As you know, I go back and forth on the question of affirmative action for college and professional-school admissions, and even after I thought I’d settled on a view (i.e., give some preference to minorities among those equally qualified for admission), it still keeps changing. After I read the long New York Times piece below […]
Sky News reports: The fact-checking director who oversees Mark Zuckerberg’s misinformation program on Facebook has been caught in secret emails colluding with a now disgraced operation which suppressed journalism during Australia’s Voice referendum. … RMIT FactLab was suspended from fact checking on Facebook after a Sky News Australia investigation in Augustfound the operation was filled with […]
Emeritus Professor of Engineering Mike Kelly has published a paper estimating the costs to New Zealand to achieve net zero emissions. He says three major projects would need to be completed: And this has to be done within the next 26 years. The electricity sector would need to grow from 155 PJ to 425 PJ. […]
Imagine if the CIA and FBI were disinvited from the US National Security Council, and replaced by the head of the EPA. Because this is the grotesque level of government incompetence Aussies are enduring.
Randall G. Holcombe writes at Independent Institute President Biden’s Climate Aspirations. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images. H/T John Ray Most of what the political class calls policies are really aspirations with no policy content. They are feel-good statements that promote goals most people would support, with no associated policies that would […]
Why judges must ‘stay in their lane’ This article with minor differences was published by The Law Association’s Law News on 15 March 2024 Provoked by the Supreme Court’s decision in Smith v Fonterra and others [2024] NZSC 5, Professor James Allan, Garrick Professor of Law at the University of Queensland, a Canadian who taught law at…
We now have almost all 2023 data in, which has allowed me to update my annual table of how Labour went against its promises. This is basically their final report card. The promise The result Build 100,000 affordable homesover 10 years 2,025 built (2.0%) Fund the planting of one billion treesover 10 years 41.4 million trees funded […]
My Dad once told about how the famous British General Bernard Montgomery was asked after WWII whether he might like to go into politics and he declined, saying: War is a dirty business, but politics, by gum! I’ve never looked into the story to see if it’s apocryphal but given that politics appears at the […]
George Mason Professor Bethany Letiecq is at the center of a firestorm of controversy over his article in the Journal of Marriage and Family declaring that the institution of marriage plays a key role in white supremacy. In considering what she labels “marriage fundamentalism,” Letiecq lashes out at the “two-parent married family” model. It is the […]
Bryce Edwards writes – Is another Green MP on their way out? And are the Greens severely tarnished by another integrity scandal? For the second time in three months, the Green Party has secretly suspended an MP over integrity issues. Mystery is surrounding the party’s decision to first suspend Darleen Tana from her small business […]
…because they are exempt from fuel economy standards: Because making light trucks held to lower environmental standards was more profitable than building small clean cars, automakers marketed big models, including suvs, enthusiastically. They portrayed them as quintessentially American, embodying freedom, strength and adventurousness. By 2002 light trucks made up a bigger share of light-duty vehicle…
What was that judge thinking? Peter Williams writes – That Golriz Ghahraman and District Court Judge Maria Pecotic were once lawyer colleagues is incontrovertible. There is published evidence that they took at least one case to the Court of Appeal together. There was a report on the case in Stuff in 2016 and another story about them […]
On March 8, I wrote a critique of this article, which appeared in American Scientist (click sceenshot to read): When I wrote my piece, I had grown weary of people making the same tired old arguments against the sex binary, arguments like saying that sex isn’t binary because male orangutans come in two forms (“flanged” […]
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
In Hume’s spirit, I will attempt to serve as an ambassador from my world of economics, and help in “finding topics of conversation fit for the entertainment of rational creatures.”
“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. - J Robert Oppenheimer.
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