Utopia, you are standing in it!

James VI, King of Scots came to the English throne in 1603 and he had been on the Scottish throne since 1567, a few months after his birth. As stated last week, often a strong monarch was able to gain control of Parliament and even rule without them. However, was the problems James had with Parliament due to him being a weak monarch or was the showdown between Crown and Parliament inevitable? My personal theory is that the two would eventually come into conflict. Society is always in a flux of growth and change and as has happened in all monarchies eventually the people rise up and desire a say in government.

For centuries the Crown held the majority of power and although the Tudor monarchs only used the Parliament to stamp its approval on what the king or queen desires, usually it had to do with raising taxes, Parliament…

Steve Pinker‘s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature is a wonderful book, not only for its wide reach and deep discussion, but also for the lively and opinionated language. Like The Economist, Pinker writes objectively with a view – though he clearly has an a opinion, well thought out and researched, in the nature-vs-nurture debate, he is careful to examine evidence and give the other side its due. Not that there is much.

Articulated, polemic and with more than a whiff of exasperated sarcasm, Steven Pinker attacks three misconceptions in modern culture: The Blank Slate, the idea that nurture, not nature, is the main shaping force behind human behavior; The Noble Savage, that the badness of the modern condition comes from the modern conditions – and things were somehow better before we got modern technology and transportation; and the Ghost in the Machine

On August 16, 1945, Maj. Sugi Shigeru led about 100 young soldiers from the army’s air signal training school in Ibaraki prefecture to Tokyo in order to protect the emperor from the imminent allied occupation. The Guard Division, which was responsible for defending the palace, shooed them away, but the group congregated at Ueno Park, eventually occupying the art museum. More arrivals from the school swelled their numbers to around 400 armed and emotional young men. Sugi ignored senior officers’ orders to disband, and the next day Maj. Ishihara Sadakichi, a Guard Division officer and friend of Sugi’s, was sent to convince him to leave. While the two were talking, a second lieutenant assigned to the training school walked up and shot Ishihara to death. Sugi in turn shot and killed the lieutenant. The murders broke the spell of an imperial rescue mission, and the disillusioned troops drifted away. That…

People are extraordinarily prone to confirmation biases. We have a strong tendency to latch onto anything that supports our position and blindly ignore anything that doesn’t. This is especially true when it comes to scientific topics. People love to think that science is on their side, and they often use scientific papers to bolster their position. Citing scientific literature can, of course, be a very good thing. In fact, I frequently insist that we have to rely on the peer-reviewed literature for scientific matters. The problem is that not all scientific papers are of a high quality. Shoddy research does sometimes get published, and we’ve reached a point in history where there is so much research being published that if you look hard enough, you can find at least one paper in support of almost any position that you can imagine. Therefore, we must always be cautious about eagerly accepting…

When faced with scientific studies that disagree with them, many people are prone to claim that they don’t have to accept those studies because most scientific studies are actually wrong. They generally try to support this claim by either citing the work of John P. A. Ioannidis (especially his paper titled, “Why most published research findings are false”) or by quoting Dr. Richard Horton who said,

“The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.”

To the anti-scientist, these are “get out of jail free” cards that let them dismiss any study that they don’t like. In reality, of course, those who oppose science…

Nine years after the passage of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act, both government and opposition have expressed a desire to repeal it, following two general elections: one brought about about using the provisions of the Act and another by circumventing them. The Constitution Committee has produced a report setting out what any replacement legislation needs to address. Its Chair, Baroness Taylor, discusses the Committee’s conclusions below.

On its introduction in 2011, the Fixed-term Parliaments Act (FTPA) was heralded by the then Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, as a ‘constitutional innovation’ that would no longer allow the timing of general elections to be a ‘plaything of Governments’. Nine years on, it is safe to say that the FTPA has not had the effect that he and others envisaged. The FTPA has been stress-tested and found wanting by political parties and commentators alike.

The FTPA sets the length of parliaments at five…

“Amerika” bomber Amerika Bomber: A group of Me 264 aircraft getting ready to take off.

The answer lies with Germany’s theory of war in general. Everyone knew that Germany could not sustain a long-drawn-out war like WWI. Blitzkrieg, to use a simple term, was developed to achieve quick victories of the kind that were essential to Germany’s success. As a result, the sole purpose of the Luftwaffe was to directly support the ground troops in getting that victory through direct intervention on the battlefield.

In general, the twin engine bombers (Do17, Ju88, etc.) were to function in an interdiction role, disrupting supplies and the flow of reinforcements directly behind the battlefield. Strategic bombing, the only use for four-engined bombers, was a waste of time if the war was only going to last weeks or months. If Germany needed strategic bombing, then she had already lost.

A very decent four-engine plane…

When I said that “Darwin was next” in the line of statue-removal, renaming, and accusations of racism, I wasn’t kidding. Darwin was an abolitionist, but he did evince some white superiority in his writings and letters, calling blacks “savages” and “barbarians” (I lecture on this). It’s only a matter of time before that bigoted paternalism, ubiquitous in 19th-century England, would bring Darwin down.

It’s starting:

Dr. Schierenbeck is a plant geneticist, taxonomist, and evolutionist at California State University, Chico.

I looked up “decolonization” on Wikipedia and found this:

Decolonization (American English) or decolonisation (British English) is the undoing of colonialism, the latter being the process whereby a nation establishes and maintains its…

Given the scientific and political luminaries who have fallen under the axe, it’s not beyond possibility that Charles Darwin himself may undergo a “reevaluation,” with people discovering what we already knew: Darwin, like many people of the mid-19th century, had some bigoted views of whites (i.e., Brits) as a superior race. Yet Darwin never did anything but write a bit about it in The Voyage of theBeagle and The Descent of Man, and was, to boot, an ardent abolitionist along with his wife’s family, the Wedgewoods. Josiah Wedgewood, Darwin’s grandfather (and also his wife Emma’s), designed this ceramic medallion that was popular among abolitionists as early as 1787. That may be enough to save Charles but, as we know, one misstep can cancel you for keeps. And Darwin made more than one—according to today’s lights.

“Am I not a man and a brother?”

It’s thus possible that Darwin…

I have just posted a paper I started writing in 2007 after reading Thomas McCraw’s excellent biography of Joseph Schumpeter, Prophet of Innovation. The paper, almost entirely written in 2007, lay unfinished until a few months ago, when I finally figured out how to conclude the paper. I greatly benefited from the comments and encouragement of David Laidler, R. G. Lipsey and Geoff Harcourt in its final stages.

The paper can be accessed or downloaded here.

Here is the abstract:

Drawing on McCraw’s (2007) biography, this paper assesses the character of Joseph Schumpeter. After a biographical summary of Schumpeter’s life and career as an economist, the paper considers a thread of deliberate posturing and pretense in Schumpeter’s grandiose ambitions and claims about himself. It also takes account of his ambiguous political and moral stance in both his personal, public and scholarly lives, in particular his tenure as finance minister…

On September 1, New York-based (and wholly-owned by its employees) publisher W.W. Norton & Company published Twilight of the Gods: The War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945, the concluding volume of Ian W, Toll’s Pacific War Trilogy, thus completing the story begun in Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific (2011)and The Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific Islands, 1942-1944 (2015). In a narrative that covers the last year of the war in the Pacific Theater from the aftermath of the Battle of the Philippine Sea in the late summer of 1944 to the invasion of Okinawa and the dropping of two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August of 1945, Twilight of the Gods puts the capstone on the first major history of the Pacific War since Samuel Eliot Morrison’s 16 volume history…