There’s a lot of news flying around about the changes happening in global currency trading. From “Gas for Rubles” to “What the Hell is Going on With the Yen?” there are a lot of questions and very few answers as to what it all means and whose on which side of the divide. The Fed just hiked 50 basis points for the first time since 2000 and will be running off its balance sheet forcing the Treasury to stop issuing new debt at stupid rates. The European Union unveiled a sixth sanctions package against Russia which calls for a complete embargo of all Russian oil. Further to this the EU is now...
climate change
Another Failed Prediction From the Global Warming Alarmists
In 2009, the BBC ran a reporting piece on the Arctic featuring the esteemed polar scientist Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University. The Catlin Arctic Survey, a project set out to answer vital scientific questions about sea ice in the Arctic, had just returned with its findings. Its central purpose had been to gather evidence on how long a warming planet could sustain an all-year ice cover at its northern pole: How long did the Arctic ice cover have left? The results, said Wadhams, who has studied the Arctic since the 1970s, were terrifying. The survey supported the “new consensus view that...
Joe Biden Is Killing America’s Energy Sector
One of the saddest quotes from the Vietnam War came from journalist Peter Arnett, who wrote in a dispatch in 1968 about an American attack on a Vietcong-held village: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” As often happens with such quotes, they take on a second and even third life. Today, the Biden administration seeks to destroy the American economy ostensibly to save America from the dreaded climate change. No one advocating the so-called Green New Deal (GND) has put it quite like that. In fact, its advocates claim that not only will the GND give us better weather, but...
The Dangers of a Jerome Powell Second Term
The U.S. Senate will soon vote on Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s nomination to a second term. One of the senators opposing Powell is Elizabeth Warren. I don’t often agree with Senator Warren, but I do agree with her assessment that Powell is “dangerous.” However, Warren actually doesn’t understand what makes Powell, or any Fed chairman, intrinsically dangerous to liberty and prosperity. Warren thinks Powell is dangerous because she thinks he will not be supportive enough of imposing her desired new regulations on banks and other financial institutions. Senator Warren, like most...
Is Virtue Signaling Vicious?
Virtue signaling—the practice of highlighting what one takes to be one’s own moral superiority, often by loudly denouncing the character and comportment, including the speech, of other people—has become a dominant mode of rhetoric throughout social media and network television. Virtue theory, in contrast, is a teleological approach to normative morality concerned with how actions affect one’s soul or character. Historians of philosophy usually trace virtue theory to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, the first extant articulation of ideas such as that habits build character, and virtues...
TGIF: Double-Rigging of the Auto Market
U.S. government interference with our lives often resembles a Russian matryoshka doll: regulation is nested in more regulation. Take the provision of Biden's pending Build Back Better bill that would create a big tax credit for people who buy U.S.-built electric vehicles (EV). Not only would the government distort the domestic auto market by rigging it in favor of electric vehicles over conventional ones, but it also would rig the EV market, Trump-style, in favor of U.S.-made products. This implies that "foreign" EVs are so attractive to American buyers that the domestic offerings need...
Joe Norman On Why Localism Is Coming
We don’t need “the global village”; we need a “globe of villages”. And when I say need here I don’t mean it in an ethical, or moral, or aesthetic sense. I mean it in the most practical sense: in order to survive we must re-localize. The global village idea is a non-starter. It misses that complex adaptive systems of a certain class typically have a characteristic scale. That is, a certain size at which they necessarily are realized. Nearly every adult human being you will ever meet will be between five and seven feet tall. And you will not find a land mammal larger than an elephant....
The Antiwar Comic: The War Against You
Will you eat the bugs? Visit other comics (and not bugs) at the Webcomic Factory.
TGIF: Another Climate Conference
Sometimes we've got to be grateful for hypocrisy. If those who pretend to be world leaders actually delivered a fraction of what they promise in Glasgow, Scotland, where the UN's COP26 (Conference of Parties) Conference on Climate Change runs through Nov. 12, we'd be far bigger trouble than we already are. You know how these things go. Power-loving, sanctimonious politicians and their minions pontificate (for 12 days!?) on how the world will end in 20 minutes unless they force their subjects to behave in ways they don't wish to behave and to spend trillions of dollars they would rather...
TGIF: Looking for the Green New Deal
I was all set this week to plunge into the details of the Green New Deal so I could see what new impositions the climate-alarmist politicians have in store for us. Then I made a startling discovery. (Startling for me, that is. I'm behind the news curve.) The Green New Deal isn't real. By that, I mean no bill in Congress sets out a list of specific government actions thought to be necessary to save the planet from carbon dioxide, heat waves, cold snaps, rising sea levels, ocean acidification, desertification, extinction, more rain and floods, more droughts, more trees, fewer tress, or...