Chris Navin

Some sensible suggestions:

‘A European Union thinking strategically about its future would create an energy union, as some have already suggested, and begin to bargain collectively for its gas. Europeans should also step up construction of the infrastructure needed to import, transport and store liquefied natural gas (LNG). The United States should step up its own efforts to export LNG. At the same time, the United States should take advantage of the shift to shale oil and build the Keystone XL pipeline. A low international oil price is not only bad for the autocrats who run Russia, Venezuela and other petro-states; it’s also good for American allies. This doesn’t mean that the hunt for alternative energy needs to end. But until the miracle fuel is discovered, it would be a lot safer if the West were supplied by the Canadians.

This kind of thinking won’t help Ukraine in the coming weeks. But it might help ensure the economic and political independence of Europe in the coming years.’

That would require taking a realist look at recent events, acknowledging the reality of economic scarcity and energy consumption, as well as directly challenging the dreams and political power of collectivist environmental activism, for starters.

Some Links On Foreign Policy & Ukraine

Nearly three years ago now: Eric Posner At The Volokh Conspiracy: The Bear Is Back!

Nuances Of A Theme By Williams

It’s a strange courage
you give me, ancient star:

Shine alone in the sunrise
toward which you lend no part!

I

Shine alone, shine nakedly, shine like bronze
that reflects neither my face nor any inner part
of my being, shine like fire, that mirrors nothing.

II

Lend no part to any humanity that suffuses
you in its own light.
Be not chimera of morning,
Half-man, half-star.
Be not an intelligence,
Like a widow’s bird
Or an old horse.

—————-

—Stevens was a poet committed to romanticism…as well as showing some serious religious impulses (it is suggested that Stevens had a deathbed conversion). He is also displaying typical characteristics of modernist metaphysics; devotion to the thing or object (a kind of aesthetic realism), individualism, and a commitment to enlightenment ideas.

William Carlos Williams’ original poem here.