Utopia, you are standing in it!

Like most European countries, Switzerland uses proportional representation (PR) to choose members of the National Council, the lower house of the country’s federal legislature. However, the Swiss system has distinctive characteristics which require a special procedure to determine the nationwide party percentage shares, and a minor technical problem during the federal election held last Sunday, […]

2023 Swiss election: minor technical problem leads to major embarrassment

Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) has pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor after he was caught on videotape pulling a fire alarm in the middle of a key vote to avoid a government shutdown.  The misdemeanor was the charge that I discussed when this first arose. However, the release of the videotape raises another issue: whether […]

Bowman Video Contradicts His Account to Congress, the Court, and the Public

John Patrick Somers (1800-1862), or ‘Pat Somers’ as he was generally known, is a strong contender for the most violent MP to have ever sat in the House of Commons. In this week’s blog our senior research fellow, Dr Martin Spychal, discusses one of the most extraordinary characters that we’ve uncovered during our research for […]

The most violent MP ever elected to the House of Commons? John Patrick Somers (1800-1862)

The new House, with a new Speaker, has finally done something: passing its first resolution. It’s a resolution supporting Israel in its war against Hamas. A bit from the NY Times: The House voted overwhelmingly on Wednesday to pass a resolution declaring solidarity with Israel, pledging to give its government whatever security assistance it needs […]

House resolution favoring Israel passes with ten holdouts, nine of them Democrats (and six Dems voted “present”). Guess the Democrats!

Of all places, Vanity Fair has a short but interesting discussion of the New York Times headline fracas! You may remember that when there was an explosion in a Gaza hospital on October 17, the NYT reported what Hamas told it: first that there was an Israeli airstrike and then, when that became less credible, […]

Vanity Fair reveals secret discussion at the NYT about using Hamas sources for headlines: “hedging” versus “attributing”

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt: Despite the continuing war in the Middle East, most markets have been relatively calm. Stock exchanges have not plunged, while volatility appears manageable, indeed ordinary. If you were looking at just the markets (except for Israel’s), you might not even know there is a […]

What are markets telling us about the Middle Eastern war?

I don’t think I’ve analyzed this paper on my site, but, since it came out recently, it’s become well known among rational biologists for being tendentious, ideologically based, and largely incoherent, something you might intuit from its title. You can read it by clicking on the screenshot below: The paper’s object is to dismantle the […]

Jesse Singal takes apart a bad paper on sex

From The Emperor’s Desk: On the anniversary of the accession of King George III upon the British throne, instead of doing a full biography of the king, I have decided to just concentrate on the titles that George inherited throughout his lifetime. George III (George William Frederick; June 4, 1738 – January 29, 1820) George […]

October 25, 1760: The Accession of King George III of Great Britain and Ireland.

About a week ago, the Washington Post published, starting on its front page, a long article arguing that race is a purely social construct without reality or utility, and thus should be eliminated. The author Sydney Trent, is a science journalist who covers social issues, and that may explain why the article was replete with […]

My letter to the Washington Post on race

The New York Times and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.) have long denounced disinformation on social media and called for censorship of those spreading false information. They and various other media outlets now find themselves accused of immediately spreading false images and accounts of the recent explosion at the hospital in Gaza. The NYT picture […]

Are Rep. Tlaib, the New York Times, and Other Media Guilty of Disinformation on the Hospital “Strike”?