There is a tragic case out of Panama City Beach, Florida where three dogs died in the case of Jason Matthew Reece, 39.  Reece however did not return to his van because police arrested him for disorderly conduct.  While Reece still allegedly left the dogs in the van to go drinking, it would raise an interesting defense that the police contributed to the tragedy by taking him directly to jail.  It is not clear whether he informed the police of the animals.

Since I consider myself the world’s biggest advocate for tax competition and tax havens (even when it’s risky), I’m always on the lookout for new material to share.

So I was delighted to see a new monograph from the London-based Institute of Economic Affairs on the benefits of “offshore” financial centers. Authored by Diego Zuluaga, it explains why low-tax jurisdictions are good news for those of us laboring in less-enlightened places.

Offshore finance serves several purposes, the most salient of which is the efficient allocation of capital. Some of this activity is tax-related, aimed at raising after-tax investment returns. If it were not for offshore jurisdictions, much foreign investment would be vulnerable to double or triple taxation. Because, under such punitive rates of tax, some of this investment would not take place, the existence of offshore centres has real positive effects on economic activity alongside the (plausibly) negative impact…

There has been continued controversy over the penchant of President Donald Trump to pardon celebrities or political figures or, most recently, a woman who was championed by Kim Kardashian.   Today Trump announced that he is considering a pardon for the late boxing sensation Muhammad Ali — not long after he granted a posthumous pardon to boxing legend Jack Johnson (who was advocated for by celebrity Sylvester Stallone).  This case however raises the added curiosity that Ali’s conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court in Clay v. United States, 403 U.S. 698 (1971)(when Ali was still under his birth name of Cassius Clay).  Obviously, there is no conviction to pardon or commute in this case. In addition to the overturning of the conviction, draft dodgers were given amnesty previously by both Ford and Carter.  

Below is a tweet in which two of the first three winners in the “girls'” 100m dash in a Connecticut competition were transgender women, one of whom, at least, apparently hadn’t begun to transition either physically or hormonally.  The Connecticut Post reports on the result and the issue:

The results of the CIAC State Open track and field championships would show that Terry Miller won the 100-meter dash in a meet record time of 11.72 seconds.

The results would show that Miller, the sophomore from Bulkeley High School in Hartford, won the 200-meter dash in a meet record time of 24.17 seconds.

Only the story is not easy. The story remains as one of the most difficult and complex in state athletic history.

To deny a transgender athlete the chance to compete is wrong in every way. To deny a teenage transgender athlete the opportunity to compete sends the kind…

From Wikipedia

The Great War is a 26-episode documentary series from 1964 on the First World War. The documentary was a co-production of the Imperial War Museum, the British Broadcasting Corporation, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the Australian Broadcasting Commission. The narrator was Michael Redgrave, with readings by Marius Goring, Ralph Richardson, Cyril Luckham, Sebastian Shaw and Emlyn Williams. Each episode is c.40 minutes long.

In August 1963, at the suggestion of Alasdair Milne, producer of the BBC’s current affairs programme Tonight, the BBC resolved to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War with a big television project. The series was the first to feature veterans, many of them still relatively fit men in their late sixties or early seventies, speaking of their experiences after a public appeal for veterans was published in…

Some welcome news via an editorial issued by The Wall Street Journal. Barack Obama’s EPA hyped the cost-benefit analysis of its proposed rules while downplaying their overall impact on the economy. By doing so, EPA bureaucrats would push through almost 600 new mandates a year, imposing the highest regulatory costs of any federal agency.

Thankfully, the EPA is poised to take the first step in reforming cost-benefit analysis by requiring an agency-wide standard for how rules are applied. This, in turn, would make the regulatory process more transparent since it would allow politicians and even civilians to assess whether more regulation is needed. The Editorial goes on to state:

By introducing “social costs” and “social benefits,” the EPA began factoring in speculation about how regulatory inaction would affect everything from rising sea levels to pediatric asthma. EPA optimists even included their guesses about how domestic regulations could have a…

If ‘slowdowns’ in global average temperatures can be natural, why not ‘speed-ups’ as well? Recent global temperature patterns correlate very poorly, if at all, with changes in the trace gas CO2 as required by IPCC-supporting climate theorists.

A team of researchers from the U.K., Sweden and Australia has found that three periods of global warming slowdown since 1891 were likely due to natural causes rather than disruptions to the factors causing global warming, reports Phys.org.

In their paper published on the open access site Science Advances, the group describes their study of global mean surface temperatures (GST) since the late 19th century and what they found.

Since the current government took office, I’ve highlighted from time to time (eg here) the tension between the rhetoric about the desire to lift New Zealand’s productivity performance (poor for decades, woeful in the last five years or so) and to increase the outward orientation of the economy,  and the specific policy promises which mostly seem likely to work in exactly the opposite direction.

The determination to reduce carbon emissions even more aggressively than the previous government’s goal, especially while sticking with a largely unchanged immigration policy that continued to drive up the population, seemed a prime example. I didn’t have any numbers, but the direction of the effect seemed pretty clear.

But now the government has published some numbers, which really should be get a lot of attention.    Yesterday the Green Party leader James Shaw (Minister of Climate Change) launched a consultative document on what form the “net…