New York Shows Off Its Expertise In Central Planning: The Buffalo Billion

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New York Shows Off Its Expertise In Central Planning: The Buffalo Billion

  • Let’s face it: Central planning of the economy hasn’t worked out so well in many places where it has been tried (e.g., Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea, etc.).

  • But then, here in New York, we are so much smarter than the dolts who fell on their faces in those backwaters. With utter confidence in our genius, we have embarked upon the total centrally-directed transformation of the economy into “net zero” utopia, via the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act of 2019.

  • But that project is barely getting under way. It will be a few years before we have enough feedback to judge it a success or failure.

  • Meanwhile, is there any other significant central planning initiative here in New York that has gotten far enough so that we can judge whether it is succeeding? Yes! — It’s the “Buffalo Billion,” a massive state-subsidized industrial development project in the long-declining Great Lakes port in far Western New York. Let’s get an update.

  • The summary is, it’s hard to believe how badly wrong this has gone.

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The Latest On International Efforts To Save The Planet Through Climate Litigation

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  • When I first came upon it, I called it the “stupidest litigation in the country.”

  • In 2015 a group of adolescents, led on a leash by some activist environmental lawyers, had sued the federal government in the District Court for Oregon. The plaintiffs alleged violation of their fundamental constitutional right to a clean and healthy environment, and sought as remedy a compulsory national plan to “phase out” the use of fossil fuels nationwide plus (why not?) “draw down excess atmospheric CO2 so as to stabilize the climate system and protect the vital resources on which Plaintiffs now and in the future will depend. . . .” I first covered this litigation in a post in December 2017 titled “The Stupidest Litigation In The Country Reaches The Ninth Circuit.”

  • Why “stupidest litigation”? Because this case seemed to represent the ultimate reductio ad absurdum of the entire idea of courts and of litigation, and indeed an attempt at complete subversion of our three-branch system of government. Just make up a new and sweeping “constitutional right,” find a friendly activist-minded judge, and you can get an order transferring all the significant operations of the legislative and executive branches of the government to a single unelected person operating out of a courthouse in Eugene, Oregon.

  • Surely, no court would take this seriously.

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Officialdom Responds To Doubts That A Renewables-Based Electricity System Will Work

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Officialdom Responds To Doubts That A Renewables-Based Electricity System Will Work

  • The single biggest problem with the Left’s “climate” agenda is that the proposed response to the alleged crisis — replacement of fossil fuels in the energy system with intermittent wind-and-sun-based electricity generation — is not going to work. This is obvious to anyone who considers the subject seriously for any amount of time.

  • Yet any mention of this issue has been almost completely banished from the mainstream media, from academia, from government, and from social media. It remains to a few lonely voices (such as, here in New York, myself, Roger Caiazza, and Ken Girardin of the Empire Center) to keep the subject in the public consciousness.

  • As small and lonely as our voices may be, somehow we must be getting under their skin. We know that because increasingly officialdom feels a need to respond publicly to our criticisms.

  • But how can they give a plausible response, given that we are absolutely right and a wind-and-sun-based electricity system is never going to work?

  • Easy! — Just treat the public like morons.

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Update On The Good And The Bad Settler Colonialists

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  • Every year millions of people move from one country in the world to another with the intent to remain permanently in the destination country.

  • Generally such people then congregate in the destination country among others who have come from the same place of origin. In other words, they form colonies of settlers. According to the normal meanings of the words, they are “settler colonialists.”

  • So how should these “settler colonialists” be treated upon arrival by their destination countries?

  • Oddly, the political left has designated some of the settler colonialists as heroes deserving of an enthusiastic welcome replete with lavish taxpayer-funded benefits — free housing (at least temporarily), free medical care, free education for the kids, even cash handouts for food and incidentals; while other settler colonialists have been designated by the same leftists as the ultimate evil.

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Claudine Gay Has Resigned As President Of Harvard. What Next?

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  • The news arrived today in my inbox at 1:27 PM, in an email from Claudine Gay herself. She wrote me “to share that I will be stepping down as president” of Harvard. Fourteen minutes later, that email was followed by an official announcement to the same effect from the Harvard Corporation.

  • Of course, Ms. Gay took the opportunity to blame her downfall on racism of unnamed adversaries. “[I]t has been . . . frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.” What personal attacks and racial animus exactly, Ms. Gay? What I have seen (and contributed to) is plenty of fair criticism of the sort that everyone who operates at the level of President of Harvard must deal with every day. Since when is it a “personal attack,” let alone “racial animus,” simply to document a record of enforcing woke orthodoxy on campus, or of allowing anti-semitism to flourish, or of committing more than 40 instances of clear plagiarism in an already sparse record of academic publication?

  • Anyway, with Gay gone, the ball goes back to the board known as the Harvard Corporation to find a replacement as President. What can Harvard expect in the next round?

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Claudine Gay Update -- Now It's Allegations Of Data Falsification

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Claudine Gay Update -- Now It's Allegations Of Data Falsification

  • It was less than three weeks ago, December 5, when the name of Claudine Gay, President of Harvard University, suddenly burst into the news. That was the day that she, along with the Presidents of Penn and MIT, testified before Congress — and could not give a clear answer as to whether it was against the policy at their schools to call for the genocide of Jews. All three women attempted to use the occasion to paint themselves as defenders of free speech, particularly important in such extreme cases.

  • Manhattan Contrarian readers already knew that Ms. Gay was the opposite of a defender of free speech. In a post on December 16, 2022 with the title “Goodnight, Poor Harvard!” — written on the occasion of the announcement that Ms. Gay would become the next President of Harvard — I reviewed her record on the subject.

  • My conclusion, based on multiple examples mostly from the work of independent journalist Christopher Brunet, was that Ms. Gay was “the enforcer-in-chief of wokist orthodoxy at Harvard.”

  • In the few short weeks since December 5, the news as to Ms. Gay has gotten worse and worse, seemingly by the day.

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