Utopia, you are standing in it!

Perhaps the worst war plan in American history. (Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, page 115) ‘It failed utterly.’ (Verdict of Marek Belka, Prime Minister of Poland which contributed troops to the coalition, describing the entire American project to invade and ‘liberate’ Iraq, p.347) Bad assumptions The US Army invaded Iraq on 20 March […]

Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas E. Ricks (2006)

‘Yee-haw is not a foreign policy.’ (Hand-written sign in the bar of the British compound of the Green Zone, Baghdad) Why America invaded Iraq In March 2003 the US Army, accompanied by forces from the so-called ‘coalition of the willing’, invaded Iraq with the aim of overthrowing Saddam Hussein. The architects of the invasion, US […]

Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad’s Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran (2006)

In Monty Python’s film, “The Life of Brian,” the lead character hangs hopelessly on the cross when a small army arrives to rescue him. His relief is short-lived as Otto, the leader, promptly announces that they are the crack suicide squad trained to kill themselves “within 20 seconds.” The scene came to mind yesterday as […]

The House Crack Suicide Squad: The Ouster of McCarthy Captures the Politics of Our Times

Radio NZ reports that Minister for Social Development Carmel Sepuloni was on the campaign trail in Christchurch yesterday defending her government’s performance. She said that: “Her government had seen higher numbers of beneficiaries moving into jobs …” Yet the numbers on a Jobseeker benefit continue to climb. Technically her assertion may be true but it’s…

Checking out Carmel Sepuloni’s campaign claims

I don’t know how Anna Krylov manages to sustain a successful career as an accomplished and honored theoretical and quantum chemist at the University of Southern California—while at the same time turning out long and thoughtful pieces that attack the ruination of science by the Authoritarian Left. She was, for example, the main author of […]

Fighting ideological repression by the Authoritarian Left

If a drug or medical device has already gone through the regulatory gauntlet at the FDA and Australia, or in the UK and Canada, or the EU and Taiwan, or Switzerland and Singapore, does it seem all that likely that Medsafe’s going to find anything that everyone else missed?Sure, Medsafe has ‘expedited’ processes for drugs…

Certified

It is of course precarious to criticize the present-day worship of “indigenous knowledge”, as it’s all too easy to dismiss that criticism as racism or bigotry.  The problem is not that the empirical knowledge of indigenous people is worthless, because it isn’t. Although it’s often derived from trial and error, that is still a way […]

NSF invests millions in indigenous knowledge

TweetErec Smith talks with C-SPAN about his new book, A Critique of Anti-Racism in Rhetoric and Composition. Ken Langone’s letter in today’s Wall Street Journal is worth reading: A hearty second to Ira Stoll (“ProPublica Buries Its Clarence Thomas News,” op-ed, Sept. 23). The closer you look at the left’s latest attacks on Justice Clarence Thomas…

Some Links

Tweet… is from page 454 of my late Nobel-laureate colleague Jim Buchanan‘s 1989 paper “The Relatively Absolute Absolutes,” as this article is reprinted in volume 1 (1999) of The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan: The Logical Foundations of Constitutional Liberty: I consider it to be the task of economists, as economic scientists, to make…

Quotation of the Day…

Without exception, every country that’s plugged into the grand wind and solar ‘transition’ is suffering from crippling power prices and unreliable delivery. The relationship is so stark as to be blindingly obvious; and one that was as perfectly predictable, as it was perfectly avoidable. Paying wind and solar operators seemingly endless and practically countless $billions […]

How to Wreck Reliable & Affordable Power Supplies: Keep Adding Wind & Solar

Without exception, every country that’s plugged into the grand wind and solar ‘transition’ is suffering from crippling power prices and unreliable delivery. The relationship is so stark as to be blindingly obvious; and one that was as perfectly predictable, as it was perfectly avoidable. Paying wind and solar operators seemingly endless and practically countless $billions […]

How to Wreck Reliable & Affordable Power Supplies: Keep Adding Wind & Solar

Labour says they want more competition in grocery retail. I worry about the cursed monkey paw version of it.Here’s what they say:“We know that it’s tough right now for many people, and the high cost of food isn’t helping,” Commerce and Consumer Affairs spokesperson Duncan Webb said.“The inquiry we ordered into competition in the grocery…

A late pitch for supermarket competition