Consumer societies are not weak because their people like road bikes, garage door openers and air fryers. The choice of goods that come in boxes rewires the society to be more flexible and eventually stronger in ways that can’t be touched.

There is a qualitative difference between protecting diversity of opinion from official encroachment and inventing some magical “right” to say any harebrained thing you want without being “shamed or shunned.” Such a “right” would be more dangerous than the problem it purports to correct.

During Vladimir Putin’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, then-Secretary of State John Kerry said that he was behaving “in a 19th-century fashion.” The truth is that Putin is behaving in a 19th-century, 20th-century and 21st-century fashion. He is confirmation of the fact that progress is not inevitable, and peace and order are fragile. Human nature means that remorseless and power-hungry men will always be with us, no matter how advanced we believe we have become.

Which brings me to the Hunter Biden laptop story — the “discovery” by The New York Times that his laptop and its contents are real, after all. Not only did the Times and other major and social media ignore the story, in some cases the story was deemed fraudulent and blocked on several platforms.

The benefits to the global economy from these twin assaults are substantial — if central bank Chair Jay Powell and People’s Bank of China Governor Yi Gang get it right. China is trying to stave off an economic and financial winter.

Monetary policy is much less precise than we’d like to believe. We can’t even be sure what a neutral rate would be. People would probably be disturbed if they knew how poorly economists understand how changing interest rates feeds through markets and ultimately affects inflation and unemployment.

There’s a new combativeness that is clearly a reflection of how Donald Trump underlined the power of cultural issues and changed the rules around how you deal with controversy — by doubling down and hitting back harder.

Truth is hard, but QAnon is easy. And defending truth grows harder still, not only in Ukraine, but also in Lafayette Square, where journalists were gassed, in Ferguson, where they were arrested, in Minneapolis, where police shot one in the eye. This, as some of us wait for John F. Kennedy to return from the dead and Donald Trump to be restored to the White House. All of which makes it difficult to have any sense of remove from Moscow’s war on reality.