Newsfeed: Gas Hookups, Influencers, Seat Belts, Jakarta

At (Newsfeed – Tim W. Ferguson (timwferguson.com) you’ll find new mini-commentaries on these items from current media: An effort to prevent gas hookups for new construction in Massachusetts, in order to curb fossil-fuel use; a push (again in the Northeast) to further criminalize failure to wear seat belts as road deaths are rising; the rising

4 New Feeds: GMO, China, Unilever, 187

I’m alerting subscribers here to four new items in recent days at my newsfeed. Please go to www. timwferguson.com/news for the bits and pieces. The four items concern a renewed plea for GMO foods, the risks that mainstream global investors face from Xi Jinping’s crackdown on certain Chinese companies, the conundrum that show-off progressive company

Kindly check out my newsfeed

I’ve got a new stream of mini-commentaries keyed to items of note from the current press. They aren’t fully developed blog posts so they don’t appear in this feed, but rather at timwferguson.com/news. This added feature is an opportunity to flag articles that I find noteworthy, as well as to communicate more frequently with readers

That Dreaded Day of Strait Crossing

6/30/2021 The latent threat of hostilities with China over Taiwan has gained currency lately, as continued aggressiveness by the Xi Jinping regime meets up with more uniform (if more measured) rhetorical resistance by the U.S. under the Biden administration. The pinch of a worldwide scarcity of vital semiconductors, and Taiwan’s outsized role in supplying those

Google It: Knowledge Is Powerful

It began with the news that Google is beta-testing a carousel display for writers at the world’s biggest search site. This is obvious catnip to content-creating freelancers in particular, as we have no default platform for highlighting our recent work, other than our own precious websites. However, my excitement dulled a bit as I discovered

‘Brewing a Boycott’: Another Era

6/26/2021 This week saw publication of my review of a new book on the long boycott of Coors Brewing by various activist groups, initiated by organized labor. It’s written by a young leftist academic who acknowledges she grew aware of this history only after a graduate-school instructor flagged a struggle that baby boomers of his

A Progressive Press Weighs Who Not to Name

In the throes of its own existential revenue crisis, the nation’s press is wrestling with the social justice of a local newspaper mainstay: crime coverage.  On top of heightened sensitivity over appearances in many parts of America—too many of those suspected or arrested after street offenses are of color—there is guilt that names of the

Getting Water on a Parched Planet

June 16, 2021 Today’s temperature map alerts us to another heat wave amid another drought across much of the U.S. These conditions guarantee continued battles over water availability and rights to use it. That, in turn, promises restrictions on usage in dry jurisdictions. These can affect as big a user as hydroelectric power generation. For many,

There’s Still Gold in Us Silver Spenders

In The Economist this week is one of those periodic reminders that the Boomer age cohort is actually where the money is.  Such nods to silver spending, even if in this case concerned with greater online purchases of adult “nappies” and mobility milks, are a useful corrective to the routine ad-market focus on the young

Even the Manhattan Institute Says Curb Your Car

If an early April panel discussion (virtual) of the Manhattan Institute on “Planning the Post-Covid City” was surprisingly progressive, maybe it was because this talk of revolution in the streets was about reallocating little more than parking spaces. Yet that much upheaval is basic, these panelists agreed, to renewal of New York’s pre-pandemic glory. The