Utopia, you are standing in it!

If you’re not British, or you live under a stone somewhere, then you may not have heard about one of the most extraordinary sporting stories ever. Leicester City, a football (in the British sense) team that last year only just escaped relegation from the top division, has just won the league. At the start of the season you could have bet on this happening at odds of 5000-1. Just 12 people availed themselves of this opportunity.

Ten pounds bet then would have net me 50000 pounds now, so a natural question arises: should I be kicking myself (the appropriate reaction given the sport) for not placing such a bet? In one sense the answer is obviously yes, as I’d have made a lot of money if I had. But I’m not in the habit of placing bets, and had no idea that these odds were being offered anyway, so I’m…

By Darren Smith, Weekend Contributor.

In September of 2014 we featured an article describing how a squad of uniformed, self appointed “Sharia Police”. Several young adults wearing orange reflective jackets embossed with the words “Shariah Police” began foot patrols of the central district of the German city Wuppertal, harassing who they perceived to be Muslim who were frequenting discos and gambling establishments.

The group held that they were promoting their Salafist beliefs and chastising others who deviated from the tenets of the religion–by consuming alcohol and engaging in gambling entertainment.

The state sought to bring criminal charges against a group of Sharia Police for violating statutes relating to the patrols. Now, the Düsseldorf State Court ruled that eight of the nine accused men can face trial for “violating laws against wearing uniforms with political messages.”

Bill Gross, the renowned US bond manager, puts out a monthly Investment Outlook opinion piece, a public outlet for some of his ideas and concerns.  I used to read them quite regularly, and although I don’t do so these days, somewhere I saw a reference to the latest issue, and so dug it out.

His focus this month is on the advance of technology and the possible threat to the future employment opportunities of people in advanced countries.  Among his possible solutions is a Universal Basic Income –  as he notes (and despite the recent flurry of interest on the left in New Zealand) it has also had significant support on the right, especially in the US.

The centerpiece of his discussion is this chart

Chart I: Advance of the Robots, Retreat of Labor

As he describes it:

As visual proof of this structural change, look at Chart I…

By Andrew Bolt ~

Terry McCrann on Labor’s most deceitful promise – and one of its most destructive, if Labor even tried to deliver:

Shorten’s overarching coup de destruction is the total insanity, restated aggressively on Thursday night, of the commitment to 50 per cent renewable energy by 2030.

This would at the same time dramatically increase the cost of power to all Australians — probably as much as four times; devastate business across the board; and add billions of dollars to our current account deficit…

Apart from the fact that even getting to 50 per cent renewable energy in just 14 years is completely impossible…

Right now we get barely 14 per cent of our total electricity from renewables…

About 8 per cent of that 14 per cent comes from the now ‘dirty’ renewable of hydro. We ain’t going to build any more hydro dams; so in the weird…

By Jake Wilde

Ian Dunt’s swift analysis of the 5 May elections is excellent. His description of the Labour Party as “the walking dead, aimlessly trundling on, a parody of political life” is as accurate as it is brutal. Like all good writing, it got me thinking. Firstly about the counterfactual: what if it had been a wipeout, a disaster, a game-changer? And secondly where does this zombie Labour Party stagger off to next.

(How counterfactual the counterfactual is does depend where you live. If that happens to be Scotland then, as a Labour Party member or supporter, you may now aspire to be the undead as opposed to being the actual dead. Third place. In Scotland. I am not going to attempt an in depth analysis here but the most obvious conclusion is that there’s only one question that matters in Scotland – the SNP answer it unequivocally…

Interviewer: Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Title: In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal

Place of Publication: Langley, British Columbia, Canada

Name of Publisher: In-Sight Publishing

Numbering: Issue 11.A, Idea: Outliers & Outsiders (Part Six)

Individual Publication Date: May 1, 2016 (2016-05-01)

Issue Publication Date: September 1, 2016 (2016-09-01)

Frequency: Three Times Per Year

Web Domain: www.in-sightjournal.com

Words: 3,290

ISSN 2369-6885

Abstract

An interview with Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago Deirdre Nansen McCloskey. She discusses: geographic, cultural, and linguistic background, influences and pivotal moments in major cross-sections of early life; backgrounds, and influences and pivotal moments in development converging to determine the personal interest in economics, history, English, and communication; global economy probable future in the next 5, 10, 50, and 100 years; interrelationship of philosophies and positions, and the joke; motivation for perpetual output of productions; ethical responsibilities to the general public…

What makes a novel or a movie or a television show sociological?

The quick answer is I don’t know. But I have thoughts, some of them relevant to the the topic at hand, and others wondering how my hair looks.

Every sociologist I talk to about The Wire says it’s one of the most sociological shows they’ve ever seen. What does that mean? In its last season,The Wire throws around the adjective Dickensian in the newsroom it portrays, a wink at the critics who used the word to describe the show’s vast sweep and interest in the urban poor.

So is Dickens sociological by the transitive property? Maybe, but I’m not sure Dickens gets at what makes The Wire so interesting to sociologists, which is that it shows the overwhelming social force of institutions, organizations, and cultural inertia. I’ve always thought of sociology as an…

An official from the U.S. Department of Justice has said the agency will no longer call people “felons” or “convicts” after they are released from prison — because it is too hard for them emotionally.

This fits right in with the Obama administration plan to release large numbers of “non-violent”  felons to remedy “mass incarceration.” To a liberal, crime is never the fault of the perpetrator. It is the fault of society, the criminal’s parents, his lack of a good education, poverty, drugs, or lack of opportunity. Federal prisons are filled with “first-time, non-violent drug offenders” they claim, who were caught up by the criminal justice system and imprisoned, unfairly, for years. This conviction is behind the current drive for criminal justice reform.

Mass incarceration of such prisoners tears apart families, and most of these unfairly imprisoned and nearly innocent are African American, which means that the system is deeply…

By Rahul Anand, Kalpana Kochhar, and Saurabh Mishra

The expansion of India’s exports of services between 1990 and 2013 has been nothing short of spectacular, putting India on a par with the world’s high-income economies in terms of service-product sophistication and as a share of total exports. This has created unique opportunities for continued growth. By contrast, when it comes to exports of manufactured goods, India has lagged behind its emerging-markets peers, both in quality and as a percentage of the total export basket, leaving substantial room for improvement.

Our colleague Gidon Shaviv alerted us to the following headline fail at the website of Europe’s most watched news channel, EuroNews.

The extaordinarily confusing headline obscures the fact that a Palestinian terrorist rammed his car into several soldiers at a West Bank checkpoint, critically injuring one of them.  Other soldiers then shot and killed the driver terrorist.  

We then tweeted a EuroNews editor.

However, we received no reply, so we tweeted the managing editor, Peter Barabas.

Later that day, we received a message from Barabas apologizing for the headline, and promising to revise it accordingly.

Here’s the new headline:

We commend…

South Australia has earned the unenviable title of Australia’s ‘Wind Power Capital’.

For its sins it has seen power prices rocket (the forward price, at $90 per MWh is more than double its neighbour Victoria’s) and unemployment with it: worse is yet to come, on both scores. Then there’s the grid instability and state-wide blackouts that come with routine, total and totally unpredictable wind power output collapses (see above).

SA’s few remaining heavy industries – such as Whyalla’s Arrium Steel Smelter and Port Pirie’s Nyrstar Smelter – are terminal, and begging for taxpayer bail-outs.

It’s already an economic basket case, dependent on Federal Government subsidies to build submarines and other naval vessels. By reference to its ham-fisted economic management, the choice made by its Labor government to throw all to the wind probably seemed like a clever one, back in 2002.

But, economics has a mean way…

Sometimes I find the Prime Minister’s claims about the New Zealand economy, and Auckland, almost breathtaking.  There is an insouciance about them that almost defies belief. They certainly defy data.

In a speech to an Auckland business audience yesterday –  there is a report here, and also video footage –  the Prime Minister repeated his breezy claims that Auckland’s “challenges” around housing and transport are “a quality problem”, and a “sign of success”, and that both the city and the country are doing “incredibly well”.

Perhaps that is how it appears when you are already wealthy, live in a large house in a prime inner suburb, and have a taxpayer-provided chauffeur at your constant disposal.  Neither housing nor traffic problems must impinge terribly much.

I’ve commented on a lot of the detailed issues previously, including the Prime Minister’s apparent vision of New Zealand as a Switzerland of the South Pacific, and…

Just updated my data series on international adoption. You can see previous posts, with commentary, at the adoption tag.

The data are the US State Department, which grants the adoption visas. It’s kind of a mess, back to 1999, here. (I have an old spreadsheet that goes back to 1990 for the big countries but I can’t find the link anymore.) The most recent report is here, and the briefer narrative is here. For the first time in those documents I saw an official description of what’s changed in China, which partly explains the broader trends. The State Department says 20,000-30,000 children are placed domestically in China now, as a result of increased government focus on domestic adoption, although without providing comparison numbers. They also say more than 90% of children adopted to the US from China now have special health needs, up from 5% in 2005…