Utopia, you are standing in it!

The latest issue of Science Advances has a provocative and clever piece of research aimed at answering a long-standing question—one considered by Charles Darwin himself: are the facial expressions associated with human emotions universal across all cultures? And, if so, is that the result of evolution? The paper suggests that, at least for a limited set of emotions, the answer is yes to both questions. You can read the paper by clicking the screenshot below, or reading the pdf here.The full reference is at the bottom.

Cowen and Keltner note that there have been a fair number of attempts to answer this question, all involving going to remote areas where there is little contact with Westerners, and seeing if people in those areas match photos of Western expressive signals (joy, anger, sympathy) with similar words in their native language. The results have been mixed. That, one would think, already…

The reign of James I

Queen Elizabeth I died aged 70 on 24 March 1603. She had resisted marrying a husband or bearing an heir throughout her reign and now died childless. King James VI of Scotland was chosen to inherit the crown of England, ascending the throne at the age of 37, having himself ascended the Scottish throne while still a child aged 13 months, after his mother, Mary Queen of Scots was forced to abdicate in his favour.

James had been brought up by four regents and umpteen guardians, and had survived the poisonous faction-fighting of the Scottish court for 20 years since coming of age.

Kidnapping Scottish kings was almost constitutional practice and James himself was abducted twice. (p.79)

Upon hearing he’d inherited the throne of England, James hastened south to Scotland’s rich, sunny neighbour and never went back. Unfortunately, he brought quite a few Scottish aristocrats…

Yesterday, in Part I of this series, we enjoyed a video from the U.K.-based Centre for Economic Education, about how capitalism lifted the world from deprivation and oppression (also see videos by Don Boudreaux and Deirdre McCloskey).

Today, in Part II of the Case for Capitalism, here’s a video from CEE that explains how markets provide you a cup of coffee.

An obvious takeaway from the video is that consumers benefit from global markets, which hopefully helps to explain why free trade is desirable.

But there are four other messages that are even more widely applicable.

1. Capitalism is based on competition, but also should be understood as a system of cooperation.
2. Voluntary exchange means that both buyers and sellers expect to benefit from a transaction.
3. Prices should be set by unfettered markets rather than politicians, regulators, or bureaucrats.
4. Our prosperity is a result of the invisible hand

The latest issue of Science Advances has a provocative and clever piece of research aimed at answering a long-standing question—one considered by Charles Darwin himself: are the facial expressions associated with human emotions universal across all cultures? And, if so, is that the result of evolution? The paper suggests that, at least for a limited set of emotions, the answer is yes to both questions. You can read the paper by clicking the screenshot below, or reading the pdf here.The full reference is at the bottom.

Cowen and Keltner note that there have been a fair number of attempts to answer this question, all involving going to remote areas where there is little contact with Westerners, and seeing if people in those areas match photos of Western expressive signals (joy, anger, sympathy) with similar words in their native language. The results have been mixed. That, one would think, already…

ChildLine : Coming Out Stories

In the third of my posts on the NSPCC, child protection charity, I looked at Coming Out Stories, involving three females and one male. Callum is a gay male. One of the females identifies as assexual, one bisexual and , despite watching this, and transcribing it, I still don’t know what the final girl identifies as. 😳. This is a video about coming out and , as far as I can tell, Maja didn’t actually come out as anything! What was noticeable was, out of the three females, not one came out as Lesbian.

Here is a link to the youtube https://youtu.be/wzw6rGDMqX0

Here is a transcript: ChildLine Coming Out stories Transcription

First question is directed at Calum. He is given, by far, the most air time in this piece. He was aware of his sexuality at a young age and began talking…

Freedom for Faith have posted this submission on the provisions of a Private Member’s Bill (sponsored by the Hon Mark Latham) being considered in the NSW Parliament at the moment. The Bill would plug a gap in NSW discrimination law by making religious belief or activity a prohibited ground of discrimination in NSW. The Bill is one that ought to receive serious consideration from the Parliament, and the submission (prepared for Freedom for Faith by Dr Alex Deagon, Senior Lecturer in Law at the Queensland University of Technology) should be very helpful in that process.

Mark Kishlansky (1948 – 2015) was an American historian of seventeenth-century British politics. He was the Frank Baird, Jr. Professor of History at Harvard University, editor of the Journal of British Studies from 1984 to 1991, and editor-in-chief of History Compass from 2003 to 2009.

Kishlansky wrote half a dozen or so books and lots of articles about Stuart Britain and so was invited to write Volume Six of the Penguin History of England covering that period, under the general editorship of historian David Cannadine.

I think of the history of Britain in the 17th century as consisting of four parts:

1. The first two Stuarts (Kings James I & Charles I) 1603 – 1642
2. The Civil Wars and Protectorate (Oliver Cromwell) 1642 – 1660
3. The Restoration (Kings Charles II & James II) 1660 – 1688
4. The Glorious Revolution and Whig monarchs (William & Mary, then Queen Anne) 1688 – 1714

Australia has seen two recent initiatives by local Parliaments aimed at what are often called “conversion therapy” practices. No-one supports coercive electro-shock or other oppressive practices imposed on someone without their consent, to change their sexual preferences or identity. But the problem with the recent legislative proposals is that the laws do not target these practices alone (as to which it is hard to find any evidence of them occurring in Australia in recent years), but seem to reach further and to prevent religious groups sharing the teaching of their faith.

This video from Dan Hannan crams 10,000 years of human history into 5 minutes. We learn about the “stationary bandit” of government and find out how our ancestors endured pervasive oppression and misery.

But there’s a happy ending to the story. It’s called capitalism.

There are many useful insights in this video.

We learn why it was important to replace arbitrary government with the “rule of law” so that property rights could be protected and so that people wanting to buy and sell no longer had to get permission from the state.

And once capitalism was unleashed beginning a few hundred years ago, living standards dramatically improved (these videos by Don Boudreaux and Deirdre McCloskey have lots of evidence).

Hannan makes the all-important point that capitalism is the opposite of exploitation. It enriches people, but also liberates them.

And, as indicated by one of my…

The endless appeal of media-driven myths rests largely in their supposed affirmation that journalists can be powerful actors whose work and words can have great and decisive effects on war, politics, and public policy.

Cronkite in Vietnam

This thread runs through all prominent media myths, from William Randolph Hearst’s presumptive vow to “furnish the war” with Spain at the end of the 19th century to the dominant narrative of the Watergate scandal, that exposés by two Washington Post reportersbrought down Richard Nixon’s corrupt presidency.

The thread also defines the presumptive “Cronkite Moment” of 1968, when CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite declared on air that the U.S. military was “mired in stalemate” in the Vietnam War.

Cronkite’s assessment, which came after he visited what then was South Vietnam in the wake of the communist-led Tet offensive, was unremarkable for the times. Even so…

There has been extraordinary progress made in many facets of medical science and treatment, with the obvious front runner being cardiac issues. Nowhere is such progress better demonstrated than in the life insurance industry with its actuarial downgrading of cardiac risk over the last thirty years.

Not so well known, perhaps, is the art of pain management.

Some of our more alert readers will know Adolf underwent surgery on his left shoulder nearly three months ago to reattach a snapped tendon. The surgeon told me while such surgery is not major compared with many other types, this particular case was at the top of it’s class for being ‘major.’

So there I was, slung in a sling for six weeks, unable to drive.

For the whole six weeks l was required to take Panadol, 24 hours per day, every day, continuing up to today and for God knows how much…

In a ‘don’t say we told you so moment’, wind and solar obsessed California has just suffered another run of weather induced mass blackouts. Like clockwork, wind power output collapsed just as the summer heat and demand for electricity rose – leaving a million or more Californians sweltering in the dark.

Anyone wondering what an all wind and sun powered future might look like need look no further than the debacle that is California. Oh, and for those who think this might be novel or unique, you can always trawl our archives on Australia’s blackout capital, the equally wind and solar obsessed South Australia: Déjà Vu (All Over Again): Yet Another Wind Power Output Collapse Plunges 200,000 South Australian Homes into the Dark Ages

Here’s a couple of primers on what happens when brazen ideology trumps sound engineering.

Green California Has the Nation’s Worst Power Grid
Washington Examiner
Steve Goreham
18…

The scare du jour is about Greenland Ice Sheet (GIS) and how it will melt out and flood us all.  It’s declared that GIS has passed its tipping point, and we are doomed.  Typical is the Phys.org hysteria: Sea level rise quickens as Greenland ice sheet sheds record amount:  “Greenland’s massive ice sheet saw a record net loss of 532 billion tonnes last year, raising red flags about accelerating sea level rise, according to new findings.”

Panic is warranted only if you treat this as proof of an alarmist narrative and ignore the facts and context in which natural variation occurs. For starters, consider the last four years of GIS fluctuations reported by DMI and summarized in the eight graphs above.  Note the noisy blue lines showing how the surface mass balance (SMB) changes its daily weight by 8 or 10 gigatonnes (Gt) around the baseline mean from 1981…

There is a lively debate among economists about the way in which UK statisticians are estimating the impact of the pandemic on the output of the public sector. This is a relatively arcane topic and the mainstream media can be forgiven for not yet covering it. But it is important, not least because other countries do things differently.

If everyone used the same method, the reported fall in UK GDP in the first half of the year would actually be similar to that in France and Italy, rather than the outlier that the headlines suggest. On the other hand, the UK method, which is more accurate, will also show an even stronger recovery in the third quarter and beyond.

These issues have also led to some confusion about an alternative measure of inflation known as the implied GDP deflator, prompting the economist Shaun Richards to ask “Has nobody else…