Month: August 2021

The Bear’s Lair: The need for space travel is ever-growing

This planet is becoming dangerous and unpleasant. The Covid-19 pandemic appears very likely to have been the result of biological warfare experimentation (albeit possibly released by accident.) Nuclear proliferation is becoming increasingly a threat, as too many nuclear powers come to have lunatic allies. While global warming is only a minor threat at most, the […]

The Bear’s Lair: History shows infrastructure has diminishing returns

In my researches into the Industrial Revolution, I have been looking at British canal building. There were three “canal manias” in 1766-75, 1786-93 and 1816-25, but only the first yielded truly attractive investments and economic gains, while the last wave lost money in general. This decline in returns for the later investments has lessons for […]

The Bear’s Lair: With Coolidge principles, we can all keep cool

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Physical Science report AR6, released August 9, raised the usual calls for panic and draconian action from that majority of the media and the left for whom this is a religion. Yet on examination, its statistics were decidedly unalarming, and suggest we can easily address the modest long-term problem […]

The Bear’s Lair: Live like Whigs, think like Tories!

Several times this column has wished for a sharp decline in global population, which with the advent of superior robotics could lead all of us to live like 18th Century Whig lords, in lavish parklands manned by robot servitors. Yet I have now learned that the original Whig Supremacy of 1714-60 led to a half […]

The Bear’s Lair: Cold Wars can be good for business

The chilling in relations with China since 2017 and the discovery that China may well have been responsible for the release of the COVID-19 virus is forcing the world to accept that the globalization and free trade world of 1991-2015 is no more. Instead, with China an authoritarian Communist society that seeks domination and does […]