Category: Viewpoints

Is Recession Timing Still Unpredictable?

Commentary Debate continues as to whether recession still lies ahead. The yield curve has pointed to an 80 percent chance of recession. But, when comparing today’s situation with the comparable U.S. real GDP contraction in 2008, its timing forecast has low accuracy. As the original literature documented, the yield curve only predicts a yes-no outcome…


Hostility Against Religious Institutions Is Only Increasing

Commentary First, it was the takeover of the Calvary Hospital in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT). Now it is the planned removal of payroll tax exemptions for many independent schools in Victoria. These actions by state and territory Labor governments denote a marked hostility towards the not-for-profit activities of religious and other charities in Australia….


Australia Must Heed Gina Rinehart’s Timely Warnings

Commentary Amid growing fears of a recession, Federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers announced on June 28 that the $4.2 billion (US$2.8 billion) surplus forecast for the 2022-23 budget will be higher. Key drivers of the improved budget position were understood to be, among other things, higher tax revenue and stronger commodity prices than forecast by the…


Can Fox News Still Be Trusted?

Commentary Since its defenestration of Tucker Carlson, Fox News is appearing increasingly to be a “false flag” operation.” Maybe it always was to some degree, but it has a more “in-your-face” aspect recently, with a consequentially thinner veneer. Most know by now the meaning of “false flag,” but just in case, here’s one definition: “A false…


Canada Has a Role in Making the World a Safer Place. Why Don’t We?

Commentary It started in Japan: the concept of de-coupling from China. The Japanese government offered its corporations billions of dollars to move manufacturing out of China, to safer, more friendly locations. It then caught fire in the United States—initially under the Trump administration, and then continued under Biden—with their massive tariffs against Chinese goods, and…


Politicians Risk AI Dependency

Commentary Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming more common, including in politics. Images of Donald Trump getting violently arrested in New York or of the Pope wearing a puffy white coat are deepfakes that many believed, or wanted to believe, when they went viral. On June 26, former Alphabet CEO Eric Schmidt warned of AI’s…


Regulatory Haze Fogs California Cannabis Policies

Commentary After voters passed Proposition 64 in 2016, California cities were supposed to play the key role legalizing and regularizing the use and sale of marijuana. The reality has been hazy. Although this has been controversial, it remains state law. Some cities are meeting the needs of their people; some are not. But the federal…


Moments of Movie Wisdom: The Outstanding Woman of the Year

Commentary Katharine Hepburn was one of the brightest stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age. She was an excellent actress who appeared in dozens of outstanding films, so I often write about her. Whenever I do, I inevitably receive a comment about her feminism, her affair with Spencer Tracy, or her liberal lifestyle. These points often have…


The Strange Wagner Coup

Commentary On June 24, mercenaries from the Wagner Group, the Kremlin’s private military company, abandoned the war in Ukraine and marched into Lipetsk, 225 miles south of Moscow, in an apparent insurrection. “This is not a military coup, but a march of justice,” declared the defiant commander of the Wagner mercenary army, Yevgeny Prigozhin, as he…


You Are Being Scammed

Commentary Even in good economic times, scams, rackets, and cons always threaten regular people. But in bad economic times such as our own, they swarm around us like never before. These days, it’s extremely difficult to tell real from fake. Even for sophisticated people who believe themselves to be beyond this, there is always a…