September 28, 2022

The New York Daily News Instructs Us On Progressive Racism

September 28, 2022/ Francis Menton

We still have three daily newspapers here in New York — the Times, the Post, and the Daily News. I subscribe to the first two, but not to the Daily News. And I almost never read the Daily News either.
From my occasional encounters, my observation is that the Daily News has completely gone over to wokism, and is just a cut-rate, slimmed-down version of the Times, pushing the progressive narrative on all issues without concern for evidence or facts.
But like the Times, the Daily News can sometimes, undoubtedly inadvertently, shine a bright light on the twisted thinking of the progressive mind. Such was the case with a piece that appeared a few days ago (September 24) . . . .

September 26, 2022

On The Death Of Climate Scientist Dr. Tim Ball

September 26, 2022/ Francis Menton

Canadian climate scientist Dr. Tim Ball passed away on Saturday, September 24. A brief obituary has been posted at the Watts Up With That website.
Ball had a long career as a professor at the University of Winnipeg, although he had been retired for a number of years, and was 83 when he died. Regular readers of this blog will likely recognize Ball as someone who commented here from time to time. I also had sporadic email correspondence from Ball, which was always respectful and informative.
Ball was that rarity of a climate scientist in the world of academia with the temerity and courage to say and repeat that CO2 is a beneficial gas. He would not back down, in a world that rapidly went insane and became increasingly intolerant and hostile to his position.
Notably, Ball did not shy away from calling out the biggest scamsters of the climate hustle, most particularly one Michael Mann. Mann is the professor at Penn State who was the lead creator of the IPCC’s iconic “hockey stick” graph that has been used to sell global warming hysteria to the world for the last 20+ years.
For today I’d like to review the disparate treatments accorded to Ball and Mann by various institutions.

September 24, 2022

September 24, 2022/ Francis Menton

As you may know, the Biden Administration is planning to hold its big “White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health” this coming Wednesday, September 28.
Apparently, we are to believe that “hunger” is and remains a significant problem today in the United States. Thankfully, we have President Biden and his many minions hard at work on the job, with a promise to finally end this scourge of human hunger once and for all. According to the announcement of the conference, “The Biden-Harris Administration has set the goal of ending hunger . . . by 2030.”
But wait a minute — hasn’t hunger in the United States already been ended? I seem to remember multiple prior government promises to end hunger in America, each of them followed by massive funding, and/or increases in prior already-massive levels of funding to achieve the goal.
Are we only now learning that none of these prior efforts worked?

September 21, 2022

September 21, 2022/ Francis Menton

When I was young, the New York Attorney General’s office had a reputation for integrity. But somewhere along the line, the office went completely off the rails.
Eliot Spitzer was elected AG in 1998, and spent his two terms in frightening misuse of the office to further his naked political ambitions, mainly through shaking down financial institutions on the thinnest of pretexts. After eight years improperly using this tactic to keep his name in the headlines, he was then elected Governor; whereupon his successor — Andrew Cuomo — followed the same playbook for one term, and with the same result of becoming Governor. The next guy, Eric Schneiderman, was, if this is even possible, the worst of the three in the category of politicized prosecutions and shakedowns. Mercifully, Schneiderman was forced from office in a sex scandal before he could move up to the governorship.
In the 2018 election, we got a woman named Letitia James. By this time, all pretense that the Attorney General ought to be an impartial law enforcement officer had been long forgotten.

September 18, 2022

September 18, 2022/ Francis Menton

The latest endlessly recurring mantra of Democratic politicians and press is that some position articulated by the opposition is a threat to “our Democracy.”
I suppose that those words must resonate with some people, or otherwise they would not be so endlessly repeated. Of course the statement is fundamentally wrong, because we don’t actually have a “Democracy,” but rather a Constitutional Republic.
Having a Democracy would mean that a 50.1% voting majority can do whatever it wants to the hated 49.9%, including locking the 49.9% permanently out of power. The whole idea of the Constitutional Republic is to keep that from happening, and our Constitution puts multiple institutions in place to prevent a temporary slight majority from seizing permanent power for itself.
Most of the current railing about threats to “our Democracy” turns out, on examination, to represent nothing more than dissatisfaction with the fact that we have a Constitutional Republic rather than a Democracy. Understanding the distinction between Democracy and our Constitutional Republic is the key to distinguishing the real threats to our system of government from the nonsense filling the media every day.
This post considers a recent example of one of the real threats, which has received almost no press coverage.

September 16, 2022

September 16, 2022/ Francis Menton

Over in Europe, and particularly in those countries in the vanguard of the green energy transition, the enormous costs of this folly have begun to hit home. In the UK, average annual consumer energy bills were scheduled to rise as of October 1 to £3549/year, from only £1138/year just a year ago. (The figure may now get reduced somewhat by means of massive government subsidies, which only conceal, but do not obviate, the disastrous cost increases.) Germany’s regulated consumer gas bills are scheduled for an average annual increase on October 1 of about 480 euros, about 13%, from an already high 3568 euros.
Anyone with a pair of eyes can see what has happened. They thought they could get rid of fossil fuels just by building lots of wind turbines and solar panels, which don’t work most of the time. Then they suppressed fossil fuel production, because that is the virtuous thing to do. Somehow they lost track of the fact that they needed full backup for the wind and sun, and have no alternative to the suppressed fossil fuels. With supply of fossil fuels intentionally and artificially constrained, prices spiked.
And they have not even yet gotten to 50% of electricity, or 15% of final energy consumption, from wind/sun on an annualized basis.
Is anybody learning a lesson here?