The U.S. government has once again smacked into the national debt ceiling. Technically, that means the U.S. government can’t borrow more than the $31.4 trillion previously approved by the U.S. Congress. But in practice, what it means is that the U.S. Treasury will start playing a shell game called “extraordinary measures” with the funds it controls. That game will continue until the U.S. Congress votes to reset the debt ceiling to a new level.

On January 12, British historian Paul Johnson passed away at the age of 94. Johnson authored many books, including A History of Christianity, A History of the American People, Birth of the Modern, and Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties. In this book, widely considered to be his most influential work, Johnson exposes one of the many attempts to divide the world into an oppressor class and a victim class:

In due course, the term “Third World” began to seem a little threadbare from overuse. The Paris intellectual fashion-factory promptly supplied a new one: “North-South.” It was coined in 1974 when French President, Giscard d’Estaing, called a conference of “oil importing, oil-exporting and non-oil developing nations.” The idea was to link guilt to “the North” and innocence to “the South.” This involved a good deal of violence to simple geography as well as to economic facts. The so-called “South” was represented by Algeria, Argentina, Brazil, Cameroon, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Iran, Jamaica, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Yugoslavia, Zaire and Zambia. The “North” consisted of Canada, the EEC powers, Japan, Spain, Australia, Sweden, Switzerland and the USA. Eleven of the “South” states were actually north of the equator, and one of them, Saudi Arabia, had the highest per capita income. Australia, the only continent entirely south of the equator, had to be classified as “North,” presumably because it was predominantly white and capitalist. The Soviet Bloc was omitted altogether though entirely in the North. In short, the concept was meaningless, except for political abuse. But for this it served very well. 

Writers with that kind of perception are hard to find. The prolific Paul Johnson rests in peace and his works will live on. 

The latest Economic Freedom of North America report issued by the Fraser Institute marks the first time economists have had a full four decades’ worth of data on economic freedom across the fifty United States. Those less familiar with economic research claim that economics isn’t a science because economists can’t conduct controlled experiments. Yet where economists can’t conduct controlled experiments (behavioral economists do conduct controlled experiments), they employ complicated statistical techniques to compensate for the fact that they must take data as they come. Here, the Fraser Institute has given economists a treasure-trove of data that provide insight into the effect of larger and smaller government footprints among the states’ economies.

Peru does not find itself in the international news very often. Ever since President Pedro Castillo attempted a self-coup that would have given him dictatorial powers, a narrative pushed by the extreme left and its fellow travelers has found its way into major news outlets.

COVID Vaccine Hesitancy and Risk of a Traffic Crash was published by the American Journal of Medicine but authored by a trio in Canada. Donald A. Redelmeier, MD FRCPC MSHSR, FACP, works in “evaluative clinical sciences” at the Sunnybrook Research Institute in Toronto. Jonathan Wang, MMASc, is with the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES) and the department of medicine at the University of Toronto. Deva Thiruchelvam, MSc, is also with the ICES and the Sunnybrook Institute in Toronto. 

It’s typical of the progressive cast of our culture to focus on the forward-looking at the expense of the traditional—or if you prefer, to miss the traditional elements that lie at the heart of a genuinely progressive movement. So it is that in celebrating the accomplishments of Martin Luther King, Jr., his connection to the thread of the Western moral and philosophical tradition is often neglected.

Avatar: The Way of the Water is a stunning, visually arresting display of cinematic achievement. Its story is also centered on one of the most enduring themes in movies: family. The film and the Avatar film franchise may need this theme to help sustain blockbuster profitability.

As we noted, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is fond of taking trips on private jets funded by taxpayers. As Fox News reports, this wasteful activity is worse than taxpayers imagined. 

In a recent post, fellow blogger Craig Eyermann discussed the concessions that Kevin McCarthy made to fellow Republicans to gain their support to be elected Speaker of the House of Representatives. One of them was “More single-subject bills to allow members to vote on specific, narrow issues instead of thousand-page pork barrel behemoths.” That’s a good idea, but it won’t happen.

A chain of storms is hammering Northern California, and as hundreds of thousands have discovered, it’s no fun waking up in the middle of the night without electric power. That means no light, no television, no internet, no microwave oven, no automatic garage door opener, and so forth. But as some discovered, all was not lost.