Utopia, you are standing in it!

While I’ve long been a critic of evolutionary psychology, I’m not stupid or woke enough—unlike some bloggers I won’t name—to dismiss the entire field as worthless. While it’s hard to test whether some behaviors in our species have evolved by natural selection, there are degrees of confidence we can get, and predictions one can make, to judge the likelihood that these behaviors are indeed “darwinian.” While nobody argues that behaviors like preferring your own children over others aren’t products of natural selection, there are those who claim that behavioral differences between men and women are not—and in fact cannot—be based on genes installed in our species by natural selection.

The two sex differences I find most evolutionarily convincing involve human sexual behavior—in particular the observation that males tend to be relatively indiscriminate in choosing someone to mate with, while females are pickier—and the fact that males are more aggressive…

Norwegian oil platform, North sea [image credit: Wikipedia]
Sounds like a woman of much commonsense, then. Of course any perceived deviation from climate alarmist orthodoxy translates as ‘controversial’ in much of the media.

Norway appointed on Wednesday a skeptic on wind power and climate change as its new oil minister who will oversee oil and gas drilling and wind turbine installations on and offshore Western Europe’s largest oil producer, reports OilPrice.com.

Sylvi Listhaug of the right-wing Progress Party was appointed Minister of Petroleum and Energy on Wednesday, replacing Kjell-Børge Freiberg who was “honourably discharged from his office,” the Norwegian government said.

Listhaug is taking over one of the most important ministries which oversees one of Norway’s top exports—oil and gas—as well as the government’s majority stake in energy giant Equinor.

A Guardian op-ed defending Bernie Sanders from charges that he’s abettedantisemitism, “Accusing Bernie Sanders of antisemitism? That’s a new low”, Dec. 18, by Kate Aronoff, contributing writer to The Intercept, includes the following claim:

For [those] on the right that have jumped on the [Sanders is antisemitic] bandwagon, though, details don’t really matter. Sanders, an avowed democratic socialist, simply belongs to an opposing political camp with opposing values. Like the attacks against Corbyn abroad and Ilhan Omar at home, those now being lobbed at Sanders aren’t about defeating antisemitism so much as using it as a narrative device to undermine a worldview that offends them. Sanders’s solidarity with Palestinians suffering under occupation is not an affront to Jews but to the right’s propaganda that looking out for their best interest means a blanket, unquestioning support for whatever the Israeli government happens to be doing, which at the…

The structure and performance of financial systems is path dependent. The relative stability of the Canadian banks in the recent crisis compared to the United States, where the recent crisis originated in the shadow banking system and spread to the universal banks, in our view reflected the original institutional foundations laid in place in the early 19th century in the two countries. The Canadian concentrated banking system that had evolved by the end of the twentieth century had absorbed the key sources of systemic risk—the mortgage market and investment banking—and was tightly regulated by one overarching regulator. In contrast the relatively weak and fragmented U.S. banking system that had evolved since the early nineteenth century, led to the rise of securities markets, investment banks and money market mutual funds combined with multiple competing regulatory authorities. The consequence was that the systemic risk that led to the crisis of…

Nice piece as always by Niranjan.

The lively office book club will later this month discuss a searing essay by B.R. Ambedkar. That gave me a welcome reason to once again read Annihilation Of Caste, which was published after a scheduled speech by Ambedkar in Lahore was cancelled by the organizers of a conference on social reforms because, in Ambedkar’s own words, “the views expressed in the speech would be unbearable to the conference”. The essay brims with insights, which is the default status for almost everything Ambedkar wrote. Each reading of Annihilation Of Caste leaves the reader with something new to think about.

One part of the essay that never fails to resonate with me is this: “[The] Caste System is not merely division of labour. It is also a division of labourers. Civilized society undoubtedly needs division of labour. But in no civilized society is division of labour…

Based on rhetoric, the Democratic Party is committed to a class-warfare agenda.

They want higher income tax rates, higher capital gains taxes, higher Social Security taxes, higher death taxes, a new wealth tax, and many other tax hikes that target upper-income taxpayers.

There are various reasons why they push for these class-warfare tax hikes.

• They want more revenue to finance bigger government.
• They think it’s politically advantageous to create social discord.
• They are envious and resentful of successful people.

I don’t pretend to know which factor dominates.

But that’s not important because I want to make a different point. Notwithstanding all their rhetoric, Democrats are sometimes willing to shower rich people with tax breaks.

The Wall Street Journalexposes the left’s hypocrisy in the fight over the deduction for state and local taxes.

Democrats have…grown more concentrated in the richest parts of the country…

Originally published on December 24, 2012 and part of the updating of my old blog-site. It is interesting to see how, seven years on, many of my claims to show how ridiculous the anti-Christmas lot were, now seem to be borderline politically incorrect. How fast the narrative can shift!

Christmas means carnage – this is the great insight of Ferdinand the Duck in the 1995 movie, Babe.

Christmas is a time of consumption, and for many of us in the West, over-consumption. That may mean too much to eat and drink (including foie gras and caviar), too many gifts we don’t need or want (decorated in senseless wrapping paper to hide their significant resource depletion) and long trips to spend a day with people we might rather not see during the other 364 days in the year. We chop down trees to put in our homes, lighting them up…

Last week, I came across this tweet from an account I follow on Twitter.

Take a closer look at the picture.

Every single person in this picture, man or woman, was wearing a hat. There isn’t a single person in that picture that isn’t wearing a hat. People even wore broad-rimmed and Panama hats to the beach (unless they were swimming).

Of course, createstreets was pointing out the large sidewalks and tiny roads in the picture, reminding the audience that this was at a time when everybody was walking or riding a horse, and very few people drove cars.

I’m not really sure how my train of thought ended up where it did, but I quickly asked this question: did hats fall out of fashion because of cars?

I ended up getting into a conversation with Andrew, who previously worked in the fashion world, about this particular subject, and…