West Archives - The Connecticut Star

Commentary: Educational Collapse and the Definition of Truth

January 7, 2024 Connecticut Star Staff

It’s no secret that America’s students are struggling. The latest Nation’s Report Cards have not been flattering, with average scores in both math and reading declining over recent years.

It’s also no secret that pandemic restrictions have only exacerbated the learning decline in the U.S. However, scores have been falling since before the pandemic, signaling that there are more systemic problems holding back young people. In fact, this educational decline comes from a deeper philosophical brokenness about the notion of truth itself.

Biden Admin Pledges Millions to International ‘Climate Reparations’ Fund

December 1, 2023 Connecticut Star Staff

The Biden administration has pledged millions of dollars to a de facto international “climate reparations” fund at the United Nations (UN) climate summit in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The fund, referred to by its proponents as a “loss and damage fund,” is intended to have developed countries transfer money to the developing world as compensation for the impacts of climate change. The U.S. promised more than $17 million to the fund on Thursday, according to Axios.

Commentary: A Review of Satirist Juvenal in This Mad, Mad World

October 21, 2023 Connecticut Star Staff

I have often noted here the difficulty our progressive and enlightened age poses for the art of satire. Satire depends on some palpable distance between common reality and the thing satirized. “Ha!,” we say, we feel viscerally, when confronted by effective satire, “that exaggeration, that caricature, that satire dramatizes a dangerous tendency in our culture. Of course, no one really tries to extract cucumbers from sunbeams, as Swift suggests in his great satire Gulliver’s Travels, but the idea that they might shows you how absurd so much academic culture is.”

Commentary: Net-Zero and ESG Are Worsening the Energy Crisis – and Weakening the West

March 19, 2022 RealClearWire

The day after President Biden announced that the United States would ban imports of Russian oil and gas, a group of eleven powerful European investment funds that includes Amundi, Europe’s largest asset manager, outlined plans to force Credit Suisse, Switzerland’s second largest bank, to cut its lending to oil and gas companies. The juxtaposition of these two events dramatizes the fundamental disunity of the West. At the same time as the Biden administration is sanctioning Russian oil and gas producers, Western investors are sanctioning Western ones. Under the banner of ESG (environmental, social and governance) investing, the West’s capital is being deployed to create an artificial shortage of oil and gas produced by its companies and reward non-Western oil and gas producers such as Russia and Iran with higher prices. In doing so, the West is undermining its own security interests.

Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, energy markets were already extremely tight. In the past, high oil and gas prices stimulated a supply-side response leading to increased output and to prices falling back. This relationship has broken down. According to analysts at JP Morgan, capital spending by S&P Global 1200 energy companies peaked in 2015 at just over $400 billion and shrank to around $120 billion last year – less than half its previous trough of $250 billion in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, even though global demand is now around 15% higher than it was then.

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