Utopia, you are standing in it!

Introduction

Reading the recent Miller No. 2 decision you would be forgiven in thinking that Boris Johnson had the chutzpah to advise the Queen to unilaterally decree a whole range of new criminal offences (Proclamations) – all under the guise of the prorogation power.

Indeed, the Miller No. 2 decision paints itself as pure orthodoxy. We are reminded that it is the emphatic duty and quintessential task of a law court to define the scope of a prerogative power, clearly a justiciable matter. And the scope of the prorogation power, so it turns out, is now limited by this rather innocuous-sounding principle (at para [50]):

A decision to prorogue Parliament (or to advise the monarch to prorogue Parliament) will be unlawful if the prorogation has the effect of frustrating or preventing, without reasonable justification, the ability of Parliament to carry out its constitutional functions as a legislature and…

As usual, YouTube is a black hole, for when I watch one video, a bunch of other ones “recommended for you” pop up on the right side. And how well they know me! Yesterday this 27-minute video of Paul McCartney appeared, and I had no choice but to click on it.

It’s a fascinating soliloquy by McCartney on how he (with John Lennon, of course) wrote some of the biggest hits of his career,  including mostly Beatles songs but a few solo songs. They include  I Lost My Little Girl, Yesterday, I Saw Her Standing There, And I Love Her, Eleanor Rigby, A Day in the Life, Hey Jude, Helter Skelter, Blackbird, Let It Be, Hi Hi Hi, Here Today, Jet and I Don’t Know.

Since the Beatles are the greatest rock group of all time, and I brook no dissent on this issue, you might enjoy it, too. If…

In order to improve conditions in the environment we need to protect nature from what has proven to be its greatest threat: Green activists and environmentalists.

While this may seem counter-intuitive, in the 25 years I have been involved in discussions on environmental-health concerns, I have understood how the complexity of the issues, the increasingly more accurate data and the speed of emerging technologies require a flexibility and an open-mindedness to adapt to the best available knowledge, technologies and tools at our disposal. In such situations, the biggest obstacle to protecting the environment is the dogmatic fundamentalism widely expressed by most green cultists, zealots and ideologues.

Over that quarter century I have had my fair share of
confrontations with a wide range of “environmentalists” – from
activists to gurus to politicians (to sisters-in-law). Two common threads in
many of these interactions with activists became evident:

• Their inherent cynicism – that…

It didn’t seem like the best weekend for Reserve Bank Governor Adrian Orr.

First, there was Radio New Zealand’s Insight documentary on the Governor’s bank capital plans, and other possible new regulatory burdens.  I was impressed with the huge amount of time and energy that was put into the programme, although inevitably there are limitations in what a programme designed for a mainstream Sunday morning audience can deal with.     In some ways, the best public service now would be if Radio New Zealand and/or the Reserve Bank agreed to release the full interview Guyon Espiner did with the Governor –  we were told it was an hour long, but no more than five minutes would have been used in the programme (I presume this was par for the course on Espiner’s background work, as I did an interview with him that went for perhaps 40+ minutes).

In commenting…

I’ve opined that statist policies harm young people.

I also shared this video explaining why big government is bad for millennials and the Gen-Z crowd.

This should be a slam-dunk issue. After all, don’t they know how the communist world collapsed?

Aren’t they aware of the problems in places such as Greece and Venezuela?

Or, to make it personal, don’t they have any inkling of the fact that they are going to get screwed by entitlement programs?

And what about the fact that they lose out because of Obamacare?

Sadly, it appears many of them haven’t learned the right lesson.

Support for socialism is disturbingly high among the young.

I’ve wondered, only half-jokingly, whether they’re too clueless to vote.

David Grasso opines on this topic for the New York Post.

It’s important to look at the typical millennial trajectory, and why unprecedented government intervention…

(Neville Chamberlain after returning from the Munich Conference)

In 1961 the controversial British historian, A.J.P. Taylor published THE ORIGINS OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR arguing that the war was caused by the appeasement policies pursued by England and France toward Nazi Germany.  He further purported that Adolf Hitler was more of a traditional European statesman who easily could have been stopped in March 1936 at the Rhineland bridges had England and France had the will to do so.  This book created a firestorm in academic circles and over the years numerous historians have challenged Taylor’s conclusions. Among the first was J.W. Wheeler-Bennett’s MUNICH: PROLOGUE TO TRAGEDY followed later by Telford Taylor’s MUNICH: THE PRICE OF PEACE, Lynne Olson’s TROUBLESOME YOUNG MEN: THE REBELS WHO HELPED SAVE ENGLAND,  David Faber’s MUNICH THE 1938 APPEASEMENT CRISIS, and last year a fictional account was written by Robert Harris.  These books among many…

Here’s a short Big Think talk by Steve Pinker, much demonized by the success-hating Pharyngula crowd as well as those who make their living by prognosticating the demise and degradation of humanity or our lack of social progress. Here Steve advances the well-known arguments for both free speech and academic freedom, which is simply free speech (as well as freedom of inquiry, the right to pursue what interests you) in a university setting. The arguments may not be new, but in this generation need to be repeated endlessly, for many young people and Leftists are beginning to mutter darkly that free speech is overrated.

And so Steve’s rationael for free speech is worth hearing again:

“We just don’t know any route to knowledge other than what Karl Popper called ‘conjecture and refutation’: throwing an idea out there and seeing if it withstands attempts to falsify it.”

This of course refers…

by Alain Naef (Postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley)

This research was presented at the EHS conference in Keele in 2018 and is available as a working paper here. It is also available as an updated 2019 version here.

The Bank of England. Available at Wikimedia Commons.

The 1960s were a period of crisis for the pound. Britain was on a fixed exchange rate system and needed to defend its currency with intervention on the foreign exchange market. To avoid a crisis, the Bank of England resorted to ‘window dressing’ the published reserve figures.

In the 1960s, the Bank came under pressure from two sides: first, publication of the Radcliffe report (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radcliffe_report) forced publication of more transparent accounts. Second, with removal of capital controls in 1958, the Bank came under attack from international speculators (Schenk 2010). These contradictory pressures put the Bank in an awkward…

Above: ‘that’ mural

Jeremy Corbyn has apologised for “pockets of antisemitism” in the Labour party as he attempts to deal with renewed claims discrimination against Jewish people in the party. The accusations flared up again at the weekend when it emerged that he had supported the retention of an antisemitic mural in the East End of London six years ago (for which he has now apologised, saying he “should have looked more closely” at the mural).  But Jewish leaders have issued an unprecedented open letter accusing Corbyn of “siding with antisemites” and being “ideologically fixed within a far-left worldview that is instinctively hostile to mainstream Jewish communities”. They also asked supporters to stage a show of solidarity outside parliament today as Labour MPs hold their weekly meeting. In his own statement on Sunday night, Corbyn said he was “sincerely sorry for the pain which has been caused” and said Labour was campaigning “to increase support and confidence among Jewish…

Above: Jews celebrate the declaration of the state of Israel in 1948

Labour Party conference passed a motion on Israel-Palestine, but shoehorned into the same session as Brexit, with no debate, and even less understanding of the issues.

The motion supports a majority-Palestinian state within the territory of Israel-Palestine, but in a fashion suffused with political dishonesty, written to hide rather than explain the issues.

The motion is premised on an “internationalist Labour Party” having particular responsibility “because of the role Britain played as a colonial power during the 1948 Nabka when Palestinians were forcibly displaced from their homes.”

That is nonsense. From the end of World War 2, Britain refused entry for Jewish refugees into Palestine, already heavily restricted during the war and the Holocaust. An increasingly violent Jewish insurgency in Palestine fought the British.

In 1947 Britain handed the problem to the UN, which proposed the partition of Palestine into…