World economic forum

Cockburn may be a devoted Valentine’s Day cynic, but he’s still all in for celebrity romance. He’s happy to hear that love is in the air between Huma Abedin, the former Hillary Clinton aide, and Alex Soros, son of George Soros and successor to his father’s Open Society Foundation. Conspiracy theorists worldwide will doubtless be sending their well wishes. On Wednesday, Abedin and Soros posted pictures cuddled up on a Parisian Valentine's date. The two sat at a restaurant table covered with gifts and roses. And more than seven years since her divorce from the disgraced Anthony Weiner and a scandal ridden marriage, Abedin deserves a romantic getaway.   Abedin, nearly ten years' Soros’s elder, could not have hitched up with a more eligible operative.

I was recently asked to say a few words about “Globalism and Freedom” at a conference sponsored by Hillsdale College in Boise. Globalism, I said, is the enemy of freedom. Why? Because globalism systematically attacks and undermines the moral and political filiations that make genuine freedom possible. In order to understand why this should be so, we must begin by pondering the word “globalism” and its adjectival personification “globalist.” Neither occurs in my thirteen-volume edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which dates from the early 1960s. What does that tell us? For one thing, it tells us that the term “globalism” and its cognates are neologisms. Neologisms come into being for a couple of different reasons.

Something is happening across the world right now, something that deserves more attention than it's getting. First, to the Netherlands, where farmers have been protesting, blockading roads with their tractors and staging enormous rallies. The demonstrations have been going on and off since 2019, when the Dutch legislature proposed a crackdown on nitrogen emissions. Nitrogen is heavily emitted by livestock and fertilizer, which means the regulations are hitting Dutch agriculture especially hard. But it wasn't until July that the protests garnered international attention. The Dutch government announced plans in compliance with a court order to cut nitrogen emissions by 50 percent.