Author Archives: Richard Fernandez

Bad luck I guess. Widespread shortages and production snags are driving prices higher for many everyday items, as an uneven economic reopening leaves Americans facing the unfamiliar risk of inflation. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/05/10/economy-inflation-prices/

New at the Belmont Club. Evidence that Gain of Function lab experiments may have accidentally released super pathogens could haunt humanity’s relationship to technology.

“The burden brought by radiation at Chernobyl is less severe than the benefits reaped from humans leaving the area,” explains plant biochemistry expert Stuart Thompson, who adds that the zone “supports more life than before.” After being described as the end of mankind, now it’s a pity it wasn’t.

Are you sure this is the right road?

The New York Times fears the Chinese narrative, which they see projected through methods copied directly from the Western media. Beijing is using its clout to suppress Western ‘conspiracy theories”. As the MSM ran roughshod over alternative media so is Chinese state media steamrolling the mere press.

The love of money has been famously described as “the root of all evil”. It has tainted love, motivated betrayal, ruined virtue and corrupted incorruptible activists. It’s never about the money yet somehow it always is.

Why are countries named “the People’s Democratic Republic” always autocratic tyrannies and why do regimes who bemoan the lack of baby milk seem awash with expensive rpgs and machine guns?

Sound familiar? The mass working-class defection to the Conservative Party; the colonisation of Labour by middle-class graduates; the transformation of Labour from a party of working people into a metropolitan machine more concerned with gender-neutral toilets and taking the knee than with what working-class people want and need

Can any inquiry that shuts itself to scientific possibilities before reaching a conclusion be an inquiry? How do you “fact check” an investigation still in progress?

The story of Franz Jägerstätter, the Austrian altar server who was executed for conscientious objection to the Third Reich, was made into a movie by Terrence Malick, director the Thin Red Line.

When you think of energy, especially hydrocarbon energy as bad, you don’t prioritize a stockpile or reserve of it. You don’t want to stockpile immoral substances which it turns out are absolutely vital.

This area of scientific activity, experts told Sinclair, carries a “dual-use”: It supports the development of new vaccines and therapeutics but can also be used in covert biological- and chemical-weapons programs, which China is suspected of maintaining.

The influence of bits on the world of atoms, identifying people worth trusting, the origin of joy, the decoupling of the American Dream from the university, and more. https://sotonye.substack.com/p/the-architecture-of-tomorrow-an-interview?r=d2gko&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=copy&s=09

Donald Trump is out of the White House — and mostly gone from the public eye — but his grip on the G.O.P. base has probably never been stronger. NYT

The latest meme. Democracy is dying in America (perhaps true) but it’s the populist’s fault. They are forcing the progressives to be fascist. By casting the Other as monstrous racists it is psychologically possible to justify the reprehensible as necessity.