Utopia, you are standing in it!

An article in the Sydney Morning Herald (“Religious discrimination bill gives Australians ‘right to be a bigot'”, J Ireland, SMH 30 Jan 2020) sets up a number of “straw man” arguments so that it can knock them down and claim that the proposed Religious Discrimination Bill is harmful. I disagree.

Following on from Jeremy Bowen’s report on the US administration’s “Peace to Prosperity” plan, viewers of BBC One’s ‘News at Ten’ on January 28^th were presented with a report by Orla Guerin which was introduced by presenter Huw Edwards as follows:

Edwards: “At least ten Palestinians have been injured in clashes with Israeli forces amid protests against the plan that’s been unveiled in Washington. The demonstrations in the Israeli occupied West Bank came as the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas said that his response to the Trump deal was ‘a thousand times no’. Our international correspondent Orla Guerin has spent the day in the West Bank gauging Palestinian opinions on the plan.”

Edwards did not bother to clarify that those opinions were given – and formed – before the details of the plan had even been made public. Guerin began her report at a crossing between Palestinian Authority controlled…

Presumably someone pointed the Retirement Commissioner to my post yesterday ,as I gather the online version of the triennial report now has a “Foreword”, rather than the “Forward” that appeared until yesterday.  We all make mistakes, typos, and literals, but you’d suppose that well-funded government agencies would have prominent parts of high-profile documents proofread.     Anyway, enough of that (perhaps rather petty) point.

One other aspect of the Commissioner’s report that caught my eye was the bit about “ethical investment”.  This was prompted by the government, which had asked the Commissioner to report on

Information about the public’s perception and understanding of ethical investments
in KiwiSaver, including:
a) The kinds of investments that New Zealanders may want to see excluded
by KiwiSaver providers; and
b) The range of KiwiSaver funds with an ethical investment mandate.

As I noted yesterday, there is a make-work element to the Commissioner’s role (and…

The paper, forthcoming in The Review of Austrian Economics, can be read online.

Here is the abstract:

Hayek was among the first to realize that for intertemporal equilibrium to obtain all agents must have correct expectations of future prices. Before comparing four categories of intertemporal, the paper explains Hayek’s distinction between correct expectations and perfect foresight. The four equilibrium concepts considered are: (1) Perfect foresight equilibrium of which the Arrow-Debreu-McKenzie (ADM) model of equilibrium with complete markets is an alternative version, (2) Radner’s sequential equilibrium with incomplete markets, (3) Hicks’s temporary equilibrium, as extended by Bliss; (4) the Muth rational-expectations equilibrium as extended by Lucas into macroeconomics. While Hayek’s understanding closely resembles Radner’s sequential equilibrium, described by Radner as an equilibrium of plans, prices, and price expectations, Hicks’s temporary equilibrium seems to have been the natural extension of Hayek’s approach. The now dominant Lucas rational-expectations equilibrium misconceives intertemporal…

News articles and blog posts are often full of buzzwords that are heavy on emotional impact but light on substance, and for scientific topics such as nutrition, health, medicine, and agriculture, four of the most common buzzwords are “toxins,” “natural,” “organic,” and “GMO.” These words are used prolifically and are typically stated with clear implications (“toxin” and “GMO” = bad; “natural” and “organic” = good). The problem is that these words are poorly defined and constantly misused. Their definitions are so arbitrary and amorphous that they are functionally meaningless. In other words, they do not add anything useful to a discussion without first attaching a list of qualifiers to them. They are often used in a way that shifts them into the category of what are referred to as “weasel words,” meaning that their use gives the impression that the author said something concrete and meaningful, when in fact the…

Genetic engineering (GE) is one of the most misunderstood technological marvels we have invented. The internet is full of articles and videos denouncing the supposed evils of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) with one of the most common arguments claiming that GMOs are inherently dangerous because they alter organisms’ genetic codes. It certainly is true the GE works by altering genomes, but what this argument ignores is the undeniable fact that all of our breeding methods work by altering organisms’ genomes. We’ve been genetically modifying organisms for thousands of years, GE simply lets us do it faster and more precisely.

At this point, I can already hear people screaming at their screens, “SELECTIVE BREEDING AND GENETIC ENGINEERING AREN’T THE SAME THING!!!!!!” This is the response I get every time, often accompanied by statements about the horrors of moving genes from one organism to another. If you are tempted to have this…

Charles’s beheading was scheduled for Tuesday, January 30, 1649. Two of his children remained in England under the control of the Parliamentarians: Elizabeth and Henry. They were permitted to visit him on January 29, and he bade them a tearful farewell. The following morning, he called for two shirts to prevent the cold weather causing any noticeable shivers that the crowd could have mistaken for fear: “the season is so sharp as probably may make me shake, which some observers may imagine proceeds from fear. I would have no such imputation.”

He walked under guard from St James’s Palace, where he had been confined, to the Palace of Whitehall, where an execution scaffold had been erected in front of the Banqueting House. Charles was separated from spectators by large ranks of soldiers, and his last speech reached only those with him on the scaffold. He blamed his fate on his…

In the fourth in our series on the tumultuous events of the winter of 1648-9, and following on from the trial of Charles I, we turn now to the consequence of a guilty verdict. Dr Patrick Little of the House of Commons 1640-1660 considers the process whereby one MP became a signatory to the death warrant for Charles I, executed at Whitehall on this day 370 years ago, 30 January 1649…

King Charles I’s death warrant was signed on 29 January 1649 by 59 men; no doubt there were 59 individual reasons for doing so. One might mention the army radicals, such as Oliver Cromwell, committed republicans, including Henry Marten, or religious zealots, like Sir John Bourchier, or Edmund Ludlowe, whose rationale for ‘Delivering justice’ was quoted in the previous post in this series. But rather than attempt to provide a group portrait, this post concentrates on the experience of…

Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland has recently surpassed Franz Joseph, Emperor of Austria and King Hungary (1848-1916) to become Europe’s third longest reigning monarch.

Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary (August 18, 1830 – November 21, 1916) was Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary, King of Bohemia, and monarch of many other states of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, from December 2, 1848 to his death. From May 1, 1850 to August 24, 1866 he was also President of the German Confederation, the state that replaced the Holy Roman Empire which had been ruled by a Hapsburg emperor for centuries. He was the longest-reigning Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary, and is now as the fourth-longest-reigning monarch of any country in European history, after Louis XIV of France and Navarre, Johann II of Liechtenstein, and now, Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom, in that…

[image credit: beforeitsnews.com]
In short, Scottish wind power often produces too much for the electricity system to handle, yet more is planned. Meanwhile the super-expensive Western Link is failing miserably to draw off the excess power. Matt Ridley is trying to blow the whistle on this fiasco in the House of Lords, with some success.

Last weekend the Italian cable manufacturing company, Prysmian, released a statement announcing to the markets that the Western Link High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) interconnector between Hunterston and Deeside had failed again, on the 10th of January, says the Renewable Energy Foundation.

This grid link, which is a joint venture between Scottish Power Transmission (SPT) and National Grid (NG), employs cables manufactured by Prysmian.

This £1 billion project has a peak transit capacity of 2.25 GW and was designed solely to facilitate the export of Scottish wind power to the English and Welsh…

John Stuart Mill [left] and Jean-Luc Picard [right, drawing by gerardtorbitt]

This is the penultimate post of our five-week roundtable on science fiction and imperial history, co-edited by Marc-William Palen and Rachel Herrmann. You can read our call for posts here, and the other posts in the series here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. We look forward to hearing your thoughts!

“No starship may interfere with the normal development of any alien life or society.”

— Prime Directive (United Federation of Planets General Order 1)

“The Prime Directive is not just a set of rules; it is a philosophy…and a very correct one. History has proven again and again that whenever mankind interferes with a less developed civilization, no matter how well intentioned that interference may be, the results are invariably disastrous.” – Capt. Jean-Luc Picard

The Victorian political philosopher…

Charles was moved to Hurst Castle at the end of 1648, and thereafter to Windsor Castle. In January 1649, the Rump House of Commons indicted him on a charge of treason, which was rejected by the House of Lords. The idea of trying a king was a novel one. The Chief Justices of the three common law courts of England – Henry Rolle, Oliver St John and John Wilde – all opposed the indictment as unlawful.

The Rump Commons declared itself capable of legislating alone, House of Lords passed a bill creating a separate court for Charles’s trial, and declared the bill an act without the need for royal assent. The High Court of Justice established by the Act consisted of 135 commissioners, but many either refused to serve or chose to stay away. Only 68 (all firm Parliamentarians) attended Charles’s trial on charges of high treason and “other high…

As we prepare to celebrate the birth of a new member of the royal family, Dr Charles Littleton, senior research fellow in the House of Lords 1660-1832 section, considers the circumstances surrounding the birth of Queen Victoria, whose 200th anniversary is celebrated later this month.

Two events this May 2019 provide an interesting light on the history of the royal succession. We are expecting (or may just have seen) the birth of the first child of the duke and duchess of Sussex. This further secures the succession to the crown down to the generation of the queen’s great-grandchildren. British history, though, shows that a smooth succession, with numerous candidates waiting in reserve, should never be taken for granted. For example, this month we also celebrate the bicentenary of the birth of Queen Victoria, on 24 May 1819. The birth of this symbol of the security and longevity of the…

In the first of a new blog series charting the collapse of the British Republic, Dr Vivienne Larminie of the Commons 1640-1660 section discusses the military coup which temporarily suspended the Rump Parliament 360 years ago...

On the morning of Thursday 13 October 1659 ‘at his usual time’, Speaker William Lenthall was making his way by coach from his London residence to preside over a day’s business in the House of Commons when he encountered a check [Publick Intelligencer no. 198, p. 796]. Overnight, troops had positioned themselves along King Street (now Abingdon Street) and occupied Westminster Hall and Westminster Abbey Yard. Furthermore, a sturdy barricade had been erected at Millbank, ‘to hinder all Accesse from those places: And some Boates well manned with Souldiers, did row up and down the Thames about Westminster, and permitted none to land thereabouts’. Initially Lenthall ‘had passage through the ranks of…