Utopia, you are standing in it!

It’s Sunday evening, you turn on the radio and the news breaks that planet Earth is invaded by Mars. So what do you do? You panic of course. Well that was the case for many when they switched on the radio on October 30,1938. By the end of October 1938, Welles’s Mercury Theatre on the […]

War of the Worlds-October 30-1938

One act that is absolutely reprehensible, unjustifiable, and downright sick is the ripping down of posters and fliers showing pictures of the hostages taken by Hamas on October 7. No matter what you feel about what’s going on in Gaza right now, there’s no justification for ripping down posters calling attention to Jewish (and non-Jewish) […]

Ripping down the “kidnapped” posters

In my post last week on ANZ’s note on the balance of payments, I included this chart from the latest IMF WEO (numbers finalised late last month). On the IMF’s read we had the most overheated advanced economy this year taken as a whole. ANZ themselves followed up with this chart (As a reminder, the […]

Monetary policy and estimated excess demand

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