Officialdom is using the coronavirus to find fresh pretexts to expand its authority. Matthew B. Crawford, writing in Unherd, observes how political and aesthetic preferences have become moralized in safety talk. As some teenaged mountain bikers in California discovered, bureaucrats now claim a bullet-proof halo of public-spiritedness to sweep aside whole domains of human activity.
Forget Everything I Said, or Backing Slowly out of the Echo-Chamber
Climate catastrophism suffered a Category 5 event with the recent confessional by Ted Nordhaus, among the world’s foremost prophets of doom, that he had it wrong all along. The models that forecast runaway global warming, Nordhaus writes in The Free Press, assumed simultaneously soaring populations, booming economies and flatlining technological improvement which, Nordhaus has belatedly recognized, simply can’t all occur at the same time.
