Corruption In Politics: The Case Of Trump And Cryptocurrency

/

  • In the New York Times from this past Thursday (May 1), the lead story was a scathing exposé of alleged corruption of our current President. The headline and sub-headline (print version) were “Trump Shapes the Policy On Crypto, and Cashes In. Hushed Deals and Foreign Investors Propel President’s Digital Money Start-Up.” The sub-headline in the online version was even more scathing: “World Liberty Financial has eviscerated the boundary between private enterprise and government policy in ways without precedent in modern American history.” The story fills the entire upper right-hand quadrant of the front page, plus another full page and a half in the interior of the paper.

  • So according to the Times, this is not just some ordinary, every day, run-of-the-mill political corruption. Rather, it is corruption that has “eviscerated” boundaries between business and government, and is “without precedented in modern American history.”

  • Is there any substance to these charges?

Read More

Special For Manhattan Contrarian Readers

/
Special For Manhattan Contrarian Readers

Commenters here often ask how I can be so crazy as to live in Manhattan. I’m not saying they don’t have a point, but living in Manhattan can also have its advantages. One of those is access to some fantastic cultural offerings.

I have mentioned in the side bar from time to time that I sing in a choir, and I have periodically posted announcement of concerts. A few readers have even come to concerts and introduced themselves. But I recognize that not that many readers are in a position to make it to the concerts in person.

Well, here’s something different. Today and tomorrow we have two concerts of a famous work by Giuseppe Verdi, the Requiem Mass. And for the first time of my various concerts, the performance of this one tomorrow (May 2) is going to be livestreamed.

Read More

Have The Intermittent Energy Blackouts Begun?

/

  • Today there have been widespread electricity blackouts across Europe, beginning in Spain and Portugal in the early afternoon (local time), and then spreading to other countries including France, Andorra, Belgium and the Netherlands. Is this related to the increasing penetration of intermittent generation from wind and solar facilities?

  • For years, many in the climate skeptic community have warned that expansion of intermittent renewable electricity generation on the grid will, sooner or later, lead to frequent blackouts.

  • The reason for the warning is easy to understand: The grid has some rather exacting operational requirements that the intermittent renewable generation technologies cannot fulfill. Primary among these requirements are, first, minute-by-minute matching of electricity supply with electricity demand and, second, grid-wide synchronization of the frequency of the alternating current. When wind and solar generate provided relatively small portions of the electricity consumed, other generation sources, particularly thermal (fossil fuel) and hydro, would fulfill these requirements.

  • But as wind and solar come to dominate generation, the problems become much more difficult to solve.

Read More

Updates On The Collapse Of The Climate Scam

/

  • On April 14 I recorded a podcast with Tom Nelson. He has since posted a slightly edited version on his YouTube site. Go to this link if you would like to watch it — about an hour long. The main subject is the sordid history of EPA’s Endangerment Finding and efforts of people including myself to get it rescinded.

  • The good news on the Endangerment Finding front is that EPA under new Administrator Lee Zeldin is very much on the job of eliminating the EF. Of course, once it has been rescinded it will face a blizzard of legal challenges. I hope and expect that Zeldin and his team are up to the job of carrying out a rescission that will stick. I offered my suggestions for how to do a rescission that will stand up to challenge in this post from January 26.

  • Separately, Nelson has made a thing out of compiling a growing list of “Signs That The Climate Scam Is Collapsing.”

Read More

Pope Francis Was No Friend Of The Poor

/

  • Pope Francis passed away two days ago, on Easter Monday. He had been the leader of the Catholic Church for just over 12 years.

  • He presented himself as a well-intentioned and deeply religious man, none of which I ever doubted. But good intentions are the paving stones of the road to hell. I often tried to find some positive things about Francis so that I could admire him. But unfortunately I think that his overall impact on the world and on the church was overwhelmingly negative.

  • Thinking that he was working to uplift the poor and downtrodden of the world, Francis accepted all the most destructive prescriptions of the international Left. I’m sorry, but I don’t find that acceptable in a man claiming to be a major religious leader and asserting moral authority to tell others how to lead a good life.

  • After a century and more of the destructive horrors of socialism, people in major leadership roles in society have a responsibility to learn about that and understand it and not continue to spread it.

Read More

Progress Report On Purging The Climate Scam From Federal Websites

/

  • In a post on January 28 — a week into President Trump’s second term — I urged that it is time to “purge the climate scam from the federal websites.”

  • Trump 1.0 did a remarkably poor job of taking control of communications on the climate issue on websites like those of EPA, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Transportation. Are they doing any better this time?

  • They have definitely taken some significant steps to address this issue here in the early weeks of the new administration. For example, on April 15 the Guardian ran a piece with the headline “Green groups sue Trump administration over climate webpage removals.”

Read More