Utopia, you are standing in it!

The core question that this website is concerned with is whether, and on what basis, male adults have the right to use “female-only” single sex services, include those services provided for everyday bodily privacy (under Schedule 3, paragraph 27 (6) of the Equality Act 2010 in the UK):

Whatever your instinct on the question it is clear that policies must be clear and workable: everyone – female, male, those who identify as transgender, and the duty staff managing facilities need clarity. Everyone needs to know what to expect: who is allowed where, and what questions they are allowed to ask.

The need for clarity is a very basic requirement in situations where people are undressing and vulnerable.Without this, everyone’s privacy and dignity is at risk.

So people turn to the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) for guidance, or to the Government Equalities Office.

The EHRC Code of…

British-allied American Indians of the 18th century. On the left is an Iroquois warrior from about 1759. He is tattooed) and is armed with a painted trade musket. The Mohawk in the center is from the early 18th century) and is carrying a Hudson Valley fowling piece. He has complex tattoos on his face and body) and wears ear ornaments of swan down. He has a European blanket and shirt. On the right is a Mohawk warrior from about 1764. He carries a bow and arrows and a trade tomahawk. He wears feather and quillwork head ornaments, wampum ear ornaments and a ‘gorget.’ In the foreground are ball-headed clubs and a red-painted scalp with decorative stretcher rim. Richard Hook

Woodland American Indian men seem to have revered war above all else and, despite the great message of peace enshrined in the Iroquois league’s constitution, a conflict between the old men…

American war for independence against Great Britain Participation of American Indians in the Revolutionary War differed from that of previous colonial conflicts. In earlier wars-KING WILLIAM’S WAR (1689-97), QUEEN ANNE’S WAR (1702-13), KING GEORGE’S WAR (1744-48), and the FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR (1754-63)-the Indians often outnumbered the Europeans on whose side they were fighting. In the Revolutionary War, however, Indian warriors serving with American, British, and Canadian troops were a minority. Their battles were more often directed against frontier settlements rather than the enemy’s conventional armies.

In the north, Indian-white conflicts centered on New York and Pennsylvania. This was the homeland of the Iroquois, longtime allies of the British. The Revolutionary War, however, split the Six Nations. The ONEIDA and the TUSCARORA sided with the American rebels, thanks to the influence of Samuel Kirkland, a Presbyterian minister and teacher, and James Dean, agent to the Tuscarora. On June 12, 1775…

I am now busy writing a paper with my colleague Paul Zimmerman, documenting a claim that I made just over four years ago that P. H. Wicksteed discovered the Coase Theorem. The paper is due to be presented at the History of Economics Society Conference next month at Duke University. At some point soon after the paper is written, I plan to post it on SSRN.

Briefly, the point of the paper is that Wicksteed’s argument that there is no such thing as a supply curve in the sense that the supply curve of a commodity in fixed supply is just the reverse of a certain section of the demand curve, the section depending on how the given stock of the commodity is initially distributed among market participants. However the initial stock is distributed, the final price and the final allocation of the commodity is determined by the preferences of…

It was hardly predictable that the New York Review of Books would take notice of Marginal Revolutionaries by Janek Wasserman, marking the susquicentenial of the publication of Carl Menger’s Grundsätze (Principles of Economics) which, along with Jevons’s Principles of Political Economy and Walras’s Elements of Pure Economics ushered in the marginal revolution upon which all of modern economics, for better or for worse, is based. The differences between the three founding fathers of modern economic theory were not insubstantial, and the Jevonian version was largely superseded by the work of his younger contemporary Alfred Marshall, so that modern neoclassical economics is built on the work of only one of the original founders, Leon Walras, Jevons’s work having left little impression on the future course of economics.

Menger’s work, however, though largely, but not totally, eclipsed by that of Marshall and Walras, did leave a more enduring imprint and a more…

Exporting jobs as well, in pursuit of their ‘climate ambition’ aka fantasy. EU voters should be careful what they wish for.
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The EU has an ambition of being climate neutral in 2050, says Science Daily.

It is hoped that this can be achieved through a green transition in the energy sector and CO2-intensive industries, as well as through altered consumer behavior such as food habits and travel demands among the EU population.

However, should the EU implement its most ambitious decarbonization agenda, while the rest of the world continues with the status quo, non-EU nations will end up emitting more greenhouse gases, thereby significantly offsetting the reductions of EU emissions.

Very sad news this week for the economics community: both Oliver Williamson and Alberto Alesina have passed away. Williamson has been in poor health for some time, but Alesina’s death is a greater shock: he apparently had a heart attack while on a hike with his wife, at the young age of 63. While one is most famous for the microeconomics of the firm, and the other for political economy, there is in fact a tight link between their research agendas. They have attempted to open “black boxes” in economic modeling – about why firms organize the way they do, and the nature of political constraints on economic activity – to clarify otherwise strange differences in how firms and governments behave.

First, let us discuss Oliver Williamson, the 2009 Nobel winner (alongside Elinor Ostrom), and student of Ken Arrow and later the Carnegie School. He grew up in…

This week’s New York Magazine column by Andrew Sullivan (click on screenshot below) is, as usual, in three parts. The first one is, as always, the main one, and it’s about Trump’s pathology. The second discusses Vitamin D as a possible palliative for coronavirus infection (something I haven’t heard about), and the third is about Sullivan’s old mate and new Labour leader Keir Starmer, whom Sullivan much admires.  I’ll give excerpts just from the first two sections.

You’ve heard Trump’s many gaffes about the pandemic and virus these past few weeks: his “per capita” fluff, the infamous “put light and bleach up your bum” remarks, his claiming to take hydroxychloroquine, his failure to understand the difference between a positive or negative test, and so on. To reverse the famous saying of Walter Brennan as Grandpappy Amos, it was all “No fact, just brag.” And, as I wrote this morning, the…

(1)The Daily Telegraph reports that the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine trial is now running into an unexpected snag.

At present a Phase 2 trial is underway with 10,000 volunteers, half of whom get the vaccine, the other half a placebo. The idea is to compare the infection rates between the two groups in order to find out whether the vaccine does indeed have protective value.

But currently infections in the UK are falling to the point that simply not enough people may get infected to be able to learn anything from the trial.

(As related here previously, an earlier vaccine for the original SARS, developed by Janssen Pharmaceutica, was never taken into production because the epidemic died out before human trials could be completed.)

According to the Telegraph, three Chinese groups are running into a similar problem with their respective vaccine candidates.

A “plan B” that nobody dares to suggest would…

Last week, Israel finally got a new government, after three elections in under a year, the most recent of which was March of this year.

And what a government it is! Benjamin Netanyahu of the Likud will remain prime minister, with a planned rotation of the premiership to Benny Gantz in 18 months.

It is being referred to as a “unity government” but that is a strange term for a government, the formation of which led to the break-up of three of the multi-party alliances that contested the most recent election, most especially Gantz’s Blue and White list. Maybe just like with “grand coalition” in Germany and Austria, it is time to dispense with the term, “unity government,” for Israel.

The most recent Israeli governments to which the term applied were following the Knesset elections of 1984 and 1988. In these elections the two main parties (Likud…

The protests in Iran seem to be getting bigger. I can’t help being reminded (though this may be wishful thinking) of the 1989 protests in Rumania and the subsequent downfall of its dictator Nicolae CarpathiaCeaucescu.

The regime was deeply unpopular following an austerity program that had Rumanians scrambling for the most basic necessities, while the Inner Party, of course, enjoyed everything imaginable. Yet the Securitate (the Romanian secret police) maintained the most repressive police state of all the Eastern European regimes, and its grip on the people was supposed to be unassailable.

Then protests broke out in the Transylvanian town of Timisoara, in support of a Protestant pastor named László Tökés who belonged to the Hungarian minority of Transylvania. At the time, I did not think this would be a cause for the Rumanian majority — but it triggered a “preference cascade“. Suddenly, all sorts of people…

We are all familiar with the scapegoat (Lev. 16:10): a person or group on which all problems including the weather are blamed, and which can then be “cast into the desert”. Jews and/or Israel often find themselves cast in this role; but anybody who has ever worked in a corporate of military setting has seen this happen to some manager or other.

In many cases, the bad things the scapegoat is accused for aren’t just factually wrong, but logically incoherent and/or physically impossible. (And yes, I’ve seen this in US politics on my own side — fodder for another post.) In many cases, if the scapegoat didn’t exist somebody would have to invent it.

But the scapegoat has a mirror image: that which Thomas Sowell in his many writings terms a  “mascot”. In short, a mascot is an “oppressed” group whose cause one champions, not because one cares for the members…

12 Rules for Life: a review of Jordan Peterson’s book

by Nitay Arbel

Two years ago, Jordan Peterson was a respected clinical psychologist and psychology professor at U. of Toronto, and apparently a brilliant, very popular teacher to his students there. (There are many YouTube videos of his lectures, which make for good listening if you are doing something else with your hands and eyes that doesn’t involve the language centers of the brain.) Then he found himself at the center of controversy when he refused to call a leg a tail because the bureaucracy had decreed it was a tail. In the aftermath, he became a media celebrity to some and a bête noire to others. He ended up closing his clinical practice as he felt he was no longer able to give his clients the undivided attention they deserved. Instead, he wrote a book that appears to be…

NPR (via Instapundit) has a long and well-written article about the demise (not previously reported) of a Soviet missile control officer who probably prevented a nuclear world war in 1983.

My brief summary: Podpolkovnik [Lt. Col.] Stanislav Petrov was on duty that night at a missile defense monitoring station, watching out for launches of American nuclear ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missiles).

That night, suddenly the computer howled an alarm that five missiles had been launched. Estimated time to impact: 20 minutes.
He was to pass the warning up the chain of command, which would have led to a mass launch of Soviet nuclear ICBMs, and World War Three.

Petrov sensed something wasn’t adding up.

He had been trained to expect an all-out nuclear assault from the U.S., so it seemed strange that the satellite system was detecting only a few missiles being launched. And the system itself was fairly new. He…

Most people that throw around the accusation of “disproportionate response” refer to some vague conception of approximate parity in casualties and means. In fact, as I noted yesterday, international law has its own definition of “disproportionality”, which is both quite specific and rather different from the use in common parlance. (Just like “insanity” for legal purposes is not some vague term for crazy behavior but a term of art with a precise definition.)

Humanitarian law expert Prof. Laurie Blank, on the Volokh Conspiracy group-blog, gives a long expose on the meaning of “disproportionality”, following her earlier op-ed elsewhere. (H/t: commenter “VultureTX” at an Elder of Ziyon piece on proportionality in the Gaza War.)

[…] proportionality is more than just a principle; it is a methodology for assessing lawfulness in advance through careful consideration of both the value of the military advantage and the likelihood of civilian casualties. The principle tells us…