Utopia, you are standing in it!

Three separate welfare stories caught my eye this week, all on benefit fraud.  The Bay of Plenty Times reported that more than $1 million of benefit fraud was committed by 41 Western Bay people prosecuted in the 18 months to the end of last year.  According to a lawyer for the Ministry of Social Development, benefit fraud is on the rise.

Benefit fraud cost New Zealand taxpayers nearly $16 million last year, and fraud detected by the Ministry has almost doubled from $8.1 million five years ago. That figure includes fraud committed by 10 social welfare staff, who were sacked for ripping off the system.

 MSD chief executive Peter Hughes says:

I do not tolerate benefit fraud and whenever a client has [been] deliberately involved in planned and premeditated benefit fraud they are prosecuted.

And yet I read in Tuesday’s New Zealand Herald about 5000 people who had moved…

On Wednesday July 10^th, at 9 p.m. UK time, BBC One will air an edition of ‘Panorama’ titled “Is Labour Anti-Semitic?”.

“Panorama goes inside the anti-Semitism crisis gripping Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. With exclusive interviews from key insiders and access to confidential communications and documents, this is the story of how the crises developed. Reporter John Ware reveals the evasions and contradictions at the heart of the political party which leader Jeremy Corbyn says has anti-racism at its very core.”

Reactions from the Labour party have already been forthcoming.

“A row has broken out in the senior ranks of the Labour party after it emerged it was trying to use non-disclosure agreements against former staffers who contributed to what is expected to be a critical documentary about Jeremy Corbyn’s team and antisemitism. […]

The split was triggered by Labour’s response to an approach from the BBC about…

The Left’s origins were a reaction to the Enlightenment, in which the fountainhead of their movement is Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The Left is fundamentally opposed to rationality as evidenced by their hostility to science, technology and, civilization. Instead they teach that primitive cultures (i.e. the barbaric or savage) are the ideal human condition. Regardless if it is their National Socialist cousins of the late 1930s or present-day environmentalist terrorists, Leftists have always harbored affections for mass movements based on barbarism and savagery.

The progress achieved by Western Civilization is the legacy of our embracing the ideas of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment (a.k.s. the Age of Reason). Parts of the world that expressly dismiss or are not influenced by rational, Western thought tend to be Third World or so-called developing countries. Consequently, Leftists seek to bolster and defend Third Worlder feelings and even their cultural manners in which they bristle at…

Raising a raft of unnecessary danger, the wind industry’s body count currently stands at 192. Flying blades, collapsing and/or self-immolating towers account for their fair share of corpses. But those that take to the air, shouldn’t overlook the number of pilots and their passengers who’ve come to grief, thanks to a wind turbine or their associated METMast wind monitoring towers. For a rundown on the wind industry’s pointless death toll refer: Summary of Wind Turbine Accident data to 31 March 2019

Slamming into a 100 m tower or 60 m blade is one thing, but coping with dirty, turbulent air generated by these things, which spans out to the horizon, is another:

The spread of giant industrial wind turbines across the US of A has attracted a range of detractors, not least the US military.

As Mark Mathis details in the video below (transcript follows), America’s Armed Forces…

Much has been made of Kamala Harris’s attack on Joe Biden in the Democrat Debates. Biden slipped way down in the polls, and Harris’s carefully rehearsed attack advanced her standing.

In her blast at Joe Biden, she claimed that:

Two decades after Brown v. Board, I was only the second class to integrate at Berkeley public schools. Without that decision, I likely would not have become a lawyer and eventually be elected a Senator from California.

That’s the power a Supreme Court Justice holds.

In political jargon, that’s called “playing the race card”, but personal experience makes it even more important. The Gateway Pundit clears the air a little, explaining that Kamala’s parents were successful professionals. Kamala went to school in Berkeley for only 2 years. She moved with her mother to Canada at age 7, where she completed grade school and high school.

Then a little checking confirms that…

This Spring I taught a history of recent economics course to undergraduate students majoring in mathematics and economics. The syllabus is here. I have reproduced the reading list with some links to papers and twitter summaries of my lectures below. Here are also a few comments on what I wanted to do with this type of course, what worked and what did not. Comments and suggestions to improve the course and set up new debates are much welcomed.

Course narrative and organization 

Though the course is tailored to a specific audience, I believe how the general narrative is conveyed through re-enacting landmark controversies in the history of economics can  appeal to many types of students. My goal was to highlight several characteristics of economics as a discipline:

(1) a contested science: economics is often perceived as contested from the inside (economists constantly arguing with each other)  as well as…

Digital Trends reports that Google, Facebook, and Twitter are attempting to crack down on misinformation on vaccines and other claims about cancer cures, weight loss, etc. In my view, this is a mistake.

I realize there is a propensity to seek to stop or prevent what is viewed as disinformation. However, restricting or outright prohibiting such information or speech can actually backfire. The voices silenced by such policies can make them actually stronger by allowing the transmitters of such speech to make the case to their followers that they are being targeted as part of the conspiracy they claim is occurring. This, in turn, wins over or even converts people who may or may not have sympathized with people, such as Alex Jones of Infowars or Mike Adams of Natural News, to support them because they will be perceived as victims.

The answer to misinformation is more speech because, in…