October 10, 2026

ICE Arrest In Far Uptown Manhattan Ends In Shooting: Two Versions Of The Story

October 10, 2026/ Francis Menton

On Thursday afternoon, October 8, a guy named Oscar Belgal was shot by ICE agents in the very most northern neighborhood of Manhattan known as Marble Hill. Belgal suffered a non-life-threatening injury to his neck, and received treatment at the uptown campus of the New York Presbyterian Hospital. Here is a picture of Belgal from the New York Post:
The shooting immediately set off a round of protests from local activists, calling for abolition of ICE as well as various other of the usual demands.
In the two days since the event took place, both the New York Post and the New York Times have provided extensive coverage. The contrast between the coverages of the two papers could not be more dramatic.

October 07, 2026

How Can Democrats Possibly Run On "Affordability"?

October 07, 2026/ Francis Menton

We are now less than a month out from the mid-term elections, and the single biggest theme that the Democrats have chosen to run on appears to be “affordability.”
How can this possibly be? We live in the age of immediate availability of information, let alone artificial intelligence to track down anything that might previously have been challenging to find. If you want a state-by-state comparison of costs for any particular thing, you can get it in a fraction of a second.
The results are in: the Democrat-run states are less “affordable.”
The Democrats and Republicans propose opposite strategies for dealing with the economy. The Democrats advocate for higher government spending, higher taxes, and more regulation of business; and the Republicans advocate for lower spending, lower taxes, and less regulation of business. The states are the “laboratories of democracy,” where we get to see the consequences of disparate policies play out, and to evaluate the results. Neither party is perfect in implementing what it advocates, so there are always some complexities. But in the main it is easy to collect data that give a relatively clear picture of the results of Democrat versus Republican policies.

October 04, 2026

October 04, 2026/ Francis Menton

My September 29 post asked whether we could deem as “definitively falsified” the hypothesis that human-caused global warming was leading to “more and more severe” hurricanes.
The cited basis for the question was that, despite the endlessly repeated prediction of “more and more severe” hurricanes, as of that date not a single hurricane had yet formed this season in the North Atlantic basin. This represented a record-low rate of hurricane formation in this region since the satellite era, and comprehensive hurricane data, began in 1966.
In response to that post, I received a comment from a reader that I thought deserved a serious response. The comment came as an email, rather than as a comment on the blog. The commenter gave his name, but since he did not post the comment on the blog I am keeping his name confidential as a courtesy. Here is the text of the comment: . . .

October 03, 2026

October 03, 2026/ Francis Menton

To judge from many of the comments on this site, a substantial number of readers have difficulty understanding the sophisticated modes of thinking of the New York progressive. Looking at New York’s official progressive orthodoxy in action, these readers often see illogic and inconsistencies that seem to make no sense at all.
And yet, despite the apparent internal contradictions, the New York progressives themselves generally achieve near or even complete unanimity as to many of the important policies that they seek to implement. How does this work?
We need to take a deeper look. So I thought for today it would be useful to examine some recent policies touted by the progressive crowd, to see what insights we can glean about exactly how they think about the world.

September 29, 2026

September 29, 2026/ Francis Menton

You know the mantra: Human caused climate change, driven by burning fossil fuels and adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, causes an increase in the frequency and severity of major storms, like hurricanes.
When major hurricanes come along, as they regularly do, the promoters of this mantra immediately claim an ability to “attribute” the storm and/or its intensity to the ongoing human-caused warming.
For example, last October we had Hurricane Melissa, a Category 5 storm that struck Jamaica and other Caribbean islands. As soon as Melissa had passed, an organization calling itself World Weather Attribution promptly came out with an analysis blaming the storm and its intensity on “climate change.” From the AP, November 6, 2025:
Melissa was one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes to make landfall and brought destructive weather to Jamaica, Haiti, Dominican Republic and Cuba, causing dozens of deaths across the Caribbean. . . . The rapid analysis by World Weather Attribution found that climate change increased Melissa’s maximum wind speeds by 7% and made the rainfall near the center of the storm 16% more intense. The scientists also wrote that the temperature and humidity in which the storm intensified were made six times more likely due to climate change compared to a pre-industrial world.
Perhaps that seemed plausible at the time. But this year the mantra that human-induced climate change is the main cause of destructive hurricanes has run into a small problem.

September 27, 2026

September 27, 2026/ Francis Menton

New York City has one of the most expensive housing markets in the country among large cities, and maybe even the most expensive by some measures. By contrast to most other parts of the country, the majority of housing units here are rented rather than owner-occupied.
Latest data from Zillow.com gives a city-wide average rent (across all apartment sizes and types) of $3650. In Manhattan, according to this New York Post piece from August 12 (citing data from the Corcoran brokerage firm) the average rent has hit $6,655 per month.
According to the politicians in power, the reason for these high rents is that greedy landlords are taking advantage of the tenants. To deal with these greedy landlords, we have had rent regulations in place in various forms since World War II; but after some reforms in the 1990s, by the 2010s those were gradually diminishing in significance. By 2019 a slight majority of the rental apartments, about 1.1 million, were outside the regulation system, with just under 1 million apartments rent-regulated.
Then, in 2019, the State Legislature came under full control of the Democrats (after decades of partial Republican control), and the new majorities immediately set out to put the greedy landlords in their place.