November 17, 2020

Surprise: The "Smartest" People Are Actually Painfully Stupid

November 17, 2020/ Francis Menton

If you were lucky enough to attend America’s premier academic institution, Harvard University, you would receive most days, as I do, the Harvard Gazette.
The Gazette generally cloaks its pieces in the mantle of “news”; but really its principal function is to find ways for us Harvard people to congratulate ourselves on how brilliant we are, while at the same time heaping scorn and derision on the the ignorant deplorables who are always getting in the way of our plans to perfect the world.
You only need to read a few of these things before you start to realize that what might seem like the very “smartest” people — the ones with the fanciest degrees and the fanciest professorships at the fanciest universities — are actually painfully stupid.

November 14, 2020

How Much Damage To America Can Biden Do With His Energy Plan?

November 14, 2020/ Francis Menton

Just a couple of months ago I had a post titled “The Biden Energy Plan Is A Joke.” Key excerpt: “In any rational world, a candidate proposing the energy plan that Joe Biden has proposed for the United States would be laughed out of the race for President on that ground alone.”
Yet there was Joe in his “victory” speech a few days ago making this ridiculous claim: “America has called upon us to . . . [fight] the battle to save our planet by getting climate under control.”
Really? In truth, there’s only one thing we can say for certain about Biden’s plans for energy, which is that they will have no effect whatsoever on the earth’s climate, at least none that can be measured. . . .

November 10, 2020

November 10, 2020/ Francis Menton

Although no state has actually yet certified its vote tally for President, Joe Biden a couple of days ago (November 7) gave his first speech assuming his potential victory. Here is a brief excerpt:
I pledge to be a President who seeks not to divide, but to unify. Who doesn’t see red and blue states, but a United States. And who will work with all my heart to win the confidence of the whole people.
What complete horseshit. Biden’s entire campaign was premised on accusing his opponent and his opponent’s supporters of being evil people, racists and white supremacists, vicious enemies of the poor and downtrodden.
Those claims and accusations have continued even since the election, and there can be no doubt that they will go on indefinitely. . . .

November 08, 2020

November 08, 2020/ Francis Menton

While we wait for final results in the race for President, other interesting data from the voting have begun to emerge.
For example, NBC has come out with an exit poll of voters, that breaks down the Biden/Trump vote by demographic factors like age, sex and race.
Of course this exit poll seems to have overestimated the Biden vote similarly to most of the pre-election polls. (They have the overall vote at about 53/46 in favor of Biden; actual is more like 51/48.)
With those caveats, this poll has some very interesting information in the category of results by race, ethnicity and sex. . . .

November 05, 2020

November 05, 2020/ Francis Menton

The very first posts on this blog went up on November 6, 2012. By pure coincidence, that was election day — the day when Barack Obama was re-elected to his second term as President.
By late that evening we knew the result. (Doesn’t that seem so quaint now?) It did not appear to be close: Obama had won 332 electoral votes to Romney’s 206.
The next day, November 7, I wrote a post about the result, which I titled “The Ascendancy of the Basket Cases.” That post pointed out that the election was much closer than it may have seemed.
In fact, the overall result turned on the outcome in a handful of states; and in each of those states, Obama had run up a huge margin in some major city, which was then sufficient to overcome a substantial Romney majority in the rest of the state. The particular handful of cities in question, which had determined the election result, were not just any cities, but what I called the “basket cases” . . .
Flash forward to today. . . .

November 03, 2020

November 03, 2020/ Francis Menton

Within a few short hours, we will know who our next President will be. Maybe, with any luck, this will be my last chance to be horrified by the prospect of a Biden presidency.
Lately, I’ve been focused, perhaps too much so, on Joe Biden’s manifest corruption, his selling out U.S. foreign policy to our worst geo-political rivals to benefit his family financially. But we mustn’t forget that Biden also represents a prospective public policy catastrophe, nowhere more so than in the arena of energy policy.
If you listened to Biden at the debates, you would have heard him promise that his energy plan for rapid elimination of fossil fuels would bring hundreds of thousands (or maybe it was millions) of new high paying green energy jobs.
Did this sound to you like a good idea?