Politics

Reading the mainstream media, one would be forgiven for believing that the upcoming midterms are part of a Manichaean struggle for the soul of democracy, pitting righteous progressives against the authoritarian “ultra-MAGA” hordes. The truth is nothing of the sort. Even today, the vast majority of Americans are moderate and pragmatic, with fewer than 20% combined for those identifying as either “very conservative” or “very liberal”.  read more »

Shortages of the following may be leading to the new norm of shortages and inflation:  read more »

Today's climate activists resemble nothing so much as a religious movement, with carbon the new devil's spawn. The green movement is increasingly wedded to a kind of carbon fundamentalism that is not only not realistic but will reduce living standards in the West and around the world.  read more »

For much of the 20th century, Los Angeles symbolised the future. Over the course of the century, the population grew 40-fold to nearly four million people.  read more »

There’s much talk today, from left and right, about threats to democracy, yet little focus on the social dynamic critical to its survival. In this respect, we may see the current, and troubling, escalation of violent political rhetoric, and even political violence, not so much as the cause of polarization but the result of changing class dynamics, most notably the increasingly perilous state of the yeoman middle class.  read more »

Jews around the world, particularly outside the fortress of Israel, are threatened in a way not seen since the 1940s. A fundamentally unstable world, with rising class and racial animus, creates a perilous environment for history’s favourite target, as seen previously in such periods as the fall of Rome, the Crusades, the Black Death and the Great Depression of the 1930s.  read more »

The world economy is in the doldrums, pessimism is rife around the world, and most young people, according to one survey, believe climate change means the end of human life on Earth.  read more »

California is working overtime to prove something that is obvious to most middle-class Americans: electric vehicle mandates are something of a scam.  read more »

Conservatives often see prospective presidential contender Gavin Newsom as a tool of the far Left—and, as such, politically doomed by the seemingly endless crises afflicting California.  read more »

As in Sophocles’s tragedy Oedipus Rex, we are witnessing a generational drama in which inheritors kill their proverbial father to marry their mother, in this case Mother Earth. The psychology behind this pattern is above my pay grade, but many of the richest people on the planet, and their heirs, now seem anxious to disparage the economic system that created their fortunes.  read more »