Utopia, you are standing in it!

If you want to see what the government of New Zealand is up to with respect to science education, you can’t do better than listening to this video/slideshow by two exponents of the “we-need-two-knowledge-systems” view. I’ve gotten a lot of scary stuff from Kiwi educators in the last couple of weeks, but this one site…

A good summary of the mess that is science education in New Zealand

One of the foundations of the modern British constitution is the idea that the Sovereign only acts on ministerial advice. However, the relationship between the Monarch and their Ministers is largely shielded from public view, making it difficult to understand how it works in practice.[1] But the material that has trickled into the public domain […]

The Language Of Ministerial Submissions

There was a knockout winner of the Leaders’ debate. Check for yourself. Recall how they looked. If you cannot remember or missed it, the debate is on TVNZ’s website. Turn off the sound and ask; “which one looks like a Prime Minister?” Political scientists have done this experiment repeatedly. Asked people who do not know…

RICHARD PREBBLE: Who won the Leaders’ debate?

Jacinda Ardern may no longer be Prime Minister of New Zealand, but she was back at the United Nations continuing her call for international censorship. Ardern is now one of the leading anti-free speech figures in the world and continues to draw support from political and academic establishments.  In her latest attack on free speech,…

Harvard’s Jacinda Ardean Calls on the United Nations to Crack Down on Free Speech as a Weapon of War

As part of my annual “hopes and fears” column, I expressed optimism at the start of 2021 that Joe Biden would steer the country back toward free trade after the economically debilitating protectionist mistakes of the Trump era. I’ve been bitterly disappointed. On this issue, he’s another Donald Trump. I’m not the only one to […]

The Job-Destroying Effect of Trump-Biden Protectionism

Though both England and Scotland recognised Anne as their queen, only the Parliament of England had settled on Sophia, Princess-Electress of Hanover, as the heir presumptive. The Parliament of Scotland (the Estates) had not formally settled the succession question for the Scottish throne. In 1703, the Estates passed a bill declaring that their selection for […]

September 18, 1714: King George I of Great Britain arrived in England. Part II.

New Zealand is at a constitutional crossroad. In one direction is liberal democracy. In the other is co-government; power-sharing between one ethnic group and all others. ACT will end co-government and restore universal human rights in New Zealand. The current government is presenting New Zealanders with a false choice. It says that if we want…

DAVID SEYMOUR: NZ at a Constitutional Crossroad

Below is my column in The Hill on the impeachment inquiry and one striking pattern among the alleged crimes facing Hunter Biden: they all served to conceal the influence peddling efforts to sell access or influence to his father. The investigation and charging of Hunter Biden has, thus far, been strikingly surgical in avoiding this […]

How The Surgical Charging of Hunter Biden Ignores a Pattern of Concealment

George I (May 28, 1660 – June 11, 1727) was King of Great Britain and Ireland from August 1, 1714 and ruler of the Prince-Electorate of Hanover within the Holy Roman Empire from January 23, 1698 until his death in 1727. He was the first British monarch of the House of Hanover as the most […]

September 18, 1714: King George I of Great Britain arrived in England. Part I.

This week my ECONS102 class is covering externalities. An externality is the uncompensated impact of the actions of one person on the wellbeing of a third party. Externalities can be negative (they make the third party worse off) or positive (they make the third party better off). We call them externalities because they lie outside…

Forestry slash, externalities, and the Coase Theorem

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson 688 pages Simon & Schuster Published: Sept 2023 “Elon Musk” is Walter Isaacson’s long-anticipated biography of the mercurial entrepreneur behind SpaceX, Tesla and, most recently, the website formerly known as Twitter.  Isaacson is an author, journalist and professor at Tulane University who has written popular biographies of Ben Franklin, Albert Einstein, […]

Review of “Elon Musk” by Walter Isaacson

Battle of the “experts”. Who are Newshub’s “Highly Regarded Economists” trying to discredit the Nats? The economics news has been dominated the past couple of weeks by Newshub insisting that the National Party’s tax plan doesn’t “add up”. Here’s the headline the outlet has been running, “National’s foreign buyer tax costings likely have a roughly…

ROB MacCULLOCH: Who are Newshub’s “Highly Regarded Economists” trying to discredit the Nats?

It is a long time now that I wanted to have a deeper look into the cost of systems based on intermittent power sources, but didn’t know where to begin. That is why I was very interested when I came across a cleantechnica article by Georg Nitsche who created a renewable electricity calculator in order […]

Looking into a 100 percent Renewable Electricity Calculator for the United States: overview

It is remarkable but true that per capita US economic growth has hewed close to a trendline of 2% per year for the last 150 years. Here’s a recent figure showing this pattern from Charles Jones in his paper “The Outlook for Long-Term Economic Growth,” as prepared for the annual symposium at Jackson Hole hosted…

The Remarkable Steadiness of US Economic Growth