June 20, 2022

Amazingly, Buzzfeed Readers Don’t Realize They Did This to Themselves

June 20, 2022/ Jane Menton

One of my roles here at Manhattan Contrarian is acting as the cultural correspondent and translator, giving some insight into the views and beliefs of the millennial generation and younger.
Unfortunately, it gets harder every day to present those views as rational when they’re so often based on magical thinking.
For example, the same people who have been haranguing us for years for not doing enough to end our dependence on fossil fuels – the same ones who cheered the shutdown of the Keystone Pipeline – now can’t believe the prices they must pay for gas. The same people who thought stimulus checks were the bare minimum the government could do for people struggling during COVID, are now shocked by surging inflation.
The recent economy has only highlighted the glaring contradictions in their thinking. Will Buzzfeed readers ever realize that they are the source of their own problems?

June 17, 2022

Some Thoughts on Netflix’s Support for Free Expression

June 17, 2022/ Jane Menton

A month or so ago, Netflix CEO Ted Serandos took a lot of criticism from the LGBTQIA+ community for saying Netflix was going to support its creators’ right to free speech.
Serandos’s response to employee complaints included sending an internal memo last month stating that if employees had a problem with Netflix’s “breadth of content,” then perhaps they should find a job elsewhere.
In an interview with Maureen Dowd for The New York Times, published May 28, Serandos stated that standing up for free expression “wasn’t hard” because a creator like Dave Chappelle is “by all measure, the comedian of our generation, the most popular comedian on Netflix for sure.”
Evidence suggests Serandos is receiving market signals that his audience is most interested in the content he’s being warned not to publish.

June 13, 2022

June 13, 2022/ Francis Menton

What I call the “energy storage conundrum” is the obvious but largely unrecognized problem that electricity generated by intermittent renewables like wind and sun can’t keep an electrical grid operating without some method of storing energy to meet customer demand in times of low production.
These times of low production from wind and sun occur regularly — for example, calm nights — and can persist for as long as a week or more in the case of heavily overcast and calm periods in the winter.
If the plan is to power the entire United States by wind and solar facilities, and if we assume that wind and solar facilities will be built sufficient to generate energy equal to usage over the course of a year, we then need to do a calculation of how much storage would be required to balance the times of excess production against those of insufficient production in order to get through the year without blackouts.
The challenge of getting through an entire year could require far more storage than merely getting through a week-long wind/sun drought, because both wind and sun are seasonal, producing much more in some seasons than others.
Previous posts on this blog have cited to several competent calculations of the amount of storage needed for different jurisdictions to get through a full year with only wind and sun to generate the electricity.

June 10, 2022

June 10, 2022/ Francis Menton

May 2022 brought two more in what seems like an endless series of mass shootings: On May 14, a gunman in Buffalo killed 10 people at a supermarket; and only a few days later on May 24 another gunman killed 19 students and 2 teachers at a school in Uvalde, Texas.
As is usual with these things, gun control advocates promptly seized the opportunity to demand that politicians “do something” about the gun violence. The “something” to be done as always consists of enacting more gun control statutes, on top of those that already exist.
But do additional gun control statutes really have the potential to make any significant dent in the existing level of gun violence? Almost certainly, the answer is no.

June 07, 2022

June 07, 2022/ Francis Menton

Today is primary day — and recall day — in California. I’m writing this on the East coast before any election returns are in. But there is some modest hope of a slight retreat from the worst excesses of progressivism.
Joel Kotkin — professor at Chapman University out there — weighs in with a June 5 column at Spiked, sounding a small note of optimism. The headline and sub-headline are “America’s great cities are gripped by decline and disorder. Voters have had enough of ‘progressive’ leaders who are presiding over spiralling violence and crime.” Excerpt:
For the past decade, America’s urban centres have been increasingly run by ‘progressive’ activists. Yet today, as US cities reel from collapsed economies, rising crime and pervasive corruption, there’s something of a revolt brewing, the success of which may well determine the role and trajectory of our great urban centres.
Fair enough. But let’s keep some perspective. These are a few modest gains in a sea of bad news.

June 05, 2022

June 05, 2022/ Francis Menton

It’s official: the world is committed to rapidly reducing CO2 emissions. Just look at the the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, or President Biden’s April 22, 2021 press release, or California’s SB 100 climate act, or New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, or Germany’s Energiewende, or the UK’s Net Zero pledge, or any of many other such pledges.
And essentially all of woke corporate America is on board with the program. Consider the tidal wave of so-called “ESG” investing, focused on re-organizing corporate activities to reduce carbon emissions. Super-woke banking giant JP Morgan is leading the charge.
And yet, somehow it just doesn’t seem to be happening.