Pun Salad

A few deep breaths are in order. Yes, Trump is what Jeb Bush called him in a Republican primary debate that took place what seems like 100 years ago (actually, December 2015): a "chaos candidate" who would be a "chaos president." He's thin-skinned, too: "One of the things he's most vulnerable to is mockery and mockery by his own supporters," an anti-immigration activist told the Post. That is nothing worth celebrating in a teenager, much less a president, but the current end-of-worldism is a bit much. Trump is doing pretty much exactly what he promised he would do: Shrink our military footprint around the world, insist on a border wall, act impulsively and childlishly. Critics are right to chastise Trump for not following any sort of coherent process in arriving at or announcing his Syria decision, but it's still the right decision. It's always ugly and disturbing when the United States pulls out of occupied countries (remember Saigon?), but are we supposed to stay in Syria and Afghanistan forever?

[W]hat are Americans trying to accomplish in Syria? For laymen, it certainly is confusing. Advocates for staying in Syria are sometimes specific and sometimes vague. One commentator will say we have to stay in order to defeat ISIS, another will say we have to stay to honor and protect the Kurds because their militias helped us defeat ISIS. Another will say that we are there, joined in the struggle to secure a post-war order in Syria. Still others will say that the mission is to prevent Russia from achieving greater influence in the region.

American policymakers have mostly given up on the mission of helping rebels topple the Alawite regime of Bashar al-Assad, partly because it would be very difficult to dislodge him. Intervention remains unpopular, and Russia proved willing to intervene dramatically. Of course it did; it naturally wants to protect naval assets hosted by a longtime regional ally, especially at a time when it considers other naval assets in Ukraine to be under pressure.

In Warren’s defense, when the supply of a vital good is interrupted, the public wants the government to do something. However, the public would also prefer that the government do something that actually works. And there we run into trouble with Warren’s scheme.

One can describe all sorts of reasons that state-owned firms ought to be better than the profit-grubbing variety. Freed from the incessant demands of greedy investors, state-directed firms can invest for the long term, pursuing innovation and social welfare rather than profit.

One can describe it easily enough; what’s hard is finding one of these creatures in the wild. Rather than providing a shining rebuke to free-market fundamentalists, state-owned enterprises (SOEs) often seem to have a secret mandate to prove their skeptics right about everything.

The battle over biomass is far from over. Eversource now says it will not purchase power from the state’s wood-burning power plants despite a state law requiring such purchases, unless it is ordered to do so by the Public Utilities Commission. The decision by the state’s largest utility, revealed in a Dec. 4 filing with the PUC, comes after a year-long debate in the state legislature over the so-called biomass bill, SB 365.

Solzhenitsyn was once my childhood hero. Growing up in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, in a family of closet dissidents, I knew him as the man who defied the system and told the truth about its atrocities—the man idolized by my parents, especially my father, himself the son of gulag survivors. I was eleven when Solzhenitsyn was arrested and expelled from the Soviet Union; our Stalinist political instructor at school bellowed that he should have been shot as a traitor. A year or two later I heard excerpts from The Gulag Archipelago on foreign radio broadcasts; then, the coveted book appeared for a short while in our home.

Later, after my family emigrated to the United States in 1980, Solzhenitsyn’s heroic halo gradually began to lose its luster in our eyes. We were hardly alone; as the years went by, many of his erstwhile admirers came to believe, with bitter disappointment, that Solzhenitsyn could no longer be seen as a champion of freedom and justice.