Utopia, you are standing in it!

I hope that the reader is as awestruck as I am (p.37)

I first read this book 25 years ago and in the intervening years I had forgotten how naive, silly and embarrassingly earnest Dawkins can be.

The blind watchmaker

The basic premise is easily summarised. In a theological work published in 1802 – Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity – the English theologian William Paley said that if you were out for a walk and stumbled over a stone, you wouldn’t think anything of it, it is so obviously part of the natural world and you unthinkingly accept it as a product of impersonal geological forces.

But if you were out for a walk and stumbled over a watch, particularly if it was an 18th-century, ornately fashioned pocketwatch, you would immediately deduce that something so wonderfully crafted, with so many carefully calibrated…

Subsidies and special deals for favoured firms/industries seem to have been becoming increasingly common in New Zealand.  There is Tiwai Point, the Sky City convention centre, the forestry industry, the export education industry and probably others I’ve forgotten.   There are the R&D tax credits the Prime Minister touts at every turn –  the only substantive item in her (very short) list of things the government is doing to reverse the atrocious productivity performance.

And then there is the film industry, into which many hundreds of millions of dollars have been poured over the last couple of decades.  There is an industry there, but one which official advice to the government makes clear has no prospect of viability without heavy subsidies.  That should be a good test as to whether there is any robust case for the subsidy.  Barring something like national defence considerations, any industry that has no credible…

The silence from traditional conservation groups against the wind industry’s rampant bird slaughter is deafening.

Once upon a time, hirsute, hair-shirted and sandal wearing tree huggers would die in a ditch to prevent harm to any of God’s other creatures. That was, of course, before industrial wind power hove into view. Groups like the Sierra Club and the UK’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds are all ‘fire and brimstone’ wherever ‘big business’ threatens our avian fauna. Except, that is, if the ‘big business’ in question is heavily subsidised, and chaotically intermittent wind power. It’s all about “saving the planet”, you see…

So, it’s a rare and beautiful thing when a couple of conservation groups get on the front foot.

In order to prevent the inevitable slaughter of millions of birds across the Great Lakes, the American Bird Conservancy (ABC) and the Black Swamp Bird Observatory (BSBO) have launched…

After their unlawful antics costing taxpayers millions of pounds and disrupting thousands of people trying to go about their daily lives, anti-terrorism police included XR in a booklet they send to statutary partners.

Biologist Nathan Lents, whose abbreviated c.v. is given below, has been featured on this site before, both as a critic of creationism (good), but also as a defender of the Adam-and-Eve apologetics pushed by his religious friend Josh Swamidass (bad). But chalk up another two marks on Lents’s “good” side.  First, he’s written a book (click on screenshot below) that lays out all the suboptimal features of the human body—features whose imperfection gives evidence for evolution. I’m getting the book for teaching purposes, and here’s the Amazon summary:

Dating back to Darwin himself, the “argument from poor design” holds that examples of suboptimal structure/function demonstrate that nature does not have a designer. Perhaps surprisingly, human beings have more than our share of quirks and glitches. Besides speaking to our shared ancestry, these evolutionary “seams” reveal interesting things about our past. This offers a unique accounting of our evolutionary legacy…

12 October 2008 was a frantic day.  It was a Sunday, and I never work Sundays (well, two financial crises, one in Zambia, one in New Zealand, in 30+ years).  There was a call in the middle of our church service summoning all hands to the pump, to put in place a retail deposit guarantee scheme that day.   We did it.  My diary later that night records that we’d “delivered a brand spanking new not very good deposit guarantee scheme”, announced a few hours earlier.   It was a joint effort of the Reserve Bank and The Treasury.

I had recently taken up a secondment at The Treasury.  I’d been becoming increasingly uneasy about the New Zealand financial situation for some months (flicking through my copy of Alan Bollard’s book on the crisis I found wedged inside a copy of an email exchange he and I had had a month…

This month marks the ten-year anniversary of one of the most despised and misunderstood Supreme Court cases: Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.

I love Citizens United. It stands as perhaps the most important First Amendment decision of the last decade. Yet it’s come to symbolize the illicit marriage between money and power, while what actually happened in the case is largely an afterthought. I remember encountering an enraged signature-gatherer outside a Trader Joe’s a few years ago who was engaged in one of the many campaigns to amend the Constitution to put an end to Citizens United. I thought he might have a coronary when I told him that it was one of my favorite Supreme Court decisions. I deeply regret not asking him if he could rehearse for me the facts of the case. Maybe he would’ve surprised me.

So what did Citizens United actually…

I’ve often been a defender of Steve Pinker, and it’s because I agree with most of what he says and because I think he’s been unfairly maligned—perhaps the most unfairly maligned public intellectual in the U.S.. But today I’m going to praise and criticize his views, largely praising his views on identity politics but criticizing his views on free will. Both are laid out in an absorbing new interview by Pelle Axelsson on the site IntellectInterviews. (I’m pretty sure Steve would hate the title below!). Click on the screenshot to read it.

There’s a lot of material in this interview: stuff about the evolution of language, the effects of social media, climate change and denialiam, Pinker’s own reading habits, and, as I said, identity politics and free will. I’ll deal only with the last two.

Identity politics (“IP”). I think this is Steve’s most explicit critique of identity politics…

Got a busy day today so not much by way of posting here, but please check out the piece I quote below by Miranda Divine she very nicely points out that the newly found support by Greenies for hazard reduction burning is actually far from being backed up by their action and advocacy in the past.

On the other side of the country, one Peter Robertson, the West Australian co-ordinator of the Wilderness Society, was singing from a different song sheet.

His letter last week to The West Australian stated: “Experience and risk analysis show that repeatedly burning tens of thousands of hectares of remote bushland and forest will do little to address the threat of bushfires to human communities … It would be a huge mistake if the community was led to believe that a massive, expensive and environmentally destructive prescribed burning program was going to protect them when…