NIMBY - not in my back yard - is an acronym for those allies who express support for a cause, as long as it is 'somewhere else.' Wind power, for example, is well-liked by people on the coasts of the US and Norway, until government decides to actually put wind power installations there. Then it's time to bring in Greta Thunberg.

In San Francisco, nearly 80 percent of residents say they want to help the homeless but routinely hire private security to patrol their own neighborhoods - to keep out the homeless.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a lot of confusion about what would help mitigate risk and what would not, and when rules seemed arbitrary (e.g. you can go to a tattoo parlor but not get a haircut) it may have caused resentment - and therefore quiet dissent.

Smallpox is no longer with us, but what gets left out of United Nations history is that smallpox was eradicated in spite of the World Health Organisation saying it could never happen, not due to UN leadership. It was driven by US advocates who went around UN bureaucracy, all while being told it was a waste of time and money.

Polio has long been gone from the US as well, and the efforts that made it possible could help the world, but the challenges in achieving that are both cultural and structural.

Food and energy are strategic resources and since conventional energy like oil is presumably finite, its extinction first said to be 30 years ago, the rationale has been to subsidize and mandate alternatives like solar and wind schemes.

Food is also subsidized because it is a strategic resource but the curve is going the other way. Instead of being depleted 'real soon' as environmental PR gurus like Jeremy Rifkin successfully convinced journalists to repeat about oil decades ago, we have so much food that for the first time in human history poor people can afford to be fat. And with affordable food, culture improves, as do lives. The world exceeded UN targets for improvement of the poor by nearly half a decade.

In almost every case, someone being called a Nazi or Fascist on Twitter is being called such by someone who never knew any of those, and is probably a second or third generation descendant who didn't know any either. I had one grandfather who went across North Africa and one who occupied Japan but to my knowledge neither had any special claim to knowing about the Axis powers.

Right now, 17 percent of the US is cropland while 51 percent is open and essentially unused. We have more open space in the US than the entire continent of Africa, only 3 percent of our land is urban, but you might not be aware of that because activists insist that urban blight is ruining the country.