November 21, 2023

A Self-Described Libertarian Wins In Argentina

November 21, 2023/ Francis Menton

In an election held on Sunday, Argentina chose as its new President self-described libertarian Javier Milei. Milei won by a not-close margin of about 56/44 over Sergio Massa, who has been the economics minister under the incumbent President Alberto Fernandez. Milei is known for a bombastic style of speaking, and for using a chainsaw in his campaign appearances as a symbol of how he plans to hack away at the government. He is also known for having even worse hair than Donald Trump.
The Perónist model of economic policy basically tracks the Democratic Party/Paul Krugman/blue state model here in the U.S.
The last 100 years — and particularly the Perónist period from 1946 on — have seen Argentina decline from one of the richest countries in the world to a kind of perennial basket case.

November 18, 2023

At The New York Krazy Klimate Konference

November 18, 2023/ Francis Menton

On Thursday (November 16) a publication called City & State (specializing in covering New York state and local government) put on a conference they called the “2023 Clean Energy in New York Summit: New York’s Path to Sustainability.” Let’s call this the New York Krazy Klimate Konference.
I showed up to observe and report on the festivities, along with another prominent skeptic, Roger Caiazza of the Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York blog.
The Krazy Klimate Konference featured a gaggle of high-ranking New York bureaucrats and legislators, there to report on New York’s exciting progress toward Net Zero nirvana; plus an even larger gaggle of grifters and parasites looking to cash in on the big piles of government loot sure to get passed out along the way.

November 15, 2023

November 15, 2023/ Francis Menton

In the realm of the climate scare, the cognitive dissonance has reached almost impossible levels.
Just a few days ago I took note of ever increasing focus by environmental NGOs on promoting the climate scare even as the green energy schemes, offered as salvation from the apocalypse, experience soaring costs and pervasive financial collapse.
But those are just a couple of pieces of the crazy mess. Everywhere you look, our overlords are doubling down on end-of-days climate propaganda while reality just refuses to cooperate. We have truly reached peak absurdity.
In the category of the overlords doubling down on climate propaganda, you can’t top the new Fifth National Climate Assessment just out (November 14) from from something called the U.S. Global Change Research Program.

November 12, 2023

November 12, 2023/ Francis Menton

In the ongoing project to achieve human perfection through government action, pervasive surveillance of the population plays a growing role.
After all, if the government can monitor everything you do all the time, then utopia will be just around the corner. The always-observing benevolent bureaucrats will be sure to make committing a crime completely unthinkable. The same goes for not paying your bills on time, or being mean to your wife — or criticizing those in power.
Thankfully we don’t have anything like that — not! In fact we have multiple nascent and growing pieces of such a system. Mostly those pieces are being developed quietly and out of sight, without disclosure of what is occurring, so that it’s impossible for you to know exactly how much of your activities are being observed for later use against you. Big examples include government data collection on financial transactions (except those done with cash!) and the increasing data collection from automobiles.
There is one very big area of data collection on the population where quite a bit of information is available, both as to the data collected and the efficacy of the data collection effort in achieving the stated objective. That area is prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs).

November 08, 2023

November 08, 2023/ Francis Menton

You have likely seen over the course of just the past few months that the supposed green energy transition — widely hyped and massively subsidized for two decades — has suddenly started to crumble on multiple fronts.
We are rapidly approaching the green energy wall.
And yet at the same time, the promoters of the climate scare are not backing down. Not in the least. To the contrary, the New York Times reports just today that the major environmental NGOs are in a process of cutting their funding for their most basic programs, like dealing with toxic chemicals, in order to double down and focus even more on the one big issue — climate change.

November 06, 2023

November 06, 2023/ Francis Menton

On and after October 7 the world has been treated to images of Hamas terrorists engaging in the most horrific acts against Israeli civilians, including even elderly people and babies. Surely all civilized people would react to these crimes with revulsion and outrage?
To the contrary, the last several weeks have seen massive pro-Hamas demonstrations around the world, including on campuses of elite universities and in major cities like London, Paris, Washington, D.C., and New York.
Here in the U.S. we have a well-established constitutional order of freedom of religion. People practice dozens of different religions, and members of one religion, and also the government, do not prevent or restrict the practice of other religions by other people. That was not an easy order to establish, but we have established it (at least for now), and it enables people who have come from all over the world and from many different religions to live among each other in peace.
The Muslim countries have no such principles. As far as I can determine, the record of Muslim countries with regard to treatment of members of other religions is universally abysmal, in every case far worse than anything Israel can possibly be accused of.