For decades, the general strategy of anti-global warming activists has been to maximize predictions of apocalypse, death, and destruction. This over-the-top approach has been used to promote the idea that virtually no cost is too high when it comes to implementing global governmental control of all human activities in the service of avoiding climate change.
Does neoliberalism, the tired slogan of our time, have a precise definition?
The short answer is no, it doesn’t. At least not readily one readily at hand, if this New Republic article is any guide:
Inspectors from the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) have finally arrived in Douma, Syria, to assess whether a gas attack took place earlier this month. It has taken a week for the inspectors to begin their work, as charges were thrown back and forth about who was causing the delay.
In this year’s letter to Amazon shareholders, released earlier this week, CEO Jeff Bezos extolled the value of high expectations. “We didn’t ascend from our hunter-gatherer days by being satisfied,” he wrote. Among the products that Bezos summarized was the company’s new shopping concept, Amazon Go.
The Economist has lately been running a series of articles on the shortcomings of the economics profession. Its most recent piece argues the important point that “the [2008-2009] crisis exposed the economic profession’s continued ignorance of the business cycle.” One reason for this ignorance is, they observe, a lack of data: while crises do happen repeatedly, they do not happen often enough for statistical analysis of them to be rigorous.
According to the Federal Reserve’s Underlying Inflation Gauge, the 12-month inflation growth in March was at 3.13 percent. That’s the highest rate recorded in 140 months, or nearly 12 years. The last time the UIG measure was as high was in July 2006, when it was at 3.2 percent.
Oil prices headed upward more rapidly this week, hitting $68 per barrel (WTI), which is the highest price since December 2014.
In his ABC interview last Sunday, former FBI chief James Comey boasted endlessly of his devotion to truth, which he said “has to be central to our lives.” Touting his role in bringing down Martha Stewart, he declared, “The truth matters in the criminal justice system.” But, when he was FBI boss from 2013 to 2017, his agency duped the American public whenever convenient.
On April 13, the United States launched a missile attack on Syria, in response to an alleged chemical attack using chlorine gas by the Syrian government on the town of Douma. Was this attack justified? One way to answer this question appeals to the “just war” tradition, developed by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, and further refined by Vitoria, Suarez, Hugo Grotius, and other thinkers. The criteria for a just war are stringent, and the missile attack violates a number of them.
In March, growth in the supply of US dollars increased at the highest rate seen in ten months. This comes after a year-long period of falling growth rates, at the end of which money-supply growth fell to a near-ten-year low of 2.6 percent, year over year.
