LET THEM EAT KALE: A few years ago it was fashionable to ask, “Are we Rome?” Martin Hutchinson suggests a far better parallel would be 18th Century France:

Today’s intellectual Ivy-educated elite is wandering around the Petit Trianon playing at being a shepherdess, not playing cricket and hunting with ordinary folk.

In its economic attitudes, the U.S. elite is also 18th Century French. It sees essentially no limit to its ability to make economically damaging regulations if some pet cause is at stake. It takes a far greater interest in the theoretical possibility of global warming a century hence and in theoretical dangers to the environment from coal extraction than in the practical problems of generating electricity from wind power on a calm day or from solar power on a cloudy day.

Bien sur.