Liz Truss: Winning the Poisoned Chalice

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There have, it is true, been stickier moments to become Britain’s prime minister: May 1940, for one, when Winston Churchill took the top job. Nevertheless, however glowingly Boris Johnson may, in his farewell speech, have spoken of his legacy (“foundations that will stand the test of time,” “great solid masonry,” the “path to prosperity” paved, and so on), the reality is that Liz Truss, his successor, has inherited one hell of a mess, politically and economically, and time is already running out for her to fix it…

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Losing the Plot: Finance, Natural Gas, and ESG

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It’s a crowded field, but as an example of the destructive uselessness of ESG (an investment “discipline” based on analyzing how companies measure up against somewhat vague environmental, social, and governance standards), this story from Bloomberg takes some beating.

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China and an ESG ‘Dilemma’

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The Financial Times’ Moral Money section is so nauseatingly named that many will be tempted to look away after one glimpse of its title. That would be an error. Grimly fascinating, Moral Money is an invaluable window into the orthodoxies of the corporatist elite, particularly — but of course — when it comes to planetary catastrophe. The FT being what it is, Moral Money’s climate message (in reality an updated version of an ancient blend, millenarianism and rent–seeking) is camouflaged, with the crazy played down. It is earnest and preachy, but — underpinned by the comfortable assumption that writer and reader alike see things the same way — not too preachy.

And it is nothing if not revealing.

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The Costs of the Energy ‘Transition’ Won’t Be ‘Transitory’

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The appointment of Christine Lagarde as president of the European Central Bank was never going to bode very well for the way that the ECB is run. Lagarde is a politician, not a banker, and, as to her attitudes to rules, well, many of those who followed the euro zone crisis (a time when Lagarde was France’s finance minister) will remember her comments after those in charge approved the first Greek bailout.

Reuters (December 2010):

“We violated all the rules because we wanted to close ranks and really rescue the euro zone,” Lagarde was quoted as saying.

“The Treaty of Lisbon was very straight-forward. No bailout.”

Oh well.

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Watching the Skies: Prudence, not Paranoia

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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….

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Adam (Smith) and EVs: Going in Different Directions

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Central 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.)

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A Heretic in the Climate Church

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Scientists 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.

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Demolishing a Distorted Past

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Conquerors 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.

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Elon Musk’s Twitzkrieg?

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How 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.

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The ‘Sustainability’ Business: A Gathering of Rent-Seekers

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The 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.

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