Unimaginable, imagined, imaginary
The rage of the totalitarian state never ebbs, but the pace at which it kills can vary, sometimes being spasms of spontaneous-seeming violence, sometimes a slower, relentless closing of the trap….
Read MoreLegends Of the Black Sea
When the Argonauts—so the story goes—sailed toward the Black Sea, they had to deal with giants, harpies and murderous women. When, in April 2018, Jens Mühling, a German journalist and a writer, arrives on the Black Sea coast during the early stages of the journey he so vividly describes in “Troubled Water,” he ends up drinking—a river of alcohol flows through this book—with a Russian (Oleg, naturally) and a Crimean Tatar (Elvis, naturally) in the courtyard of a rundown fishing cooperative on the western tip of Russia’s Taman Peninsula. A mile away, a newly built bridge awaits its formal opening. It connects the peninsula with Russian-occupied Crimea: “We screwed up our eyes, shelled Black Sea shrimps, and observed the world’s largest country in the act of growing.”
Read MoreElon Musk’s Twitzkrieg?
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.
Read MoreThe ‘Sustainability’ Business: A Gathering of Rent-Seekers
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.
Read MoreLet Them Eat Lentils
Some “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 MoreBloc Trade: Russia, China, and the Limits of Globalization
Another 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.
Read MoreOur Enemy’s Enemy
After Nazi Germany attacked the USSR, Winston Churchill had no qualms about entering into an alliance with Stalin, whose regime he understood all too well: “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.”
Similar thinking does much to explain the enlistment of former (and not so former) Nazis by the Western allies in intelligence work against the Soviets after 1945…
Read MoreThe Staff of Life
It was hard to read Scott Reynolds Nelson’s original and intriguing “Oceans of Grain” without thinking of Woody Allen’s “Love and Death”: “The crops, the grains. Fields of rippling wheat. Wheat. All there is in life is wheat.” Karl Marx looked at history and found class. Mr. Nelson tends to find wheat. Thus, in the 19th century, he writes, “the rise of Germany and Italy, the decline of Austria and Turkey, and the European struggle for empire all [had] more to do with the injection of cheap foreign grain into Europe than most historians have recognized.”
Read MoreLarry Fink, ‘Emperor’?
We live in an age when the Left is increasingly focused on the supposed evils of business concentration, from the “big is bad” ideology of the new antitrust enforcers at the FTC to the attempts to blame inflation on Big Grocery, Big Oil, or any of the other “bigs” allegedly exploiting the beleaguered consumer. And yet the concentration of corporate ownership positions held by a relatively small number of massive investment funds, particularly (but not only) the indexers, has drawn comparatively little criticism from the same quarters. Perhaps their managers’ role in helping create our emerging corporatist state through an ever tighter embrace of “socially responsible” investment and larcenous stakeholder capitalism has acted as a shield of sorts.
Nevertheless, the degree of that concentration has been something to see….
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