Utopia, you are standing in it!

CNN had a big “Climate Forum.” Seven hours of the remaining Democrat candidates for the presidency, trying desperately to find the magic key to the votes of everyone who is worried about the end of the earth and Climate Change. Marc Morano, proprietor of Climate Depot watched all seven hours so you didn’t have to. (He is also the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change which you can order at the website.) Journal Nature has named Morano as the Number One contrarian in the media (#1 out of 386 skeptics) You can watch his appearance on Fox and Friends with the link at Climate Depot. It’s pretty clear that not only have the Democrat candidates never read any of the science of climate, but neither have the reporters at CNN.

The remaining Democrat candidates want desperately to appeal to everyone concerned about Climate Change and the…

I’m gonna gripe about modern rock music again and contrast it with the music produced between the early Sixties and mid-Seventies, which I consider the apotheosis of rock—just as I see the apotheosis of jazz lasting from the mid-Thirties to the early Sixties, ending with Coltrane. Since their apogees, both genres have gone downhill. And because what I see as the heyday of jazz occurred well before I began listening to it and loving it, you can’t accuse me of liking only the music that I listened to at the “vulnerable” period of my teens.

This curmudgeonly attitude is apparently shared by Steven Pinker, as evinced by this tweet (h/t Kevin). And that tweet called my attention to the linked article in The Week by Damon Linker (a man with whom I’ve had some differences sin the past), calling attention to the upcoming demise of the great musicians of…

The Reserve Bank’s radical bank capital proposals –  markedly increasing required capital for locally-incorporated banks, in a country with (a) a low demonstrated risk of financial crisis and (b) high effective capital ratios by international standards anyway –  hasn’t been much in the news lately.  The Governor –  unelected, but sole decisionmaker on this –  his own –  proposal has presumably retreated to his high tower to contemplate.   He hired some carefully selected overseas academics to review bits of the Bank’s analysis, and we might expect to see their reports shortly (but recall the tight constraints on what they were allowed to look at, who they were allowed to talk to etc).

I was doing an interview yesterday on various aspects of the proposal, including making the point that what the Governor is proposing can be seen as –  on the Bank’s own numbers – an incredibly expensive insurance…

Many people are under the false impression that evolution is just a guess or a belief, when in reality, it is one of the most well-supported concepts in all of science. The evidence for it is overwhelming and comes from many different disciplines such as paleontology, comparative anatomy, biogeography, and perhaps most significantly, genetics. Indeed, modern genetic tools have allowed us to repeatedly test evolution’s predictions, and those predictions have consistently come true. Therefore, I am going to explain in simple terms what the genetic evidence is and why it is so compelling. As I will show, the evidence perfectly matches the predictions that the theory of evolution made decades before we could test those predictions. Further, the patterns do not make sense if our modern organisms were specially created, because there is no reason why a creator would have had to make life with these patterns. In other…

Whether or not it is ultimately found to be unlawful, the Prime Minister’s decision to advise the Queen to prorogue Parliament  has shed a spotlight on what Robert Blackburn has described in his illuminating article on the monarch’s personal prerogatives as: “a little corner of the constitution that is little understood and is routinely misunderstood”, (‘Monarchy and the personal prerogatives’ (2004] PL, 546) In the absence of any clear consensus amongst UK constitutional scholars on this issue, I would suggest that the postcolonial experience of the Commonwealth Caribbean with regard to the head of state’s personal prerogatives, prorogation, and constitutional review more generally, can offer a helpful comparative constitutional perspective.

Prorogation in the Commonwealth Caribbean

The 12 countries that make up the Commonwealth Caribbean (Antigua, the Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, St Kitts, St Lucia, St Vincent and Trinidad) attained their independence from the UK in a period…

Housing Minister Megan Woods this week eased herself  past the KiwiBuild fiasco to   announce a fresh range of housing policies. She conceded the commitment to specific KiwiBuild targets had been a “mistake”: others have labelled KiwiBuild as a “political humiliation”. Woods exuded confidence the new bundle of policies has what it takes to deliver on the government’s housing goals.

As for Greens co-leader Marama Davidson who appeared alongside Woods as the government’s housing policies were “reset”, she exclaimed that it was one of the best days in her political career. “I want to say to those NZers today who have given up hope on their dream of owning a home we have opened the door to you”.

Pardon?

Twenty-one eminent constitutional lawyers expressed this view in a letter to the Times (3 4 19): ‘Any attempt to advise refusal of Royal Assent to a Bill passed by Parliament would stand constitutional principle on its head. It would presume a governmental power to override Parliament, yet it is in Parliament, not the Executive, that sovereignty resides’.

But it is the eminent-21 who stand constitutional principle on its head.  The true principle is: it is in Parliament (not the Executive, and not the Legislature) that sovereignty resides.

The name Parliament, or parliamentum, came (from the Old French: parlement, parler) into use in England in the 14^th century (the Modus Tenendi Parliamentum, probably 1321), but by the 15^th century it had come to mean a legislature (OED 3^rd edition, 2005); and, indeed, that’s what it was.  The movement from an absolute monarch to a legislative Parliament…