August 24, 2025

No There Is Not A "Genocide" In Gaza

August 24, 2025/ Francis Menton

The accusation that Israel is committing a “genocide” in Gaza has become pervasive on the Left, and particularly in academia.
I think that the accusation is absurd, so much so that until now I haven’t thought it worthy of a response. However, the accusation has recently arrived on my own website. In the comment thread on the prior post, one of the commenters (regular readers can guess who) has leveled against President Trump the charge that he “is sending weapons to Israel for the genocide in Gaza.” Really? It’s time for a response.
In my opinion, what’s going on in Gaza is not a genocide, but a war. Deaths in war are not a genocide.

August 20, 2025

A Mini Scorecard For President Trump's First Seven Months of Term Two

August 20, 2025/ Francis Menton

In Federalist Number 70, one of the most often-cited of the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton famously made his pitch for a strong unitary executive as provided for in the then-proposed Constitution:
Energy in the Executive is a leading character in the definition of good government. It is essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks; it is not less essential to the steady administration of the laws; to the protection of property against those irregular and high-handed combinations which sometimes interrupt the ordinary course of justice; to the security of liberty against the enterprises and assaults of ambition, of faction, and of anarchy. . . .
Our current President Trump carries the concept of “energy in the executive” to an extreme level, undertaking a dizzying array of initiatives, with new ones emerging so rapidly that it is difficult to keep up.
Many of Trump’s initiatives have corrected disastrous and destructive policies of the Biden and Obama years. But with so many initiatives, perhaps it is inevitable that some will be misfires; or perhaps Trump lacks a capacity for self-criticism to distinguish his good ideas from the bad ones.

August 17, 2025

August 17, 2025/ Francis Menton

It was back in 2021 that I started to ask which country or U.S. state would be the first to hit the “Green Energy Wall.”
It has long been obvious to anyone who looks at the situation that the fantasy of a fully de-carbonized energy system, with everything run on electricity generated by intermittent wind and sun, could never happen.
But what would be the limiting condition that would put a stop to the madness? Would it be confronting the absurd costs of grid-scale battery storage? Or perhaps a string of blackouts caused by insufficient backup of the wind and solar generation?
Here in New York, we are starting to see some push back from politicians on the fantasy green energy transition, but the source may be the last thing you would have predicted.

August 14, 2025

August 14, 2025/ Francis Menton

Our nations’s capital, Washington, D.C., has a violent crime problem that is, objectively, very serious. Indeed, considering that Washington is the capital of the wealthiest and most important country in the world, its level of violent crime is quite shocking.
And thus a few days ago (August 11), the President decided to address the problem by federalizing law enforcement in the District of Columbia, at least for some period of time.
Trump accompanied his action with a press conference and a series of news releases: “Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Declares a Crime Emergency to Restore Safety in the District of Columbia”; “Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Restores Law and Order in the District of Columbia”; and “RESTORING LAW AND ORDER IN THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA.”
Both orally at the press conference, and in the written news releases, Trump cited various crime statistics from the District to illustrate the seriousness of the problem.

August 11, 2025

August 11, 2025/ Francis Menton

It was in July 2019 that New York State adopted its Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act. Our Legislature and Governor (it was Andrew Cuomo at the time) had officially designated us as the climate “leader,” here to show the unsophisticated rubes and provincials in the rest of the country how a small application of political will could transform our electricity system from majority fossil fuels in 2019 to 70% “renewables” by 2030 and 100% “zero-carbon” by 2040.
Now six years into the eleven available to meet the 2030 mandate, we actually get less of our electricity from zero-carbon sources than we did in 2019.
The reason is that the large (2 GW) Indian Point nuclear plant was forced to close under pressure from environmentalists, to be replaced by two natural gas plants of approximately the same total capacity.
Meanwhile the vision of massive amounts of power from the wind and sun has barely gotten off the ground; and in particular the vision of vast offshore wind capacity has essentially died with the withdrawal of federal support by the Trump administration.

August 08, 2025

August 08, 2025/ Francis Menton

Here in New York City, in the grip of the hysterical climate cult, we are undertaking a massive transformation of our energy system without anyone in authority having done the simple arithmetic to check whether the plans have any chance of succeeding. A big theme of this blog has been pointing out the obvious problems that mean that these “net zero” schemes can never work.
But maybe it’s not really important whether they will ever work or not. Maybe the real point is just to spend a lot of (somebody else’s) money to show that you, somehow, “care.”
A very similar scenario is now playing out in the closely related category they are calling climate “resiliency.” The word means getting ready for the impending climate armaggedon. The armaggedon isn’t coming, of course, but we will anyway spend vast sums supposedly to show we are “doing something” about the problem.
Whether the scheme in question might actually work is beside the point.