July 29, 2024

Settler Colonialists In Israel And The United States

July 29, 2024/ Francis Menton

Of all the epithets of the left that don’t make any sense, the term “settler colonialist” is one of my favorites.
We live in a world where the ability of people to relocate, even to places thousands of miles distant, has increased greatly over time. These days, many millions of people per year pick up and relocate, or try to relocate, from one country to another.
By far the biggest mass migrations going on currently are into the U.S. and into Europe from various poorer countries. This November 2023 piece from NPR puts the number of “migrants” crossing the U.S. Southern border illegally in 2023 at about 2.4 million. That would be in addition to about 1 million legal immigrants to the U.S. each year. The European Commission at this site from April 2024 gives a figure of 42.4 million people living in the EU who were not born there, about 9% of the population. That would suggest something like 1 million or so new arrivals per year.
So are all these people “settler colonialists”?

July 26, 2024

How Will New York's Energy Madness End? The "Don't Do It!" Report

July 26, 2024/ Francis Menton

I frequently write about how the mandates for energy transition that New York has adopted are impossible and irreconcilable in the real world; and therefore it is inevitable that they will have to be abandoned at some point when implementation of the project runs up against physical reality.
Probably the most frequent question that I get asked is, OK, how and when will that occur?
The question is important because for as long as the impossible mandates remain in place they are causing massive ongoing damage to our electricity system and to consumers.

July 23, 2024

July 23, 2024/ Francis Menton

Probably very few readers here are old enough to remember China’s “Great Leap Forward.” You’d have to be my age (73 - born in 1950), or close to it, to remember the GLF from reading about it at the time.
The name “Great Leap Forward” refers to Mao Zedong’s second Five Year Plan, launched in 1958, and intended to catapult China’s economy from backwardness into modernity.
This was to be not just any old central planning project, but a whole new approach designed by the really smart people to correct the mistakes and failures that the Soviet Union had encountered on the road to communism. This time, they were going to get central planning right.
Yesterday the Biden Administration launched a significant new climate initiative with a design that has some remarkable resemblances to the Great Leap Forward. Since most readers probably don’t know how the Great Leap Forward worked out, I’ll save that for the end of the post.

July 20, 2024

July 20, 2024/ Francis Menton

These days, there is lots and lots of news about how the supposed “energy transition” is not happening.
There’s so much news on this subject that I could devote this entire blog to that subject alone and have plenty to occupy my time. Expect multiple posts about this topic over the next several weeks.
To whet your appetite, I will take you today to Australia, where we find the latest news on the inevitable collapse of impossible dream of “green” hydrogen as the means to make electricity from wind and sun work.

July 17, 2024

July 17, 2024/ Francis Menton

Before everything got disrupted by the attempt on President Trump’s life, I had written a post last week titled “Big Tech On The Path To Net Zero.”
That post looked at the most recently issued “sustainability” reports from Google, Microsoft and Meta, and noted that all three admit to going rapidly in the opposite direction from “net zero.” As their businesses grow in the direction of power-hungry data centers and AI, they inevitably require large incremental amounts of always-available electricity — the kind of electricity that wind and sun cannot provide. Lacking viable alternatives to fossil fuels, their “emissions” rise.
But, you might ask, how about Amazon and Apple?

July 14, 2024

July 14, 2024/ Francis Menton

The attempted assassination of Donald Trump is not the kind of event that I would normally write about at Manhattan Contrarian. Like many other newsworthy events, it’s not that it’s not important; it’s that I don’t have any special expertise or insights to offer.
But there is one aspect of this attempted assassination that cries out for comment. That is the truly incredible failure of the Secret Service that enabled the shooter to gain access to the vantage point to shoot.