Utopia, you are standing in it!

The recently launched ‘Make It 16’ campaign – aimed at lowering the voting age in New Zealand to 16 – has support from Children’s Commissioner Judge Andrew Becroft.

Becroft said lowering the voting age would enhance turnout, ingrain the habit of voting and uphold young people’s rights.

If this be so, why stop at 16?

Becroft says

“Children and young people have the right to have their voices heard and taken into account.”

This suggests there should be no age limit.

This week’s Supreme Court judgment against Boris Johnson on parliament’s prorogation has shaken British politics and will be looked back on as a landmark case. Yet at the same time, Meg Russell argues, it simply reinforces the core principle of parliament’s centrality in our constitution. There has long been a myth of executive-dominance in the British system. Perhaps after this case, the fact that the government gains its power and authority from parliament will be better recognised – by those both inside and outside the system.

The Supreme Court’s judgment in the prorogation case was damning. Short of deciding that Boris Johnson had misled the Queen (which would be difficult to know, given private conversations) the court issued the strongest possible condemnation on all counts. The government had argued that prorogation was non-justiciable: i.e. not a matter in which the courts could get involved. The justices instead ruled it justiciable…

Nick Gillespie gets the focus right in his Reason artilce Think Globally, Shame Constantly: The Rise of Greta Thunberg Environmentalism. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Her future—and that of the planet—hasn’t been “stolen” and the best way forward is through serious policy discussion, not histrionics.

To say that reactions to Thunberg are as extreme as her rhetoric is an understatement. . . But despite the volume and vitriol of the attacks directed her way, it’s vitally important that the worldview she represents and the policies she espouses are refuted. Like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), and a host of other American politicians, Thunberg believes that we’ve only got a few years left to settle the fate of the planet, a basic tenet pushed by supporters of the Green New Deal and by most of the Democrats running for president. In fact, Thunberg thinks that “cutting our…

Environmentalists have tumbled to the fact that wind power is anything but the ‘clean, green’ energy source its proponents claim it to be.

While the wind industry works overtime to bury a range of inconvenient facts, it’s actually burying millions of tons of toxic waste, among a list of other environmental sins.

Wind turbines don’t run on wind, they run on subsidies: cut the subsidies and once these things inevitably grind to a halt, they’ll never be replaced.

With an economic lifespan of something like 10-12 years (rather than the overblown 25 put forward by turbine makers and wind power outfits), over the next decade countries like Germany will be left with hundreds of thousands of 2-300 tonne ‘problems’ littering the landscape. With hundreds of turbines already kaput, Germans have already been smacked with the harsh and toxic reality of their government’s so-called ‘green’ obsession.

And they aren’t alone.

Iowa’s…

This new video, narrated by former NASA astronaut (and Columbia professor) Mike Massimino, answers a lot of your pressing questions about how astronauts keep clean in space. His answers apply to the Space Shuttle and to the International Space Station, though procedures sometimes differ between them.  Here are some of the important issues addressed in the video.

How do you shower?
How do you pee and poo? And what happens to the feces and urine?
Can you shave in space?
How do you wash your hair or brush your teeth?
Can you wear contact lenses?
How can you do laundry?
What if you have to go to the bathroom during a space walk?
And does it get stinky up there? (Answer: yes indeed!)

In the end, Massimino speculates about future hygiene problems as we travel farther and longer from Earth.

Constitutions do many things. They distribute authority amongst public bodies, enshrine important points of substantive principle, and cement relationships between rulers and the ruled. However, in a more abstract and fundamental sense, constitutions also tell us something about ourselves as political collectives: they express the kind of polity we embody and the kind of people we have come to be.

Whether written or unwritten, constitutions establish the contours of our political communities. To use Hannah Arendt’s metaphor – borrowed from the Ancient Greek understanding of law as nomos – constitutions are the walls that encircle, define, and defend the everyday aspects of our political lives. It is against this normative backdrop that I want to reflect upon one element of what is expressed by the recent judgement of the United Kingdom Supreme Court in the cases of R (on the application of Miller) v The Prime Minister and Cherry and…

The chorus that the United Kingdom Supreme Court’s decision on prorogation (R. (on the application of Miller) v The Prime Minister; Cherry and others v. Advocate General for Scotland [2019] UKSC 41) has “nothing to do with Brexit” cannot withstand serious scrutiny. The British electorate’s decision to leave the European Union is the pivot around which contemporary politics revolves. There is no question to my mind that the aim of prorogation was to ease Britain’s withdrawal from the organisation, and thankfully the question of prime ministerial motivation was not a live issue in the Court’s judgment. This post argues that the Court acted in a partisan fashion as if it were the legal wing of Remain, and that as a result the judiciary now needs to have its wings clipped.

The political fundamentals against which the Miller-Cherry case fell to be decided are as follows: (1) a majority of…

By Bethany Mandel, September 24, 2019, National Review

Activists left and right are protesting an effort to close loopholes in a state law mandating vaccination for schoolchildren. Here’s why they’re wrong.

There aren’t many policy proposals or causes that unite Left and Right these days, but in California, one has emerged: opposition to Senate Bill 276, which aims to close loopholes in a state law mandating vaccination for schoolchildren. Liberal and conservative activists alike have protested the bill at the state capitol and demanded that state legislators scrap it.

Unfortunately, this particular bipartisan movement isn’t just wrong — it’s dangerously wrong.

California has been the epicenter for anti-vaccine sentiment, and measles outbreaks, for the last several years. That’s not a coincidence; the former fuels the latter. When “herd immunity” dips too low, the entire “herd” is placed at risk. Anti-vaccine activists often ask, “If vaccines work and you’re vaccinated, why…

James Flynn is a well known researcher on human intelligence at University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, and the man after whom the “Flynn Effect” is named. If you don’t remember that term, it refers to the continuing increase in intelligence, as measured by IQ, throughout the world. We don’t fully understand the trend, but it seems to be a real phenomenon.

At any rate, in this new article in Quillette(click on screenshot), Flynn recounts how a book he just wrote defending free speech (called, of course, In Defense of Free Speech) was rejected by Emerald Publishing, but not on very substantial grounds.

In fact, the book appears to be largely about colleges and universities and their attempts to deplatform speakers or otherwise enforce ideological purity through speech codes, trigger warnings, and the kind of “party line” that pervades much of the humanities. Why did the…

Welcome to issue #5 of my occasional newsletter on climate and energy issues. The above image comes from an essay I have in press titled “Climate Change as Symbolic politics in the United States,” which I’ll share in due course. The image shows a “word cloud” for President Obama’s Rose Garden comments on the Paris Agreement and those of President Trump in the Rose Garden. They were speaking in the exact same location about the exact same policy, but they clearly live in different symbolic realities.

As a reminder, my day-to-day research or writing is focused on sports governance and various issues of science policy. But I’ve written a fair bit on the topics of climate and energy over the past 25 years, including two recent books and a boatload of academic papers, and I’m paying attention. So caveat lector!

A few things to say up front:

• If you don’t…