Sure, sure, there was last year’s intelligence report and this year’s congressional hearing. But you really know that UFOs/UAPs are having a moment when they turn up in the Financial Times’ storied Lex column — albeit in a piece that has a faint but unmissable “crazy American” subtext and is a touch disapproving….
Read MoreCentral planning is not exactly the best way of organizing an economy (#understatement). That’s true, whether we look at the colossal failures of communism or, for that matter, many less ambitious attempts to manage an economy by decree.
Central planning lite (or relatively lite) has been a feature of the energy “transition” now underway in much of the West for some time. As this transition proceeds, the difficulties flowing from its reliance on aggressive, unrealistic and arrogant directives from above are becoming all too apparent, from the woes associated with wind energy — a technology clearly not ready to fulfill the role assigned to it by the climate technocracy — to growing evidence that forcing people away from conventional autos into electric vehicles is going to lead to immense problems that appear not to have been anticipated. (This may a charitable explanation. Perhaps those in charge were well aware of the problems but were determined to press on regardless. Omelets, eggs, we know that script.)
Read MoreScientists have traditionally tended to appreciate the usefulness of disagreement or, where necessary, to take it in stride and move on. (A flat Earth, you say? Oookay.) But in many faiths, dissent is heresy. The offender must be cast out, or worse.
Moral Money is, as its name implies, a particularly sanctimonious corner of the Financial Times. It is focused on the likes of ESG (a variant of “socially responsible” investing that measures actual or potential portfolio companies against environmental, social, and governance standards), “stakeholder capitalism,” and other facets of a kumbaya capitalism superior to the Gekko-hearted incumbent, or so the cleverly marketed corporatist story goes.
Read MoreConquerors like to remind the conquered of who is in charge. One way of doing so is by the construction of monuments, symbols of the new order — and by their permanence, of its permanence. The Soviets were no exception to this rule, distinguishing themselves only by the ugliness and, not infrequently, the gigantism of the works they fashioned. Not far enough from the center of the Latvian capital, Riga, there’s an archetypal example of this genre: overbearing, grandiloquent, and brutal. It dates from the later years of the Soviet occupation, a time when the Kremlin was using memories of the “Great Patriotic War” to bolster a regime struggling to deal with ideological failure, economic stagnation, and growing disaster in Afghanistan.
Read MoreToomas Hendrik Ilves. Estonia’s president between 2006 and 2016, is not known for mincing his words about Russia. Nevertheless, as we drove towards a restaurant amid the refurbished industrial buildings and new waterfront apartments in a neighborhood that is a monument of sorts to Estonia’s astonishingly successful tech sector, it was evident that, had circumstances allowed, he would rather have been talking about the future that this small, determined nation is making for itself than about the latest poisonous eruption from the past.
Read MoreHow Twitter polices speech on its platform is, assuming it remains within the law, up to Twitter. If those who run the company wish to do so in a way that offends our notions of free expression, that is, with one crucial exception, solely up to them. Twitter is privately owned, and the U.S. government has no business regulating how legal conversations are supervised behind the company’s virtual walls. Nor, for that matter, should any “independent” body be set up under the auspices of the state to review Twitter’s speech policy.
Read MoreThe Economist Group, publisher of the Economist, has been hosting its seventh annual “Sustainability Week,” with one day in London and three others on virtual platforms.
The event’s website offers a revealing glimpse into the ecosystem that “sustainability” has created — an ecosystem that contains true believers, to be sure, but is also one in which opportunists can take advantage of the pathway it offers to power, profit, and prestige — or at least a job.
Read MoreSome “foods” have no place on a plate — anchovies, capers, and lentils, to pick out but three. Don’t @ me.
It was thus dispiriting to read the now-infamous article by Teresa Ghilarducci in Bloomberg, in which she argues that one way of combating the effects of inflation might be to turn to . . . lentils:
Read MoreAnother week, and more bloodshed in Ukraine. How the Russian invasion will play out remains anyone’s guess, but one result seems increasingly likely. What began as an imperial gambit may well end up with the imperialist transformed into the junior partner, or even satellite, of a greater superpower still on the rise.
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