Jim Meigs

Columnist for @WSJFreeEx newsletter from @WSJOpinion; Sr fellow @ManhattanInst; Former @PopMech EIC. I beg to differ.

[Jim Meigs @jamesbmeigs]

A cease-fire in which the other side shoots at you but you don't shoot back is not a cease-fire. @continetti cuts through the happy talk in his tough @WSJFreeEx column today.
https://t.co/mO2zJav0tk

[Jim Meigs @jamesbmeigs]

@LocasaleLab Also: politics.

[Brian Anderson @BrianAcity]

This is something people need to keep in mind

[Bridget Phetasy @BridgetPhetasy]

Can’t believe the guy with the Nazi tattoo turned out to be violent that’s crazy.

[Jim Meigs @jamesbmeigs]

I love it when my living room looks like this...

[David Zweig @davidzweig]

Fifield sent a text in August referring to Platner having a Nazi tattoo. But Platner has been saying he didn’t know its meaning until October. How is this not conclusive that Platner has been lying through his teeth? Did she get in a Time Machine to send the text?

[Jim Meigs @jamesbmeigs]

Also, in what world does an employee demand to know the reasons why other people were fired? Any normal HR person would just say, Sorry. Confidential.

[Free Expression @WSJFreeEx]

SpaceX carries the lion’s share of all space launches. A new competitor would ease the current shortage in launch capacity. Last week’s Blue Origin explosion leaves the whole industry holding its breath, writes @jamesbmeigs
https://t.co/6capqdKwnn

[Shannon Watts @shannonrwatts]

Weird that an organization started to address climate change no longer cares about climate change.

[Jim Meigs @jamesbmeigs]

People get fired from companies all the time, especially when there is a change in leadership. And especially in journalism.

If they're any good they'll get new jobs. I've fired tons of people and been fired more than once. No hard feelings.

Anyone who goes into journalism thinking they'll be guaranteed a high-status, high-paying job for life is too naive—and too entitled—to be a decent journalist.

[Virginia Postrel @vpostrel]

@BrianRoemmele No, no, no. There was a detailed scholarly book about this in the 80s. There were price controls that led to service degradation and people increasingly found cars more appealing. Los Angeles and the Automobile: The Making of the Modern City" by Scott L. Bottles

[Jim Meigs @jamesbmeigs]

@SpaceX @blueorigin Musk-related controversies notwithstanding, the US is lucky to have the world's best space-launch company within our borders. My @WSJFreeEx column today:
https://t.co/mqc43xvso9

[Jim Meigs @jamesbmeigs]

NASA, the Space Force, private industry—they've all been hoping for the day when other launch companies can offer capabilities that can compete with @SpaceX. @BlueOrigin was getting there. Then, BOOM.

In the aftermath of the New Glenn explosion, SpaceX is still the only game in town—at least for now. They earned their dominant slot through hard work and vision. But NASA will be better off when New Glenn returns to flight and the agency has more options.

Meanwhile, let's hope Musk's many political enemies don't succeed in hobbliing SpaceX. The U.S. really needs this company. That's my take in today's @WSJFreeEx newsletter [link below].

[Stephen L. Miller @redsteeze]

The Obama Bros coming to the passionate defense of Scott Pellley kind of proves the entire point doesn't it.

[Charles C. W. Cooke @charlescwcooke]

Right. Pence didn’t fail the biggest test. He passed the biggest test.

[AG @AGHamilton29]

It's just all so exhausting.

Three weeks ago, the UK Home Office cancelled the ETAs of a bunch of controversial commentators on the right. That included Ezra Levant (explicitly pro-Israel), Joey Mannarino, Valentina Gomez etc.

The cited reason was that their presence in the UK would not serve the public good.

There was no outrage. No claims they did it for nefarious reasons. No concerns for free speech. No news articles.

Then Shabana Mahmood's office does the same thing to Cenk Uygur and Hasan Piker for the same justification. They rush out to blame Israel. And suddenly, it's widespread outrage and non-stop stories pushing their claim while explicitly and intentionally ignoring the context above.

It's just tiring and dishonest.

[Brit Hume @brithume]

Not to mention the utterly unbalanced 60 minutes report she did on Publix grocery stores distribution of the Covid vaccine. Even Democrats denounced that story as unfair.

[Molly🎧🏳️‍🌈 @RasberryRazz]

Good excuse to post one of my favorite jokes in cartoon history

[Mary Katharine Ham @mkhammer]

A reminder that Alfonsi was reporter on a 13-minute 60 Minutes feature this year that opened w a German police raid on a man’s apartment for posting a cartoon they didn’t like. There were no critical questions for the German speech police and zero pro-speech figures interviewed.

[Axel L. Jacob @BalticSnowTiger]

🚨'Some regions, such as Germany and California, have made wind and solar major contributors to their electric grids. But “everywhere the penetration is high, prices have gone up,” [🇺🇸Energy Secretary Chris Wright] noted, and “deindustrialization” has followed'.
The ‘Renewable’ Boondoggle - Excellent article by James B. Meigs @WSJ
🔹The North American Electric Reliability Corporation's January 2026 assessment finds grid resource adequacy worsening: outage risk is rising even as consumer prices climb — the predictable consequence of retiring dispatchable coal, gas and nuclear capacity in favour of weather-dependent generation.
🔹The very label "renewable" is a 1970s political artefact, born of Carter's response to the oil shocks and the then-fashionable peak-oil thesis. What began as economic nationalism — sun and wind cannot be embargoed — was subsequently rebranded as a proxy for low-carbon, with no engineering rationale behind the taxonomy.
🔹That taxonomy quietly excluded nuclear on the technicality that uranium ore is finite, giving anti-nuclear activists rhetorical cover to dress plant closures as environmental victories. The United States allowed its nuclear industry to wither; Germany dismantled its fleet outright. Course corrections under both Biden and Trump arrived only after decades of compounding capacity had been forfeited.
🔹The cheap-electrons argument ignores integration costs [we call them system costs]: variable output forces grid operators to maintain a parallel dispatchable fleet (today, gas) alongside utility-scale batteries — three redundant systems uneasily coexisting. Meigs's conclusion is that grid policy must be governed by engineering and economic reality, with firm power — nuclear foremost — restored to its proper place.

🇩🇪Now, how do we save European industry and finally get the Germans to shed the cultish utopia, forgo the Emperor's new clothes, and revert back to rationality?!

@UlrichGraeber @kallemets @shwageraus @energybants @VeroWendland @thinkBTO @MoormannRainer @Rainer_Klute @Nuklearia @ulfposh @HGoebel @SchullerKonrad
https://t.co/bgpzeCedZs