In London, England earlier this week, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker delivered a speech about global trade at the Chatham House think tank. Given that the group's mission is "to help build a sustainably secure, prosperous and just world," and that it encourages "open debate and confidential discussion on the most significant developments in international affairs," it seemed a reasonable expectation that those present would ask questions relevant to those matters.

Instead, Scott Walker was asked several brazenly off-topic questions, including if he believed in evolution. He refused to answer them. In the case of evolution, he said, "I’m going to punt on that one ... That’s a question that a politician shouldn’t be involved in one way or another," while reminding the audience that "I'm here to talk about trade and not pontificate on other issues."

Taraji P. Henson, one of the stars of the new Fox drama Empire, gave an interview for the February 9 edition of Time magazine. She plays Cookie, the “fiery matriarch” at a hip-hop record company. Time asked, “What are people upset about?” Henson said “Barack Obama.”

Time replied, “You mean the scene in which one of Cookie’s sons calls Obama a sellout during a drunken rant?” Henson explained:  “It was to prove a point about how reckless young kids are nowadays. Some of them are out of control! They don’t understand hard work, what it took for that man to get in office. But people get so offended. It’s art, baby!"

At the recent meeting of the world's elites in Davos, former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and former Mexican President Felipe Calderon circulated a proposal to ban cars in all major cities in the world by dense-packing their layouts. The cost, as I noted on Monday: a mere $90 trillion (that's right, trillion). It's telling in a foreboding sense that the pair's idea wasn't laughed off the continent.

Enviro-nutty ideas such as these trace their origin to Gore's 1992 book, "Earth in the Balance," in which Gore called the internal combustion engine "the mankind's greatest enemy." In reality, it is arguably the greatest enabler of human progress in the world's history. So readers should take some delight in articles appearing two years apart — one at Time.com, and another at the Wall Street Journal, where the authors predict that the odds seem to be in favor of the evil internal combustion engine continuing to outshine the enviros' favored alternatives for at least the next couple of decades. Gore and his media enablers surely wail and gnash their teeth when such inconvenient items rear their scientific heads.

The year-end issue of Time magazine includes an enormous article on “The Ebola Fighters,” their Persons of the Year, but there are also five pages on “The Ferguson Protesters: Their refusal to let a life be forgotten turned a local shooting into a national movement.”

Four years ago, Time made “The Tea Party” a runner-up, but they were projected to fall apart. The headline was “The grass-roots uprising that restored the GOP was fueled by anger at the ruling Democrats. But it won’t be easy to hold together.” Oops, conservatives helped the GOP win again in 2014, so Beatles-breakup metaphors sound a little silly.

Yesterday at 4:11 p.m. ET, Eugene Volokh at the Washington Post's Volokh Conspiracy blog sharply criticized Time.com's Eliza Berman for not being "quite fair" — i.e., being quite unfair, given the author's penchant for understatement — to Breitbart.com's John Nolte, the reporter who investigated the veracity of Lena Dunham's detailed claims about and descriptions of her alleged Oberlin College rapist.

Volokh's critique was based on language in Berman's original writeup which Time pulled at some point after Volokh's post without any notice that it had done so. Berman, as Volokh noted, "casually dismiss(ed) an investigation ... that actually succeeded in getting a publisher to correct a statement," and in the process betrayed fundamental tenets of journalism as it's supposed to be practiced.