Utopia, you are standing in it!

Grand Aletsch Glacier, Switzerland [Image credit: Wikipedia]
It’s not the conclusion some might be expecting…

Analysis of ice cores delivers continuous data for the first time on industrial soot from 1740 to today, reports HeritageDaily.

In the first half of the 19th century, a series of large volcanic eruptions in the tropics led to a temporary global cooling of Earth’s climate.

It was a natural process that caused Alpine glaciers to grow and subsequently recede again during the final phase of the so-called Little Ice Age.

This has now been proven by PSI researchers, on the basis of ice cores.

In the second of two posts on the voting reform referendum in British Columbia, Jameson Quinn argues that the province’s electorate should support a move to some form of proportional representation. Specifically, he argues that the version known as Mixed Member Proportional is best for both the province itself and representative democracy as a whole. 

This is the second of two posts on the upcoming British Columbia (BC) referendum on proportional representation (which I’ll call ‘pro-rep’, because ‘PR’ has too many other meanings). In the first post, I discussed the context and rules of the referendum itself. In this one, I’m going to discuss the options available, in the context of theories of voting and democracy. I’ll also look at some of the arguments being used in this campaign.

Before I start, I should lay my cards on the table. I am unabashedly in favour of voting reform. For…

An Oregon liberal judge is determined to put climate change on trial in Juliana vs US, scheduled to start on October 29, 2018.  But now another pitfall stands in the way.  The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to review the legitimacy of the scope of the kids’ claims they have a right to an unchanging favorable climate provided to them by the federal government.  Here is the update from Scotusblog by Amy Howe Government returns in climate change lawsuit  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

In July, the Supreme Court declined to intervene in a lawsuit filed by a group of 21 children and teenagers who allege that they have a constitutional right to a “climate system capable of sustaining human life.”The justices rejected the federal government’s request to block discovery and a trial until the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit could rule on…

Greetings and salutations, Instapundit readers! Thanks for stopping by.

Kendra, James and Tricia Wachtendorf. American Dunkirk: The Waterborne Evacuation of Manhattan on 9/11. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2016)

Did you know that between 300,000 and 500,000 people left Lower Manhattan Island by boat on September 11, 2001? The boat-lift was spontaneous, self-organized for the most part, and has been relatively unsung. The Coast Guard eventually acted as sort-of-coordinator, but had little or nothing to do with the efforts at first.

It’s possible to keep the following two statements in our heads at the same time about Israel’s decision to deny entry to 22-year-old American BDS activist Lara Alqasem, who was to participate in the Hebrew University program:

1. Despite her past involvement in the extremist group SJP (Students for Justice in Palestine), Alqasaem doesn’t currently pose anything resembling a real threat to Israel, and authorities were wrong – both from a policy and public relations standpoint – to detain her.
2.  If Lara Alqasaem had been in a leadership position with a right-wing extremist group, instead of a pro-Palestinian extremist group, the media wouldn’t have batted an eye, and Alqasaem wouldn’t represent a political cause among ‘human rights’ activists.

Before proceeding with the second statement, what we believe the most compelling and unobserved element of the story, it should be noted that critics of the detention of Alqasem make a valid…

Stephan Heblich, Stephen Redding and Daniel Sturm write on how Railways shaped City of London:

In new research, we use the mid-19th century transport revolution from the invention of steam railways, a newly created, spatially disaggregated dataset for Greater London from 1801-1921, and a quantitative urban model to provide new evidence on the contribution of the separation of workplace and residence to agglomeration (Heblich et al. 2018). The key idea behind our approach is that the slow travel times achievable by human or horse power implied that most people lived close to where they worked when these were the main modes of transportation. In contrast, the invention of steam railways dramatically reduced the time taken to travel a given distance, increasing average travel speeds from around 6 mph for horse-drawn vehicles and 3 mph for walking to around 21 mph, which permitted the first large-scale separation of workplace and…

I came across this video today of my short, 5 minute opening statement before the House Science Committee last March. The focus of my testimony was to ask members of Congress not to spend their time going after scientists whose work they don’t like and instead, to defend the importance of scientific assessments for obtaining robust answers to their questions.

Understanding how political parties function is an area where recent research in political science has contributed major insights. Political parties are a fairly recent phenomenon. Prior to the 19th century, there were factions and loose groupings – the Optimates and Populares in Republican Rome, Tories and Whigs in late 17th century England, and Girondins and Jacobins in the French Revolution – but not organized parties. They were looser groupings that centered around dominant individuals – a Marius or Sulla, a Lord Shaftsbury, or a Brissot or Robespierre; but not parties with structured platforms and a deep well of local support.

I recently reviewed Daniel Ziblatt‘s recent book Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy for the Journal of Economic History (gated and ungated). Ziblatt provides new insights into the key role played by conservative parties in the formation and stabilization of democracy in Western Europe. Ziblatt’s thesis…

In the high-profile decision in Lee v Ashers, the Supreme Court had to consider a customer’s rights against discrimination along with the baker’s right to freedom of expression. In its finding for the baker, the Supreme Court took an important step in developing a domestic doctrine against ‘compelled speech’. While the outcome of the case divides opinion, the reasoning of the Court requires further consideration of when a person has a right not express a particular view.

The facts of the case are well known. Mr Lee sought to buy a cake with the message ‘support gay marriage’. The bakers refused to go through with the order on the grounds that it went against their religious beliefs. The customer then complained that the refusal amounted to unlawful discrimination. The Supreme Court found that the refusal did not amount to discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, as the bakers…