Update On New York's Self-Inflicted Energy Crunch

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  • As I have noted many times before, this whole green energy thing is all just so much talk until the point hits where energy shortages start to emerge or consumer prices begin to soar. At that point, the people will notice. And then, how will the politics shift? Will the politicians press forward with green energy — and impose energy deprivation on the people in the process? Or will they promptly back off the green energy blather, and return to the cheap and reliable fossil fuels?

  • Here in New York, where professing the green religion is the indispensable ticket to entry into polite society, we’re in the early phases of seeing this process play out. Out there in the hinterlands, you may be interested in the dynamics.

  • Our Governor Andrew Cuomo clearly thirsts to be part of polite society. Same with the members of the legislature. Thus, fealty to green orthodoxy must be regularly demonstrated. Result: We have had one measure after another over the past several years to restrict fossil fuels and promote energy from wind and solar sources.

  • But is any of this stuff real, in the sense that it will stand up when the crunch hits?

  • In August, the first inklings of the crunch began to hit. As I reported on September 3, after the cross-harbor pipeline was blocked in May, the natural gas utility named National Grid, which covers Long Island (including the parts of New York City known as Brooklyn and Queens) announced that it could not accept any additional gas customers. By August, some 3000 potential customers in that area had been denied service. . . .

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A Few Things To Feel Guilty About This Thanksgiving Weekend

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  • As a Manhattan Contrarian reader, probably you spent your Thanksgiving day being thankful for the many blessings in your life.

  • Obviously, that is your moral failing. If you had any moral compass, you would have spent the day feeling guilty.

  • But wait, you say. What have I done to feel guilty about? Right there is where you’ve got it all wrong. It’s not that you’ve done anything wrong, or even that you’ve done anything at all. Your guilt is collective guilt, not resulting from your own actions, but rather principally resulting from the sins of your ancestors, and transmitted to you via your genes, and probably based on your race.

  • For our post-Thanksgiving entertainment, let’s consider some of the more unhinged exercises in race-based guilt and shaming taken from the media over just the past few days. There are a near-infinite number of these things to choose from, so I’ll select just a few. . . .

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No Amount Of Disastrous Failure Can Kill The Fantasy Of A Government-Directed "Great Society"

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  • It was 1964 — I was in the 8th grade — when Lyndon Johnson, newly elevated to the presidency by the assassination of John F. Kennedy, announced the launch of the “War on Poverty” and the imminent coming of the “Great Society.”

  • All that was needed was to put the powers of government to work to apply the available societal resources to the problems at hand; and presto! the problems would be solved. This was obvious to all thinking people. Experts within the government agencies would quickly set to work to devise the programs that would use the gusher of federal tax revenue to end poverty and bring about universal fairness and justice in short order.

  • Programs designed by the experts to eradicate poverty proliferated rapidly, both before and after the 1964 election — Medicaid, the Community Action Program, the Job Corps, the Food Stamp program, Project Head Start, the Office of Economic Opportunity, the Housing and Urban Development Act, and on and on.

  • Fifty-five years on, is it possible to name any public policy disaster in the United States greater than the disaster of the War on Poverty and Great Society?

  • It’s not just that all the government spending has not reduced the measured rate of poverty nor the number of people in poverty. . . . We have only fomented anger and resentment in the program beneficiaries.

  • For today I’ll just go into the single example of public housing programs. . . .

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Who Is Winning The Climate Wars?

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  • If you get most of your news passively by just reading what comes up in some kind of Facebook or Google feed or equivalent, you probably have the impression that the Climate Wars are over and the Climate Campaigners have swept the field of battle.

  • In my case, I certainly don’t rely on those kinds of toxic sources of information, but I do regularly monitor many of the media sources in the “mainstream” category — the New York Times, the Washington Post, Bloomberg, the Economist, Politico, and several of the television networks like CBS, ABC, NBC and CNN. All of those (and plenty more) have clearly put an absolute ban on any news or information that would cast even the slightest negative light on the proposition that there is an imminent “climate crisis” that must be solved by government transformation of the world economy.

  • I’ll give a couple of examples of the lengths to which this has gone. Back in September, mentally unstable Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, whose only qualification was her ignorant passion for climate extremism, got the platform of the UN “Climate Action Summit” for a big speech.

  • Actually, out there in the world, reality continues to trump hysteria. Do you remember reports from a couple of years ago that China was ceasing to develop fossil fuel power and was becoming a “climate leader” by going all in for trendy renewables wind and solar? Well, that was to fool the dopes. Just this month, something called Global Energy Monitor is out with a new report on what’s going on on the ground in China. Bottom line: 148 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity under active construction or with construction being resumed after suspension. . . .

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The Evidence That Joe Biden Committed Bribery

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  • Over here at Manhattan Contrarian, I have now had five posts detailing the lay-down case that Joe Biden committed the federal crime of bribery (18 U.S.C Section 201(b)) with respect to the conduct of himself and his son in Ukraine.

  • Meanwhile, over in what we continue to call the mainstream media, there has developed a mantra that there is “no evidence” that Joe Biden acted to help his son collect a bribe in Ukraine. Just yesterday, Eric Felten over at RealClearInvestigations put together a nice roundup of these ridiculous statements.

  • What are we missing here? Actually, it’s what are they missing? What they are missing is a fundamental understanding of how motive or causation are proved in this world.

  • Here is the basic principle: A hypothesis as to motive or causation cannot be proved by evidence consistent with the hypothesis. Instead, motive or causation are proved by evidence inconsistent with the alternative hypothesis.

  • Unfortunately for Joe, there is indeed evidence that is inconsistent with the hypothesis that he acted for pure motives, and not to help his son. I have identified two pieces of such evidence in prior posts. . . .

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Biden v. Trump: Which One Is The "Bribe"?

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  • It was right around the time that I was writing my last post (“The Trump Impeachment: What Is The Crime?”) that House Democrats started using the word “bribery” to describe what they are looking into. OK, that’s a start. Shall we consider it further?

  • Bribery is a real crime, and it’s even mentioned in the Constitution as a basis for impeachment. But there are two major problems with trying to fit the square peg of the Trump/Ukraine fact pattern into the round hole of the impeachable crime of “bribery.” The first is that if providing to a politician some intangible political advantage can be characterized as a “bribe,” then most of what politicians do all day would become “bribery.” The second is that calling President Trump’s conduct as to Ukraine “bribery” invites comparison with the conduct of Joe and Hunter Biden in the same country, and calls for testing the conduct of each against the words of the applicable statute to see which is the better fit.

  • As discussed in the previous post, it’s only a “crime” if you can fit within the exact words of some criminal statute passed by Congress. In the case of the crime of bribery of a federal official, the main statute is 18 U.S.C. Section 201(b).

  • If you have read that, perhaps your reaction was, “then why isn’t every politician already in jail?” The problem is that politics is inherently corrupt. Even if a politician is not “on the take” for personal money, it goes without saying that every incumbent politician regularly uses the powers of his office to obtain intangible political benefits to himself from third parties, for use against rivals.

  • With that background, let’s try applying the words of the bribery statute to the conduct of President Trump and of Joe and Hunter Biden relating to Ukraine. . . .

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