waters surrounding Britain. However, if Boris Johnson’s plans to carpet Britain’s coasts with more of these things come to fruition, then expect to see the wholesale wipeout of entire species, including the iconic puffin.

Puffins and other seabirds will be driven to extinction by Boris…

The Intercept co-founder Glenn Greenwald was interviewed on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show discussing his resignation highlighting censorship of his articles about Joe Biden at the publication. This is significant since it is a blatant exposure of media corruption.

Seven people have been arrested on suspicion of seizing control of an oil tanker, police have said.

The men were detained when military forces stormed the Nave Andromeda which was thought to have been hijacked off the Isle of Wight on Sunday night.

Sixteen members of the Special Boat Service (SBS) ended a 10-hour stand-off which started when stowaways on board the ship reportedly became violent.

Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said there had been a “threat to life”.

Hampshire Constabulary said the seven men were being held on suspicion of “seizing or exercising control of a ship by use of threats or force under Sections 9(1) and (3) of the Aviation and Maritime and Security Act 1990”.

“All 22 crew members are safe and well and the vessel is now alongside in the port of Southampton,” a spokesman said.

Investigators are now speaking to the ship’s crew to establish what…

Introduction

The line between academia and scholarship on the one hand and punditry and activism on the other has become increasingly blurred in Canada, especially in the wake of the coalition-prorogation crisis of December 2008. Recent works like Democratizing the Constitution: Reforming Responsible Government are emblematic of the attempt, as well as the failure, to reconcile the mutually exclusive concepts of political activism and constitutional scholarship.

A spin off of that book, Lori Turnbull’s column “A three-peat for prorogation? Bring on reform” in the Globe and Mailalso effectively underscores this problem: sometimes the correct academic argument becomes an obstacle to effective activism. The article makes at least two factual errors and, more broadly, purports a serious conceptual error of interpretation about the nature of crown prerogative and the role of unwritten convention in Canada’s constitution.

Problems with Turnbull’s Column and Democratizing the Constitution: Reforming Responsible Government

On Prorogation…