Utopia, you are standing in it!

Washington Examiner has the story: Federal judge dismisses New York City’s climate change lawsuit against Big Oil Excerpts below in italics with my bolds.

A federal judge Thursday dismissed New York City’s lawsuit against major oil companies for their contribution to climate change, the latest in a string of suits filed by cities to be tossed aside.

“Global warming and solutions thereto must be addressed by the two other branches of government,” U.S. District Court Judge John Keenan ruled in dismissing the city’s climate lawsuit, saying the matter should not be handled by the courts. He added that Congress has already delegated to the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, so it’s not the job of the courts.

Keenan, of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, is an appointee of former President Ronald Reagan, a Republican.

In January, New York…

The picture which you have drawn, & the accts which are published, of the commotions & temper of numerous bodies in the Eastern States, are equally to be lamented and deprecated. They exhibit a melancholy proof of what our trans atlantic foe have predicted; and of another thing perhaps, which is still more to be regretted, and is yet more unaccountable; that mankind left to themselves are unfit for their own government. (George Washington letter to Henry Lee, 31 October 1786)

Debunking myths

In his blurb on the back of American Revolutions, historian Eric Foner makes the Big Point that it was during the Cold War that a particular version of American history was defined and taught across the nation’s schools, a version which made the American revolution an exception, distinct and different from the later French and Russian revolutions, ‘good, orderly, restrained and successful’ (p.3), a squeaky clean Disney…

Despite being more than a decade old, Bryan Caplan’s The Economic of Szaz is still sparking debate.  The gist of the article:

Building on psychiatrist Thomas Szasz’s philosophy of mind, this article argues that most mental illnesses are best modeled as extreme preferences, not constraining diseases. This perspective sheds light not only on relatively easy cases like personality disorders, but also on the more extreme cases of delusions and hallucinations.

The economic nature of mental illnesses, addictions, and compulsions is a topic worth exploring.  The problem is that mental illnesses aren’t experienced by everyone, and those who do experience it might experience it in radically different ways.  It’s very tempting for someone struggling with one of these conditions to say that Caplan and Szasz just don’t understand what it’s like to be depressed or addicted.  Other analogues have been floated that might straddle the preference/constraint line, like sexuality or…

Heather Roy

19 July 2018

Freedom of speech is off to court, thanks to over a thousand small donations. The Free Speech Coalition has filed court action over Auckland Mayor Phil Goff’s decision to ban controversial Canadians Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux from speaking at the Bruce Mason Centre and other Auckland Council owned venues.

Phil Goff’s story keeps changing. First, he announced that the decision was his – a Captain’s call. Then he said that he’d taken the advice of Regional Facilities Auckland, the CCO that manages the venues. And most recently he says it was a matter of safety – he didn’t want the police to get hurt. He is ‘digging in’ despite the public backlash and the Free Speech Coalition’s attempts to give him a back-out option by reversing the decision.

As a society I often wonder if we’ve lost sight of the things that really matter…

On holiday in the (remarkably for mid-July) sunny South Island, I was reading Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa, by British journalist Paul Kenyon.  It is well-worth reading for anyone with an interest in Africa, or indeed in economic (under)development. Over 400 or so pages, it is a series of accounts of leaders of post-colonial African countries who enriched themselves –  typically almost obscenely so –  from the vast natural wealth of the continent.    There are exceptions of course; notably well-governed Botswana.   And there were countries where idealistic disastrous policies impaired the material wellbeing of the citizenry without any great personal enrichment of the leaders (Tanzania and Zambia under Nyerere and Kaunda are two examples).  But Kenyon’s focus is on a series of countries with abundant natural resources (oil or very fertile land in his particular examples), one or more brutal leaders, and, at very best, mediocre material…

Today the Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) heard the appeal of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (AKA Tommy Robinson).

Judgment was reserved, meaning the Court’s decision will not be known for another couple of weeks. However it is worth, given the events of today, having a quick look at what happened. In doing so, I am grateful to the excellent Lizzie Dearden of the Independent who provided a comprehensive live-blog of the hearing from the Royal Courts of Justice, as well as the indispensable Matthew Scott who live-tweeted the hearing, and whose blogpost on the subject tells you everything you could ever need to know.

Background

Some of the background was set out in my first blog after Yaxley-Lennon was committed to prison for contempt at Leeds Crown Court on 25 May 2018. The full facts were, and to an extent are still, unknown. The judgment will, when it is handed down…

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “errors”, comes pretty close to the kind of tautological arguments made by very orthodox Christians and Muslims.

For Christians—not so much Muslims—some of those scriptural errors, which are real (e.g., the absence of a Roman census around the time of Jesus’s birth, the absence of evidence for the exodus of Jews from Egypt, and, of course, the creation story of Genesis) are dismissed by claiming that these are metaphors, not factual errors. Others, most notably and recently William Lane Craig, have admitted that the Bible is erroneous because humans were involved in writing it, and simply appropriated stories from other sources. In contrast, the average Muslims tends to take his scripture much more literally, so Mo’s argument may be apposite there. 

I’ll point out once again, and for the last time, that my reproduction of Jesus and Mo cartoons has caused…

MGM Resorts International has gone to an extraordinary point to forum shop for more sympathetic judges: it is actually suing the victims of last year’s Las Vegas concert mass shooting.  The move has outraged many as MGM shamelessly sues grieving families and individuals to get before the more conservative federal bench. It is a move that is a stark reminder of how corporations openly forum shop for judges as well as the view of the federal bench as being more sympathetic to corporate defendants.  What is all the more unsettling is that MGM and Mandalay Bay could well succeed.