Here’s one contradiction—of countless such—in the fear of unregulated markets.

The contradiction is implicit in the oft-heard claim that the financial crisis of 2008 was caused by de-regulation. But the contradiction is wider: most people hold, explicitly or implicitly, that without regulation, markets could, and sometimes would, spin off into disastrous excesses of one form or another.

The operative image of economic regulation is that of a huge truck without steering or brakes. “We have to have those instruments of control, or the truck will go careening off the side of a cliff.”

The truth is that government regulation is precisely the cutting of the brake lines and the seizing up of the steering column.

The actual alternative is: government regulation vs. market regulation—which means coercive rule by political appointees vs. freely negotiated prices.

On a free market, when price relationships begin to diverge from economic reality, they are brought back in line because of greed. Speculators, arbitrageurs, and other “profiteers” swoop in to profit from any misalignment.

Their activity acts to eliminate the very misalignment with reality that created the profit opportunity.

Suppose the price of Brazilian coffee is out of whack. That means: not consistent with other prices across space and time. Across space: if the price of Brazilian coffee in Brazil is higher than its price in the U.S., exporting to the U.S. makes no sense. More coffee staying in Brazil lowers its price there; less coffee coming to the U.S. raises its price here. The recognition of a price discrepancy motivates action to eliminate that discrepancy.

Across time: if the price of Brazilian coffee today is too low given an expected increase in demand for it next month, then one can make money by buying it today and holding (in vacuum sealed containers) to sell at a higher price next month. And once again the profit-seeking acts to correct the economic mismatch that created the profit opportunity.

Whenever prices, including interest rates, diverge from economic reality, there is money to be made in correcting the prices by the appropriate buying and selling.

And here’s the best part: those with the best judgment of economic reality are the ones who make the most money, which means they have the most influence on the market. It is the buying and selling of the Warren Buffets (and their more speculative counterparts) that keep the economy aligned with the facts.

This I call the “natural selection” operative on a free market. It is a selection of the best minds, and it is “natural” in the sense of the outcome of free, individual judgments.

This “natural selection” for rationality is what keeps an unregulated, uncoerced market in line with reality.

But government intervention creates an “unnatural selection”: selection for the ability to acquire and hold onto political power. To the extent there is government intervention, the minds of the profit-seekers are thwarted and rewards go not to the Warren Buffets but, at first, to the ward heelers and power brokers, then as the system devolves, power over the economy goes increasingly to those who are better at conning the public. Then, they are replaced by those more willing to use compulsion. The ruthless displace the relatively timid punks, and destruction reigns.

So, people have it backwards. “Unregulated” means reason sets the terms and “regulated” means reason is quashed by political power.

You think market prices are getting out of whack? Don’t call for government goons to “correct” them; put your money where your mouth is. Buy or sell short accordingly.

The contradiction is between the desire for economic rationality and the advocacy of that which destroys economic rationality: the government’s gun.

Note another contradiction: the same people who can’t tell when the price of coffee is too high are supposed to be able to tell what is the right political system and who is the right person to be in power over them. “I’m going to vote for Mr. X because he’s best qualified to stop me from doing what I think I should.”

It would be less directly contradictory to say that what is needed is a dictatorship, because ordinary people are too irrational to know whom to vote for.

But then we face Plato’s contradiction: we need a philosopher-king to rule the people who are too irrational to distinguish the real philosopher from the charlatans.

Can Plato’s philosopher-who-would-be-king just seize power, rather than try to gain popular support? Who would let him take over? Not the citizenry. Not the warrior class, who also can’t distinguish real philosophy from the charlatans. And once seizing power is allowed, the race goes to the most brutal.

The fear of full, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism is a fear of freedom.

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THINGS FALL APART FOR CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY AND “PROFESSOR” JASON ARDAY.

This is, quite likely, the worst academic scandal of all time. There have been other academic scandals over the centuries, but nothing quite like this one. It’s the worst academic scandal not only because it indicts one of the greatest universities in the world, but because it indicts all higher education in the English-speaking world! The Arday case is the symbol and culmination of the kind of intellectual and moral rot that has been seeping into higher education for sixty-plus years.

If Cambridge University—an 817-year-old institution—is to be saved (and it’s an open question as to whether it can or even should be saved), all those administrators and faculty involved in hiring, promoting, and defending Jason Arday should be fired immediately. Nothing less will do if Cambridge is to survive.

The great tragedy of the L’Affaire Arday is that there may very well be scores if not hundreds of similar cases around the English-speaking world.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF CAMBRIDGE STARTS HERE.

Watch Professor Hilary Cremin, Head of the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge, fawn all over Arday and say to him: “You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do!!!!!!!” I’ve never seen anything so cringeworthy in my life. It’s just so pathetic:

LET’S START FROM THE BEGINNING

For those not familiar with the Jason Arday story, I tasked Mr. Grok with the following assignment: “List the fantastical claims made by Jason Arday?”

Here’s what Mr. Grok reported, which sums up everything I’ve learned about Arday over the course of the last week:

“Jason Arday (a former University of Cambridge sociology professor who resigned in August 2026 amid plagiarism allegations (the plagiarism consisted of directly copying over 100 pages from another dissertation) and scrutiny of his background) has been widely reported to have made numerous extraordinary or unverified claims about his life, achievements, and experiences.

Key claims include but are not limited to:

• Diagnosed with autism and global developmental delay at age 3; non-verbal until age 11 and unable to read or write until age 18.

• Extreme athletic feats: Running 600 miles (roughly Edinburgh to London) in six days for charity (a near-world-record ultra-distance performance); alternatively or additionally, running 300 miles in three days; and completing 30 marathons in 35 days (including the final nine after an epileptic fit and hairline fracture of the fibula that caused severe swelling, managed with painkillers and ice baths).

• Charity fundraising: Personally raising £5–£5.5 million (or more) for 70–80+ charities over years, often tied to the running events.

• Threats and attacks after his Cambridge appointment: Being threatened twice by masked men (once at knifepoint) demanding he resign, with no CCTV evidence; receiving a severed pig’s head at his family’s home (falsely claiming a police investigation); and receiving bananas, bullets, corrosive substances, and other items via post, plus physical assaults, spitting, and rape/death threats.

• Television appearance: Being featured in the documentary series Seven Up! as a child. The original series began in 1964 (Arday was born in 1985), and the BBC rejected involvement in related later series given his age.

• Academic credentials and roles: visiting roles at Ohio State University (no records found); and authoring a book titled Being Young, Black and Male: Challenging the Dominant Discourse (Palgrave—publisher confirmed a proposal but no publication).

• Other experiences: Traveling to South America and West Africa to install water points (WaterAid noted they do not send volunteers abroad and do not facilitate self-funded visits); being hit by a car as a teenager, spending months in a (conscious) coma, being told he might not recover (with suggestions to withdraw life support), and relearning to walk/talk (details varied or omitted between book proposal and memoir); testicular cancer or multiple brain tumors (details inconsistent or omitted); and appearing to claim involvement in Olympic-related activities or other feats.”

HERE IS THE JASON ARDAY NEWS ROUNDUP:

• DEI Fraud and Cover-Up at Cambridge

• Playbooks, plagiarism and a pig’s head: new claims surrounding a star Cambridge professor.

• Cambridge Professor Jason Arday’s Ohio State Affiliation Appears Fabricated.

• Police investigated journalist who tried to expose Cambridge professor.

• Charity casts doubts on volunteering record of Cambridge professor.

• Now THREE universities dispute claims Cambridge plagiarism row professor holds academic positions with them - as charity casts doubt on volunteering record

• Jason Arday reported academic critic to police after questions over his research

• Star Scholar Resigns as Cambridge Announces Investigation Into His Record

• WHO HAD TO LOSE FOR JASON ARDAY TO WIN?

• The police. Universities. Our national broadcaster. Publishing. Charities. And, of course, Labour... The surreal ‘plagiarising Professor’ scandal exposes in chilling detail just how many of our institutions have now been captured by woke dogma

• Great and Unfortunate Fabrications

• Icarus in the Faculty Lounge

NOTE THE ATTEMPTED COVER-UP BELOW:

AND IT ONLY GETS WORSE!

AND SO, IT ENDS!

TO BE CLEAR: THIS POST IS NOT PRIMARILY ABOUT JASON ARDAY.

It’s about the corruption and rot at the heart of Cambridge University. Here is a partial list of courses currently being taught at Cambridge University. This is the real scandal at Cambridge U:

• Traditional Cultural Norms, Technology and Gender Relations in Ghana

• The Political Economy of Female Circumcision

• Unsexed beings: constructing gender, humanness, and agency through the use of the word “unsex” in Late Modern British society and writing

• In Her Own Words: A Study of Women’s Voices in Contemporary White Supremacy and Far-Right Online Hate

• Legal Mobilization by Black Lesbian, Bisexual and Queer (LBQ) Womxn in Kenya and South Africa

• Exploring gendered embodiment in transgender and gender-diverse adolescents at the intersection of exercise and eating behaviours, social inclusion, and mental health: Towards a desire-centred approach in paediatric gender-affirming healthcare and research

• Codes of Life, Codes of Death: Tracing the (Im)possibility of Trans Lives in Algorithmic Assemblages

• Queer Cultural Memory in Literature, Film and Television since 1999

• The Sexually Sociological: Gay Masculinity, Intimacy and the (Un)queer State

AND NOW WE KNOW, THANKS TO ERIC RASMUSEN, WHO HIRED ARDAY.

The wall of shame:

I SUPPORT THE FOLLOWING UNRESERVEDLY:

I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THAT YOU WATCH THIS INTERVIEW WITH KATHLEEN STOCK. She nails it.

AND MORE:

FROM PHILOSOPHER STEPHEN HICKS. The hall of shame: Jason Arday’s prominent supporters at Cambridge University and elsewhere.

IT’S A SLIPPERY SLOPE TO THE BOTTOM? The Tip of the Iceberg

AFTER 817 YEARS, IT IS SAD TO WITNESS THE DECLINE AND FALL OF A ONCE GREAT UNIVERSITY:

• Can Cambridge weather the Arday storm? Whatever happened to serious scholarship?

• Cambridge University’s Disgrace

THE CORRUPTION RUNS DEEP:

LAST THOUGHTS FROM BRET WEINSTEIN AND PETER BOGHOSSIAN:

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY IS A FRAUDULENT INSTITUTION JUST LIKE THE UNIVERSITIES IN AMERICA’S SO-CALLED “IVY LEAGUE.” (Remember the Claudine Gay scandal at Harvard.)

THE QUESTION IS: WHAT WILL BE DONE ABOUT IT?

• Dons call for Cambridge leaders to take blame for Jason Arday appointment

• Cambridge Can — but Evidently Won’t — Catch Jason Arday.

• Arday’s students think Cambridge failed them. Now they want their grades reviewed.

• Cambridge professors who hired Arday attacked ‘whiteness’ in education

• Cambridge is culpable in plagiarism row

• Jason Arday and the Dukes and Dauphins of DEI

• The genius of Jason Arday

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

I conclude with one last thought: the Jason Arday scandal is one of the best possible things to happen to higher education in my lifetime.

But let’s make this clear: the Arday scandal is not primarily about Jason Arday; it’s about the corruption of Cambridge University and indeed of all higher education. Arday is, to be sure, a fraudster and a grifter, but his crime is to have exploited a totally corrupt system. The “system”—the system of DEI welfarism—is the greater crime. The faculty and administrators who hired and promoted him are intellectual and moral malefactors who have stolen something important from us. They deserve to be fired. They do not belong in the hallowed halls of academia.

I’m not at all confident that Cambridge will fix the problem. They will appoint a “committee” or a “commission” to investigate and two-years later the committee will bury the report and do nothing. It’s all a charade.

Let’s be clear: there is NO systemic racism in higher education, at least not the kind that they want you to think exists. Quite the opposite. There is, instead, a kind of fawning, sycophantic but ultimately demeaning treatment of black scholars that is, as black scholar John McWhorter put it, “a symptom of academia’s dehumanization of black scholars and willingness to accept intellectual mediocrity in its self-seeking pursuit of virtue.” Just so! So yes, there is racism at Cambridge, just not the kind they want you to think exists. It’s the racism of low expectations, the racism of guilt, and the racism of revenge.

But the new, systemic racism is more than about the pursuit of some form of perverted virtue as McWhorter suggests. Hilary Cremin, the Chair of the Education School at Cambridge and Arday’s chief promoter (she’s the fawning woman in the BBC documentary above who said Arday “was the best in the world”), was clearly looking for redemption—the kind of redemption that relieves one of an overwhelming sense of guilt. You can see it in her eyes and hear it in her voice when she tells Arday that he is the “best in the world.” Jason Arday was hired and sanctified by racists, who are morally responsible for his rise, decline, and fall. They nailed him to the cross.

Arday’s career is ruined. He should sue Cambridge for having hired him!

And so, I think we should all say “thank you” to Jason Arday. We owe him a debt of gratitude for exposing the intellectual and moral rot not only at Cambridge University, but in all higher education in the English-speaking world.

I think the only proper ending to this story would be for King Charles to knight him as Sir Jason of Cambridge. Surely he deserves that much!

***Have a great week!

On July 28, 2026, a brand-new Airbus A350 broke the record for the longest uninterrupted flight by a commercial jet: twenty-four hours and twenty-four minutes. The 14,338-mile flight from Melbourne, Australia, to Toulouse, France, demonstrated the viability of Project Sunrise, a joint effort by Airbus and Australian airline Qantas to establish direct flights between Australian cities and destinations that were previously unreachable without a layover. The airline plans to fly in 2027 from Sydney and Melbourne to London, Paris, New York, Rio de Janeiro, and Cape Town.1

Previously, the aircraft had flown from Toulouse (Airbus’s manufacturing base) to Melbourne on July 23 on a 10,500-mile route east over central Asia, demonstrating that the aircraft can fly nonstop from Europe to Australia. The longer return flight also flew east, transiting both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, the United States, and Canada. In two flights, the plane circumnavigated the globe and demonstrated that it can reach any American or European destination from Australia in a single flight. With a full load of passengers and cargo it can fly a little more than eleven thousand miles, enough to reach Spain or eastern Canada from Melbourne.2

Although spending more than twenty hours on a plane is arduous, it represents a saving of approximately four hours compared to an average layover journey—significant for busy business travelers. It also saves the airline (and, therefore, customers) from paying navigation, landing, handling, security, and other fees—and taxes—at the layover location. Despite these savings, the flight is still more expensive to operate than a layover flight due to the eighteen tons of fuel the plane carries at takeoff and the need to carry two shifts of flight and cabin crew on board for the whole journey. To achieve these long flights, the aircraft must also have fewer passenger seats to reduce its weight. For these reasons, Qantas is banking on passengers paying a premium for the comfort and convenience the flights will offer, charging about 30 percent more for a ticket than the layover option.

Some are dismissing Project Sunrise as a merely expensive indulgence for the wealthy, but this is untrue: Early adopters provide vital funding to drive innovation that ultimately benefits everyone (a principle that can be seen in all kinds of fields, from cars to smartphones). In the days when a jet needed four engines to cross the Atlantic, transatlantic flights cost as much as a family car—but those high-price tickets helped fund development of three- and two-engine jets that made the trip more affordable.3 That process was greatly delayed by regulations prohibiting two-engine jets from crossing the ocean for a long time, and laws that prevented competition among businesses also contributed to the high prices. For example, the Bermuda I and II regulations forbade airlines from undercutting each other’s fares and limited the number of services each airline could provide.4 Despite these artificial constraints, the market still enabled manufacturers to produce a generation of more-efficient transatlantic planes, such as the Airbus A300, the capabilities of which encouraged regulators to relax the two-engine restrictions.5

The Airbus A350 is undeniably a marvel of modern engineering. In addition to the record-breaking range of the Project Sunrise aircraft, which is Qantas’s A350-1000ULR (ultra-long range) variant, all variants of the A350 boast a number of other innovations. Their Active Load Alleviation and Fly-By-Wire systems constantly input data from the plane’s sensors into the flight computers, which make tiny adjustments to stabilize the flight and prevent adjustments that might lead to excessive stress or a loss of flight stability. This keeps the aircraft’s flight safer and more stable, even in harsh wind conditions, than human pilots can.6 Their takeoff and fault monitoring systems detect component failures and system anomalies long before they threaten aircraft functions.7 Most impressively, their pioneering carbon fiber construction increases the aircraft’s ability to endure high-stress conditions from intense crosswinds to fire—a point well demonstrated in the January 2024 accident at Tokyo Haneda Airport, during which the A350 protected its passengers from a raging inferno long enough for all 379 to safely escape following a head-on, high-speed collision with another plane.8 Had any other aircraft type been involved, the crash likely would have been a mass-casualty disaster. (Five of the six people on the other aircraft were killed in the crash.)9

The A350 is, in many respects, the pinnacle of traditional jet airliner development. Virtually no greater time saving on flights of this length is possible until supersonic flight becomes commercially viable because subsonic passenger jets cannot get closer to the speed of sound than they already do without the airflow over the wing exceeding it.10 Just as regulations slowed development of the twin-engine, long-haul jets that preceded the A350, the progress of supersonic aviation has been strangled by the recently lifted restrictions on its use over land.11 Until supersonic aircraft catch up that lost time, the A350 represents a new era in super-long-haul travel. Alongside its unique extra fuel tanks in the center rear of the aircraft, the A350 also boasts adaptations designed to improve the passenger experience in-flight, including a wellness area for exercise and relaxation and enhanced cooling systems for keeping food fresh on board. Airbus is working with Singapore Airlines on adapting its A350-900 fleet into a lighter-weight, shorter-fuselage ULR variant, and it is continuing to develop the A350-1000URL design through Project Sunrise Evolution.12

If these projects are successful and Airbus can continue making the design more efficient and affordable, the A350 could deliver the fastest, most comfortable ultra-long-haul flights for all kinds of passengers across the globe. This kind of innovation enhances people’s lives in myriad ways, making it easier for people to visit overseas family and friends, discover new places and cultures, meet new people, and build new personal and professional relationships. Moreover, it empowers businesses to more easily and efficiently move goods across borders, opening up opportunities and breaking down the barriers between nations. This is what makes the aviation industry and the people who deliver and progress it worthy of celebrating: the way their hard work and constant pursuit of knowledge and achievement enhance human life.

Project Sunrise is not merely a luxury indulgence but rather a turning point in aviation history. It represents the pinnacle of traditional jet travel, and it should spawn a global network of affordable ultra-long-distance flights in the coming years and decades. That will be a tremendous improvement for passengers in Australia and other remote countries that should make their journeys more bearable until supersonic jets finally return. Airbus and Qantas deserve praise for their remarkable achievement, which, if conditions are favorable, will be the sunrise of a new era for aviation.

"Sometimes both institutions and people pick up a firearm and blow both feet off. 

"Cambridge University has done so with its gross mismanagement of the Jason Arday affair. ...

“The idea that historically disadvantaged groups are entitled to extra civil rights – coupled with social preferment – over and above those held/enjoyed by people considered their oppressors is inimical to the rule of law, specifically the principle that people should not be punished for crimes they did not commit. We do not inherit criminality from our ancestors. This is in turn derived from the larger principle of treat like cases alike, which was first articulated in its modern form by the Roman jurist Ulpian. ...

“Jason Arday got his job in large part because a lot of people – and especially humanities and social science academics – think it’s reasonable to punish whites (and sometimes East Asians) who have never wronged blacks by making it harder for them to get into university or gain employment. This punishment of whites/East Asians who have done no wrong is undertaken to compensate blacks who have not been wronged for wrongs committed by other white people against other black people in the past. This logic is the basis of all affirmative action schemes and preferential hiring regimes (provision for which exists – albeit in limited form – in the UK’s Equality Act 2010). It is also the logic of inherited vengeance.

“It took humans centuries to work out that the law should punish individual wrongdoers rather than members of their family, their descendants, or their extended kin group for crimes or civil wrongs. One only need read some of the world’s great literature, both ancient and modern – from Njal’s 'Saga' to 'The Godfather' – to gain imaginative entry to a world where intergenerational and kin-based revenge are norms.

“May I suggest that the world of medieval Iceland or a New York dominated by the Five Families are the sorts of places you probably only want to visit in fiction? We stopped basing punishments on vendetta – a long, slow process of legal evolution starting in early Republican Rome – for good reasons. Societies based on vendetta are places of violent horror and boiling intergenerational resentment.”

~ Helen Dale from her column 'L’affaire Arday'

I hear from the Guardian that Anthony Fauci pled the Fifth 100 times in Senate hearings about his actions during the pandemic. To a certain knee-jerk portion of the body politic, I hear this means that Trump's former advisor is guilty as sin and should be locked up. [Insert whistle here.]

Unfortunately for MAGA, that same trial-by-ordeal-like "standard" would have have their hero, Donald Trump, behind bars long ago: He did the same thing over 400 times during a 2022 deposition in New York about his namesake organization's business practices.

But that was a witch hunt! will be their version of But this is different!

Trump is openly, obviously corrupt -- and Fauci plainly isn't omniscient and made mistakes. Two things about each can be true at once: Authorities can (1) have valid reasons for wanting to understand their past actions better, and (2) choose to perform a witch-hunt instead.

In 2022, the Democrats were incompetently trying to bring Trump down before the election for legally weak reasons -- after inadequately pursuing several serious legal matters they should have already had well underway by then.

Now, the Republicans, who -- as Amesh Adalja argues in the embedded video above -- should be interested in looking back at their handling of the Covid pandemic are instead trying to simply scapegoat Fauci.

Regarding Fauci, I once said:

As much as I am personally inclined to dislike Fauci, he is a human being who had a very difficult job to to. He should state his side of the story clearly, and we should hear it before passing judgement on him.

That isn't what happened in the hearings.

Regarding actual post-mortems, the Guardian piece mentions the commentary of Zeynep Tufekci, which I found thoughtful.

I concluded that post as follows:

It is interesting, and not in a happy way, to consider what this pandemic has revealed to us about the state of our culture (as manifest in its intellectual and governing classes), both in terms of what passes for knowledge and in terms of how society should be organized.

That observation applies particularly well today. The Guardian notes:

No surprise, really, that Fauci, now retired from his public post, invoked the fifth amendment more than 100 times during last week's Senate committee hearing.

That's the action that -- though reasonable enough given all the circumstances -- is the supposed impetus for holding him in contempt. Now the committee has referred the matter to the justice department for possible criminal prosecution.

Fauci could see the writing on the wall as this trumped-up hearing began. In his opening statement, he singled out the Kentucky senator Rand Paul, the Republican committee chairperson.

"The only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something, anything, that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, 'behind bars'," Fauci said. "Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion."

I agree with the Guardian that Fauci does not deserve this, and I agree further with epidemiologist Amesh Adalja (whose podcast is embedded above) that "Blaming Fauci won't prepare us for the next pandemic."

-- CAV