October 18, 2026

When Ignorant Ideologues Take Control Of Major Economic Decisions

October 18, 2026/ Francis Menton

As previously mentioned, I have been reading Frank Dikötter’s trilogy on the history of China during its years under the rule of Mao Zedong (1949-76). Of the three books, the one covering the middle years of 1958-62 is titled “Mao’s Great Famine.” The name given by Mao and his gang to these years was “The Great Leap Forward.”
The story told in this book is the sort of critically important and easily-available information about how the real world works that all our newly-minted elite college graduates have somehow missed. The short version is that a clique of political ideologues with zero knowledge of how things are actually produced takes control of making the major economic decisions. They have what they think are brilliant ideas about how to transform the economy and do everything better. In short order, output collapses and people are starving.
It is impossible not to notice the close analogy between the events that led to China’s catastrophe and the ongoing energy disaster being imposed on various U.S. states and other Western countries by an equally ignorant clique of political ideologues.

October 15, 2026

France Is The Future Of The Progressive Project

October 15, 2026/ Francis Menton

Probably, you have read about the recent round of riots in France. They began in late September, and are now in their fourth week.
This round of riots features mostly students, and the stated bases for the protests certainly appear quite mundane, if not trivial, and certainly out of proportion to the scale and intensity of the riots. What are they so worked up about? They are demanding things like hiring more teachers, repair of dilapidated school buildings, more and better air conditioning and heating, universal school lunches at 1 euro, and so forth. (Here is a list of the demands (in French) from something calling itself the Union of Students.).
Meanwhile the riots have involved hundreds of thousands of participants on many days, multiple schools burned down, lots of violence, and thousands of arrests (the majority, but far from all, being high school students).
The big picture is that France has painted itself into the inevitable corner at the end of the progressive project.

October 13, 2026

October 13, 2026/ Francis Menton

We finally had our first hurricane this season in the North Atlantic region: Isaias. Isaias formed on October 7 as a tropical storm in the Gulf of America, and made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane on October 10 near Destin, Florida.
Paul Homewood of Not a Lot of People Know That collects the relevant data in a post from October 11.
Homewood notes that Isaias represents the latest ever first hurricane for the North Atlantic, at least since the satellite era (1966) has provided full data:

October 10, 2026

October 10, 2026/ Francis Menton

On Thursday afternoon, October 8, a guy named Oscar Belgal was shot by ICE agents in the very most northern neighborhood of Manhattan known as Marble Hill. Belgal suffered a non-life-threatening injury to his neck, and received treatment at the uptown campus of the New York Presbyterian Hospital. Here is a picture of Belgal from the New York Post:
The shooting immediately set off a round of protests from local activists, calling for abolition of ICE as well as various other of the usual demands.
In the two days since the event took place, both the New York Post and the New York Times have provided extensive coverage. The contrast between the coverages of the two papers could not be more dramatic.

October 07, 2026

October 07, 2026/ Francis Menton

We are now less than a month out from the mid-term elections, and the single biggest theme that the Democrats have chosen to run on appears to be “affordability.”
How can this possibly be? We live in the age of immediate availability of information, let alone artificial intelligence to track down anything that might previously have been challenging to find. If you want a state-by-state comparison of costs for any particular thing, you can get it in a fraction of a second.
The results are in: the Democrat-run states are less “affordable.”
The Democrats and Republicans propose opposite strategies for dealing with the economy. The Democrats advocate for higher government spending, higher taxes, and more regulation of business; and the Republicans advocate for lower spending, lower taxes, and less regulation of business. The states are the “laboratories of democracy,” where we get to see the consequences of disparate policies play out, and to evaluate the results. Neither party is perfect in implementing what it advocates, so there are always some complexities. But in the main it is easy to collect data that give a relatively clear picture of the results of Democrat versus Republican policies.

October 04, 2026

October 04, 2026/ Francis Menton

My September 29 post asked whether we could deem as “definitively falsified” the hypothesis that human-caused global warming was leading to “more and more severe” hurricanes.
The cited basis for the question was that, despite the endlessly repeated prediction of “more and more severe” hurricanes, as of that date not a single hurricane had yet formed this season in the North Atlantic basin. This represented a record-low rate of hurricane formation in this region since the satellite era, and comprehensive hurricane data, began in 1966.
In response to that post, I received a comment from a reader that I thought deserved a serious response. The comment came as an email, rather than as a comment on the blog. The commenter gave his name, but since he did not post the comment on the blog I am keeping his name confidential as a courtesy. Here is the text of the comment: . . .