Utopia, you are standing in it!

Above is a 53 minute video of my lecture in Lyon this past summer titled “Scientific Authority and Political Myth.” You can see the slides on Twitter and as a PDF.

As reader Eric astutely pointed out, the BBC has now changed question #7—the “accommodationism” question—in the evolution quiz I described this morning. It previously read this way:

Now it reads this way:

I’m fairly sure, but not positive, that calling attention to this question by myself or others has led to the change. It’s an improvement for sure, but I emphasize again that this question has no place in a quiz about evolution. It’s a theological or philosophical question that doesn’t test anybody’s knowledge about evolution. What gives, Beeb? You in bed with Templeton?

Further, the “right” answer depends on what you mean by “incompatible”. If you construe “compatibility” as “some people can be both scientists and religious,” then of course they’re compatible. But if you construe it as “compatible in using comparable methods to ascertain what’s true”, then it’s false. My whole book Faith Versus Fact

Earth and climate – an ongoing controversy
‘Move along please, nothing to see here, science is settled’. Is that the BBC’s climate reporting policy? Does controversy have to be swept under the carpet, for fear of upsetting the ‘greenblob’? What happened to their charter duty of impartiality?

H/T The GWPF

In order to avoid giving ‘false balance’ to the climate alarmists at the BBC, I thought it would be a good idea to fact-check their new internal guidance on climate change, writes Harry Wilkinson.

This is their totalitarian memorandum aimed at stamping out free scientific discourse, on the basis that certain facts are established beyond dispute.

The problem is that these ones aren’t, and the BBC is guilty of repeatedly failing to describe accurately the nuances of climate science and the degree to which certain claims are disputed.

Something no Prime Minister could contemplate

The Foreign Office records regarding the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 must be amongst the most regularly requested papers held at the National Archives. One file, FO 608/65, is part of the herculean effort to redraw the map of Europe after the First World War. It recounts the efforts of officials and ministers to work out how to provide Poland with meaningful access to the Baltic. The focus of this attention was the port city of Danzig. The two options before the Council of Ten were to include the city as part of Poland, but place limits on how Poland exercised its national sovereignty over this part of its territory, or to create a “free city”, administered by a League of Nations High Commissioner, which was tied into a customs union with Poland. In late March 1919 Lloyd George expressed the UK’s support…

Superb short review by Helen Fessenden of Richmond Fed.

The article looks at how advent of telegraph technology in 1866 between US and UK shaped their markets and economies:

Economists have been increasingly studying the role of technology, in particular, as a way to break down information frictions and make markets more transparent. This field of inquiry applies not just to trade but to any kind of economic activity, especially when real-time information is critical but difficult to find. For example, economists have looked at the effect of Internet shopping on life insurance markets — cheaper on net for consumers, according to Jeffrey Brown of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Austan Goolsbee of the University of Chicago. As these and other studies suggest, the speed and ease of online shopping can reduce these frictions for consumers.

To anyone who surfs websites to shop, these insights are intuitive. But as the case…