Utopia, you are standing in it!

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

Below is my column in the New York Post in response to the attack this week by Harvard Professor Laurence Tribe. I am honestly saddened by the ad hominem attacks that have become common place with many academics like Tribe. There was a time when legal disagreements could be passionate but not personal. The use…

Ragefully Wrong: A Response to Professor Laurence Tribe

My colleague Dan Klein is famous for his research on academics’ ideology. Recent Bet On It discussions of left versus right inspired him to shoot this video. You can also view detailed notes for the lecture here. Enjoy!Update: Dropbox link fixed.Dan Klein

Dan Klein Dissects Left and Right

The Temple Church is a small church in London built in 1185 by the Knights Templar. It’s now hidden behind Fleet Street amid the Middle and Inner Temple, two of the four “Inns of Court”, the educational institutions and professional associations for common law barristers and judges. The Temple Church is known as the Mother Church of the […]

The Mother Church of the Common Law

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 body and social environment must…

CITIZEN SCIENCE: Social justice warriors

The government-appointed (and reappointed) chair of the Reserve Bank Board has been in the news today, after the reports earlier this week that in his role as Vice-Chancellor of Waikato University he’d been negotiating policy around a future new medical school at Waikato with National’s health spokesman Shane Reti. I don’t have any particular problem […]

Just making stuff up: the chair of the RB Board and the blackball on expertise

Elizabeth I (September 7, 1533 – March 24, 1603) was Queen of England and Ireland from November 17, 1558 until her death in 1603. Elizabeth was the last monarch of the House of Tudor and is sometimes referred to as the “Virgin Queen”. Elizabeth was born at Greenwich Palace on September 7 ,1533 and was […]

September 7, 1533: Birth of Queen Elizabeth I of England and Ireland

I was a last-minute stand-in for Ruth Richardson at Monday evening’s debate at Vic Uni, hosted by the Free Speech Union. The moot: “The tax system is unfair and the wealthy must pay more.”Moots are fun. You don’t have to argue what you believe, but it’s easier and more convincing if you find angles sufficiently adjacent…

Debating tax

Liberty Scott is the name of a blog run by a Libertarian who spent a lot of time overseas but who appears to have returned to New Zealand, judging by his blog becoming a lot more active recently. While he does write about economics and other topics his speciality is transport and there are very […]

Liberty Scott on National’s Transport Policy

The numbers The Treasury will release in its PREFU next week will make it fairly easy to follow some bits of New Zealand fiscal policy over time, less so others, but do almost nothing to facilitate international comparisons, and discourage New Zealand users and analysts from looking at fiscal policy in the way most other […]

Thinking about fiscal policy

Below is my column in The Hill on the growing list of aliases used by President Joe Biden in prior years and the unsuccessful efforts of public interest groups and Congress to gain access to the emails. There may be innocent explanations of why the President used aliases to send information to Hunter Biden. For…

Biden’s Use of False Names Could Cost Him

A fascinating article on an event that has long been indicated by human genome research but which more powerful analytical methods have been able to pin down more accurately: The population of human ancestors crashed between 800,000 and 900,000 years ago. They estimate that there were only 1,280 breeding individuals alive during this transition between […]

Extinction Event

Green Energy Activists are hitting hard realities, as summarized by Jonathan Lesser at New York Post Why wind and solar power are running out of juice.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images Green energy and the push to electrify everything have been in the news recently but for all the wrong reasons. […]

Green Energy Grinding to a Halt

Judge Mehta: A dominant firm like Google does not violate the law, however, merely because it occupies a monopoly market position. It must act in a manner that produces anticompetitive effects in the defined markets. [e.g., that harm consumers].Mozilla CEO testifying on behalf of Google (page 109 of MSJ transcript): …consumers are choosing Google. We’re…

Should the Justice Dept be more concerned with Google’s complaining competitors or their enthusiastic customers?