Utopia, you are standing in it!

UPDATE: Over at his website, my Chicago colleague Brian Leiter, a philosopher and legal scholar, has a good take on Hume. An excerpt:

What’s bizarre about the mass delusion now gripping the Anglophone world, even outside the U.S., is that no one yet knows whether George Floyd was killed because he was Black, rather than poor, marginalized, and non-cooperative (which cops hate!), the factors that actually explain most police killings (race is largely an epiphenomenon).

And what’s even worse is that none of this has anything to do with Hume.

Hume was a man of his time in some ways, but we don’t read him to figure out whether we should invest in the slave trade.  We read him because he transcended his time, because he touched the fundamental questions about what it is to be a human being in the world:  what do we know, what…

Today appears to be Get Off My Lawn Day, for there are multiple acts of cancellation underway. I call them to your attention. Not that any of us can do anything about this, for, as I’ve said, wokeness is a one-way ratchet—at least for now. Nobody dares oppose these unhinged intitiatives for fear of being called a racist, and so the demands lumber over rationality like a big, dumb juggernaut.

According to the article below in the Torygraph—and echoed in the Daily Fail—the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) is undergoing a woke housecleaning, involving the cancellation of George Bernard Shaw, a call for changes in how English is used, and a call for halting the production of Restoration comedies. In general, the students are trying to “decolonise the curriculum” and enact “root and branch structural reform to end institutional racism at RADA.” (RADA has already admitted that…

Zut alors! Could it be, that this earlier version of an Agatha Christie novel is now on assorted streaming TV channels? Taking advantage of the fact that this story will return to theaters under the care of Sir Kenneth Branagh anon?

If I was a gambling man, I’d put money on the fact that this 1978 Christie adaptation, the second starring the great Peter Ustinov, was the one that inspired Branagh and the studio then-known at 20th century Fox to revive Hercule Poirot and this old-fashioned whodunit franchise.

“Murder on the Orient Express” is the most famous Dame Agatha title, at least as far as the big screen goes. It’s a good story to stuff with an all-star cast and introduce Christie’s obnoxious, all-seeing/all-knowing sleuth and gourmand, a “proof of concept” franchise opener.

That was good enough for Ustinov and director Sidney Lumet and Paramount back in 1974, and…

I want to begin this post by doing something atypical for me. I want to tell you about an amazing cure-all that I that was recently introduced to: turpentine (aka paint thinner). According to the vast wealth of knowledge available on the internet, most (if not all) diseases are actually caused by parasites, fungal infections (particularly Candida), and even modern medicine itself. Don’t worry, however, because all of these can be cured by drinking turpentine (or sometimes kerosene or even gasoline). Now, you may think that sounds crazy, but have no fear, because this treatment is totally natural (turpentine is made from distilled tree resin). Also, it has been used for nearly two centuries, and several brave doctors have bucked the medical establishment and are promoting it (e.g., Jennifer Daniels). You may think that is pretty flimsy evidence, but don’t worry, I also have multiple blogs, alternative health…

John Taylor in the Hayek Lecture 2012 organised by Manhattan Institute looks at this question.

Most figure Hayek with liberty and anti-planning. Taylor says we need to read Hayek for a different cause.

He says we need to still read Hayek as latter believed in rules:

Manhattan Institute organises annual Hayek Lecture.

The 2012 winner was John Taylor.  Here is his speech on the occasion titled as Road to recovery (based on Hayek’s famed book – road to serfdom).

Taylor connects his rule based policies to Hayek’s freedomm ideas which also relied on consistent rules:

Here we have some pretty amazing shots of the Ecuadorian volcano Reventador erupting between January 5 and 7 of this year, and filmed by Martin Rietze. It’s quite active, and there are two sites reporting the activity (here, and a better one here).  The curious thing is that, as the second site reports, January 2020 wasn’t a particularly active time—even though there were daily explosions! From the second site:

Volcanism in January 2020 was relatively low compared to the other months of this reporting period. Explosions continued on a nearly daily basis early in the month, ranging from 20 to 51. During 5-7 January incandescent material ejected from the summit vent moved as block avalanches downslope and multiple gas-and-steam and ash plumes were produced (figures 120, 121, and 122). After 9 January the number of explosions decreased to 0-16 per day. Ash plumes rose between 4.6…

On September 21, 2015, W,W. Norton & Company – an independent, employee-owned publishing company based in New York City – published Ian W. Toll’s The Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific Islands, 1942-1944. This is the second book in Toll’s Pacific War Trilogy, which begins with Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942 (2011) and ends with the recently-published Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945.

As the subtitle clearly indicates, The Conquering Tide covers the war between the Japanese Empire and the Allies (the United States, Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand) during the “island-hopping” campaigns of the American-dominated twin drives across the vast expanses of the South and Central Pacific to drive the Japanese out of their conquered island holdings and build a network of bases from which Admiral Chester W. Nimitz’s…

Andrew Sullivan has devoted a lot of the last two editions of The Weekly Dish to the genetics of intelligence, perhaps because he’s taken a lot of flak for supposedly touting The Bell Curve and the genetic underpinnings of IQ.  Now I haven’t read The Bell Curve, nor the many posts Sullivan’s devoted to the genetics of intelligence (see the long list here), but he’s clearly been on the defensive about his record which, as far as I can see, does emphasize the genetic component to intelligence. But there’s nothing all that wrong with that: a big genetic component of IQ is something that all geneticists save Very Woke Ones accept. But as I haven’t read his posts, I can neither defend nor attack him on his specific conclusions.

I can, however, briefly discuss this week’s post, which is an explication and defense of a new book by…

I recall reading about how Joseph Stiglitz was the most prolific economist with something like 600 papers with CV running in 59 pages. This was was 2008 so it could be in the 65th page as he has written so much since then as well. It was felt no one could Stiglitz on this paper writing activity.

But then as you start thinking that this record will stay comes  someone who breaks it in quick time. Take Tennis. Emerson’s Grand Slam record (12 titles) was broken by Sampras (14), Sampras by Federer (16 by now) and Federer’s could be broken by Nadal/Djokovic. Michael Schumaker’s record could be broken by Vettel and may be someone has the courage to challenge T’kar’s record.

In similar vein we have Daron Acemoglu of MIT who could challenge Stiglitz in coming years. He writes papers faster than anyone can think and on variety of topic…

Nice interview of the Armchair economist.

Why did he write the book?

Don Brash was invited to speak at Victoria University by the Shalom Students Association.

In an email from the Freee Speech Colation Jordan Williams says:

Last night Don Brash gave his speech to a handful of people at Victoria University.  I say a handful because the University limited those who could be in the room to just ten!

Other events are the University are fine with much larger numbers.  But for some reason COVID is much more a concern when it is Don Brash, or when his speech is about free speech…

The Free Speech Coalition thought it deserved a wider audience.

Here it is:

IS FREEDOM OF SPEECH UNDER THREAT IN NEW ZEALAND?

On the face of it, that’s a silly question.  In New Zealand, freedom of speech is enshrined as one of our fundamental rights in the Bill of Rights Act of 1990.  Section 14 of that law…