The Right Coast

Dutch Farmers: Canaries in the Globalist Coal Mine | Michael Yon & Eva Vlaardingerbroek | EP 340

via www.youtube.com

UK / Government Announces Plans To Include Nuclear Energy In Green Taxonomy :: NucNet | The Independent Nuclear News Agency

Nuclear power is to be classed as “environmentally sustainable” in the UK’s green taxonomy, giving it access to the same investment incentives as renewable energy, chancellor Jeremy Hunt announced in his spring budget 2023 speech on Wednesday (15 March).

Hunt also said the government would launch the first competition for small modular reactors. It will be completed by the end of this year and if demonstrated as viable “we will co-fund this exciting new technology”.

He announced the launch of Great British Nuclear, a government-backed agency which will he said will bring down costs and provide opportunities across the nuclear supply chain to help provide up to 25% of the country’s electricity by 2050, up from around 15% today.

via www.nucnet.org

Well, good. The n-th best solution.

Western governments are on the verge of introducing expiring money

The European Central Bank (ECB) is considering using negative interest rates, a tool that erodes the value of your money, as it introduces the digital euro — its central bank digital currency (CBDC).

This is according to Sarah Palurovic, the executive director of the Digital Euro Association (DEA) think tank.

During an appearance on the Poundcast podcast, Palurovic said that the ECB wants to “keep the possibility open for tiered remuneration” after it introduces the digital euro because the ECB wants to have “measures that incentivize or disincentivize people to hold more or less CBDCs.” She added that one of the measures the ECB is considering is negative interest rates.

via reclaimthenet.org

Well this is terrible. This is a big sloppy step down the slippery slope toward total control. We should make sure (to the extent we can -- I don't recall anybody asking me about this!) that nothing like this happens with the dollar.

In CA, I notice you now have to digitally check in whenever you buy alcohol, this even if you are obviously of age. So now the state knows how much you drink, which would seem to me to be one's own business. No doubt they have other excuses for gathering this information, such as public health. But there are less intrusive ways to gather that information.

Wave of Federal Judges Ditch Bench for Lucrative Big Law Jobs

George Hazel and Gregg Costa had yet to turn 40 when former President Barack Obama nominated the lawyers to become federal judges.

The appointments—Hazel to a federal court in Maryland and Costa in Texas—were part of an emerging trend, as the Obama administration looked to tap younger judges for lifetime roles that could secure their seats for a generation. Roughly a decade later, Hazel and Costa opted for another path: they recently left their roles for lucrative partnerships at elite law firm Gibson Dunn & Crutcher.

Hazel, now a 47-year-old father of two, said he was ready for another act as a lawyer, not to mention the pay boost that comes with it. Gibson Dunn reported more than $4.4 million in profits per equity partner last year.

via www.bloomberglaw.com

You can hardly blame them. I think of Leo Strine, former Chief Justice of the Delaware Supreme Court, now at Wachtel, Lipton.

China’s Foreign Minister Holds Call With Ukraine Counterpart - WSJ

China’s foreign minister on Thursday spoke by telephone with his Ukrainian counterpart as Beijing continues to signal its desire to play a part in ending that country’s war with Russia.

via www.wsj.com

Big news.

We are living in Mystic Meg's world - UnHerd

We live in the age that succeeded and built upon the one of science, exploration and British Empire that Dee inaugurated: that is, the American Empire. And in this era, someone who wanted the ear of those with real power would be far more likely to borrow the authority afforded by the exoteric side of Dee’s interests: the field now known just as “science”. Instead of sigils, it would use more mundane symbols to give substance to intuition. Users might call it “data-driven decision-making”.

And nor would such a person bother to learn abstruse tables of Enochian symbols or inscribe wax discs with elaborate symbols, if they wanted to use languages to shape reality. Other arcane languages are now routinely in use, coding the algorithmic trading engines that power the roiling back-and-forth of global finance, and the social media platforms that serve as giant, distorting scrying-mirrors for our collective souls.

via unherd.com

Henry Kissinger has said that we're going to live in a New Age where people worship the powers of AI oracles who can predict, sort of, the future. I don't think he's wrong.

Has Ukraine made a mistake by refusing to retreat from Bakhmut?

Ukraine says its future may depend on the brutal battles currently raging around Bakhmut, but there are growing splits between officials in Kyiv and some Western military analysts over the best approach to what could be a decisive period in the conflict.

For months, Ukraine’s defense of the eastern city has held up and worn down Russian forces while serving as a potent symbol of the country’s defiance.

Now, as Moscow’s assault intensifies, a number of observers have questioned whether Kyiv's decision to reinforce the area rather than retreat is being driven more by the political desire to avoid a high-profile defeat than by military logic.

A long-speculated Ukrainian withdrawal from the battered city has not materialized, with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his military chiefs instead betting that they can buy critical time and benefits for a future counteroffensive by doubling down.

via www.nbcnews.com

Unlike most other observers online, I don't know what Kyiv should do or have any advice, except Slava Ukraini. The strategy of bleeding Mordor with Ukrainians dying is sacrificial but ultimately may be effective. It's like Thermopylae on a massive scale and with modern arms. Horrible but inspirational. Pray for wisdom and cunning for the leaders of Ukraine.

Russia Wants a Long War: The West Needs to Send Ukraine More Arms, More Quickly

Faced with the certainty of defeat, Putin’s calculus would shift. For the past 12 months, Western ambiguity has emboldened Putin to prolong this war, allowing him to believe that there may perhaps come a time when the flow of support will stop, and thus that he can outlast the West and Ukraine. Replacing that ambiguity with strategic clarity—robbing Putin of any viable option other than an organized retreat—can help bring this war to an end. To borrow a phrase from Biden’s State of the Union address in February, it’s time for the West to finish the job.

via www.foreignaffairs.com

Even the blind bird occasionally catches the worm. Ukraine and Eastern Europe is one of the few places in the world where freedom has a chance to get a fresh start. We should not abandon it to the rot of Putinism. That rot will spread to the US. We already have our own version of it here in the form of woke totalitarianism. The battle for Ukraine and the battle *against* woke-ism is in fact the same battle, difficult as that may be for some to see.

Why is the number of Jews in elite America plummeting?

What happened? The war on merit happened. DEI happened. The drive for “equity” happened. And Jews, who have traditionally aligned with the leftists who made these things happen, did not push back.

Let’s start with college admissions. Thanks to the war on merit and the DEI movement, top Ivy League schools now have entering classes that, by small margins, are majority non-white.

Naturally, Jewish enrollment suffers from this sea-change, but that’s not the entire explanation for its decline. If Jewish representation at top Ivy League schools has fallen from, say, 20 percent to 10 percent, this outstrips the decline in white representation. Whites weren’t 100 percent of Ivy League student bodies 30 years ago.

What else is going on? Here’s one thing. Jewish applicants tend to be clustered in large metropolitan areas and these areas are prime territory for reducing white admissions. As Savage notes, elite colleges aren’t shrinking the number of athletes they admit and they still strive for geographic diversity. Thus, it’s not surprising — and not evidence of anti-Jewish animus — that Jews tend to lose out more than other whites when top colleges slash the number of whites they admit.

via ringsideatthereckoning.substack.com

It would be interesting to know what percentage of those in say the 95th percentile and up in SAT scores, are Jewish. I bet it's a lot more than their representation in top colleges and universities. But "Jews, who have traditionally aligned with the leftists who mode these things happen, did not push back." Not just these particular Jews will suffer for this, but all the students they would have taught as professors, patients they would have treated as doctors, audiences they would have entertained as directors, and on and on. The harm compounds, out into the future. This is infuriating to me, frankly, and I'm not even Jewish. Perhaps schools lower in the traditional pecking order will just get better and hierarchies will adjust. I hope so.

SVB, ESG, and Biden’s ERISA Rule | RealClearEnergy

Under ERISA, retirement savings must be invested for the exclusive purpose of providing retirement benefits. With the rise in fashion for ESG investing and its dubious claim of “doing well by doing good,” the Trump administration decided that the Labor Department needed to clarify application of the law’s intent that the sole objective of pension investing is to do well by seeking to maximize risk-adjusted returns. The result was a 2020 rule that skilfully clarified the legal duties of investment fiduciaries. Far from preventing them from considering ESG among other factors, as the Biden administration subsequently alleged, the 2020 rule doesn’t even mention ESG. Instead, it de-fanged ESG by requiring that fiduciaries consider only pecuniary factors in selecting plan investments. If a factor doesn’t make the cut as pecuniary, it should not be taken into consideration.

This, the Biden administration claimed, had a chilling effect on incorporating ESG, especially climate factors, into investment decisions – as well it should. Most of what constitutes ESG is investment chaff. This represented an obstacle to the administration’s climate-policy ambitions. In May 2021, President Biden signed an executive order to use corporate climate-risk disclosure to help achieve its aim of decarbonizing the economy by 2050. Under White House instruction, in October 2021, the Labor Department rushed out a draft rule that appeared to suggest that fiduciaries should consider climate and other ESG factors in making investment decisions. Together with other provisions, it would have driven a coach and horses through ERISA. For this reason, it stood little chance of surviving inevitable legal challenge. 

The final rule, which the Braun-Barr resolution nullifies – barring a presidential veto –substantially weakens the earlier draft but inevitably retains the climate tilt, stating that investment decisions must be based on factors that fiduciaries reasonably determine are relevant to a risk-and-return analysis that “may include” the economic effects of climate change and other ESG factors. The rule makes 161 mentions of climate or climate change. Prudence and loyalty this isn’t. The rule’s aim is facilitating the use of retiree savings in progressives’ fight against climate change.

via www.realclearenergy.org