Utopia, you are standing in it!

During the 20th century, Sinn Féin officially split three times and from these splits emerged some of the most central parties in Irish politics. In this second blog of a two-blog series, our Public Engagement Assistant, Kirsty O’Rourke, discusses the reasons behind the party splits. As discussed in an earlier blog, Sinn Féin (translated as we […]

Sinn Féin: A 20th Century History of Party Splits

Introduction Under our system of responsible government, the Sovereign or Governor General exercises his prerogative powers on the advice of the Crown-in-Council, and his constitutional powers relating to Parliament on the advice of the Prime Minister alone. Responsible government means that “Ministers of the Crown are responsible for acts of the Crown” and responsible to […]

No Discretion: On Royal Assent and the Governor General

In July, 2021, a group of seven University of Auckland academics (two now deceased) published a letter in the Magazine “the Listener”  saying that the local (Māori) “ways of knowing”, or Mātauranga Māori (MM), while of significant cultural, sociological, and anthropological value, was not equivalent to modern science.  It was written because the New Zealand…

University of Auckland continues to promote indigenous ways of knowing while not allowing a promised debate between that and modern science

Back in 2003, I wrote this for Walter Block’s I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians. I’m planning on extending by the end of this academic year (though I kind of already did). Enjoy!High SchoolIt began with Ayn Rand, as it proverbially does.  I was in 11th grade journalism class with Matt Mayers, my friend…

Intellectual Autobiography of Bryan Caplan

In yesterday’s PREFU The Treasury was quite open about the fiscal impulse – the estimated impact of discretionary fiscal choices on demand and domestic inflation pressures in the current year. In other words, a slightly larger degree of pressure on resources/inflation in the year to June 2024 than they’d thought in May’s Budget (and anything […]

Fiscal impulses and fiscal spin

Citizen Science writes –  One of the strangest aspects of entering Transworld, as a parent, is the absolute prohibition on not only discussion or analysis, but even thought, on whether it is a good idea to agree with small children and tumultuous teenagers that their gender doesn’t match their body, and that therefore their […]

CITIZEN SCIENCE: Social justice warriors

By Paul Homewood h/t Philip Bratby   Just one more cost burden from Net Zero:       Households face an estimated bill of £2,300 each to shut down Britain’s gas grid as part of the Government’s drive towards net zero, a leaked draft of an official report suggests. The cost of decommissioning the grid […]

Households face £2,300 bills under net zero plans

Mexico in the nineteenth century presents a dramatic example of this problem. Mexico suffered extreme political instability and strife in the nineteenth century. There were 800 revolts between 1821 and 1875. Between independence in 1821 and 1900, Mexico had 72 different chief executives, meaning that the average term was only a little more than one […]

How Mexico built a state (that was then, this is now)

In one of the best papers of the year, Anna Stansbury and Larry Summers present what is to me the best non-“Great Stagnation” story of what has gone wrong, and I have read many such accounts.  Here is their abstract: Rising profitability and market valuations of US businesses, sluggish wage growth and a declining labor […]

Stansbury and Summers on the declining bargaining power of labor

The battlelines have been drawn. The campaign to win the right to govern New Zealand has begun. Four recent polls signal the tide is going out for Labour. The Roy Morgan poll has National on 31 percent, Labour on 24 percent, ACT on 18 percent, the Greens on 12.5 percent, New Zealand First on 5.5…

MURIEL NEWMAN: A Broken Country

Netflix has a new documentary on Blue Zones, regions in the world such as Okinawa Prefecture, Japan; Nuoro Province, Sardinia, Italy; the Nicoya Peninsula, Costa Rica; Icaria, Greece; and Loma Linda, California, where people appear to live “extraordinarily long and vibrant lives.” What are the secrets of such blue zones and how can you live […]

The Real Secret of Blue Zones

New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham on Friday suspended laws that allow open and concealed carry of firearms in Albuquerque for 30 days after declaring a  public health emergency. The order, in my view, is flagrantly unconstitutional under existing Second Amendment precedent.  It could also be a calculated effort to evade a ruling by making […]

New Mexico Governor Suspends Gun Rights in Albuquerque for “Public Health Emergency”

I’ve written about disgustingly hypocritical politicians who oppose school choice for poor families while sending their kids to private schools. President Obama President Obama’s Education Secretary Elizabeth Warren Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina Gov J.B. Pritzker of Illinois Now there is another hypocrite. The boss of the Chicago teachers union is a big opponents […]

School Choice Hypocrite

HOW IT STARTED: “We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department.  Say it with me.  Dismantle. The. Minneapolis. Police. Department.” That’s one Shivanthi Sathanandan , a vice chairwoman of Minnesota’s Democrat-Farmer-Labor party, jumping onboard the BLM/Antifa-led Defund The Police movement after the death of George I-stick-this-gun-in-your-pregnant-belly Floyd. HOW IT ENDS: That photo is of […]

Mugged by reality – literally